New Anarchist Research Group – forthcoming meetings

New Anarchist Research Group Programme January to March 2019
Usually in the MayDay Rooms, 88 Fleet Street, London EC4Y 1DH
BUT SEE CHANGE OF VENUE FOR FEBRUARY

14:00-16:30 

Saturday 26 January, 2019

Afterword to Marie Louise Berneri's Journey Through Utopia.

Rhiannon Firth

M-L Berneri, 1918-1949
(libcom image)

"I was recently invited by PM Press to write the afterword to a new edition of Marie Louise Berneri's Journey Through Utopia. Berneri was an anarchist activist and author active in London, particularly involved with Freedom Press, during the 1930s and 40s. The new edition is currently in press to be released in early-mid 2019. Written in 1948 shortly before her death in 1949, Journey Through Utopia gives a detailed critical examination of utopian literature from an anarchist perspective, beginning with Plato’s Republic and continuing through to Huxley’s Brave New World. In my Afterword, I aim to extend Berneri's work to the present day, giving a critical anarchist analysis starting from post-war utopias, extending through the proliferation of critical utopian literature and social movements in the 1960s and 70s, through to what I shall argue is a contemporary dearth of utopianism. I conclude with some predictions concerning the future of utopianism. In this presentation to the New Anarchist Research Group, I will give a brief introduction to Berneri's life and work before presenting a summary of my Afterword."
More detail on the forthcoming book is available

Rhiannon Firth is Senior Research Officer in Sociology at the University of Essex, where she is working on the EPSRC-funded project 'Chatty Factories', investigating the social and ethical implications of new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and automation in manufacturing. Prior to this she was Research Fellow in Education at the University of East London, where she conducted research on a range of radical and critical pedagogies. She received her PhD, funded by the ESRC, from the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. Her thesis involved ethnographic work with intentional communities throughout the UK. She has published articles on topics including urban utopianism, critical pedagogy and methodology, utopian theories of time and temporality, critical cartography, pedagogies of the body and feminist consciousness-raising. She is also currently writing about anarchist approaches to organising around natural disasters.

Saturday 23 February, 2019
CHANGE OF VENUE - This meeting now to be at The Poetry Café
22 Betterton Street

London WC2H 9BX

An anarchist among the anarchists: Dora Marsden’s Egoism

Lidia Iazzolino

Wikipedia image

Among the active anarchist thinkers in the early twentieth century, Dora Marsden  – editor of The Freewoman, The New Freewoman and later of The Egoist – was perhaps one of the most complex and controversial characters. In the years between 1911-1914, her strong feminist and anti-statist ideas drew her close to anarchism. However, her avid reading of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner eventually caused a permanent fracture between her ideas and that of social anarchists. In this respect, scholars have contended that by the time Marsden became the editor of The Egoist, her anarchism had already become unstable. However, whereas past research questioned whether Marsden had been an anarchist at all, this study intends to re-insert her ideas into the vast anarchist political spectrum while aiming to expound the importance that her review of the anarchist and feminist movements had in providing a thoughtful assessment of their ideological foundations. In fact, whereas this process has often been mistakenly identified as a complete ideological break from feminism and anarchism, this research argues that her efforts can be instead interpreted as an attempt to transcend what she considered to be their limitations and conceptual flaws. Rather than posing as their nemesis, Marsden felt the necessity to investigate both movements from a new philosophical and anti-humanist perspective, in a daring attempt to free the individual from anything that is external to himself.  As such, her criticism of the anarchist and feminist ideologies are symptomatic of the Victorian and Edwardian clash of ideas. It was a collision between the nineteenth-century liberal and socialist values against that of a fierce modernist avant-garde. However, in spite of her efforts, Marsden’s archetypes  of the ‘Freewoman’ and of the anti-humanist ‘Egoist’ remained confined in a small political avant-garde without any noticeable effect on the mainstream British anarchist and feminist circles.

Lidia Iazzolino is a PhD candidate at Anglia Ruskin University.  Her research focuses on the lives and the thought of several British anarchist women during the first two decades of the twentieth century. She is particularly interested in analysing the evolution of their system of thought and of their political ideas in antebellum Britain, as well as searching evidence of their contribution to their community and the British anarchist milieu.


Saturday 23 March, 2019

Anarchism, Syndicalism and workplace organisation: Malatesta and Monatte, Malatesta and the FORA.
Anthony Zurbrugg

EM online archive/
libcom image

Errico Malatesta is a singular figure in anarchist history, given the length of his activity and the impact he made. How well did his perspectives stand up, in the light of events and developments before and after WW1, in the light of experience in France, Italy and Argentina?

Anthony Zurbrugg is a bookseller and publisher. He has edited and translated: Bakunin: Selected Texts 1868-1875 and René  Berthier’s Social-Democracy and Anarchism in the International Workers' Association, 1864-1877. His most recent publication is Anarchist Perspectives in Peace and War, 1900-1918, and he is working on a sequel: Anarchist Perspectives: Revolution and Syndicalism: From 1917 to 1930. 

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See previous listings for lots of other early-year events

 Details of April-June 2019 meetings of the New Anarchist Research Group 

are on later blogpost, 13 April 2019