In this 1950 article from the “Thread of Time” series Amadeo Bordiga examines the question of war and revolution in Marxist theory—characteristically emphasizing the epochal shift entailed by the Franco-Prussian War—and the role played by the ideological legacy of the French Revolution in the defeat of the Paris Commune and in the mobilization for and justification of participation in World Wars One and Two, which “were not revolutionary wars, but massacres of the slaves of Capital”.
The young Edgar Bauer (1820-1886) was credited by Gustav Landauer and Max Nettlau with founding the anarchist tradition in Germany. The following is a selection from his 'Der Streit der Kritik mit Kirche und Staat' (1843), pp. 260-269. After the failed 1848 revolutions Bauer renounced radicalism and embraced conservatism.
Novel about the plight of the French peasantry in the years leading up to the French revolution, and the parallels with life in London. Arguably Dickens most sophisticated work politically speaking. Two Cities graphically describes the corruption and brutality of the French Monarchy and the plight of the peasantry.
This brief survey of the historical and philosophical differences between authoritarian and libertarian communism, written by the anarchist historian Max Nettlau in 1928, exemplifies the “anarchism without adjectives” which, confronted by the Bolshevik experience, reacted by reasserting the particularly liberal and pluralistic roots of the anarchist tradition and denouncing the “doctrinaire rigidity” that hinders the formation of “the great union of all men of good will” that is the only force that can successfully oppose the worldwide trend towards barbarism and fascism.