Public

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.

Newsnight correspondent, Paul Mason’s Live Working or Die Fighting offers a unique, timely and engaging micro-historical account of the rise and fall of the revolutionary working class. Charting the conditions which gave rise to the mass syndicalist movements in Europe and the Americas during the early 20th century, contemporary parallels are drawn and interwoven with the experiences of workers in the newly industrialised “global south”.

Mason eulogises key inspirational figures from our past – figures like Louise Michel, Bill Haywood, Tom Paine – telling of bitter struggles fought with murderous bosses and implacable rulers. Latterly, he cites the post-war factors that have seen militant workers’ movements fall into seemingly irretrievable decline; welfarism and workforce stratification, to name but two.

The rapacious western imperialist oil machine marches on, this time in Peru. After government decrees opened up parts of the Amazon region to plunder by multinationals in April this year, indigenous communities responded by setting up a series of blockades. Leaders of the resistance movement issued a statement saying; “we will fight together with our parents and children to take care of the forest, to save the life of the equator and the entire world”.