Transcribing the Past

      TO IWA SECTIONS AND LIBERTARIAN MOVEMENT: PERUVIAN ANARCHO-SYNDICALISTS SEEK HELP FOR MINERS Dear comrades, We have recently received word from our comrades in Peru (publishers of “Colectivizacion”) about a desperate situation. Former miners in Huamper, Peru have been living and begging on the streets of the capital city of Lima for almost two years now. These miners were involved in a labor dispute and came to the capital to get the government and mining bosses to act on their problems. The issues leading to their trip to the capital have not been resolved and have forced the miners to stay in Lima. Our comrades report that the miners “must go out asking for alms (from) the people every day.” Sadly, the money they raise is not enough for food, medicine and clothes. “Therefore”, writes our comrades, “Victor Taype (former President of the Miners and Metal Workers Union) and (us) have planned to set-up a small self-managed restaurant” that would aid the...

  Link https://youtu.be/exD6tc-wI0o Recently trainers giant Nike hired Colin Kaepernick to be its new celebrity sponsor. Kaepernick is a professional American style Football player but his fame is largely boosted by his public protesting against police killings of African Americans. As a result this has made him a target of right wing American vitriol. As a result they greeted his lucrative and high profile new gig with alarm and outrage. Currently #Nikeboycott is trending on social media platforms, as are pictures of very strange and impotent protests of consumers destroying the Nike products that they have already bought. So yeah that's probably not going to hurt Nike's profit margins much at all unless they get their act together. However Nike is a pretty awful company, most well all capitalist business are, its rooted in their structure and motives for existence. Nike is infamous for its use of sweatshops and what became known in the 1990s as Corporate s...

  Link  https://youtu.be/1hQhkANKkJM in the early 1990s a spoof made for Soviet TV, persuaded some Russians that Vladimir Lenin's personality had been seriously affected by hallucinogenic mushrooms. The mushrooms in question were the deadly poisonous fly agaric fungi which the programme alleged Lenin had eaten whilst in exile in Siberia. Dina Newman has spoken to journalist Sergei Sholokhov who presented the TV spoof.   Was Lenin a Mushroom? Transcript Dina Newman: Hello, you’re listening to the Witness history podcast with me Dina Newman. Do you know who Vladimir Lenin was? A Russian politician? A communist revolutionary? All this may be true but in 1991 Russians came up with a different take on their former leader, a special program on Soviet TV claimed that Lenin was in fact a mushroom. It was the most famous hoax in the history of Soviet media and an example of just how confused many Russians became once the structures and certainties of ...

    Author Biography Paul Arthur Müller-Lehning (1899-2000), born in Utrecht, the Netherlands, was an anarchist and syndicalist from the 1920s. Involved in the Anti-Militarist Bureau and the syndicalist International Workingmen’s Association, he fled Nazi Germany for the Netherlands in 1933. In 1935, he helped found the International Institute for Social History (IISH), which includes the Mikhail Bakunin archives, and the Karl Marx / Friedrich Engels papers. In 1940, he fled to Britain when the Nazis invaded. He retained some influence after his return to Europe. A prolific writer and editor, his masterwork was the edited works of Bakunin, published in French in 1976.   The Use of Reading Bakunin for Anti-Imperialists On imperialism itself, [Mikhail] Bakunin [1814-1876] has nothing specifically to say. That is not strange, because imperialism in its modern form had not yet appeared; besides, opposition to imperialism by a revolutionary is a rather obvious thing. But I thi...