At The Cafe

We are going through an unprecedented time of human history, in which even the future of the planet is at stake. This was not inevitable. It is the result of the systems

We believe that only anarchist communism can save the day. The ruling class is desperate to make us think that the serious issues we are facing can be resolved within

Other options are being put forward by Communists of the Leninist tradition. Though they call for revolution, theirs would be a top-down one, sacrificing our freedom in the process.

Anarchism, without the communism, is also an inadequate solution. Focusing on individual freedom and being anti-authority does not address the big changes that need to take place in our economic and social systems.

Instead we

“We too aspire to communism as the

Public Discussion Meeting hosted by the ACG.

Complete recording of a public discussion meeting hosted by the ACG.

This is a complete and unedited recording of a public discussion meeting held in June 2022 by the ACG on the cost of living.

This is a podcast of our pamphlet Land and Liberty- arguing the case for building movement for land justice as part of a general revolutionary movement for anarchist communism.

Nick Heath talks about anarchist communism and how this current is the main way forward for building a well-organised, revolutionary, working class anarchist movement.

Nick Heath talks about his book The Idea, stressing the importance of organisation and the anarchist communism perspective as opposed to individualist anarchism and other currents. Ruth Kinna gives her perspective from academic anarchism.

Recently two important books on anarchist communism have appeared. They both seek to reclaim the tradition of anarchist communism, and both have been written by veterans of the anarchist communist movement. The first to appear has been A Defence of Anarchist Communism by Brian Morris, followed by The Idea: Anarchist Communism, Past, Present and Future. Brian has been defending the “integrity, importance and contemporary relevance of anarchist communism as a historical movement and as a political tradition” for more than 40 years in pamphlets, articles, books and letters. In Defence of Anarchist Communism is a very valuable book, and one that will hopefully rehabilitate anarchist communism and bring it to the attention of many new readers. As Brian writes: “…it is important to recognise and stress the vitality and continuing relevance of anarchist communism as a political tradition. Like all social movements, anarchist communism is complex, diverse, and ever-changing, open and responding to new events and new ideas…”

Nick Heath’s book seeks to rehabilitate the current of anarchist-communism and make it better known and understood; and to renovate and modernise it. It offers a prehistory of the idea of anarchist communism, its origins in the First International and extensive chapters on the history of anarchist communism in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. As such it will be the first comprehensive work on anarchist communism, one where it is not sidelined or where it ends up as a footnote.

We have selected the first three chapters of Petr Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread for the reading group because it tries to envisage what an anarchist communist society would look like.

Kropotkin wrote The Conquest of Bread to systematically explain the essential ideas of anarchist-communism. It was a watershed moment in anarchist history since it was the first time that a completed and in-depth theoretical work of anarchist-communist theory was available to the public.Throughout the first three chapters, Kropotkin constructs an argument for the common ownership of all intellectual and useful property due to the collective work that went into creating it. Kropotkin does not argue that the product of a worker's labour should belong to the worker but asserts that every individual product is essentially the work of everyone since every individual relies on the intellectual and physical labour of those who came before them as well as those who built the world around them. Because of this, Kropotkin proclaims that every human deserves an essential right to well-being because every human contributes to the collective social product.

Dale Walford spoke to anarchist communist historian, writer and militant Nick Heath about his new book The Idea – Anarchist Communism, Past, Present and Future. The book is being published in May 2022 by JUST books

If you are interested in finding out more about anarchist communism or are interested in the Anarchist Communist Group (ACG), please visit: https://www.anarchistcommunism.org with links to all our socials.