“The winds of change were never warm.”

This is the story behind the story—the Cold War’s beginning told without the sugarcoating. From Stalin’s stolen chair to Truman’s frozen silence, this isn’t your textbook history. It’s a poetic, brutal unpacking of American myth and manufactured consent.

This version is free, because truth should be.

Ko-Fi link:

Direct download:

Subject index: Cold War, History, Free Download, Truman, Stalin, Political Writing, Educational, E-book, Nonfiction, PDF, Antiwar, Geopolitics, US History, Soviet Union, Storytelling, Poetic Nonfiction

Very insightful interview. Worth watching to see what life before and after prison is from a radical anarchist perspective. Also a lot of ideas on how you can actually provide support even if you don't have the time or energy for much of activism.

If you lived in mid-19th century Portland, chances are you would have been familiar with an eccentric-looking character who roamed the dusty streets with a bundle of his radical newspapers. Jeremiah Hacker was strikingly tall, with a big bushy beard. He carried an ear trumpet because he was nearly deaf and wore an old drab coat covered in patches because he felt “required to clothe himself according to plainness and simplicity of truth.” Often on the edge of poverty, he lived on bread and water in a boarding house on Cross Street, where he wrote his paper, The Portland Pleasure Boat, every week on his knee, assailing the institutions of government, capitalism, slavery, prisons and organized religion.

Although Hacker had devoted readers throughout the country, historians have largely ignored him. Fortunately, Maine journalist Rebecca M. Pritchard has breathed new life into Hacker’s iconoclastic writings in her wonderful new book, Jeremiah Hacker: Journalist, Anarchist, Abolitionist.

Born to a large family in Brunswick in 1801, Hacker was deeply influenced by his Quaker upbringing, which shaped his pacifism and disdain for the hierarchy of organized religion. In the midst of the Second Great Awakening, Hacker joined scores of itinerant preachers who flocked to the Maine countryside. But unlike the others, his aim was to convince people to leave churches, not to join them. He believed that God “dwelleth not … in temples made with men’s hands, but in man” and that “pure and undefiled religion … visits the sick, feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, and leads man to live inwardly and outwardly unspotted from the world.” As Pritchard notes, Hacker was also fiercely anti-government, believing, like 20th century anarchist Emma Goldman, that all governments rely on violence, so he refused to support them by voting or paying taxes.

He had no love for wealthy capitalists either. “While the wives and daughters of mechanics are toiling over their wash tubs, or cooking over hot fires, the wives and daughters of capitalists are murdering pianos, sighing over novels, sauntering with coxcombs or searching for the latest fashions; and all these things cost money, and this money must by some kind of hokus pokus means, come from the pockets of the producing classes,” Hacker observed in an 1849 essay. “If therefore they can wring an hour’s labor each day from each man in their employ, it will aid in defraying their pious expenses, and in supporting them in luxury and idleness.”

When Hacker launched the Pleasure Boat in 1845 by selling his one good coat to pay the printing costs, the Industrial Revolution was beginning to draw independent artisans and subsistence farmers from the land and into wage labor in the cities and towns. Fearing the impending loss of their economic independence, Maine workers formed associations to call for land reform and the elevation of the producing classes over monopolists, land speculators and bankers. Mainers also experimented with cooperatives and utopian socialist ideas as female textile workers organized the first strikes in Saco and Lewiston for better pay and working conditions. After visiting some of these factories, Hacker poured his outrage into the pages of the Pleasure Boat.

“There are hundreds of young females shipped from this State every year to the factory prison-houses, like cattle, sheep and pigs sent to the slaughter,” he wrote in another 1849 piece. “Every steam boat and car that leaves this State for Massachusetts carries more or less of these victims to the polluted and polluting manufacturing towns where they are prepared for a miserable life and a horrible death in the abodes of infamy.”

Hacker also visited jails and was appalled by the conditions he witnessed, particularly the sight of children in cells with adults. To prove they could be reformed, he bailed boys out of jail and placed them with farmers and a sea captain to learn their trades. He was also the first voice to call for a reform school, which eventually became the Boys Training Center, most recently renamed Long Creek Youth Development Center, in South Portland.

Hacker couldn’t be pigeonholed into one reform group because he was critical of all of them. He opposed slavery, but scolded abolitionists for not boycotting slave-made goods like he did. He chastised peace activists for paying taxes to the war machine. He was an ardent teetotaler, but opposed Maine’s landmark 1851 prohibition law because he believed in persuasion, not coercion. Hacker supported gender equality, but didn’t think anyone should vote.

Many of Hacker’s ideas seem quaint in retrospect. His solution to poverty, crime, alcoholism and wage slavery was to just grant everyone tracts of land where they would “be no longer the landless slave of capital, driven about by landlords, and robbed by shylocks.” But as Pritchard notes, President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862, granting land to 2 million Americans, and we still have basically the same societal ills that Hacker observed. Hacker failed to grasp the power of capitalism to globalize, or as his contemporaries Marx and Engels put it, “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” In spite of his flaws, many of Hacker’s critiques of our institutions still ring true today, even if his solutions are hopelessly naive.

Hacker’s most entertaining writings were his takedowns of prominent figures. He described temperance crusader Neal Dow, the mayor of Portland, as “a mad dog with a firebrand to his tale.” And he despised lawyers, declaring them “no more fit to enact laws for a nation of working men than a lady’s bustle is fit for a dairy-woman’s cheese-hoop, or a dandy’s cane for a laborer’s crowbar.”

Hacker was Maine’s original alt-journalist. The Pleasure Boat contained no ads, which gave him the freedom to “hack” away at disreputable businesses that advertised in other Portland papers. His favorite targets were “quack” doctors selling fake miracle cures. After one doctor threatened to sue a printer for printing Hacker’s constant tirades against him, Hacker just found another printer, defiantly writing, “If I live a while longer, there shall be a free press in Portland, if I have to beg rags to procure it!”

In the end, it was Hacker’s fervent opposition to the Civil War that did him in. Incensed readers cancelled their subscriptions en masse in 1862. He would revive his paper in various forms, but they were short lived. After the Great Fire of 1866, Hacker moved to the progressive community of Vineland, New Jersey, to farm and write. He lived for another 30 years before passing at the ripe old age of 94.

Pritchard’s book is quite short (it was adapted from her master’s thesis), but it’s an excellent primer on an influential figure who deserves more attention. And her descriptions of old Portland through Hacker’s eyes — the tenements, the grog shops, the free blacks, sailors, street children, impoverished widows and destitute elderly couples forced to continue working — provide a vivid context for his righteous anger.

“A cruise on The Pleasure Boat was no pleasure if you were the subject,” notes historian Herb Adams. “Hacker was deaf — quite literally — to both pleasure and pain, and let critics of his paper bellow themselves hoarse while he stood silently by.

“He was a true lone eagle,” Adams continued, “happy to keep a shrewd eye and a sharp pen pointed at our world of sin that never quite came up to his expectations. And there was plenty of sin in his time, as he’d say — slavery, alcohol, taxes, politics and people who would not listen, especially to him. He must have been a fascinating neighbor, an exasperating friend, and a terrible foe.”

Chicago, February 27, 1934

Dear Carl: Your letter of February 13 was quite a surprise and illuminating, to learn that you had arrived at the same conclusions that I had some years ago: that is, that Anarchism has not produced any organized ability in the present generation, only a few little loose, struggling groups, scattered over this vast country, that come together in “conferences” occasionally, talk to each other, then go home. Then we never hear from them again until another conference is held.

Do you call this a movement? You speak of “the movement” in your letter. Where is it? You say, “I just feel disgusted.” I have been for a long time.

Anarchists are good at showing the shortcomings of others’ organizations. But what have they done in the last fifty years, you say. Nothing to build up a movement; they are mere pipe-dreamers dreaming.

Consequently, Anarchism doesn’t appeal to the public. This busy, practical world cares nothing for fine-spun theories—they want facts, and too, they want a few examples shown.

They talk about cooperation. You state that you have been trying to get the four little excuses for papers to cooperate to get out one worthwhile publication, but you can’t succeed. . . .

Anarchism is a dead issue in American life today. Radicalism has been blotted off the map of Europe. The Vienna horror-slaughter is too shocking to realize. The worker is a mere appendage to the capitalist factory. Machinery has eliminated him. Robert Burns said: “O God, that men should be so cheap, and bread should be so dear!”

Radicalism is at a low ebb today. We are living in strange times! Despotism is on horseback, riding at high speed. The worker is helpless; he has no voice in his mode or method of life—he just floats along on the tides of ill times.

I went to work for the International Labor Defense (ILD) because I wanted to do a little something to help defend the victims of capitalism who got into trouble, and not always be talking, talking, talking. When the little work that is now being doled out [is finally doled out], what then?

As ever, fraternally, yours

Lucy E. Parsons

Ned Kelly was an Australian outlaw, known for his defiant stand against colonial authorities in the late 19th century, culminating in his capture and execution after leading a rebellion against the police.

The Jerilderie Letter doesn't explicitly mention anarchism, but its themes align pretty good with anarchist principles.

Ned Kelly criticizes the established authority, particularly the colonial legal system, and speaks out against police brutality and the exploitation of his family, which aligns with anarchist critiques of state power and hierarchical structures.

Hs rejection of authority and advocacy for justice and equality can be seen as a precursor to some of the anti-authoritarian ideas found in anarchist thought.

Hello all, I am wondering can you point me to reading material or share ideas on how manifacure of medicine(and other things currently requiring complex supply chains) can be achieved in anarchist society?

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/29111557

The Haymarket Affair (1886)

Tue May 04, 1886

Image: *A Harper’s Weekly illustration of the Haymarket Riot from May 15, 1886.

A Harper’s Weekly illustration of the Haymarket Riot from May 15, 1886.

A Harper’s Weekly illustration of the Haymarket Riot from May 15, 1886.

A Harper's Weekly Illustration of the Haymarket Affair, May 15th, 1886

The Haymarket Affair (also known as the Haymarket massacre) was the bloody aftermath of a bombing that took place on this day in 1886 during a radical labor demonstration demanding an 8 hour day in Chicago, Illinois.

The strike began as a peaceful rally in support of workers striking for an eight-hour work day. After police began trying to disperse a May 4th rally associated with the strike, an unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at the police. The bomb blast and ensuing gunfire resulted in the deaths of seven police officers, four to eight civilians, and wounded approximately one hundred people on either side.

In the internationally publicized legal proceedings that followed, eight anarchists were convicted of conspiracy. Seven were sentenced to death and one to a term of 15 years in prison. Illinois Governor Richard J. Oglesby commuted two of the sentences to terms of life in prison; another committed suicide in jail rather than face the gallows. The other four were hanged on November 11th, 1887.

The trial, widely believed to be a farce, was condemned internationally. The Haymarket Affair, and working class struggle more broadly, is commemorated annually on May 1st as "May Day" or "International Workers' Day".

• Date: 1886-05-04
• Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, libcom.org, theanarchistlibrary.org.
• Tags: #Labor, #Anarchism, #Riots, #Protests.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

I didn't think I could hate Facebook and the rich techbros any more than I already do, but holy shit, this book is making want to start learning how to build guillotines.

It also does a great job on showing how power and wealth just make people into sociopathic simulacra of humanity.

IT'S GOING DOWN: Tearing Into It: A Conversation with Dean Spade

Episode webpage: https://itsgoingdown.org/tearing-into-it-a-conversation-with-dean-spade/

Media file: https://media.blubrry.com/itsgoingdown/thebeautifulidea.show/content/media/2025/04/Discussion-with-Dean-Spade.mp3

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/62560258

Hello dear fellow human beings!

Let me clarify a few things.

We are one, all of us, all stardust, right from the belly of an exploding star, right to our shared evolution, history, & current technological & societal progress. All humanity and all life is one and connected, and so are all of our problems.

Poverty, hunger, homelessness, climate change, fascism, war, and even the global epidemic of loneliness & depression aren’t distinct disconnected problems. They are a singular globally connected problem. And it requires a singular globally connected solution.

All of these are problems of a skewed economy, aka wealth inequality. Those who don't have enough face poverty, hunger, homelessness, and a lifetime of financial insecurity. Those who have plenty, want even more, which leads to them dividing the masses by propaganda, eventually leading to fascism & war. Our collective mismanaged consumption is pushing us all towards climate catastrophe. All of these global issues are making us very lonely & depressed, and the overall society prone to crime & violence.

So how can we fix this skewed economy and our collective social issues? And is it even solvable?

Some might find the answer as obvious, some might consider it incorrect or impossible to achieve. Well, let me tell you folks, I've done the math, I've double checked my work, there is one and only one way out - Collectively!

Welcome to Collective Cake, a secular democratic global economic engine powered by all, and created for all. If we are the producers and if we are also the consumers, then we can manage our economy however we collectively want. It’s our Collective Cake, let’s take ownership and enjoy it best we can.

Is it a business? Or is it an cooperative? Is it a think tank? Or is it an economic union? Is it a democratically controlled, sustainability led unified global economy? It is anything & everything we want it to be. We get to collectively decide it!

Is it capitalism? Is it communism? Is it market socialism? All I will say about this is that capitalism is what exists right now, and market socialism is also capitalism, but the better kind. However, I want us all to refrain from using such labels while problem solving. Labels might help identify a sub-group, but it invariably causes division and we pick sides, we blindly love ours, and blindly hate theirs. An emotional response is not a well reasoned response. Lastly, if even one man cannot understand ambiguous or technical jargon, we have all collectively lost.

There's a lot for us talk about. Not a debate to be won, but a problem to be solved. Not using violence, but by strategy and collective action. Before we talk about the what or the how, we must talk more about the why. I have some thoughts that I'll share, but it doesn't matter for we can collectively decide and do anything we want. The matchstick has been lit.

Next week, I'll share my thoughts on our collective ethos or "our water".

Stay tuned!

Love, fakir

PS: enjoy this lovely animation that was released over 50 years ago!

Cross-posted from "Up to 4 Anarchist instances and 9 ACAB instances!" by @[email protected] in [email protected]

Let's go for 5 and 10 at least!

by Colin Denny Donoghue

While it’s true many people are wrapped up in a consumer-corporate lifestyle and think trying to change the world is a naïve or impossible task not worth even trying, many other people are more actively compassionate and are giving a lot of time and effort to try and make this world a better place. Some of those engaged in this productive work, like The School of Living, have a better vision than others on how to achieve the goal of a healthier and more just society; from its founder Ralph Borsodi’s book Flight From the City, along with the later Decentralism by Mildred J. Loomis, to current vegan homesteading projects like Ahimsa Village, I find the ideas and praxis of philosophy toward achieving a sustainable society to be very on-target. Unfortunately many others do not yet see how crucial it is for people to be connected to the Earth in a more direct, natural and free way in order for there to be global social-justice, and in order to restore our environment, health, and sanity.

In “close-but-no-cigar” fashion (i.e. missing the crucial point), modern conservationists, scientists, sociologists and radical activists give key ideas for stopping and reversing the destructive ecological & health crisis we face, namely: we need much more decentralization of power, localization of organic food production, and we need much less environmental destruction, pollution, waste and radiation. As good as these ideas are, the critical problem with them is that their version of decentralization, localization and sustainability only go to a certain limited extent (limited within corporate/statist/monetary systemic restraints), and are alternatives accessible only to a relatively narrow segment of the world population. Here I will argue that the decentralist/localization/sustainability movement absolutely needs to go further, i.e. all the way to the universal individual level, in order for us to achieve the significant positive change the world needs. This “extreme” decentralization, localization and sustainable living would not only be more effective, but is in fact the only way to a globalization of equality and personal/environmental health. And it leads to a clear and specific destination: communities of sovereign zero-waste veganic homesteads. That way of life produces none of the environmental/health/life-destruction that is dominant now, and also fosters human equality, well-being and flourishing; more on why this is the real solution will be explained shortly.

The difference in perspective between what most people are offering as solutions and what’s offered here is fundamentally a difference between inside & outside-the-box thinking; the former is limited within the socioeconomic box (the box that is actually the main source of the problems), looking for within-the-system top-down solutions from State policies and programs (or the International Monetary Fund, etc.), rather than bottom-up solutions from autonomous individuals & the Earth’s ecology. This can also be looked at as a collectivist versus individualist way of thinking, though the former is often mistakenly equated with community, and the latter with a selfish isolationist perspective. In reality, collectivism means forced assimilation into a social-system while individualism has the ethical superiority of valuing individual sovereignty, self-responsibility, and voluntary relations.

archived (Wayback Machine)

To embrace veganism and forgo the consumption and utilization of animal products is not an end, but a beginning; a new start affording the practitioner an opportunity to see everyday realities in a different light.

However, to speak of the suffering of non-human animals and the benefits of a vegan lifestyle is often a disheartening situation to the vegan, for typically the first reaction of her audience is to disagree. Opponents of veganism say that the way vegans view human-animal relationships (i.e. radically) is wrong, and that, looming on the horizon, is a severe cost for such blatant societal insubordination. Ultimately, they prophesize, the error of veganism will become obvious and, eventually, the idea thrown away.

In a strange way, however, veganisms’s critics are correct.

Not until one realizes what makes veganism “unreasonable,” will the individual realize the true reasoning behind what it means to be vegan. Not until one questions what it is that depicts veganism as “wrong,” in the eyes of non-vegans will one gain the ability to adequately address the wrongs driving their refusal to accept humanity’s violent and unwarranted treatment of non-human animals. Not until the principles of veganism are applied to the rubric of injustice as a whole will one understand the need for veganism at all.

They are correct because veganism in isolation defeats the purpose for which it is intended.

And so it goes, for the alienation experienced as an effect of breaking social conventions is often enough to make one “question” her commitment to veganism.

As a philosophy, veganism stands in defiance to ideologies touching the core of Western thought. Opposed to the irrational belief systems which establishment institutions socialize people to “accept,” the principles of veganism challenge individuals to confront the dogma they are issued and to construct new ethics and values based on the premises of compassion and justice.

Confronting the existing belief systems, however, is a frightening concept to a society that has voluntarily conscripted itself to the dominant social paradigms of the state. However, as Brian Dominick so skillfully illustrates in the following essay, it is precisely this confrontation that we must agree to make if we are honest in seeking a true assessment of what social liberation has to offer. In the totality of this process, veganism is but one element in the compound structure of social revolution. It is in this light that Brian’s essay shines its brightest. Animal Liberation and Social Revolution is a compact framework designed to assist us as we embark on the endeavor of recognizing what roles compassion, critical thinking, and rationality (ought to) play in our simultaneous deconstruction and transformation of society. Relentless in his quest to set the proverbial wheels of this transformation in motion, Brian presses us to confront the oppressive ideologies we harbor within ourselves and to uncover their linkages to the injustice that pervades every sphere of our existence.

It is Brian’s belief that each of us has been given the tools to draw these necessary conclusions. It makes no difference if you are an anarchist approaching veganism, a vegan approaching anarchism, or neither of the two. All that is required is the willingness to roll up your sleeves, sharpen those tools and start drawing, in a concerted effort, to challenge humanity’s myopic vision of what constitutes a just society.

—Joseph M. Smith

November, 1995

archived (Wayback Machine)

Interesting... Also cool illustration

Hey everyone came here after reddit started censoring everyone and anything.

I'll put down some suggestions and whatever folks are interested in I'll do weekly/bi-weekly posts talking about the chapter with folks.

Please comment if you are interested and/or have a suggestion

these are all a bit longer and I've read 2/3 (Conquest of Bread by Kropotkin and Anarchism by Goldman) the third is a fascinating one but I'm also open to other suggestions for what to read together.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post-scarcity-anarchism-book

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-anarchism-and-other-essays

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-conquest-of-bread

I'll also include a really short essay in the comments and short story for personal reading here.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-are-you-an-anarchist-the-answer-may-surprise-you

https://files.libcom.org/files/ursula-k-le-guin-the-ones-who-walk-away-from-omelas.pdf