The Edinburgh Fringe is upon us but fear not! You can escape the tourist mania by popping by our next library day! Come enjoy our vast collection of political and cultural literature covering worker organising, pedagogy, revolutionary history, anti-colonialism and more.

As always, we read these texts together so no need to prepare anything in advance, but we'll link the texts in our bio in case you want to read it before. Don't worry if you missed previous reading circles - see you at this one! ☀️.

What do you want to know?.

His preface draws connections between the role of prisons in different contexts as well as the position of the political prisoners in liberation struggles from Ireland to the USA to France to Palestine.

To contextualise his letter, we''ll also read Ahmad Sa'adat's preface to the french language edition of Huey Newton's Revolutionary suicide. Sa'adat is the general secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and is currently imprisoned by Israel in Ramon prison

Abdallah has remained steadfast in his support for Palestinian liberation and struggle against imperialism for which he was jailed over 40 years ago. And in this letter he address the yearly solidarity march calling for his release, speaking on his own conditions as a prisoner.

In honor of the release of Europe's longest incarcerated political prisoner, the Lebanese marxist Georges Abdallah, we will be reading a letter of his written from prison in October 2024 for our next reading circle (Saturday 2nd August).

Details on our reading circle for this session will be posted soon so keep an eye on this space and drop us a message or email us with any questions you have.

We call on those who yearn for a world free from domination to join us on May 3rd. Let us show Edinburgh that a new world is not only possible but necessary! 🔥 🏴.

We stand proud as a part of a long tradition of revolt, from the Paris commune of 1871, to the Spanish revolution of 1936 all the way to the ongoing revolutions of the Zapatistas and Rojava, who show us that organising society without the state and capitalism is possible.

Workers should take control of their work places, abolish bosses and place them under workers-self management. Housing should be expropriated from landlords and owned only through usage. Gender autonomy must be considered an unalienable right.

We propose a smashing of the state and replacing it with a confederation of autonomous participatory councils, communes and assemblies, using recallable delegates to represent decisions taken by the base rather than taking decisions on behalf of the base.

Taking over the state is a useless activity in instituting revolution, the ruling class does not rule the state, neoliberal imperialist capitalism rules the state.

The neoliberal stripping of all social aspects of society will continue, the interests of landlords and shareholders will continue to control policy.

The parliamentary political developments of the last decade — from the state and bourgeois society's counter attack against Corbyn, the starmerisation of the labour party, to the rise of Reform UK — clearly show that hoping to vote our way into genuine change is a pipe dream.

To preserve their power and profit, they are driving us towards extinction due to ecological collapse. We must radically transform our social and economic system before it's too late.

Likewise, the state continues to repress mass calls for climate action. They know that addressing the roots of climate change will necessarily endanger the capitalist state system.

Deviations from the heteropatriarchal gender system in place is dangerous for the state, and so long as states exist, they will continue to seek the annihilation of trans and queer identities.

We should understand this move and the general trend it belongs to as an attempt to remove trans people from public life entirely.

Of course, the real purpose of the ruling is to provide justification for wide reaching discrimination — it is already being applied in contexts where it is not legally required, such as in the Scottish Football Association.

Additionally, governments are increasingly attempting to extend the control of individuals by the state. The ruling by the UK Supreme Court denying trans women legal recognition as women in the eyes of the EHRC is the latest example of a wider backlash against queer people.