history

A recent proposal by the student body at London University to campaign against the BNP was unceremoniously rejected by the Tory Party’s youth wing unless, they stated, the BNP was identified as a left wing party. It would seem on this occasion leftwing fascism is exclusively the enemy for these young Tories. But there is nothing new about this muddled thinking or its intended implications. To this vein, we can safely say Liberal Fascism belongs. It is an essential crash course in historical revisionism for the American free market right.

Luigi Fabbri described the rise of Italian fascism as a “preventive counter-revolution” to the 1920s worker occupations in Italy. For Goldberg, fascism is defined as:

Twenty five years on from the epic 1984-5 miners’ strike, David Bell’s The Dirty Thirty pays homage to the 30 or so Leicestershire miners who went on strike from a coalfield where the remaining 2,000 failed to do so.

Illustrated with period photos and ephemera, this inspirational account draws on the experiences of all involved, examining their motivations and offering insight into their tenacity in the face of adversity. The Dirty Thirty is a deeply poignant tale of the human impact wreaked by a regime hell bent on removing all obstacles in its path – one being the National Union of Mineworkers. As a powerful testament to the power of mutual aid, the book describes the emerging support networks during the dispute. The closing section also highlights “where they are now” and confirms how the thirty’s tireless campaigning came to acquire them hero status among the 170,000 strikers across the country.

In March 1984, twenty five years ago, the National Coal Board announced it intended to close 20 pits with the loss of 20,000 jobs. Cortonwood in South Yorkshire was earmarked as the first to close, “imminently”, in the words of the NCB chairman, Ian MacGregor. The miners at Cortonwood immediately came out on strike and by March 12th the National Union of Mineworkers had made the strike national. This was to become the bitterest industrial dispute in most of our lifetimes and marked a major defeat for the working class.

This collection of articles charts the tragic story of Salvador Puig Antich, a Catalan anarchist who was the final victim of the executioner’s garrotte in Franco’s Spain. The pieces, including several by Spanish and Catalan anarchists, also detail Puig Antich’s legacy and attempts to expropriate it by those who did not share his ideals.

His political journey began early, his family being steeped in democratic Catalan nationalism and opposition to the forces of Spain’s right, which they saw as a lethal threat to Catalonia’s identity and integrity. Yet it was the events of May 1968 in Paris and the armed actions of ETA which are generally acknowledged to have inspired Puig Antich to become actively involved in the fight against the Spanish dictatorship in the late 1960s. From initially supporting communist inspired workers’ groups, he embraced anarchism and joined a fledgling paramilitary organisation, the Movimiento Ibérico de Liberación (MIL).

This overview of the main Uruguayan anarchist movement takes the form of various articles by and interviews with militants. It may be initially daunting for anyone not familiar with the subject, as the pieces which give a basic overview of the history only appear in the middle and at the end of the pamphlet. However, it is worth persevering as the story of the Federación Anarquista Uruguaya (FAU) is instructive.