Anarchists In Love (The Generation Quartet)

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Bowling for Anarchy: The Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League – Empty Hands History on RAGE! Anarchism in the Late 1980s The periodical press was the foremost means by which the interwar anarchists exchanged ideas. Footnote 4 Published between 1898 and 1905 and then again from 1923 to 1936, La Revista Blanca was a weekly long-form political journal costing twenty-five cents per issue. Footnote 5 No periodical could have legitimately claimed to represent all Spanish anarchists since the movement was such a broad church, and indeed La Revista Blanca's co-editors, the middle-class Montseny family, had some long-standing disputes with other anarchists. Footnote 6 But in spite of its modest readership of 12,000 in its second period of publication, La Revista Blanca's multifaceted engagement with the anarchist community and particular fixation on sexual morality warrants historical attention. Footnote 7 From 1933 to 1936 it became one of the few Spanish anarchist periodicals to include an advice column ( Consultorio) manned by the editorial team and an anarchist doctor. Footnote 8 The editorial team comprised Juan Montseny (alias Federico Urales), his partner Teresa Mañé (alias Soledad Gustavo), and their daughter Federica Montseny. Between 1934 and 1935, Federica took over managerial duties from her father who had fallen ill. Footnote 9 The doctor recruited to assist with the advice column was one Javier Serrano Coello (calling himself ‘Doctor Klug’ – German for ‘Doctor Clever’). Based in Barcelona, he had previously written for other anarchist periodicals under the pseudonym Doctor Fantasma and gave lectures on sexology at several Catalan anarchist community centres ( ateneos). Footnote 10 Through his efforts and those of the Montseny family, La Revista Blanca – especially in its advice columns – self-consciously intervened in the construction of a new anarchist socio-sexual morality, opposed to that of the Catholic and bourgeois Establishment. Spencer’s first novel, An Absurd Affair, was published in 1961, but it was with his second, Anarchists in Love (1963), the first in the four-volume Generation sequence, that he began to garner widespread critical acclaim. Seven more novels followed between 1966 and 1978, including Poppy, Mandragora and the New Sex (1966), Asylum (1966), an

Whether or not ACT UP strictly conformed to anarchist theory and practice was beside the point; AIDS activists took whatever opportunity they could to respond to an existential crisis. It may be useful to lay out an anarchist critique of state-centered AIDS activism, but to apply a “pure” anarchist standard to ACT UP verged on a dogmatic prioritization of anarchist politics over the lives of people with AIDS. During his twenties numerous of Colin Spencer's drawings were published in The London Magazine, The Transatlantic Review and Encounter. A series of drawings of writers of our time was published in The Times Literary Supplement in 1959. Those he portrayed included John Betjeman, E.M. Forster, C.P.Snow and his wife Pamela Hansford Johnson, Graham Greene, Alan Ross, Iris Murdoch, Angus Wilson, Evelyn Waugh, John Lehmann, Stevie Smith, V.S.Naipaul, and John Osborne, among others. An oil portrait of E.M. Forster hung for many years in his rooms at King's College Cambridge. On his death Forster left it to Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears and it is now in the Britten-Pears Library in Aldeburgh. Reports From Behind (with Chris Barlas), 1984, Enigma Books (with 27 illustrations by Colin Spencer), ISBN 978-0727820389.Three comedies: The Trial of St George, a satire on British justice when dealing with sexuality, inspired by the Oz Trial; Why Mrs Neustadter Always Loses, a wry monologue by an American divorcee exiled on a Greek island; and Keep It in the Family, a satire concerning a happy incestuous family (which Colin Spencer also directed) appeared between 1972 and 1978 at the Soho Poly. Interest in his work abroad led to performances of his play The Sphinx Mother, a modern Oedipus, at the Salzburg Festival in 1972, and Lilith, a comedy of surrealist images, at the Schauspielhaus, Vienna in 1979. Read’s acceptance of a knighthood for his literary achievements had already discredited him amongst many anarchists. But, at the time of his visit in 1959, he was still the most prominent anarchist in Britain and his published writings had considerable influence on, amongst others, Murray Bookchin. There are slogans & posters everywhere, and party literature in every hotel lounge: but like the professor this afternoon, however firm their faith, they are willing to discuss it in a free & friendly manner. … This book includes an account of several Workers’ Revolutionary Party trips to Libya to obtain funding from Gaddafi’s ‘revolutionary’ regime. This pamphlet summarises the book, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation, which was inspired by a visit to the USSR during the devastating Ukrainian famine. In the pamphlet, these influential intellectuals overlook the famine while claiming that ‘Stalin is not a dictator’ and that the USSR is ‘not only a political but an industrial democracy’.

Colin Spencer (17 July 1933 – 6 July 2023) was an English writer and artist who produced a prolific body of work in a wide variety of media after his first published short stories and drawings appeared in The London Magazine and Encounter when he was 22. His work included novels, short stories, non-fiction (including histories of food and of homosexuality), vegetarian cookery books, stage and television plays, paintings and drawings, book and magazine illustrations. He wrote and presented a television documentary on vandalism, appeared in numerous radio and television programmes and lectured on food history, literature and social issues. For fourteen years he wrote a regular food column for The Guardian.

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I remarked to the interpreter that I had not seen a policeman, & he answered as I expected, that they were not needed since the Liberation. The advice columns of La Revista Blanca represented a microcosm of the explosion of anarchist press attention devoted to sexual revolution in the interwar period. As a venue of political, medical, and cultural thought they platformed the voices of men and women from a range of social classes and generations, giving them the opportunity to feel empowered, obtain sex education and receive medical care, as well as adding their contributions to the ongoing evolution of radical discourse surrounding bodies, birth control, and free love. Responses to their queries, from the Montseny family or Doctor Javier Serrano Coello, on one hand destigmatised women's embodied traumas, instilled pride in readers’ bodies, offered practicable guidance about reproductive hygiene and safety, and granted dignity to sexual pleasures outside of procreative marital sex. On the other hand, their advice was ever underpinned by eugenic motivations, concerned with the (subjective) evolutionary betterment of the human species, which placed significant limits on the permissiveness of the sexual revolution that they envisioned and prefigured. The obligation to serve a collective revolutionary struggle was forever in tension with the impetus to ‘free’ oneself as an autonomous individual. Footnote 159 Seven of Colin Spencer's plays have been performed since the first production in December 1966 at the Hampstead Theatre Club of The Ballad of The False Barman. It was directed by Robin Phillips and featured Caroline Blakiston, Penelope Keith and Michael Pennington. The play is a musical fantasy set in a beach bar run by a bald-headed lesbian "barman" and peopled by whores of various sexes and their clientele, including a transvestite thieving vicar. Nov 23: ‘Feminism Practices What Anarchism Preaches’: Anarcha-Feminism in the 20th Century (Panel Recording) One woman whose contribution to Spanish anarchism is exceptionally well-documented is Federica Montseny (1905–94), the daughter of La Revista Blanca's co-founders and one of its most prominent writers from the age of eighteen. Footnote 24 When the Second Republic (1931–6) replaced Primo de Rivera's dictatorship (1923–30), female suffrage was granted which made political participation more possible for women. In this context she began writing for Solidaridad Obrera, the organ of the CNT, and these connections led her to be chosen from among Spain's leading anarchists for the role of Minister of Health and Social Care in 1936. In her first year in office, she oversaw the legalisation of abortion and contraception, as well as promotion of sex education and research into sexual science. Footnote 25 She and La Revista Blanca had intervened into anarchist debates about gender and sexuality for years prior to these reforms, yet on these matters this anarchist periodical has attracted somewhat less historical attention than others such as Estudios or Iniciales which were more singularly committed to sex-reform content.

The Chinese] are extremely moral, in fact puritanical. Crime has, apart from occasional ‘crimes of passion’, practically disappeared. Each street has a committee which settles all disputes, and there are women’s associations that look after the morals of the inhabitants. Theft, which used to be frequent, is now almost unknown. … Food is plentiful & cheap. … By the late 1910s, Chinese translations of Goldman's writings began to surface in the progressive press as well as in anarchist publications. In 1917, Yuan Zhenying (袁震瀛 1894–1979), an English major with anarchist leanings at Peking University, chose "Marriage and Love" as his first translation of Goldman and published it in Xin qingnian (新青年 New Youth), a leading left-wing liberal monthly in China that later promoted communism. 21 Meanwhile, Yuan and his anarchist friends issued translations of Goldman's "Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty" and "Anarchism: What It Really Stands For" in an essay volume published by their Anarchist Society. 22 In 1919, Yuan's translation of Goldman's "The Modern Drama: A Powerful Disseminator of Radical Thought" was published in Xin qingnian. 23 These translations together contributed to Goldman's "enormous popularity during the [May Fourth] New Culture Movement," as Arif Dirlik noted. 24 His subsequent artistic work ranged from landscape drawings of Winchelsea Beach and Rye countryside to oil portraits of the poet Harry Fainlight and has lately been exhibited in London, Rye and Brighton. A recent series of paintings entitled The Downs reflected the sensuous forms of the landscape of the South Downs where he lived. He was latterly intensely involved in creating paintings which he described as "images of the unknown, paths through conflict, compounds of sex and spirit, mysterious reflections, hints and fading memories which unsettle the darkness." The themes of his recent paintings are: War, Music, and Sex, the interior life of flowers, the sea bed and how do hills form roots. Public Humanities and Collective Education at Ithaca’s Socialist Night School – Empty Hands History on Marxist Reading Group: Introductory Syllabus

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For fourteen years he wrote a regular food column for the Guardian. His column was particularly concerned with exploring current issues and anxieties about food production and manufacture. In 2001 he was described by Germaine Greer as 'the greatest living food writer'. [7] I was based at the Brooklyn Interference Archive for Fall 2021 conducting dissertation research and interviews with support from Cornell’s Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. During this time, I wrote sixteen new blog posts, which I am collecting here: the first thing that YOU have to do, young lady, is emancipate yourself economically, so that hardship does not obligate you to live forever with a man whom you could stop loving’. Footnote 1 This was the advice imparted by the editorial team of the anarchist periodical, La Revista Blanca, to a girl who had written to their advice column expressing curiosity about ‘free love’. It encapsulated the gendered dynamics of the anarchist sexual revolution: in theory men and women were equally free to decide the lengths of sexual partnerships, unburdened by marriage, but in practice women's sexual freedom was conditional on the overhaul of the patriarchal distribution of economic power. This article frames the interwar Spanish anarchist press as a venue of political, medical, and cultural thought which straddled the complex intersection between sexual revolution and ‘women's emancipation’. It explores how the anarchists harnessed advice columns as radical spaces to empower, educate, and provide medical care to readers, as well as platforming their concerns. Advice columns offer us insight into the connections between private and public morality, as they were forums for the discussion and resolution of intimate problems. Footnote 2 Using La Revista Blanca and interwar Spanish anarchism as a case study, the article interrogates how political movements have historically constructed socio-cultural – including socio-sexual – moralities via interactive media. Footnote 3 Although restoring dignity and autonomy to women was considered necessary in the realms of sex and pleasure, Spain's anarchists nonetheless delineated clear circumstances in which sexual pleasure was morally and hygienically acceptable. Female sex workers, in particular, continued to be associated with dirtiness and disease, even though they were simultaneously pitied by the anarchists as the ultimate representatives of social victimhood and exploitation. Footnote 143 In La Revista Blanca's advice columns, the editorial team urged men not to visit sex workers. On multiple occasions male readers wrote in seeking advice about their sexual dilemmas: they struggled to find girlfriends, but also felt morally uncomfortable about visiting brothels. Footnote 144 The replies emphasised that visiting sex workers contributed to social injustice and reassured the men that they would find love eventually. Footnote 145 They believed that ‘resorting to prostitution is just as degrading to the man as it is to the woman’. Footnote 146 The association between sex work and indignity in the interwar period did not only pertain to venereal disease but also to spermatorrhea: a (now disproven) illness characterised by excessive loss of semen. Footnote 147 Seminal loss had been a key concern of doctors in Europe and the United States since the nineteenth century; some even invented special devices that they claimed would inhibit ‘nocturnal emissions’. Footnote 148 Men who engaged in sexual intercourse too often and with too many women, as well as those who masturbated, were thought likely to fall prey to this illness, which could apparently cause symptoms such as erectile dysfunction, infertility, and decline in intelligence. Footnote 149 Particularly worrying to many early twentieth century Spanish doctors was the seemingly ‘psychic’ nature of this illness, which connected it to a more fundamental loss of masculinity in the patient. Footnote 150 Many men sought medical advice from Doctor Klug through La Revista Blanca to treat their spermatorrhea. Footnote 151 They were told that by swearing off masturbation and visits to sex workers and seeking stable relationships, they could avoid this medical affliction. Footnote 152 The advice columns of La Revista Blanca evidently did not advocate for total sexual freedom, but for a specific model of sexual morality that aspired to safeguard the reproductive health of all anarchists. The advice columns did not berate sex workers for their loss of virginity because many of La Revista Blanca's writers saw ‘virginity’ as an oppressive, unnatural construct invented by the Catholic Church. Footnote 153 Indeed, the editorial team emphasised in one advice column response that former sex workers should be free to shake off that stigma once they walked away from the profession (contrary to prevailing social attitudes at the time). Footnote 154 However, reconception of sex work as a legitimate, dignified profession was never an option, because the apparent risk it posed to fertility via venereal disease or spermatorrhea was too great.