‘1968 and all that’, was, originally, a talk given at Glasgow’s Aye Write Festival in December 2008. It was an attempt on that 40th anniversary to put the events of that year into some sort of political and social context — at least from my personal perspective. In it, however, I posed the somewhat rhetorical question ‘Where are today’s angry young people?’ The answer is, as we have seen across large parts of the capitalist world this summer, they (‘they’ not being just young people) are a...

“Stuart Christie's granny might well disagree, given the chance, but her qualities of honesty and self-respect in a hard life were part of his development from flash Glaswegian teenager — the haircut at 15 is terrific — to the 18-year old who sets off to Spain at the end of the book as part of a plan to assassinate the Spanish dictator Franco. In the meanwhile we get a vivid picture of 1950s and early 1960s Glasgow, its cinemas, coffee bars and dance halls as well as the politics of the ci...

Some thoughts on Niccolò Machiavelli, 'The Prince' and 'The Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius'.

Focusing on the literary works and career of British novelist E.M. Forster (1879-1970), this book argues that the writer adapted a much older literary form, the pastoral, to the purposes of writing about modern British experience. The publication points out that Forster's pastoral fiction challenged conventional parameters for the British novel, allowing for the emergence of his subsequent modernist classic, A Passage to India (including its critique of British imperialism). The monograph ...

“¡PISTOLEROS! is the story of twentieth century anarchism as witnessed by McHarg, a Glaswegian anarchist engineer who became embroiled in Spanish revolutionary politics at the end of the First World War. Curiously echoing the editor Christie’s own life fifty years later, the youthful and naïve McHarg jumps ship in Barcelona and enlists with the CNT (the anarchist national workers union) in their struggle against the bosses proto-fascist murder squads and para-military catholic groups (whic...

Until the end of the eighteenth century one of the most important developments in warfare, apart from the invention of gunpowder and the adoption of firearms, had ‘been the superseding of feudal military organisation by professional, mercenary, troops’. By the end of the fifteenth century the diffused feudal nobility of Europe had discovered, to their cost, that professional soldiers, who fought for pay alone and were personally loyal to the sovereign, were far more reliable than the hasti...

An anarchist critique of John Rawls' 'A Theory of Justice'. Since its publication in 1971 the political ideas expounded by philosopher John Rawls in A Theory of Justice have provided the justifiers and apologists (i.e., the informers and the regulators who, respectively, mould opinion and behaviour within the bourgeois state) for a ‘just’ capitalist democracy — the currently prevailing form of class society — with an alternative to utilitarianism. It also provides...

The floodgates holding back anarchy are constantly under strain. The liberal would ease the pressure by diverting some of the water; the conservative would shore up the dykes, the totalitarian would construct a stronger dam.But is anarchy a destructive force? The absence of government may alarm the authoritarian, but is a liberated people really its own worst enemy—or is the true enemy of mankind, as the anarchists claim, the means by which he is governed? Without government the wo...

Within the Spanish anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist movements there were three distinct points of view on the question of war and revolution. The first, probably the majority view, was that the war would be over in a matter of weeks, after all, a few days had been enough to rout the army in Barcelona and other industrial centres, and that the social revolution and Libertarian Communism as debated and adopted by the CNT’s national congress at Zaragoza in February, five months previously, w...

Empire. Contents: Mise-en-scène (1919-1939); The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR); The Grand Area; The IMF, the World Bank and the United Nations; Post-war Solutions; The Cold War; The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan; From The Brussels Treaty to NATO; The ‘European Movement‘; The Council of Europe and The American Committee on a United Europe (ACUE); The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) ; Containment Militarism and the European Defence Community (EDC); The Bilderberg...

Stuart Christie looks at the history and power base of the ‘Brotherhood’— the West’s largest secret society. If secrecy is to be considered a factor in British politics and commerce then without doubt Freemasonry is one of its principal vehicles. Freemasonry is the largest semi-covert organisation of the western bourgeoisie, with over six million members worldwide sharing a vision of a unified world order bound together through a series of interlocking Masonic alliances. Among the worlds m...

On the last day of July 1964 Stuart Christie, a newly-turned 18-year-old Glaswegian anarchist, left London for Paris and Madrid on a mission whose objective was to kill the last of the Axis dictators — General Francisco Franco. This was to be the last of at least 30 attempts on the fascist leader’s life. This second volume of ‘The Christie File’ takes us through the prison years which followed Stuart’s summary drumhead court-martial in Madrid where he faced possible execution by garrote-vi...