Image: a woodcut from 1568 of an ancient printing press in use.
“Twenty-volume folios will never make a revolution. It’s the little pocket pamphlets that are to be feared.”
— Voltaire.
The ACG’s magazine Stormy Petrel is the only specifically anarchist communist magazine published in the UK. The intriguing name of the magazine is inspired by the association that the Stormy Petrel bird has with revolution.
“We are the birds of the coming storm.”
— August Spies, anarchist militant and Haymarket martyr, executed by the US government in 1887.
The Stormy Petrel bird was seen as a herald of coming storms. The Russian poet Maxim Gorki wrote The Song of the Stormy Petrel in 1901 it was a coded call for revolution, coded because of the repression meted out by the Tsarist tyranny. That poem proved very popular in Russia and was translated into many languages. Gorki himself became known as the Stormy Petrel of the Revolution.
The poem was popular in anarchist circles the German-American anarchist communist Claus Timmermann edited Der Sturmvogel (Stormy Petrel) between 1897 and 1899 and the paper Burevestnik (Stormy Petrel) was published by Russian anarchist communists in exile in Paris and then Geneva between 1906 and 1910. Burevestnik was later the title of the daily paper brought out by the Petrograd Federation of Anarchist Groups in 1917-1918. The name has also been applied to anarchist militants like the Russian sailor Anatoli Zhelezniakov, the Spanish militant Buenaventura Durruti and the Scottish anarchist Ethel MacDonald.
The ACG also publishes a printed regular free anarchist news sheet called Jackdaw which reports on current aspects of the class struggle focusing on workplace resistance, housing and environmental campaigns.
Why the name Jackdaw?
The ACG decided to publish a regular news sheet and the name Jackdaw was
suggested because of the characteristics often associated with this
intelligent bird, characteristics which are an important part of a
revolutionary anarchist movement for a new society: resilience and a
fighting spirit, as well as being social and co-operative. ‘Jack’ means
‘rogue’ and ‘daw’ means ‘call.’ Anarchists are rogues in the current
society and the ACG free paper aims to call for a working class
revolution and the creation of an anarchist communist society.
The ACG has published many pamphlets including the controversial Manifesto of Libertarian Communism by Georges Fontenis, Against Nationalism, The Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists, The Politics of Division: An Engagement with Identity Politics and The Truth About Trotsky.
The ACG publishes pamphlets to further the development and understanding of what anarchist communism is, both through theoretical writing and by describing historical examples of anarchist communism.
The ACG has also published two books; Compendium of Karl Marx’s Capital by Carlo Cafiero and The Dossier of Subject No.1218: A Bulgarian Anarchist’s Storyby Alexander Nakov.
The book The Dossier of Subject No.1218 by Alexander Nakov is a memoir of an anarchist communist militant detailing his youthful activity, subsequent imprisonment, and fierce resistance to an inhuman system. A short quote from Alexander Nakov sums up his experiences.
“Secondary education in fascist prisons — higher education in Bolshevik prisons”.
The Anarchist Communist Group is committed to consistently producing printed material as we consider that print still matters.
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