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Type | Online daily and semi-annual journal |
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Format | A4 |
Owner(s) | Freedom Press |
Publisher | Freedom Press |
Founded | 1886 |
Political alignment | Anarchist |
Language | English |
Headquarters | 84b Whitechapel High Street, London |
Circulation | 1,000 |
Sister newspapers | Freedom Bulletin Spain and the World Revolt! War Commentary |
ISSN | 0016-0504 |
Website | freedomnews |
Freedom is a London-based anarchist news website and semi-annual journal published by Freedom Press. It was formerly either a monthly, a fortnightly or a weekly newspaper. It is the world's oldest surviving anarchist publication, currently edited by Uri Gordon.
The paper was started in 1886 by volunteers including Peter Kropotkin and Charlotte Wilson and continued with a short interruption in the 1930s until 2014 as a regular publication, moving its news production online and publishing irregularly until 2016, when it became a bi-annual. Originally, the subtitle was "A Journal of Anarchist Socialism". The title was changed to "A Journal of Anarchist Communism" in June 1889. Currently it's labelled simply as an "Anarchist Journal". The newspaper's mission statement was originally stated in every issue and summarises the writers' view of anarchism:
Anarchists work towards a society of mutual aid and voluntary co-operation. We reject all government and economic repression. This newspaper, published continuously since 1936, exists to explain anarchism more widely and show that only in an anarchist society can human freedom thrive.
The current printed issue does not carry a summary, but the website retains a section of the original 1886 introductory essay by Peter Kropotkin:
We are socialists, disbelievers in property, advocates of the equal claims of all to work for the community as seems good — calling no-one master, and of the equal claim to each to satisfy as seems good to them, their natural needs from the stock of social wealth they have laboured to produce ...We are anarchists, disbelievers in the government of the many by the few in any shape and under any pretext.