May 2019 Update (Patreon)

Hi everyone,

Have decided that from now on I'm going to release a monthly update to all my patrons telling them what I've been up to recently and what I plan to do in the future.  

Youtube

This past month I made 3 videos:

1. The International Syndicalist Congress (1913)

2. Anarchism 101: Do Anarchists Ignore Political Struggle?

3. Means and Ends: The Anarchist Critique of Seizing State Power

I had a nice chat with revolutionary left radio about anarchism and Marxism which you can listen to here.

The next video I'm working on is a response to Jordan Peterson's debate speech against Zizek in which he systematically misrepresents Marx. Is going to be a collaboration video with red plateaus (who you should subscribe to if you haven't already).

PhD

I continued to make good progress on my PhD. I've almost finished my two chapters on syndicalism.

The first chapter goes through the general history of syndicalism and how it developed from the 1st international to revolutionary syndicalism in France to anarcho-syndicalism. This took me ages to research and write because I had to work out what the difference between revolutionary syndicalism and anarcho-syndicalism even is. Its often presented as the idea that anarcho-syndicalism advocates using syndicalist means to achieve an anarchist society. But this is wrong because many important revolutionary syndicalists, such as Pouget, were anarchists. In turns out that the actual difference is that anarcho-syndicalists think trade unions should not be political neutral and should instead have an anarchist program, such as advocating anarcho-communism as the end goal within its constitution or not allowing members of political parties to join the union.

The second chapter explains the main strategic ideas syndicalist anarchists in general held, such as how they thought workers would be transformed into revolutionaries through participating in direct action for immediate improvements like higher wages.

I've been realising that I don't use enough women as examples in the thesis and so am now trying to correct this. One of my favorite new examples is the Yiddish anarchist Sonia Farber who liked to kick policemen at picket lines, rather than punch them, because they could not identify who had hit them.

Over the next month I plan to totally finish my syndicalism chapters and move onto writing about anarchist arguments in favour of building large scale organisations.

Thanks so much for supporting me and making this research possible.

Zoe