How to build a movement

In “Anarchism, Marxism and the Future of the Left”, a book that appeared in 1999, Murray Bookchin expanded on the issue of how to build a (communalist) movement. I offer you a Dutch translation. Bookshop Rosa translated this part of the book some years ago, and I have edited it a bit. You can find the first part of the translation in Dutch here, the second part will be there tomorrow. To those who do not read Dutch, I must advise you to read the book.


AK Press : “This expansive collection ranges over, amongst others, Bookchin's account of his teenage years as a young Communist during the Great Depression, his experiences of the 1960s and reflections on that decade's lessons, his vision of a libertarian communist society, libertarian politics, the future of anarchism, and the unity of theory and practice. He goes on to assess the crisis of radicalism today and defends the need for a revolutionary Left. Finally, he states what is to be valued in both anarchism and Marxism in building such a Left and offers guidelines for forming a new revolutionary social movement.”
Anarchism, Marxism and the Future of the Left. Interviews and Essays, 1993-1998 (1999). Edinburgh and San Francisco : A.K. Press. ISBN 1-873176-35-X.

Roger Scruton and definitions of communalism

Why we should hate Roger Scruton...
"Scruton's Burkean political views, expounded in the conservative quarterly Salisbury Review and elsewhere, made him a hated figure amongst many on the Left. The Meaning of Conservatism was, to some extent, a response to the growth of liberalism in the Conservative Party. The book seeks to shift the emphasis of the right away from economics towards moral issues such as sex education and censorship laws. He has attracted criticism because of his support for fox hunting with hounds in his book Animal Rights and Wrongs. He is generally regarded as the most important living British conservative philosopher."
Wikipedia

communalism
Advocacy of communes.
There is a positive value in individuals cooperating with each other in small groups, rather than relying on individual effort.
Communalism differs from collectivism in that it values groups small enough for all members to be familiar with one another; and in seeing the benefits of co-operation as consisting as much in social and cultural satisfaction as in material efficiency.
Communalism provides the ethical aspiration of which communism was, in its 19th century version, the strategic or political application.
Source:
Roger Scruton, A Dictionary of Political Thought (London, 1982)

In Dutch :

communalisme
Het verdedigen en promoten van communes.
Er is een positieve waardering van de onderlinge samenwerking van individuen in kleine groepen, eerder dan te vertrouwen op individuele inspanning.
Communalisme verschilt van collectivisme in die zin dat het groepen waardeert die klein genoeg zijn opdat alle leden elkaar in ruime mate kennen; en in het zien van evenveel voordelen in de samen-werking bij sociale en culturele bevrediging als bij materiële efficiëntie. Communalisme levert de ethische aspiraties van dat waarvoor, in zijn 19de eeuwse versie, communisme de strategische of politieke toepassing was.
Bron :
Roger Scruton, A Dictionary of Political Thought (London, 1982)


Murray Bookchin in The Communalist Project :
Its most important goal is clearly spelled out in a conventional dictionary definition: Communalism, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, is ”a theory or system of government in which virtually autonomous local communities are loosely bound in a federation.”
And then he added in a note :
What is so surprising about this minimalist dictionary definition is its overall accuracy: I would take issue only with its formulations “virtually autonomous” and “loosely bound,” which suggest a parochial and particularistic, even irresponsible relationship of the components of a confederation to the whole.

(Edited post at the 1st of august 2007)

27 years of Food not Bombs

“Food Not Bombs began in the early 1980s in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, a city adjacent to Boston, when a group of anti-nuclear activists, who were protesting the nearby Seabrook power plant, began spray-painting the slogan "Money for food, not for bombs" around the city. The slogan was shortened to "Food Not Bombs", and it became the name of their group. Soon after, they decided to put their slogan into practice. At a meeting of wealthy bank executives who were financing nuclear projects, the group showed up and started handing out free food outside to a crowd of three hundred homeless people. The action was so successful that the group began doing it on a regular basis, collecting surplus food from grocery stores and preparing it into meals.”
Wikipedia


Dan Read : “Over its 27 year existence it has been a vocal component of the wider progressive movement for peace and social change. The first recorded arrest of a volunteer was on August 15, 1988, when nine activists were taken into custody at Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Over the next 9 years, over 1,000 similar arrests took place; 700 of them directly due to an alleged violation of a court order prohibiting the feeding of homeless citizens.”

More...

Ecofolk as vague ritualism

The term "ecofolk" music was probably coined by David Kupfer, to describe ecologically oriented folk music, through befriending and traveling with a California-based group called the Clan Dyken. Kupfer (2002, Whole Earth) : “I heard them and other artists at protests against the Nevada Test Site and the Livermore Nuclear Lab, at Big Mountain benefits, at rallies against nuclear power and clear-cutting and for organic farming in rural California, against road building in Britain, for solar and against geothermal power in Hawai'i. As I repeatedly heard the same groups, with similar messages, I sensed that I was witnessing the evolution of a new genre, which I've called ecofolk.”
Ecofolk has been the resurgence of folk music with a green message, “often spiritual, sometimes quite touching, and at other times wonderfully witty. Its roots can be found in the music of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Malvina Reynolds, Country Joe McDonald, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Phil Ochs, Kate Wolf, Jackson Browne, Bruce Cockburn, and Tom Lehrer. The No Nukes Festival album and film (1977) were early ecofolk, but quite mainstream.” (Kupfer, 2002)
Kupfer saw three threads in this emerging genre. The first was activist, informing audiences and fostering community. The second thread comprised “songs reflecting the beauty, power, impact, and stature of wildness and wilderness, the geography of our home”. The third thread was educational ecofolk for kids. “This is music from the vernacular of community, rallies, and demonstrations. You can hear it at small clubs and regional festivals. So far, these are fringe artists. Mainstream media has not discovered any of them. Their CDs are often available only by mail order or from websites.”
Still, that might change in the near future. In Belgium, one of the newest summer folkfestivals is called “Thumbs up for Doel”, it calls itself explicitly an eco-folkfestival. “Though the government wants to destroy the Belgian village of Doel, this eco-folkfestival shows that it is a good spot to live and to feast.” Doel is a village near Antwerp city that is threatened by the expansion of the Antwerp harbor. It is well-known for the nuclear power station near the village (the power station is also often called “Doel”). In order to prevent the disappearance of the village Doel, a coalition of left-leaning people and right-wingers has arisen to prevent that from happening. Neoprimitive, paganist or catholic thoughts and other forms of traditionalism have inspired this campaign. Even politicians from the Far Right in the region have been supporting the struggle for the village conservation. The ecofolk festival has been a way for right-wingers and left-leaning people to get this struggle more known.

In the meantime Belgium has more and more musicians, they pop up everywhere. The biggest festival organiser has compared the situation this year with the scene in Seattle (when grunge music became so much succesful there). The situation often leads to arising nationalist feelings about the music scene in Flanders (the northern region of Belgium, where people usually speak Dutch). The ecofolk group Laïs is one of the most known bands in and outside Flanders. One of their well-known songs is called “After the goldrush”, originally a song from the nowadays excellent artist Neil Young. But just like one of the early band members of Laïs, Young has been criticized for supporting the Right a long time ago.

after the goldrush

well, I dreamed I saw the knights
in armour come
saying something about a queen
there were peasants singing and
drummers drumming
and the archer split the tree
there was a fanfare blowing
to the sun
that was floating on the breeze
look at Mother Nature on the run
in the twenty first century

well I was lying in a burned out basement
with the full moon in my eyes
I was hoping for replacement
when the sun burst through the sky
there was a band playing in my head
and I felt like getting high
I was thinking about what a
friend had said
I was hoping it was a lie
thinking about what a
friend had said
I was hoping it was a lie

well I dreamed I saw the silver
space ships flying
in the yellow haze of the sun
there were children crying
and colours flying
all around the chosen one
all in a dream, all in a dream
the loading had begun
flying Mother Nature's
silver seed to a new home in the sun
flying Mother Nature's
silver seed to a new home

The website of the band shows that Laïs' music has crossed the borders of Belgium many times. “The group has been on the bill of festivals from southern Europe to South-Africa, and moved spectators from Toronto to Shanghai.”
“Those international tours showed us that we can get anywhere”, says Nathalie (one of the band members). “The people experience our voices as an instrument. And if we succeed in passing on a certain mood, in fact the words lose their importance.”
“It is striking how even an audience that doesn't understand us, instinctively feels what we're talking about”, continues Jorunn (another band member). “But for those who do understand Dutch or French, the lyrics are a nice bonus.”
Laïs was a part of a new generation of folk artists in Belgium that set out from a traditional base, but then added influences from rock, jazz and sometimes world music. It was in the summer of 1998 that Laïs recorded its first album, entitled simply, “Laïs”. "All the material on the album was traditional, but all the songs were rearranged by us. None of it was produced really. We recorded the songs as we sung them in concert. This was really raw stuff. But it's been our best-selling album." In 2005, the album had already sold 80,000 copies.
As Sabina Ispas (director of Bucharest's museum of Romanian folklore), has said in 1999 (in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian) , ecofolk is “a style of life, a system that demonstrates and embodies the fundamental ritual concepts of life and death and how to live on earth." She called ecofolk a combination of ecology and popular culture, but I rather think of it as vague ritualism.
Ispas said we had much to learn from the Romanian peasant and was therefore fighting to keep alive what she termed "ecofolk". "There is a real danger that the peasants are being eclipsed by the modern world and we ignore that at our peril", she said. These peasants “have their own cosmology, demonology and 'angelology', mixing orthodox religion with superstition and meteorology. Wedding ceremonies, set in autumn, include dances round wells and the primitive ritual of hanging out the bloodied wedding sheet. At funeral services, bocitoare (voices) are hired to wail for three days to drive away spirits, a piece of wax as long as the corpse is set to burn for three days, and the coffin's nails are pounded in with a stone to ensure that the vampire can't claim another recruit.”

Electoralism and direct action

According to Wikipedia, direct action is “a form of political activism which seeks immediate remedy for perceived ills, as opposed to indirect actions such as electing representatives who promise to provide remedy at some later date.”
Although support for electoralism often is a form of indirect action, it can also be direct. Direct action can include such activities as strikes, workplace occupations, sabotage and civil disobedience. And so, it is sometimes illegal. Legal forms of direct action include strikes, establishing social centers, performing street theatre, demonstrating and... participation in municipal elections by communalists.
This does not mean that communalists and other radicals should be against illegal things like civil disobedience or social revolutions. On the contrary, Henry David Thoreau, the early advocate of civil disobedience should inspire us. Just like Errico Malatesta, one of the advocates of a left-libertarian revolution, should inspire us.
The naturalist American author Thoreau, who pioneered the modern theory behind civil disobedience in his 1849 essay "Resistance to Civil Government", can be seen as one of the ablest thinkers of the 19th century. He inspired people like Leo Tolstoi, Emma Goldman and Martin Luther King. Malatesta was a principled revolutionary who defended the refusal of military service, and was also right in being in support of the economical work and pleasure principle “from each according to abilities, to each according to needs”.
Civil disobedience encompasses the active refusal to obey certain laws, demands and commands of hierarchical institutions without easily resorting to physical violence. People should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their conscience, or deny their principles and become agents of injustice.
Revolutions are interesting when they are about establishing a lot of power from below, a dual power against the nation-state within cooperating communes. True revolutions are not about trying to gain state power, like so many marxists have advocated, they are about empowerment of all the people, not about empowering vanguard elites.
To participate in municipal elections can be seen as an educational form of direct action when the final goal is to abolish municipal hierarchies and the institutions that support them. The Left should get rid of the statification of municipalities, by forming a dual power against the State. Therefore radicals who are in favor of direct democracy should try to gain majorities for their cause at the local level, by this they can delegitimize the power of dominating municipal governments that support the immoral market economies and state power.
Rafa Grinfeld

The return of Naomi Klein

“The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.” is the forthcoming book of Naomi Klein. It will appear soon in more than ten languages.


Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is said to be “the gripping story of how America’s 'free market' policies have come to dominate the world-- through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.”

The shock doctrine is about “using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters -- to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets.”

The Shock Doctrine book shows how “disaster capitalism” (as if capitalism has not always been a disaster) – the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock – did not begin with September 11, 2001. The book traces its origins back fifty years. Still, I look forward to this book. Naomi Klein is a very good journalist.

Naomi also has a new site.

The site of Chuck Morse

The site www.negations.net contains musings and resources that are connected in one way or another to building a radical movement and transforming society. Chuck Morse publishes book reviews, opinion pieces, photographs, translations, scanned documents, and miscellaneous commentary upon events and ideas on it.

Recent posts include :
# Bookchin’s legacy
# Neo-anarchism by Manuel Castells
# Revolutionary Films Online - ChristieBooks
# Aspects of a 21st Century Anarchism - Two New Books

Chuck Morse was born in 1969 in Poughkeepsie, New York. He has spent most of life trying to contribute to radical movements. He presently lives in Queens, New York.

Some recent works - - -

Article

The Life - or Death - of the Anti-Globalization Movement (spring, 2004)

Book reviews

The New Anti-Imperialism (fall, 2004)

Magonismo: An Overview (winter-spring, 2004)

Latin American Anarchism (February, 2003)

War is the Health of the State. An Interview with Howard Zinn (with Paul Glavin) (spring, 2003)

Resistencia Libertaria: Anarchist Opposition to the Last Argentine Dictatorship (February, 2003)

To remember London Greenpeace

London Greenpeace was the first Greenpeace group in Europe, founded in 1971, and has always been separate from Greenpeace International (founded in 1977). According to one of its members, Dave Morris, it was “an open, anarchist, ecological group which has always supported a wide range of radical, social and environmental issues, networking with other activists and initiatives.” And so, it is not to be confused with the larger Greenpeace International organization, which they declined to join as they saw it being too "centralized and mainstream for their tastes".
When Greenpeace International was established, the biggest of the Greenpeace organisations outside Britain - the Vancouver Greenpeace Foundation in Canada saw itself as the "lead" group. It also wanted the London group to "take its orders from" the Board of Directors in Vancouver, but London Greenpeace refused.

In 1986 "London Greenpeace", as a small campaigning group, started distributing a pamphlet entitled What’s wrong with McDonald’s: Everything they don’t want you to know. The pamphlet led to the famous McLibel case, a long-running English court action.
Dave Morris : “Myself and co-defendant Helen Steel (a 33-yr old barworker) were sued for libel by the $30 billion-a-year Corporation in 1990 for distributing London Greenpeace leaflets criticising McDonald’s, the food industry and multinationals in general for promoting unhealthy food, damaging the environment, monopolising resources, exploiting workers, targeting and exploiting children and causing animal suffering.” Later, the defendants learned McDonald's had not only hired spies to infiltrate London Greenpeace, but that the company had hired agents to break into their offices and steal documents. The case turned into a matter of serious embarrassement for the company.

In 2005, the pair's 20-year battle (and 11-year court battle) with the company concluded when the European Court of Human Rights ordered that the United Kingdom government had to pay the McLibel Two £57,000 in compensation for not supporting the two in their fight against McDonald's.
The European Court declared that the notorious and long running McLibel case was in breach of the right to a fair trial and right to freedom of expression, and ruled that UK laws had failed to protect the public’s right to criticise massive corporations whose business practices can affect people’s lives, health and the environment.
Helen and Dave have recently been active in local community groups and campaigns in North London.

More about the McLibel case...

Emma Goldman and free love

“Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere. In freedom it gives itself unreservedly, abundantly, completely. All the laws on the statutes, all the courts in the universe, cannot tear it from the soil, once love has taken root.”
Emma Goldman



A concept that originated in the mid-nineteenth century, free love meant an absence of legal ties rather than promiscuity, as frequently misunderstood and more frequently charged in the press. Emma Goldman (1869-1940) became a celebrated left-libertarian spokesperson of the free love cause, criticizing marriage and male domination. She was won for a free society with universal education and worker's rights. The women's liberation movement later made a strident critique of “free love” as practiced by the New Left in the sixties. In polemical essays and pamphlets, the objections became important new statements of free love principles. Until then, liberated love often had been a mark of bohemian lifestyles.

What is this site called then, and why?

Indymedia + is the name of this new site, with contributions in English and soon also in Dutch. Indymedia +, also called i+, is not a part of the worldwide indymedia-network, but shares with it some objectives. It fights against the big power of corporate media and state media.
i+ will almost daily have new contributions in the near future. The names of the site just sound well, to the point. Indymedia + is not an independent media center, but the name of its founder, Rafa Grinfeld, has been connected to the indymedia network for years now, although he always just posted on it. “i+” as a name sounds a bit like i10, an international revue. Arthur Lehning was the editor of this avant-garde journal. Lehning (1899-2000) aligned himself with antimilitarists and libertarian socialists. In Amsterdam, he published the i10 International Revue from 1927 to 1929.
Within the pages of i10, Lehning collaborated with artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondriaan. He also was supported by Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Max Netlau,
Alexander Berkman, Alexander Shapiro,...

Here is Lehning's obituary from the International Institute of Social History (IISH):

On January 1, 2000, Arthur Lehning died at his residence at Le Plessis, Indre (France). Born on October 23, 1899, he was 100 years old. Others will no doubt commemorate his life as an anarchist and anti-militarist, an essayist and the sole editor of the avant-garde journal i 10. He was, among many other things, a secretary of the anarcho-syndicalist International Working Men's Association in 1932-1935, at a time when the IWMA was closely involved in the revolutionary activities of the Spanish Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo.
At the International Institute of Social History, Lehning will be remembered as an important representative of its founding generation. In 1935 he was among the Institute's first staff, with a special responsibility for the South-European and Anarchist collections. From April 1939 all through WW II he was in charge of the Oxford branch of the IISH, to which the most sensitive archival records had been sent after the conclusion of the Munich Agreement. In 1957 he returned to the Institute as editor of the collected works of the Russian revolutionary, Mikhail Bakunin, published under the title Archives Bakounine. Some of his major scholarly articles were collected in From Buonarroti to Bakunin (1970).
A real internationalist, who lived in many countries and used to travel widely, Lehning always took a lively interest in political and cultural affairs that far outranged the traditional scope of the Institute. The IISH owes him deep gratitude for the tremendous work he has accomplished on its behalf.

New long texts from Communalists

"Anti-Semitism in the Socialist Tradition" from Kjetil Simonsen is the newest long text at the site of Communalism.
Simonsen : “The extent of anti-Jewish, or potentially anti-Jewish, notions within the Left may come as a surprise or seem incomprehensible. After all, the Left has always said it stood for human emancipation. Alas, anti-Semitic ideas have been found among socialist theorists and in leftist circles for two centuries. This anti-Semitism has taken a host of different expressions, but certain elements have been characteristic: a fundamental contempt for the Jews as Jews; allegations of negative character traits; and an attribution of responsibility for economic problems, exploitation, and social injustice to 'the Jews', viewed as a monolithic entity.”


Before that, there was "Democratizing the Municipality. The Promise of Participatory Budgeting" by Sveinung Legard (see photograph). He is also participating in the upcoming elections of Oslo.
Legard : “The aim of this article is not to discuss whether Porto Alegre is a 'remarkable city', nor to judge the specific achievements of participatory budgeting. Neither is it my objective to criticize confused reformists who do not have coherent ideas about how to change society, nor to pick on their insurrectionist counter-parts. Rather, what I would like to do is assess participatory budgeting from a Communalist perspective, to see what potentialities or limits it has as a democratized municipality and challenge the assumptions about participatory democracy on the 'participatory Left'.”

Thoughts of Peter Staudenmaier

For those of you who know Dutch, you might want to check this new interview with Peter Staudenmaier on antroposophy.

He also wrote a lot of texts, criticizing mystical environmentalism, the far Right, antroposophy, ... :

Anthroposophy and its Defenders
The Janus Face of Anthroposophy
The Art of Avoiding History
Disney Ecology
The Economics of Race Hatred
Fascist Ecology: the 'Green Wing' of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents.
The Hijacking of History
Redeeming Reason: Domination and Reconciliation in 'Dialectic of Enlightenment'
Peter Singer and the Re-emergence of Eugenic Thought
Ambiguities of Animal Rights
Mythologizing Kosovo: A Reply to Peter Hudis
Selective Outrage: Achilles Heel of the Left

The Fable of the Illegal in Leiden, Holland

"De Fabel van de illegaal (The myth of illegality) is a radical-Left organisation working from the grassroots level in Leiden, Holland. We want a free socialist and feminist society, without racism, nationalism or fascism. That goal can only be attained through a worldwide fundamental change in social and economic relations between all people. Therefore international solidarity is a central concept in our struggle.
De Fabel van de illegaal tries to make this solidarity concrete through fighting together with migrants and refugees for their rights."

Many of their texts have been translated in English, you can find them here.

Feminist radicals in Belgium

Feminist radicals have been active in groups like Next GENDERation and FC Poppesnor.

The Next GENDERation network is a European network of students and graduates working in various fields of women's, feminist and gender studies. It wants to stand for "a type of feminist knowledge politics, deeply concerned with the democratisation of higher education." On its site you will find many texts in English, French and Dutch.

The Feminist Café Poppesnor is not literally a café, but is a monthly info/discussion evening about a feminist topic. There have been similar feminist cafés in the Netherlands too, like in Amsterdam. Alot of the feminist radicals tend to visit these activities.
Following the example of the cafés in the Netherlands, FC Poppesnor decided to start its own feminist café in the city of Antwerp, Belgium, where there are little feminist initiatives.

"Feminism for FC Poppesnor is a contemporary notion and practice. It does not only examine gender-relations, it also questions other power structures and socio-economic and political/religious situations and issues in the world."
FC Poppesnor (the name) derives from (FC) 'feminist café' and (Poppesnor - a very rare, Dutch word) 'investigating spirit'. In Dutch, 'pop' means 'doll' and 'snor' means 'moustache'.
Themes the group has worked on during the past year : the history of feminism in Belgium, ecofeminism, Antwerp city, genderbending of musicians, islamophobia, Queer theory,...
You will find very little information on the site in English though.

Athens, "webperiodical for direct democracy"

"Athene" (Athens) is a "webperiodical for direct democracy". Its first issue appeared in 2002, and its latest issue is about Cornelius Castoriadis. One of the two people behind Athene is Roger Jacobs. He has written a lot about Murray Bookchin in Dutch. He was also quite influenced by Castoriadis and George Orwell. In Belgium he has been one of the most known anarchists for several decades.
Ronald de Vries has been less involved in left-libertarian circles. He was influenced a lot by people like Erich Fromm and then (later in his life) became a libertarian socialist, much interested in thinking about the concept of democracy. This has also been the central theme of the nine issues of Athene, de Vries was the original initiator of the periodical.
Almost all the texts are in Dutch, but sometimes you can find an original version in English (or an other language) on the site of a translated text.

Before the issue on Castoriadis appeared, Athene was about:

The parlementarian system
march 2006 [8]

The radical democratic opininions of KARL MARX
september 2005 [7]

Direct Democracy in Switzerland
december 2005 [6]

The revolutionary thinking of Hannah Arendt
june 2004 [5]

The participatory budget in Porto Alegre
december 2003 [4]

The Quarters of Paris
february 2003 [3]

Libertarian Municipalism
october 2002 [2]

The Polis of Athens
june 2002 [1]

Anarchy in the Netherlands

Just like in Belgium, squatting and anti-militarism have been very important for the libertarian left in the Netherlands, maybe also because much of the libertarian left movement in these parts of Europe was destroyed when the two World Wars came along.

The portal site of anarchist groups in the Netherlands really shows the influence of non-violence.
(The site is mostly in Dutch but shows some internet links to sites in English)

The group behind the portal site anarchisme.nl is just about the same as that of the collective Atalanta.

What is Atalanta? In their own words...
"Our philosophy contains sober things from knowledge theory, like skepticism and stoicism. Substantial it is about freedom, fairness and also gaiety. Anarchism and feminism that is."

Its political philosophy is to be found in an old text called "Tijd voor de anarchie", that has been translated into English...
"Time for Anarchy. Some misunderstandings concerning anarchism."
Here you can find a lot of things (also in English and German) about the woman that wrote this pamphlet. She's called Weia Reinboud.

Anarchy in Belgium

In Belgium the libertarian left of the 21st century could be described as a movement in which the ideologies of those active in its main center, the Anarchist Center in a big city called Gent, are very important. This place is in the north of Belgium, not far from the border with The Netherlands.
What is the Anarchist Center? In their own words...
"The Anarchistisch Centrum is a meeting place for individuals and groups active in Gent with anarchism and/or direct action. Anarchism means for us that we want to work in an anti-authoritarian way at an ecological society in which all power is equally divided."
I think anarchism of the now in Belgium is a lot like that of Sweden, but with less syndicalist influences and a lot more people interested in squatting, because the laws around it are not that strict here.

The portal site of anarchist groups in Belgium
(About everything is in Dutch or French)

Two people have started this year with a journal called "Anarchy is order". Two issues of it have appeared already and they have been active as a collective that distributes alot of radical writings, digital and non-digital. They clearly have been inspired by writers like Chaz Bufe, Peter Kropotkin and Murray Bookchin. Their website is almost fully in English.