Hay Festival - Rutger Bregman

Tuned in today to "Hay Festival - Rutger Bregman - chaired by Lily Cole - Humankind: A Hopeful History"

Nathan Robinson on Jordan Peterson

Recommended reading by Chomsky: The Intellectual We Deserve in Current Affairs by Nathan J. Robinson.

On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky

Next book for the Book Group (meeting on Tuesday 18 June) is On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky: the Penguin Special edition of 2013 – not to be confused with Chomsky on Anarchism, a collection of essays selected and edited by Barry Pateman, AK Press, 2005.

Accidental Anarchist film report

Twenty-seven people attended the screening at Firstsite on Sat 30 June of Accidental Anarchist: Life Without Government. (See previous blogpost for details.)  It was free and there was a collection, which raised £75.

Murray Bookchin

The Murray Bookchin Reader is available as an ebook at libcom.org and a free audio (MP3) download at www.archive.org, which summarizes it thus:

On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky

Latest version of On Anarchism was published 2014 by Penguin, earlier versions available as PDF.

Colin Ward

Colin Ward (1924-2010) wrote Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction in 2004 (one in the Oxford VSI series).

intentional communities - why most fail

Good essay at aeon.co looking at why, like most start-ups, most intentional communities fail. Conclusion is that:

Accidental Anarchist film

Accidental Anarchist: Life Without Government is a rare instance of TV putting anarchism in a favourable light. You can see the trailer at www.accidentalanarchist.net. Produced by BBC Scotland and shown on BBC4 Storyville on Sunday 23 July 2017 at 21:50, the one-hour film tells how:

Carne Ross was a career diplomat who believed western democracy could save us all. But after the Iraq war he became disillusioned and resigned. This film traces Carne's worldwide quest to find a better way of doing things - from a farming collective in Spain, to Occupy Wall Street to Rojava in war-torn Syria - as he makes the epic journey from government insider to anarchist.

Decision making at NVC camp

Notes for a workshop.

Riots Rebellions and Protests – A Walk around Colchester town

The walk on Sat 2 May 2015, 2pm-4pm, was led by Dorian Kelly and started at Slack Space, Old Police Station, 35 Queen Street, Colchester CO1 2PQ. It was part of janeswalk.org 2015, which is hosted locally by Walk Colchester.  It featured the High Street (Castle Park Memorial end, scene of the Poll Tax riots in 1990) and a speech by John Ball and a song about him (both now on my Youtube channel) and much more. Here is the ad for the walk:

God Friday, Sydney Carter and John Ball (again)

Good Friday Morning

From 2004/mar/17/guardianobituaries on Sydney Carter (1915-2004) -  famous Quaker, Londoner, composer of Lord Of The Dance (1963) - here is part of "Friday Morning", where the robber, crucified with Jesus, cries out: 

It was on a Friday morning that they took me from my cell
And I saw they had a carpenter to crucify as well.
You can blame it on to Pilate, you can blame it on the Jews,
You can blame it on the Devil, it's God I accuse.
It's God they ought to crucify, instead of you and me,
I said to the carpenter a-hanging on the tree.

Rev John Ball of Colchester - England's original anarcho-syndicalist

John Ball trained as a priest in Colchester, but he's never been mentioned once during my children's combined 18+ years of schooling here. Colchester history mentioned in the classroom is all oysters, the Romans, Boudicca, the civil war siege and the Romans. As Melvyn Bragg explains, John Ball was so subversive he's been virtually airbrushed out of history.