Month: February 2025

Our friends over at Freedom Press, who host the reading group, are having a book launch tomorrow, February the 13^th, for Physical Resistance, a 100-year history of grass roots anti-fascism in Britain. Physical resistance covers the fight of the International Brigades in Spain to the Battle of Cable Street and the defence of Southall, and locates these large-scale events alongside forgotten episodes of everyday resistance, collecting voices from across the movement to highlight the ways racism was faced down in communities nationwide. As part of the launch there will be a discussion about the book with the editor of its latest edition, Louise Purbrick, who inherited Dave Hann’s book, and has extended this new edition with activists’ accounts of the formation of the Anti-Fascist Network and their role in street anti-fascism of the twenty-first century.

The book launch will be at 7pm, at Freedom Bookshop, Angel Alley, 84b Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX.

For our seventh reading group we will be reading Queering Anarchsim, an anthology of essays. From the blurb:

“What does it mean to “queer” the world around us? How does the radical refusal of the mainstream codification of LGBT identity as a new gender norm come into focus in the context of anarchist theory and practice? How do our notions of orientation inform our politics and vice versa? Queering Anarchism brings together a diverse set of writings ranging from the deeply theoretical to the playfully personal that explore the possibilities of the concept of “queering,” turning the dominant, and largely heteronormative, structures of belief and identity entirely inside out. Ranging in topic from the economy to disability, politics, social structures, sexual practice, interpersonal relationships, and beyond, the authors here suggest that queering might be more than a set of personal preferences, pointing toward the possibility of an entirely new way of viewing the world.”

For this book we will be changing our format slightly. We will be reading Queering Anarchism over two months. This month we will be reading up and including the essay Harm Reduction as Pleasure Activism and stopping there, and we will read the rest of the book in March,

Free versions of Queering Anarchism can be found on the Anarchist Library here and our friends at Freedom Press here have offered a 10% discount on physical copies for the reading group. Just quote “London SolFed Reading Group” or pop into Freedom for your general radical book buying needs.

The reading group will be meeting on Tuesday the 25h of February, 19:00, at Freedom Bookshop, 84b Whitechapel High St, London E1 7QX. You are welcome to come and join in the discussion even if you have not finished the book.