A Podcast Introduction: The Ideas and History of Anarchism

Sitting down with the Revolutionary Left Radio podcast, historian and author Mark Bray gives an overview of the origins, history and ideas of anarchism. Topics discussed are: Bakunin and Marx, the first international, the Spanish Civil War, Stalinism, listener questions, the anarchist view of the State, Occupy Wall Street, Antifa, and more. Bray is also a member of Black Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation.

Mark Bray is a historian of human rights, terrorism, and political radicalism in Modern Europe. He completed his PhD in Modern European and Women’s and Gender History at Rutgers University in 2016, and is currently finishing his manuscript “The Anarchist Inquisition: Terrorism and the Ethics of Modernity in Spain, 1893-1909.” “The Anarchist Inquisition” explores the emergence of groundbreaking human rights campaigns across Europe and the Americans in response to the Spanish state’s brutal repression of dissent in the wake of anarchist bombings and assassinations. At GRID, he will begin work on his next project which explores the cultures of violence and street resistance that emerge in the social movements of postwar Western Europe and their impact on conceptions of leftist masculinity in the context of the emergence of competing conceptions of feminism. Bray is the author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (Melville House, 2017) and Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street (Zero Books, 2013) as well as the co-editor of the forthcoming Francisco Ferrer and the Modern School (PM Press, 2018).