Crooked Bough News Round-up

— Verviers Congress - Resolutions of the Congresses of Verviers

 

at 5/28/23 12:18am

Author: Verviers CongressTitle: Resolutions of the Congresses of VerviersSubtitle: 5 to 8 September 1877, and Ghent, 9 to 14 September 1877Date: 5–8 September 1877, and 9–14 September 1877Notes: René Berthier’s note: “From: the Bulletin de la Fédération Jurassienne, 23 and 30 September, 1873.”Source: In Appendix 15 to Social-Democracy and Anarchism in the International Workers’ Association 1864–1877, by René Berthier, pp 188–91. London: Anarres Editions, 2015. On social revolution Verviers, 8.9.1877. Considering that if social revolution is by its very nature international, and depends on being spread to all countries for its triumph, nevertheless there are certain countries which, because of their social and economic condition are more ready for a revolutionary movement. Congress declares: that it is the duty of every revolutionary to support morally and materially every country in revolution, as it is the duty to spread it, as only through these means is it possible to assure the triumph of the revolution in those countries where it breaks out. Agreed by all federations except the Jura federation. The tendencies of modern production and property Verviers, 8.9.1877. Considering that modern means of production tends, insofar as ownership is concerned, towards the accumulation of capital in the hands of a few and increases workers’ exploitation; that this state of things — being the source of all social inequalities — needs to be changed; Congress considers that the achievement of collective property, that is to say the takeover by groups of workers of social capital, is a social necessity; congress also declares that a Socialist party truly worthy of being so-named should make plain the principle of collective property, not in some distant future but rather in its current programme and in its everyday activities. Two Opposing Resolutions This was the first matter discussed and voted on in Ghent on 11 September 1877. After many delegates had spoken two opposing resolutions were put: Considering that as long as land and other instruments of production, which are the means for life, are owned and appropriated by individuals or groups, the economic subjugation of the mass of the people, and all the misery that results therefrom, will continue; Congress declares that the State or the Commune, representing and encompassing all people should have possession of land and other instruments of labour. (Sixteen delegates voted in favour — for the most part German, Flemish — including De Paepe, Greulich, and Liebknecht.) Considering that modern means of production tend, insofar as ownership is concerned, towards the concentration of social wealth in the hands of a few and thereafter all social inequalities. We believe that workers should take over social wealth and transform it into the collective property of federated producer groups. (Eleven Verviers delegates voted in favour.) Politics and political parties Verviers, 8.9.1877. Considering that the conquest of power is a natural tendency for all political parties and that this power has no other goal than the defence of economic privilege; Considering besides, that in reality current society is divided not into political parties but rather through economic situations — exploiters and exploited, workers and managements; wage-earners and capitalists; considering further that the antagonism that exists between the two categories cannot cease through the will of any power or government, but rather through the united efforts of all the exploited against their exploiters; for these reasons: Congress declares that there is no difference between political parties, whether they are called socialist or not, all these parties without distinction forming in its eyes one reactionary mass and it sees its duty as fighting all of them. It hopes that workers who still travel in the ranks of these various parties, instructed by lessons from experience and by revolutionary propaganda, will open their eyes and abandon the way of politics to adopt that of revolutionary socialism. Ghent, 14.9.1877, the above resolution appeared in Ghent in amended form: Considering that the conquest of power is a natural tendency for all political parties and that this power will have consequences of nothing other than the creation of privileged positions; Considering also, that in reality current society is divided not into political parties but rather through economic situations — exploiters and exploited, workers and managements; wage- earners and capitalists; Considering further that the antagonism that exists. between the two categories cannot cease through the will of any political power but rather through the united efforts of all the exploited against their exploiters; We declare it is our duty to combat all political parties, whether they are called socialist or not, hoping that workers who still travel in the ranks of these various parties, illuminated by experience will open their eyes and abandon the way of politics to adopt anti-governmental socialism. (Eight Verviers delegates voted for this resolution — three others were absent; eighteen delegates — mostly Flemish and German — voted against.) Ghent 14.9.1877. Considering that social emancipation is inseparable from political emancipation; Congress declares that the proletariat, organised as a distinct party opposed to all other parties formed by the wealthy classes, must employ all political means that promote the social emancipation of all its members. (As with the voting on property and production the Flemish and German delegates who were present in greater numbers voted in favour of this text whilst eight of the Verviers delegates voted against it.) ...

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— Anonymous - Not Very Minnesota Nice

 

at 5/27/23 8:15am

Author: AnonymousTitle: Not Very Minnesota NiceSubtitle: Medea Benjamin in Minneapolis, May 2023Date: 2023Source: Retrieved on 2023-05-26 from medeabenjamin.com/may23 We wish to make it unmistakably clear On May 23rd Medea began posting misleading videos and press releases of our action on Friday claiming that: 1. Someone tried to steal her phone No one tried to steal her phone (the very thought of what might be on it is unsettling). One person tried to get her phone out of their face. 2. a member of our group struck an elderly man An elderly man struck an individual in our group. Cognizant of the fact that this man was quite elderly, the person attempted primarily to push him away, not hurt him. The man fell to the ground, at which point another person from our group tried to help him up. The elderly person then decided to punch the person helping him up. As we note in our reportback below: under no circumstances was our intent to be escalatory, not least because of the age of the people attending the event. Unfortunately for all of us, the members of “Veterans for Peace” who instigated the melee chose a different path. The Scene On an unseasonably cool May evening even by Minneapolis standards a small and diverse group of antifascists stood outside of a building used by a number of Minneapolis non-profits, among them the local chapter of “Veterans for Peace” (VFP) and “Women Against Military Madness” (WAMM). The occasion was a book talk by Medea Benjamin to discuss her book about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Medea--who some older anarchists will recall as the person who reported the 1999 Seattle WTO Black Bloc to the police--has most recently taken to shilling for authoritarian regimes like Iran, Russia, and China, under the guise of preventing Iraq style “preemptive” wars which she frequently claims are imminent (coincidentially: she and CodePink are the only ones capable of stopping them). Her event was held at a building owned by Dave Bicking, a former Green party candidate for City Council and prominent member of Communities United Against Police Brutality, among other groups. Conveniently for us, the road immediately outside the building was closed due to construction in the adjacent intersection and people were only able to access the building from one direction. Medea enjoys a moment standing behind one of the many cops she called Our plan was simple: stand outside, sing songs, make noise, and generally make Medea feel as unwelcome as possible in Minneapolis. Given the age of the people attending the event (Medea’s tour in Minneapolis includes a senior care facility for a reason) there was no need to escalate. As the few attendees arrived, we stood on the sidewalk leading to the building passing out fliers highlighting the lived experience of our anarchist and antifascists comrades in Ukraine and the objective historical falsehoods of Benjamin’s book. Finally, Medea herself arrived. She immediately began filming us and members of our crew began shouting. Someone ironically for self professed “peaceniks”--many of whom were bedecked with peace symbol buttons or jewelry--they woke up choosing violence and shoved a member of our group off the sidewalk and causing him to fall into a shallow ditch. This caused a minor scuffle which was relatively quickly resolved. Nevertheless, Medea Benjamin, a member of WAMM, and the building owner all called 911, claiming there was a large mob fighting outside the building. MPD arrived some minutes later which members of VFP and WAMM took as an opportunity to stand behind the protection of no fewer than 7 bored looking Minneapolis cops while accusing us of being “fascist sympathizing pro-NATO warmongers.” After about 45 minutes of standing around while members of WAMM and VFP (including Bicking) gave detailed accounts of events to the cops milling about, most of their group went inside while our group sang one too many verses of “Which Side Are You On.” The one WAMM member who remained to scowl and yell at us resulted in this gem of a photo. We dispersed without incident and no arrests. We achieved our goal of making Medea feel like she received a less than “Minnesota Nice” welcome, and we made new connections and friendships. Litter Bloc, Minneapolis Style The day after Medea’s WAMM and VFP event, she was hosted by May Day Books, a local authoritarian leftist bookstore in Minneapolis’ Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. We understand the attendees of the Mayday Event were nearly all the same people as the one the night before. May Day is an interesting target because it has the distinction of being in the basement of a fairly ramshackle building with only one known entrance and exit. Comrades took it upon themselves to create approximately 500 double sided strips of paper with a simple message: “Medea Benjamin is lying to you.” Each small strip included a link to https://medeabenjamin.com with a QR code. May Day’s stairwell can be accessed numerous ways and in the initial pass of the building, “Security” ie., one of the people responsible for starting the scuffle the night before, was standing nearby. Happily enough, he was “guarding” the route that would be taken by someone doing what our comrades planned to do if they had no knowledge of the local area or had not performed the most cursory tactical terrain analysis. ...

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— Wayne Price - Are Anarchists Giving in to War Fever?

 

at 5/26/23 2:51am

Author: Wayne PriceTitle: Are Anarchists Giving in to War Fever?Subtitle: In Defense of Anarchists Who Support the Ukrainian peopleDate: February 18, 2023Source: Retrieved on 26th May 2023 from anarkismo.net/article/32731 This is my response to an article, “British Anarchism Succumbs to War Fever” by Alex Alder. It appeared on the libcom site and has been promoted by the Anarchist Communist Group. It was published on anarchistnews. Its author is dismayed that so many revolutionary anarchist-socialists are in solidarity with the Ukrainian people. “How is it that today the anarchist movement in Britain (and elsewhere) is supporting one nation’s military against another, ideologically justifying and materially provisioning the Ukrainian war effort? … From the long-standing anarchist paper Freedom and anarcho-communist Anarchist Federation (AFed), to the anarchist ‘scene’ around antifascist and other activist groups, war fever is rife.” From my perspective it is a very good thing that so many Western anarchists are supporting the Ukrainian people against the Russian imperialist attack. So are most Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian anarchists. “Many of the anarchists in Ukraine, and across Eastern Europe, have thrown themselves behind Ukraine’s war effort.” Alex Alder sees this as a betrayal of anarchist internationalism and anti-militarism. I do not. If two slave masters get into a brawl, freedom-loving people will stay out of it. We don’t care who wins. But if a slave master is fighting with a slave who is trying to escape, freedom-loving people will support the slave. If another slave master (an enemy of the one fighting) throws a club or knife to the slave, we who love freedom will still support the slave and help him or her escape. (The metaphor does not present the “slave” as the Ukrainian state but as the Ukrainian people.) Nationalism and Internationalism Alder argues that supporting Ukraine contradicts anarchist opposition to nationalism. He quotes with favor a previous statement by the British AFed against nationalism: “As anarchist communists, we have always opposed nationalism…including that of ‘oppressed nations’. While we oppose oppression, exploitation and dispossession on national grounds, and oppose imperialism and imperialist warfare, we refuse to fall into the trap … of identifying with the underdog side and glorifying the ‘resistance’— however ‘critically’.” Surely this is an odd statement. On the one hand it opposes national oppression and exploitation and imperialist warfare, while on the other hand it refuses to identify with the “underdog,” the oppressed and exploited. Why should anarchists, opponents of all oppression and exploitation, not identify with the underdog, and support (if not “glorify”) the popular resistance? The reason given is that national resistance is done under the ideological cover of “nationalism.” Here it is worth citing the view of the great Italian anarchist, Errico Malatesta (associate of Bakunin and Kropotkin). In 1915, he wrote “While the Carnage Lasts,” in opposition to both sides in World War I. Among other things, he wrote, “We are cosmopolitans….But we understand that in countries where the government and the main oppressors are of foreign nationality, the question of freedom and economic emancipation presents itself under the guise of nationalist struggle, and we therefore sympathize with national insurrections as with any insurrection against the oppressors. In that case, as in all others, we are with the people against the government.…We bow before the will of those concerned.” In other words, anarchists are not nationalists but internationalists (“cosmopolitans”). Yet we recognize that sometimes peoples are oppressed by rulers from other nations. For example, the Ukrainians are not just exploited as workers (although the class conflict is always involved). They are bombed, massacred, raped, and tortured as Ukrainians. As Ukrainians they are threatened to have their language banned from schools, their children kidnapped, and their independence abolished. This is what the earlier quotation called “oppression, exploitation and dispossession on national grounds.” Therefore they tend to see this conflict in nationalist terms—not surprisingly. As Malatesta concluded, “We therefore sympathize with national insurrection…We are with the people against the [invading foreign-WP] government.” “Nationalism,” which anarchists oppose, is not simply the same thing as opposition to national oppression. It is not just a desire for one’s people to be able to decide for themselves what kind of country they will have. That is “national self-determination”—including the freedom of a people to chose what political system they want (e.g. a democratic state, a centralized state, or no state at all [anarchy])—and their freedom to decide what economic system they want (state socialism, capitalism, libertarian socialism). Rather, nationalism is only one program proposed for national self-determination. It implies the total unity of the nation, denying the reality of class and other differences, and supporting the ruling class and its state. Anarchists reject nationalism but not the goal of national self-determination. In the same article, Malatesta wrote, “We would like every human group to be able to live in the conditions it prefers and to be free to unite and break away from other groups as it pleases.” This is anarchism. ...

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— Pierre-Jean Le Foll Luciani - Anarchism and Decolonization in Algeria

 

at 5/25/23 11:48pm

Author: Pierre-Jean Le Foll LucianiTitle: Anarchism and Decolonization in AlgeriaSubtitle: The North-African Libertarian Movement (1950–1956)Date: 2019Source: Translated from « Anarchisme et décolonisation en Algérie. Le Mouvement libertaire nord-africain (1950–1956) », Histoire Politique [En ligne], 39 | 2019, mis en ligne le 01 octobre 2019, consulté le 04 mai 2023. URL : journals.openedition.org/histoirepolitique/3268 ; DOI : 10.4000/histoirepolitique.3268 Abstract The North African Libertarian Movement (MLNA) was Algeria’s only Anarchist movement that focused on the colonial question in the postwar years. A small group consisting of around ten men, most of whom were drawn from Algeria’s European or Jewish families, its experience was symptomatic of the difficulties facing anarchist movements and other political ideologies and movements imported from Europe in penetrating colonial societies. But the experience of the MLNA also allows one to understand how the radicalization of the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria contributed to reformulating the ideas and strategies of Algerian organizations. For, between 1950 and 1956, the anarchists of the MLNA changed course, shifting their stance from radical rejection of Algerian nationalism to “critical support” for the insurgents. Introduction The decade from the end of the Second World War to the beginning of the Algerian war of independence (1954–1962) was marked by an unprecedented political proliferation within the Algerian anti-colonialist movement. These years of recomposition and opening up of possibilities contrasted sharply with the closure of the anti-colonialist field imposed at the beginning of the war of independence by French repression and by the hegemonic pretensions of the National Liberation Front (FLN). This decade has gained in visibility and intelligibility in recent years. On the one hand, studies devoted to the so-called reformist nationalist currents and to Algerian communism have made it possible to move away from a focus on the dominant radical nationalist current.[1] On the other hand, the contradictions between the nationalist currents and the Algerian communist currents have been examined. On the other hand, the internal contradictions of radical nationalism are becoming better known[2]. Finally, the work on the small minority of anti-colonialist Algerian Christians and Jews[3], as well as on the socialists situated in an “in-between, neither anti-colonialist nor purely colonialist “[4], allows us to understand the motivations behind the participation of French Algerian citizens in the contestation of the colonial order. Without obscuring ideological cleavages, this historiography highlights the importance of circulations, alliances and inter-individual and inter-organizational interactions within the Algerian anti-colonialist field. These interactions, which occur above all on Algerian soil, also put Algeria in relation with metropolitan France and other worlds (communist, colonial or Muslim). As part of this movement, the anarchist currents in Algeria remain little known. If their structures and activities have been the subject of a census based on work on the press and police archives[5], their singular place in the Algerian political field remains to be studied. The only anarchist current in Algeria focused on the colonial question is the North African Libertarian Movement (MLNA). The trajectory of this movement may seem marginal in more than one respect. Created in Algiers in January 1950 and dissolved by its members in the summer of 1956, the MLNA had a brief life. Above all, it can be described as an ultra-minority group. Composed of no more than a dozen men, its troops were even smaller from November 1954 onwards due to dissension in the face of the Algerian insurrection. And despite the movement’s desire to recruit from among the colonized, its members were mostly French citizens from European or Jewish families in Algeria. Its experience is, in this sense, symptomatic of the difficulties of anarchists in all the colonial empires to “penetrate the colonized milieu” because of “seemingly insurmountable obstacles “[6], according to the terms of a motion of the 1947 congress of the Fédération Anarchiste (FA), the organization in metropolitan France from which the MLNA emerged. Within the Algerian anti-colonialist field, this question of anchoring in the colonized society is common to both anarchists and communists. The latter certainly have an incomparably greater social weight, since the Algerian Communist Party (PCA) had about 12,000 members in 1954, more than half of whom were colonized. But both communist and anarchist organizations were founded by Algerian Frenchmen and functioned primarily as local sections of French structures. Moreover, communists and anarchists have in common that they rely on an ideology, a language and political referents born in the industrialized societies of Europe and out of step with nationalism. From then on, anarchists and communists were similarly hesitant as to what attitude to adopt in the face of the dominant radical nationalist current. While they shared neither the ideology nor the political perspectives of the nationalists, they could not remain aloof from them insofar as they wished to exert an influence on Algerian society and contribute to the anti-colonialist struggle. Beyond anarchists and communists, this questioning can be extended to all organizations and individuals opposed to colonial domination when they are caught off guard by the minority of activists who launch the 1954 insurrection. ...

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— Costantino Paonessa - The Contestation of the “Reformation” in Egypt at the end of the 19th Century

 

at 5/25/23 11:42pm

Author: Costantino PaonessaTitle: The Contestation of the “Reformation” in Egypt at the end of the 19th CenturySubtitle: Anarchists and SufisDate: 10 Feburary 2022Notes: “La Contestation de la « Réforme » en Égypte à la fin du XIXe Siècle : Anarchistes et Soufis” was translated from french to english (with the help of Deepl translator of course) and revised by MXS.Source: dial.uclouvain.be/pr/boreal/object/boreal%3A257135/datastream/PDF_01/view Abstract Researchers and historians of the Middle East have dedicated numerous studies to the nahda (renaissance, awakening) period in Egypt. However, the complexity of the dynamics and issues – both economic, social, and cultural – that affected the country at least until the 1919 revolution has not yet been exhaustively investigated. Through the case of some famous ulema/Sufi and Italian anarchists, our research is in line with previous studies that aim to demonstrate how the renovation process in Egypt is in fact more complex, more articulated, and less linear than it is usually described. The purpose of this article is to provide a more articulate look at a past where sometimes myth has supplanted reality. Introduction The quarrel between Roberto D’Angiò and Errico Malatesta, two famous Italian anarchists, originated, according to a note in the Archives of the Italian Ministry of the Interior, with the publication of an article by D’Angiò. The latter mentioned an agreement between Malatesta, during his stay in Alexandria in 1882, and an Egyptian “rebel”. According to the note written by an undercover agent, Malatesta “intended to stir up the European population, the rebel was to help him with money and by sending his hordes into the insurgent city.”[1] The veracity of these statements is not established, but they are indicative of the strength of the protest movement at the time when the British had decided to bomb Alexandria and occupy Egypt in 1882. Although historiographers differ in their description and reading of the revolt led by Urabi Pasha,[2] it is clear that it was the culmination of a highly heterogeneous movement (Reid, 1998; Hafez Diyab, 2011). With the exception of more recent research (Mestyan, 2017; Booth, Gorman 2014, Gonzales-Quijano, 2007), nineteenth-century Egypt, as a metaphor for the Middle East region, has long been described by both Western and Egyptian historiography through very narrow analytical criteria. From then on, the teleological perspective of modernisation with a European face became the main thread of the dominant historiographical narrative, ignoring all kinds of endogenous movements (Bozarslan, 2011). According to this narrative, only contact with Europe and the ‘westernisation’ of local elites — no matter if it is in the form of colonialism — have been the drivers of the ‘renaissance’ in a country otherwise closed to any kind of renovation. The result is an almost exclusive focus on individuals, intellectuals and political groups (liberals, religious reformers, nationalists, socialists, etc.) who were part of this ‘emancipatory’ period commonly referred to as the Nahda, ‘renaissance.’ Based on this reading of nineteenth-century Egypt, this article will highlight, from a ‘micro’ perspective, how the social actors of the time negotiated the social, political and cultural transformations that resulted from the country’s integration into the era of capitalist colonisation and ‘modernisation.’ In order to address this question, we propose to explore the possibility of uncovering the question of affinities and divergences, influences, but also political strategies and conflicts. Personal biographies and particular trajectories are indeed an effective way to examine the relationship between individuals and historical and social dynamics in a given period (De Maria, 2016). Therefore, through the case of some famous Ulemas/Sufis and Italian anarchists, our study is in line with studies aiming to demonstrate how the renovative process (nahda) is in fact more complex, more articulated and less linear than it is described. While the reformism of the secular intellectuals and the new Azharite currents of thought was generally uncompromising towards the traditional ulama and their cultural, social and political hegemony throughout Egypt (De Jong, 1999), it did not admit any kind of emancipation of the sub-proletarian and peasant masses outside the nationalist and/or Islamic framework. In both groups, the historical-social function of the traditional, modernist and reformist intellectual class was to use the peasant masses and the urban sub-proletariat to perpetuate the interests of the dominant social groups — and thus their own interests — whether they were linked to the administration of the old khedivial court or the new nationalist elites. Indeed, in the wake of a history too focused on culture and anthropology (Chih, 2004; Chih, Mayeur-Jaouen, 2002), contemporary European historiography, which has focused on so-called ‘traditional’ figures and organisations (al-Azhar, the Council of Sufi Brotherhoods, al-Sâda al-Ashrâf[3]), has sometimes overlooked — probably as a reaction to Marxist readings of history — the dynamics of social and political power relations, which constitute an essential element on which behaviour, practices and ideas are grafted. There is no question here that the authors fail to describe the social differences specific to nineteenth-century Egypt, but that they choose to make them one of the criteria and tools of their argument. ...

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— Osvaldo Bayer - The Anarchist Expropriators

 

at 5/25/23 11:02pm

Author: Osvaldo BayerTitle: The Anarchist ExpropriatorsSubtitle: Buenaventura Durruti and Argentina’s Working-Class Robin HoodsDate: 1986Notes: The Anarchist Expropriators: Buenaventura Durruti and Argentina’s Working-Class Robin Hoods by Osvaldo Bayer (AK Press, 2016) was added by El Vagabundo Argelino. Introduction It’s a chastening thought that Osvaldo Bayer wrote this book nearly forty years ago and his work still challenges us, as anarchists, with ideas, arguments, and problems that are still as relevant today as they were in 1975 or, indeed, as when the actions of this narrative were originally carried out. Much of Bayer’s work belongs to the first wave of modern anarchist historiography that was, and still is, concerned with excavating anarchism’s stories; research that began to challenge our ideas as to what anarchism is and had been. Some of those early pioneering works include those by James J. Martin (1953) and Voline (first English translations in 1954 and 1955) as well as the works of Antonio Tellez (1974 in English), Bill Fishman (1975), Hal Sears (1977), and Paul Avrich (1978).[1] These authors, together with Bayer and others, made the 1970s an exciting time for anarchist research. “The Anarchist Expropriators” was first published in 1975 as “Los Anarquistas Expropriados y Otros Ensayos” and is here published in its first English translation. It appeared shortly after what we consider to be Bayer’s greatest work, the four volume “La Patagonia Rebelde” (1972–1975), soon to be published in one volume as “Rebellion in Patagonia” by AK Press. A later work, “Simón Radowitzky and the People’s Justice” (1991), was recently published by Elephant Editions. Bayer and some of the other writers mentioned here were lucky enough to know some of the relatives and comrades of those who feature in their work, and this knowledge informs their narratives with a richness and immediacy that later histories often lack. The Anarchist Expropriators is a companion piece to Bayer’s earlier work “Severino Di Giovanni: El Idealista de la Violencia” (1970), which was translated into English as Anarchism and Violence by Elephant Editions in 1985. The main protagonist of that work, Severino Di Giovanni, is glimpsed only occasionally in this volume, which in essence concentrates on other groups of anarchists carrying out acts of expropriation and revenge both alongside Di Giovanni and his comrades and after Di Giovanni’s execution on February 1, 1931. It presents us with additional information on the Argentinian anarchist expropriation movement that peaked during the twenties and thirties. Vicious infighting between anarchists, ruthless state opposition, bad luck, and its own ineptness destroyed this complex, challenging, and provocative movement, and Bayer attempts to show how that happened. Like Anarchism and Violence, the book is short on analysis but long on action. Events hurtle along at breathtaking speed and, by the final page, we are left breathless (and a little confused as to what has just happened!). It is best not to read this book as a portrayal of the romantic outsiders who cannot fit into society and take a principled stand against all the everyday hypocrisies they see in anarchists and the rest of the world—the Stirnerite individualists going out guns blazing, proudly proclaiming their identity in a world that constantly attempts to suffocate them. Undoubtedly there are traces of that, but the people here are a little different from Di Giovanni and others who featured in Bayer’s earlier work. You won’t find in these pages the heightened language, the passionate hyperbole, the tragic hero set against the world. Men such as Miguel Arcangel Roscigna and Juan Antonio Moran seem much more hardheaded and pragmatic. In different circumstances, they could have been the 1936 version of Durruti who survived his own expropriation career and, during the period covered by this volume, was no different from these men. Indeed Durruti thought so highly of Roscigna and his activities that he wanted him to come to Spain and help with the anarchist struggle there. Argentinian anarchism in the twenties and thirties was a product of brutal state repression against a movement that, in the early part of the twentieth century, was a force to be reckoned with.[2] This repression, exemplified by the events of 1st May 1909, the Social Defense Law of 1910, and the Tragic Week of 1919, together with a constant, brutal day-to-day treatment at the hands of the police and other agencies, reflected the concern anarchism engendered in the authorities. Reacting to these and other factors, such as the popularity of syndicalism among the working class, some anarchists began to analyze and reflect on what they believed and where they thought these beliefs should take the movement. Spurred on by the events of the Russian revolution, writers such as Lopez Arango and Abad de Santillán, for instance, were teasing out the relationship between syndicalism and anarchism in the labor movement, discussing the nature of trade unions, and the intricacies of class as the “lodestar” of anarchism as they attempted to rebuild a movement that would bring about the world they desired. The primary vehicle for this discussion was La Protesta, the paper they edited. ...

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— Paul Cudenec - Nature, Essence and Anarchy

 

at 5/25/23 11:02pm

Author: Paul CudenecTitle: Nature, Essence and AnarchyDate: 2016Notes: Nature, Essence and Anarchy by Paul Cudenec (Winter Oak Press, Sussex, England) (2016) was uploaded by MXS. “To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone – to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone. From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of double-think – greetings!” George Orwell, 1984 Preface At a time when the very future of our species and of planetary life is at threat from the unchecked growth of the industrial capitalist cancer, the need for a powerful and coherent resistance can hardly be disputed. One of the effects of this disease, however, has been a thought-paralysis which renders any authentic and holistic anticapitalist philosophy difficult to conceive and communicate. This is not by chance, of course – it is by disabling our intellectual immune system that the illness has been able to take and maintain control over us. As well as fighting capitalism in a physical and day-to-day sense, we need to fight it in our heads and in our hearts by rooting our thinking in a healthy intellectual soil beyond the mental toxicity of its philosophically polluted wastelands. However, to expound a world-view that stands outside the received wisdom of contemporary industrial rigidities is far from simple when you have to communicate using a language which has been remodelled to reflect the requirements of capitalist modernity and when you are addressing a public whose deepest assumptions are those ingrained by the very system you seek to challenge. In previous books, namely The Anarchist Revelation, The Stifled Soul of Humankind and Forms of Freedom, I have attempted to set out one overall argument that runs throughout the length of the book, developing sequentially from one chapter to the next. This is not the case here. Instead, you will find a series of separate essays, addressing similar issues from different angles. Each essay is like a cross-section of the overarching critique I am trying to present, through which a particular seam of analysis is revealed. One practical advantage of this format is that the reader can safely feel free to read the chapters in any order that happens to appeal. I also hope that the intersections and parallels between the various essays, as well as the spaces between them, will help stimulate the reader’s thinking in ways that are not possible within a single linear thread. The first essay, Natural Anarchy, begins with an echoing of Guy Debord’s condemnation of the world of artifice in which we live. I describe how, in order to hide its own falsity, capitalism denies that humanity belongs to a holistic natural world and also denies the very possibility of authenticity. I discuss the way that, despite Peter Kropotkin’s work in describing the evolutionary importance of mutual aid and solidarity for all species, including humanity, many anarchists remain strangely suspicious of the idea of “nature”. Widespread misuse of the word, and the effects on our thinking of the industrial society surrounding us, make it difficult to reclaim the term and overcome our separation. I look at the nature-based philosophy of the 16th century physician Paracelsus and suggest that we might rediscover authenticity by feeling within ourselves what he termed the Spiritus Mundi, the vital energy of the universe. The second essay, Denying Reality: From Nominalism to Newthink, explores the way in which contemporary society has a problem with objective reality. George Orwell warned about this in his novel 1984, in which the Big Brother state insists that everything exists only in the human mind. I argue that this fallacy dates back to medieval nominalism, when traditional “universals” were redefined as merely words describing human-invented categories. Postmodernists and postanarchists today extend this approach to deny the validity of concepts like essence. Everything is said to be a construct. Subjective language is confused with objective reality. Anything outside industrial capitalist reality is denied legitimacy, trapping us within the dominant mindset. In When Negative is Positive, I stress that the anarchist desire to destroy capitalist society cannot be regarded as negative. For one thing, it aims to clear the way for a better world. But it also arises from a belief, as voiced by Rudolf Rocker and Noam Chomsky amongst others, that an anarchist society is always possible and that humans have the capacity to live harmoniously as a social organism. This capacity, which is innately present in the human mind but not always activated, reflects the overall tendency of the universe to take on a coherent structure. Conflict arises when the innate structures of the human mind meet an external world which does not allow them to fulfil their potential. As Otto Gross explains, some individuals give way and adapt to circumstances, while others rebel. A hatred of corrupt and unnatural society is founded on a positive vision of how things are meant to be. Essence and Empowerment begins by suggesting that modern life maintains us in a state of metaphysical sensory deprivation. If we wish to discover our core reality we need to look deep within ourselves. “Know Thyself” is a maxim dating back to at least Ancient Greek times and still central to contemporary paganism. The descent into the unconscious to find the Self, as invoked by anarchist Gustav Landauer for instance, is a reconnection to the organic universe described by Plato and Plotinus and also by the Sufi tradition. Understanding the individual as an aspect of a greater collective entity does not deny individual freedom, but rather removes the limits imposed upon it by our separation and reveals an empowering and anarchic truth, always regarded as a dangerous heresy by authority. ...

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— Paul Cudenec - Nature, Essence and Anarchy

 

at 5/25/23 11:02pm

Author: Paul CudenecTitle: Nature, Essence and AnarchyDate: 2016Notes: Nature, Essence and Anarchy by Paul Cudenec (Winter Oak Press, Sussex, England) (2016) was uploaded by MXS. “To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone – to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone. From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of double-think – greetings!” George Orwell, 1984 Preface At a time when the very future of our species and of planetary life is at threat from the unchecked growth of the industrial capitalist cancer, the need for a powerful and coherent resistance can hardly be disputed. One of the effects of this disease, however, has been a thought-paralysis which renders any authentic and holistic anticapitalist philosophy difficult to conceive and communicate. This is not by chance, of course – it is by disabling our intellectual immune system that the illness has been able to take and maintain control over us. As well as fighting capitalism in a physical and day-to-day sense, we need to fight it in our heads and in our hearts by rooting our thinking in a healthy intellectual soil beyond the mental toxicity of its philosophically polluted wastelands. However, to expound a world-view that stands outside the received wisdom of contemporary industrial rigidities is far from simple when you have to communicate using a language which has been remodelled to reflect the requirements of capitalist modernity and when you are addressing a public whose deepest assumptions are those ingrained by the very system you seek to challenge. In previous books, namely The Anarchist Revelation, The Stifled Soul of Humankind and Forms of Freedom, I have attempted to set out one overall argument that runs throughout the length of the book, developing sequentially from one chapter to the next. This is not the case here. Instead, you will find a series of separate essays, addressing similar issues from different angles. Each essay is like a cross-section of the overarching critique I am trying to present, through which a particular seam of analysis is revealed. One practical advantage of this format is that the reader can safely feel free to read the chapters in any order that happens to appeal. I also hope that the intersections and parallels between the various essays, as well as the spaces between them, will help stimulate the reader’s thinking in ways that are not possible within a single linear thread. The first essay, Natural Anarchy, begins with an echoing of Guy Debord’s condemnation of the world of artifice in which we live. I describe how, in order to hide its own falsity, capitalism denies that humanity belongs to a holistic natural world and also denies the very possibility of authenticity. I discuss the way that, despite Peter Kropotkin’s work in describing the evolutionary importance of mutual aid and solidarity for all species, including humanity, many anarchists remain strangely suspicious of the idea of “nature”. Widespread misuse of the word, and the effects on our thinking of the industrial society surrounding us, make it difficult to reclaim the term and overcome our separation. I look at the nature-based philosophy of the 16th century physician Paracelsus and suggest that we might rediscover authenticity by feeling within ourselves what he termed the Spiritus Mundi, the vital energy of the universe. The second essay, Denying Reality: From Nominalism to Newthink, explores the way in which contemporary society has a problem with objective reality. George Orwell warned about this in his novel 1984, in which the Big Brother state insists that everything exists only in the human mind. I argue that this fallacy dates back to medieval nominalism, when traditional “universals” were redefined as merely words describing human-invented categories. Postmodernists and postanarchists today extend this approach to deny the validity of concepts like essence. Everything is said to be a construct. Subjective language is confused with objective reality. Anything outside industrial capitalist reality is denied legitimacy, trapping us within the dominant mindset. In When Negative is Positive, I stress that the anarchist desire to destroy capitalist society cannot be regarded as negative. For one thing, it aims to clear the way for a better world. But it also arises from a belief, as voiced by Rudolf Rocker and Noam Chomsky amongst others, that an anarchist society is always possible and that humans have the capacity to live harmoniously as a social organism. This capacity, which is innately present in the human mind but not always activated, reflects the overall tendency of the universe to take on a coherent structure. Conflict arises when the innate structures of the human mind meet an external world which does not allow them to fulfil their potential. As Otto Gross explains, some individuals give way and adapt to circumstances, while others rebel. A hatred of corrupt and unnatural society is founded on a positive vision of how things are meant to be. Essence and Empowerment begins by suggesting that modern life maintains us in a state of metaphysical sensory deprivation. If we wish to discover our core reality we need to look deep within ourselves. “Know Thyself” is a maxim dating back to at least Ancient Greek times and still central to contemporary paganism. The descent into the unconscious to find the Self, as invoked by anarchist Gustav Landauer for instance, is a reconnection to the organic universe described by Plato and Plotinus and also by the Sufi tradition. Understanding the individual as an aspect of a greater collective entity does not deny individual freedom, but rather removes the limits imposed upon it by our separation and reveals an empowering and anarchic truth, always regarded as a dangerous heresy by authority. ...

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— Třídní Válka - What’s new in “anarchism”?

 

at 5/25/23 8:11pm

Author: Třídní VálkaTitle: What’s new in “anarchism”?Subtitle: National self-determination and the coincidence of interests with capital?!Date: May 2023Source: Retrieved on 2023-05-26 from autistici.org/tridnivalka/whats-new-in-anarchism-national-self-determination-and-the-coincidence-of-interests-with-capital The following lines are a short response to an article by Wayne Price published on the Czech Anarchist Federation (AFed) website. The delay in our brief response can only be explained by the fact that it took us a long time to recover from the text “Are Anarchists Giving in to War Fever?” [originally this text was published in English on the Anarkismo network]. We assumed that even an organization as programmatically disparate and confused as AFed could not deviate from at least the basic principles of anarchism, since it already has it in its name. But we were wrong. In the context of the war in the Ukraine, under the guise of specific conditions and critical support, Wayne Price (and his publisher, AFed) are trying to introduce into anarchism (which we take for a revolutionary movement and part of the general struggle of the proletariat against the dictatorship of capital) fundamental elements of bourgeois ideology that are in direct contradiction to the anarchist program for the emancipation of humanity. Let’s remark that this program does not derive from the text of this or that anarchist theorist, but was formed in opposition to capitalism, in struggle against it and as its negation. Anarchists for the nation? Who exactly do the “anarchists” of AFed in Ukraine support? Wayne Price tries to convince us that it is the “oppressed nation”. He states that “Anarchists reject nationalism but not the goal of national self-determination (…) including the freedom of a people to chose what political system they want (e.g. a democratic state, a centralized state, or no state at all [anarchy]) — and their freedom to decide what economic system they want (state socialism, capitalism, libertarian socialism).” That “anarchists” operate with the concept of nation is new to us! For until now, we have assumed that anarchists are opposed to nationhood and its material consequences such as the nation-state, national self-determination, the national unity, and ultimately even the war between nations. Revolutionary anarchists have always held anti-national positions, and for a good reason. If we argue that social relations correspond to the stage of development of material production and also produce principles, ideas, and categories corresponding to these social relations, then it is clear that even these ideas, these categories, are only historical and transitory products that appear and disappear. Such an idea is also the nation, an artificially created entity, a historical product of the development of the productive forces, which served the bourgeoisie to carry out its revolution, to establish its domination. And also to attach the proletariat to its project, to divide it into nation-states, to convince it that its interests are identical with those of the capitalists of the same nationality, so that it can better control it physically and ideologically. The nation is an artificial alliance of the exploited and the exploiters. The “people’s independence, culture and national freedom” that Wayne Price comes up with is just a terrain on which the bourgeoisie can exploit us at will and make us believe that if we are chased to work by a slaveholder who speaks our language, our toil is more bearable. The constitution of the proletariat as a class is constantly undermined by the competition between proletarians as free and equal sellers of commodities, of labor power. All ideological, political and military forces consolidate this atomization on which social peace and bourgeois order lean on. The proletariat disintegrates into the people, this bourgeois negation of the exploited as a universal being, as a class standing in antagonism to capital. And this negation ultimately culminates in the massacre in the capitalist war. The establishment and existence of nation-states has not eliminated the very essence of the bourgeoisie – competition – which forces the bourgeois to brutally oppose and confront each other on all levels regarding the distribution of the means of production and markets. Unity within the bourgeoisie (for example within a nation-state, international agreements, etc.) is established in order to obtain the best possible conditions in the commercial war (and also the class war). This unity can at any time break up into various specific factions which will assert their interests in mutual conflicts. Therefore, any peace is only a phase of an upcoming war. On the other hand, every action of the proletariat – however partial – In which it acts for itself and its interests contains an affirmation of the proletariat and its struggle for the general social revolution. That is why anarchism as a revolutionary movement from the beginning opposes the fatherland, the nation and the national struggle and seeks the abolition of all frontiers and nations. Revolutionary anarchists do not support one nation against another, neither “the weaker one” nor “the invaded one” nor “the oppressed one”. Revolutionary anarchists stand on the side of the proletariat on both sides of the front. ...

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— Costantino Paonessa - The Contestation of the “Reformation” in Egypt at the end of the 19th Century

 

at 5/25/23 11:00am

Author: Costantino PaonessaTitle: The Contestation of the “Reformation” in Egypt at the end of the 19th CenturySubtitle: Anarchists and SufisDate: 10 Feburary 2022Notes: “La Contestation de la « Réforme » en Égypte à la fin du XIXe Siècle : Anarchistes et Soufis” was translated from french to english (with the help of Deepl translator of course) and revised by MXS.Source: https://dial.uclouvain.be/pr/boreal/object/boreal%3A257135/datastream/PDF_01/view Abstract Researchers and historians of the Middle East have dedicated numerous studies to the nahda (renaissance, awakening) period in Egypt. However, the complexity of the dynamics and issues – both economic, social, and cultural – that affected the country at least until the 1919 revolution has not yet been exhaustively investigated. Through the case of some famous ulema/Sufi and Italian anarchists, our research is in line with previous studies that aim to demonstrate how the renovation process in Egypt is in fact more complex, more articulated, and less linear than it is usually described. The purpose of this article is to provide a more articulate look at a past where sometimes myth has supplanted reality. Introduction The quarrel between Roberto D’Angiò and Errico Malatesta, two famous Italian anarchists, originated, according to a note in the Archives of the Italian Ministry of the Interior, with the publication of an article by D’Angiò. The latter mentioned an agreement between Malatesta, during his stay in Alexandria in 1882, and an Egyptian “rebel”. According to the note written by an undercover agent, Malatesta “intended to stir up the European population, the rebel was to help him with money and by sending his hordes into the insurgent city." The veracity of these statements is not established, but they are indicative of the strength of the protest movement at the time when the British had decided to bomb Alexandria and occupy Egypt in 1882. Although historiographers differ in their description and reading of the revolt led by Urabi Pasha3 , it is clear that it was the culmination of a highly heterogeneous movement (Reid, 1998; Hafez Diyab, 2011). With the exception of more recent research (Mestyan, 2017; Booth, Gorman 2014, Gonzales-Quijano, 2007), nineteenth-century Egypt, as a metaphor for the Middle East region, has long been described by both Western and Egyptian historiography through very narrow analytical criteria. From then on, the teleological perspective of modernisation with a European face became the main thread of the dominant historiographical narrative, ignoring all kinds of endogenous movements (Bozarslan, 2011). According to this narrative, only contact with Europe and the ‘westernisation’ of local elites — no matter if it is in the form of colonialism — have been the drivers of the ‘renaissance’ in a country otherwise closed to any kind of renovation. The result is an almost exclusive focus on individuals, intellectuals and political groups (liberals, religious reformers, nationalists, socialists, etc.) who were part of this ‘emancipatory’ period commonly referred to as the Nahda, ‘renaissance’. Based on this reading of nineteenth-century Egypt, this article will highlight, from a ‘micro’ perspective, how the social actors of the time negotiated the social, political and cultural transformations that resulted from the country’s integration into the era of capitalist colonisation and ‘modernisation’. In order to address this question, we propose to explore the possibility of uncovering the question of affinities and divergences, influences, but also political strategies and conflicts. Personal biographies and particular trajectories are indeed an effective way to examine the relationship between individuals and historical and social dynamics in a given period (De Maria, 2016). Therefore, through the case of some famous Ulemas/Sufis and Italian anarchists, our study is in line with studies aiming to demonstrate how the renovative process (nahda) is in fact more complex, more articulated and less linear than it is described. While the reformism of the secular intellectuals and the new Azharite currents of thought was generally uncompromising towards the traditional ulama and their cultural, social and political hegemony throughout Egypt (De Jong, 1999), it did not admit any kind of emancipation of the sub-proletarian and peasant masses outside the nationalist and/or Islamic framework. In both groups, the historical-social function of the traditional, modernist and reformist intellectual class was to use the peasant masses and the urban sub-proletariat to perpetuate the interests of the dominant social groups — and thus their own interests — whether they were linked to the administration of the old khedivial court or the new nationalist elites. Indeed, in the wake of a history too focused on culture and anthropology (Chih, 2004; Chih, Mayeur-Jaouen, 2002), contemporary European historiography, which has focused on so-called ‘traditional’ figures and organisations (al-Azhar, the Council of Sufi Brotherhoods, al-Sâda al-Ashrâf4 ), has sometimes overlooked — probably as a reaction to Marxist readings of history — the dynamics of social and political power relations, which constitute an essential element on which behaviour, practices and ideas are grafted. There is no question here that the authors fail to describe the social differences specific to nineteenth-century Egypt, but that they choose to make them one of the criteria and tools of their argument. ...

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— Troy Araiza Kokinis - Juan Carlos Mechoso

 

at 5/25/23 2:50am

Author: Troy Araiza KokinisTitle: Juan Carlos MechosoSubtitle: It’s Only Been a Few Days and We Already Feel Your AbsenceDate: October 12, 2022Source: Retrieved on 2023-05-25 from blackrosefed.org/juan-carlos-mechoso-obituary Troy Araiza Kokinis reflects on the life and revolutionary work of Juan Carlos Mechoso, who passed on October 11, 2022. Juan Carlos was a founding member of our sister organization, Federación Anarquista Uruguaya (FAU) and he will be dearly missed. Black Rose/Rosa Negra sends its heartfelt greetings and solidarity to the family, friends, and comrades of Juan Carlos. Juan Carlos Mechoso was the last surviving militant of those who founded the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU). He died on October 10, 2022. Juan Carlos lived his life alongside his wife Mari in Montevideo’s working class El Cerro neighborhood. Their home has served as a pilgrimage for anarchists from all over the world who are interested in the FAU’s strand of especifista anarchism, in which anarchists integrate into a specific anarchist organization that is used as a support network and infrastructure for triangulating mass social movements in which they are inserted. Numerous militants of Black Rose/Rosa Negra (BRRN) have met and sustained relationships with Juan Carlos and Mari. They spent the past two decades organizing historical FAU documents, some written in code, into a home archive where militant-researchers could access content related to the Uruguayan worker revolt of the 1960s and 70s. Juan Carlos and others founded FAU in 1956. The organization set out to develop a strategy and practice for anarchist organizing in the Cold War Latin American context. They developed the especifista model as an intervention to the then dominant strategy of anarcho-syndicalism, which played a foundational role in Uruguay’s first labor unions of the twentieth century. By the late 1960s, a New Left coalition centered around FAU controlled roughly one-third of the country’s labor unions. From 1968–1973, Uruguayan workers carried out upwards of two thousand work actions—the majority of them wild cat strikes and occupations led by the coalition surrounding FAU. The coalition supported direct action tactics in the labor movement. This growing (counter)hegemony of such tactics arguably led to an eventual military coup in June 1973. Juan Carlos worked as a graphic artist at this time. He eventually went underground as part of FAU’s small armed unit, OPR-33, which robbed banks and kidnapped brutish employers in effort to settle labor disputes. He fell prisoner in 1971 and survived frequent torture sessions under the military and police. At this time in Uruguay, 1 in 30 people experienced detention; and 1 in 62 experienced torture. While imprisoned, Juan Carlos lost his brother and FAU comrade Alberto “Pocho” Mechoso, who was disappeared as part of a pilot operation for a U.S. backed transnational state terror initiative, called Plan Condor. FAU saw 35 militants of its organization disappear during this time. Juan Carlos was released after the fall of Uruguay’s civic-military government in 1985. He returned to his home in El Cerro and participated in rebuilding FAU to confront the post-dictatorship neoliberal era. Part of this effort included gathering historical documents hidden in safe houses throughout Montevideo to organize and preserve them in a publicly accessible archive. Juan Carlos was an organic intellectual. With no more than a secondary education, he dedicated his life to understanding Left political theory and developing novel models for its modern practical implementation from an anarchist perspective. He was equally influenced by psychoanalysis and post-modern theory. For this reason, FAU’s notion of poder popular (popular power) emphasizes the question of mass subjective transformation. Those fortunate enough to visit Juan Carlos’ home archive would also share lunch of ravioli con tuco and hours of conversation around the ideas of theorists ranging from Bakunin to Foucault. They also witnessed Juan Carlos’ embodiment of this subjectivity when taking a stroll with him in his El Cerro neighborhood—everyone knew him and, in turn, he could tell you about the history of every crack in the pavement. His rootedness was product of his political commitment, one in which he truly saw himself to be of and with the people. His life serves as a model for anarchist militant counter-subjectivity the world over. Juan Carlos Mechoso, it’s been just a few days and we already feel your absence. Troy Araiza Kokinis is the author of the forthcoming book Anarchist Popular Power: Dissident Labor and Armed Struggle in Uruguay 1956–76 from AK Press. For more on the FAU and the life of Juan Carlos, we recommend An Organisation of Militants by Tommy Lawson, and Anarchists Had More of a Stomach for the Fight: Interview with Juan Carlos Mechoso.

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— Sidney E. Parker - Anarchism, Angst, and Max Stirner

 

at 5/24/23 10:22pm

Author: Sidney E. ParkerTitle: Anarchism, Angst, and Max StirnerDate: 1972Notes: Published in ANARCHY Magazine #7, 1972, pp. 20–21. Freedom Press UK.Source: Retrieved 07/06/2022 from libcom.org (The Ego and His Own: Selections from Max Stirner. Selected and introduce by John Carroll. Jonathan Cape. £2.95. The Egoist Nihilist Max Stirner. By R. W. K. Paterson. Published for The University of Hull by Oxlord University Press. £3.50.) 1 After many years of neglect the philosophy of Max Stirner is at last receiving attention in British academic circles. These two books mark his public début into the world of professional savants and it will be very interesting to see what kind of reception this intellectual vagabond will get. Mr. Carroll’s choice of extracts is as good as one can expect another man’s to be. He includes many of Stirner’s most pungent passages which amply support his claim that “Stirner is the only writer to develop fully the implication of a total rejection of external authority. In his book the anarcho-egoist stands before us in full view.” He also contributes a lengthy and valuable introductory essay and a number of informative footnotes. So far, so good. The question remains, however, what is Max Stirner doing in a series called “Roots of the Right” which is described as “readings in fascist, racist, and elitist ideology”? Mr. Carroll himself seems uneasy at having to justify the inclusion. He confesses that “in the end we have to admit that the case for including Stirner in the ‘Roots of the Right’ is not watertight” and that “to be fair to him, we accept that his work is categorically anti-authoritarian, that there is no suggestion of racism, and that he had nothing but contempt for German nationalism.” He is also severely critical of Hans G. Helms’ recent Marxist attempt to represent Stirner as “the first ideologist of the middle class and one of the precursors of fascism.” Nonetheless, Mr. Carroll claims that Stirner “presents himself as an important contributor to the growth of European fascism” and it is necessary to look at his reasons for making such a claim. Just what relationship, if any, has “the philosopher of the self” to the collectivist doctrine fascism which urges self-sacrifice and the subordination of the individual to the group ideal? Mr. Carroll’s case is a poor one. He gives no clearly delineated causal connection between Stirner’s conscious egoism and the altruism of fascism. He can only suggest, for example, that Stirner’s ideas had a direct influence on Mussolini and perhaps and indirect influence on Hitler. Since he admits that Hitler was probably ignorant of Stirner his conjectures about are too tenuous to consider. Mussolini is a different matter. He wrote enthusiastically “why shouldn’t Stirner become significant again” and praised individualism as late as 1919. But, as Mr. Carroll says, his “notorious exhibitionism made him less a passionate follower of ideas than an intellectual opportunist, freely swapping them to suit the cause of the moment. True to form, once he was in authority, Mussolini dropped his sympathy for individualism like a hot potato. At the Fascist Party Congress of 1929 he declared that the individual only existed as part of the State and subordinate to its necessities. And in his “The Political and Social Doctrines of Fascism” he wrote: “The foundation of Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State...” It would take a medieval schoolman or a Marxist theoretician to find any trace of Stirner in such statements as these. The rest of Mr. Carroll’s examples are little more than unsupported insinuations. For instance, when Stirner argues that it is not enough for the press to be free, that it must become his own, and concluded “writing is free only when it is my own, dictated to me by no power or authority, by no faith, no dread: the press must not be free—that is too little—it must be mine—ownness of the press or property in the press, that is what I will take”—Mr. Carroll notes that this is “an anticipation of...fascist attitudes to the press”! Such an assertion is frankly absurd. No fascist favours uncontrolled individual ownership of the press, nor believes in the freedom of the writer from authority. Despite these unconvincing efforts to connect Stirner with fascism, this attractively-produced volume is a useful introduction to the unique world of “The Ego and His Own.” The price, however, is extortionate and those who are willing to sample the original without preliminaries can still obtain a hard-backed edition for about the same money. 2 Mr. Paterson’s book is the first full-length critical study of Max Stirner to appear in the English language (apart from Marx and Engels’ excruciating “German Ideology”). It deserves attention for this aIone. The author has clearly done a great deal of research on his subject. He makes many interesting suggestions for interpretation and about possible parallels with Nietzsche and existentialism which will be of value to anyone wishing to study Stirner’s philosophy. In the end, however, Stirner eludes his grasp and those familiar with “The Ego and His Own” may wonder at times if Mr. Paterson is writing about the same book. ...

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— Sidney E. Parker - A disappointed revolutionary

 

at 5/24/23 10:20pm

Author: Sidney E. ParkerTitle: A disappointed revolutionaryDate: 1963Notes: Published in Anarchy 33 (Vol. 3 No. 11) November 1963. Freedom Press UK.Source: Retrieved 07/06/2022 from archive.org MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONARY, by Victor Serge. Translated by Peter Sedgwick. (Oxford University Press, 42s.). These memoirs trace the life of Victor Lvovich Kibalchich—alias Victor Serge—“revolutionary, novelist and poet”, who began his political life as a young socialist in Belgium, became active in individualist anarchist circles in Paris, worked with the syndicalists in Barcelona, joined the Russian Communist Party just after the 1917 Revolution, was expelled for belonging to the Left Opposition, left Russia after a period of exile in Central Asia, and died a revisionist Marxist in Mexico in 1947. Serge writes well and the poet is present in many passages (particularly in his evocations of Paris), but the book left me with a sense of emptiness, a feeling of sadness that so much talent should have been wasted in useless politicking. The chapter I found the most interesting—and the most disappointing—was the first, the bulk of which is devoted to Serge’s anarchist activity before World War I. Repelled by the academic anarchism preached by Jean Grave, Serge became prominent—under the name of Le Rétif—among the individualists inspired by Albert Libertad (1875–1908) and was a close friend of two of the so-called “Bonnot Gang” who, despairing of peaceful propaganda, waged their war against society by means of armed bank robberies. Serge gives only the sketchiest of descriptions of the ideas he held at this time and the merest hints of his activities. Reviewing the first French edition of the “Memoirs”, E. Armand remarked that Serge was “... a memoir-writer with a short memory who forgets the rôle he played in regard to ‘l’anarchie’ (an individualist weekly—S.P.) with which he collaborated from September, 1909 to January, 1912. If he tells us in detail of the private life of Libertad ... he guards himself from saying that he (Serge) was the man who searched for ‘rare sensations’, the man of the unbounded ‘I deny’, the glorifier of the ‘Bandits’ on the morrow of the rue Ordener affair (‘l’anarchie’, January 3, 1912), the exalter of ‘the unsubmissive, deserters, thieves, because they are not adapted to slavery ... for us (he wrote) they are the only men who dare to revindicate life.’ Kibalchich has forgotten the endless Stirnerian, Nietzschean and Ibsenian litanies that he gladly reeled off. As he forgets rather indelicately that Rirette Maîtrejean was his companion and that he did not stop writing to her for a long time ... “ (This last omission is made good by a note by the translator in the English edition—S.P.) In addition, Serge makes the almost traditional misrepresentation of Stirner and attempts, in usual Marxist style, to link conscious egoism with “the most brutal bourgeois individualism.” He also tries to give yet another death sentence to anarchism : “Between the copious theorizing of Peter Kropotkin and Elisée Réclus, and the rage of Albert Libertad, the collapse of anarchism in the bourgeois jungle was now obvious.” Unfortunately this rather contradicts what he had written earlier about Libertad being “the heart and soul of a movement of such exceptional dynamism that it is not entirely dead even at this day (i.e. 30 years later.—S.P.)”. A case of “he’s dead, but he won’t lie down”? The remainder of the book retells the now well-known and wearying tale of the fate of enthusiastic idealists who supported the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. Once more the tragic farce of the biters being bit is unfolded and the ghosts of persecutors who fell victims to the machine they helped to create are paraded before us. Serge sees these men as the iron cohort of the Revolution. Actually they appear to be more possessed men who drove themselves and others to pointless destruction. He quotes “certain French individualists” who said to him: “Revolutions are useless. They will not change human nature. Afterwards reaction sets in and everything starts all over again. I’ve only got my own skin; I’m not marching for wars or for revolutions, thank you.” These words he dismisses as “cynical stock phrases”, but in view of the evidence he himself provides one is led to the conclusion that “certain French individualists” were not all that wrong. In spite of his earlier individualist associations and his youthful enthusiasm for Stirner, Nietzsche and Ibsen, Serge seems always to have wanted to serve something greater than himself. He claims that even in his individualist days “other influences were at work on me and there were other values which I neither could nor would abandon: basically, the revolutionary idealism of the Russians.” Outlining his conception of the purpose of writing, he states that “Individual existences were of no interest to me—particularly my own—except by virtue of the great ensemble whose particles ... are all that we ever are.” Even when, in his final summing-up, he says that “I view human personality as a supreme value”, it is so “only integrated in society and history.” And while disclaiming “any yearning for self-effacement” he nonetheless concludes “nothing of us is truly our own unless it be our sincere desire to share in the common life of mankind.” ...

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— Murray Bookchin - The Ecology of Freedom

 

at 5/24/23 10:00pm

Author: Murray BookchinTitle: The Ecology of FreedomSubtitle: The Emergence and Dissolution of HierarchyDate: 1982Notes: Converted September 2018; footnotes, section spacing, and italicization added in 2023. This version taken from the 1982 edition published by Cheshire Books. Acknowledgments This book stands on its own ground and projects a coherent theory of social ecology that is independent of the conventional wisdom of our time. But we all stand on the shoulders of others, if only-in terms of the problems they raised and we are obliged to resolve. Thus, I owe a great deal to the work of Max Weber, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Karl Polanyi, who all so brilliantly anticipated the problems of domination and the crises of reason, science, and technics that beleaguer us today. I have tried to resolve these issues by following intellectual pathways opened by the anarchist thinkers of the previous century, particularly Peter Kropotkin’s natural and social mutualism. I do not share his commitment to confederalism based on contract and exchange, and I find his notion of sociality (which I personally interpret to mean symbiotic mutualism ) among nonhuman organisms a bit simplistic. However, Kropotkin is unique in his emphasis on the need for a reconciliation of humanity with nature, the role of mutual aid in natural and social evolution, his hatred of hierarchy, and his vision of a new technics based on decentralization and human scale. I believe that such a libertarian social ecology can avoid the dualistic, neo-Kantian ideologies such as structuralism and many communication theories-a dualism very much in vogue today. To know the development of domination, technics, science, and subjectivity-the latter in natural history as well as in human-is to find the unifying threads that overcome the disjunctions between nonhuman and human nature. My intellectual debt to Dorothy Lee and Paul Radin in anthropology is enormous, and I cherish the time I encountered the work of E. A. Gutkind and Martin Buber’s utopian reflections. I have found Hans Jonas’s Phenomenon of Life an ever-refreshing source of inspiration in nature philosophy as well as a book of rare stylistic grace. For the rest, I have drawn upon so vast a cultural tradition that it would be meaningless to saddle the reader with names; this tradition appears throughout the book and hardly requires delineation. I am indebted to Michael Riordan, who was more than a zealous editor and sympathetic publisher. His meticulous reading of this book, his keenly intelligent queries, his searching criticisms, and his demand for conciseness and clarity have made this book more accessible to the Anglo-American reader than I might have been inclined to do. For a European perspective, I must thank my dear friend, Karl-Ludwig Schibel, who, in reading the opening chapters, brought to them the sophisticated queries of his students at the University of Frankfurt and obliged me to examine issues that I would have ordinarily ignored. Richard Merrill, like Michael Riordan, was an endless source of articles and data from which the scientific material in the Epilogue is derived. To have so able and absorbing a biologist at hand is more than a privilege; it is an intellectual delicacy. I wish to thank Linda Goodman, an excellent artist, for bringing her talents as art director to the designing of this book and for rendering it aesthetically attractive. I have had the benefit of highly sympathetic copy editors, particularly Naomi Steinfeld, who exhibited a remarkable understanding of my ideas and intentions. In writing The Ecology of Freedom , I have had the support of many people, a few of whom I would like to cite here appreciatively. My thanks go out to Amadeo Bertolo, Gina Blumenfeld, Debbie Bookchin, Joseph Bookchin, Robert Cassidy, Dan Chodorkoff, John Clark, Jane Coleman, Rosella DiLeo, David and Shirley Eisen, Ynestra King, Allan Kurtz, Wayne Hayes, Brett Portman, Dmitri Roussopoulos, Trent Schroyer, and my colleagues at Ramapo College of New Jersey and the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont. I could not have begun writing this book in the early 1970s without a grant from the Rabinowitz Foundation, nor could I have completed it a decade later without the sabbatical year provided to me by Ramapo College. This has been a wayward book that has taken on a life of its own. So I cannot refrain from closing these acknowledgements with the exquisite remarks (all failings of gender aside) of my favorite utopian, William Morris: Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name. Murray Bookchin Burlington, Vermont October, 1981 Epigraph We are enabled to conclude that the lesson which man derives from both the study of Nature and his own history is the permanent presence of a double tendency — towards a greater development on the one side of sociality, and, on the other side, of a consequent increase in the intensity of life .... This double tendency is a distinctive characteristic of life in general. It is always present, and belongs to life, as one of its attributes, whatever aspects life may take on our planet or elsewhere. And this is not a metaphysical assertion of the “universality of the moral law,” or a mere supposition. Without the continual growth of sociality, and consequently of the intensity and variety of sensations, life is impossible. ...

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— Albert Camus - Bread and Freedom

 

at 5/24/23 9:57pm

Author: Albert CamusTitle: Bread and FreedomDate: September 1953Notes: This talk was originally published as “Restaurer la valeur de la liberté” (“Restoring the value of freedom”) in the September 1953 issue of La Révolution Prolétarienne, a French syndicalist journal. The title was changed when it was reprinted later the same year. “Bread and Freedom”, incidentally, was also the title of the Russian translation of Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread. (Translator)Source: Retrieved on 2023-05-25 from anarchistfaq.org/translations/bread-freedom.html If we add up the violations and the many abuses which have been revealed to us, we can foresee a time when, in a Europe of concentration camps, only prison guards will be free, who will still have to imprison each other. When only one remains, he will be named the head guard and this will be the perfect society wherein the problems of opposition, the nightmare of twentieth-century governments, will be finally, and definitively, resolved. Of course, this is only a prophecy and although governments and police forces around the world are striving, with great good will, to reach such a happy outcome, we are not there yet. Amongst us, for instance, in Western Europe, freedom is officially viewed favourably. Basically, it makes me think of those poor cousins that we see in certain bourgeois families. The cousin became a widow, she lost her natural protector. So they took her in, gave her a room on the top floor and tolerate her in the kitchen. They occasionally parade her in town, on a Sunday, to prove that they are virtuous and not dogs. But for everything else, and especially on special occasions, she is requested to keep her mouth shut. And even if a police officer casually violates her a little in a corner, they do not make a fuss about it, she has been through worse, especially with the master of the house, and, after all, it is not worth getting into trouble with the proper authorities. In the East, it must be said that they are more forthright. They have settled the business of the cousin once and for all and flung her into a closet with two sturdy locks. It seems that she will emerge in fifty years, more or less, when the ideal society will have been definitively established. Then they will have celebrations in her honour. But in my opinion she may be somewhat moth-eaten by then and I do fear that they may no longer make use of her. When we add that these two concepts of freedom, that of the closet and that of the kitchen, are each determined to prevail over the other, and are obliged in all this commotion to further reduce the movements of the cousin, it will be easily understood that our history is more that of servitude than of freedom and that the world in which we live is the one just spoken of, which leaps out at us from the newspaper every morning to make of our days and our weeks a single day of outrage and disgust. The simplest, and therefore most tempting, thing is to accuse governments, or some obscure powers, of these wicked ways. Besides, it is indeed true that they are guilty, and of a crime so impenetrable and so long-lasting that we have even lost sight of its beginnings. But they are not the only ones responsible. After all, if freedom had only ever had governments to guard its growth, it is likely that it would still be its infancy, or definitively buried with the inscription “an angel in heaven”. The society of money and exploitation has never been charged, so far as I know, with ensuring freedom and justice. Police States have never been suspected of opening law schools in the cellars where they interrogate their subjects. So, when they oppress and exploit, they are doing their job, and whoever gives them unchecked disposal of freedom has no right to be surprised when it is immediately dishonoured. If freedom today is humiliated or in chains, this is not because its enemies have used treachery. It is actually because it has lost its natural protector. Yes, freedom is widowed, but it must be said because it is true, it is widowed by all of us. Freedom is the concern of the oppressed, and its natural protectors have always come out of oppressed peoples. In feudal Europe it was the communes which maintained the ferments of freedom, the inhabitants of the towns and cities who ensured its fleeting triumph in 1789, and since the 19th century it was the workers’ movements assumed responsibility for the double honour of freedom and justice, which they never dreamt of saying were irreconcilable. It was the manual and intellectual workers who gave freedom a body, and who made it advance in the world until it become the very principle of our thought, the air that we cannot do without, that we breathe without even noticing it, until the moment when, deprived of it, we feel we are dying. And if, today, freedom is declining across such a large part of the world, it is undoubtedly because the business of enslavement has never been so cynical nor better equipped but it is also because its true defenders, through fatigue, through despair, or through a false idea of strategy and efficiency, have turned away from it. Yes, the great event of the 20th century was the abandonment of the values of freedom by the revolutionary movement, the progressive retreat of the socialism of freedom before Caesarian and military socialism. From that moment, a certain hope has disappeared from the world, a solitude has begun for every free man. When, after Marx, the rumour began to spread and gain strength that freedom was a bourgeois hoax [balançoire], a single word was misplaced in this definition, but we are still paying for that misplacement in the convulsions of our century. For it should have been said merely that bourgeois freedom was a hoax, and not all freedom. It should have been said specifically that bourgeois freedom was not freedom or, in the best of cases, that it was not yet [freedom]. But that there were freedoms to be conquered and never relinquished. It is quite true that there is no freedom possible for the man tied to his lathe all day and who, when evening comes, huddles with his family in a single room. But that condemns a class, a society and the servitude it presupposes, not freedom itself which the poorest of us cannot do without. For even if society were suddenly transformed and became decent and comfortable for all, it would still be barbaric if freedom did not reign there. And because bourgeois society talks of freedom without practising it, must the workers’ society also give up practising it, boasting only of not talking about it? Yet the confusion took place and freedom was gradually condemned in the revolutionary movement because bourgeois society used it as a mystification. From a just and healthy distrust of the prostitution that this bourgeois society inflicted upon freedom, we have come to distrust freedom itself. At best, we have postponed it to the end of time, praying that in the meanwhile we will not talk about it anymore. It was declared that justice was the first necessity and that freedom would be seen to later, as if slaves could ever hope to achieve justice. And vibrant intellectuals announced to the worker that it was bread alone that interested him and not freedom, as if the worker did not know that his bread also depends on his freedom. And certainly, faced with the long injustice of bourgeois society, the temptation to go to such extremes was great. After all, there is perhaps not one of us here who, in action or thought, has not yielded to it. But history has moved forward and what we have seen must now make us reconsider. The revolution made by the workers triumphed in 1917 and it was then the dawn of real freedom and the greatest hope that this world has known. But that revolution, surrounded, threatened within and without, armed itself, equipped itself with a police force. Inheriting a conception and a doctrine that unfortunately rendered it suspicious of freedom, the revolution gradually weakened as the police grew stronger, and the world’s greatest hope ossified into the world’s most effective dictatorship. The false freedom of bourgeois society is no worse off, however. What was killed in the Moscow trials and elsewhere, and in the camps of the revolution, what is murdered when a railway worker is shot, as in Hungary, for a mistake at work, is not bourgeois freedom, it is the freedom of 1917. Bourgeois freedom can meanwhile engage in all its mystifications. The trials, the perversions of the revolutionary society give it both a good conscience and arguments. ...

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— Rafael V. Da Silva, Kauan Willian and Victor Khaled - Anarchism in the Face of Fascism and the Electoral Debate

 

at 5/24/23 8:43pm

Author: Rafael V. Da Silva, Kauan Willian and Victor KhaledTitle: Anarchism in the Face of Fascism and the Electoral DebateDate: October 5th, 2022Notes: Translated by S Nicholas Nappalos, This article was originally published by Jacobin Brasil.Source: Retrieved on May 24th, 2023 from blackrosefed.org/anarchism-in-the-face-of-fascism-and-the-electoral-debate. Introduction With neither Bolsonaro (Liberal Party) nor Lula (Workers’ Party) able to secure an outright majority during the October 2nd presidential election in Brazil, both advance to a run off election set to take place on October 30th. There is a great deal of anxiety and tension surrounding the electoral process in the country, which has seen extreme political polarization not dissimilar to what is taking place in the United States. This article was written as a response to a prior piece also published in Jacobin Brasil titled “Anarchists in defense of the vote for Lula.” The previous article defended the tactical use of the vote to defeat Bolsonaro as a tool in the antifascist struggle, which is the principal theme the authors take up here. The authors of this article are associated with the Institute for Anarchist Theory and History, a project supported by Black Rose / Rosa Negra. Article Anarchists understand that the radical transformation of society, in an emancipatory and self-managed form, will only be possible with a growth of the social power of the oppressed classes in an internationalist project. Fascism must be crushed, but the ballot box is not capable of doing so. We will continue the fight against fascism, without sectarianism, along side those who vote and those who do not. We are all obligated to live, more or less, in contradiction with our ideas; but we are socialists and anarchists precisely in the sense that we suffer with this contradiction and seek, so far as it’s possible, to shrink it. The day we adapt to this environment, of course, we would no longer have the desire to transform it, and we would become simply bourgeois; penniless bourgeois, perhaps, but no less bourgeois in deeds and intentions. – Errico Malatesta In my weekly speech in the Civil Construction Union, I will explain the anarchist concept of law, as a bourgeois creation and as a revolutionary creation. There are, in effect, two kinds of laws: those representing the pressure of the possessors on the non-possessors, and those representing the conquests of the non-possessors against their masters. These are laws imposed by revolutions, for example: the Magna Carta, the Declaration of the Rights of Men, the Law of 13th of May, etc. […] But to get such laws, it was never necessary to have representatives in parliaments. Imposition takes place on the street, in factories, mines, work centers and barracks. – José Oiticica This article is a response to the text “Anarchists in defense of the vote for Lula”, published in Jacobin Brasil on September 6, 2022. Anarchism has never been a dogma, but there is a deliberate confusion in thinking that, due to its anti-authoritarian stance, there are “as many anarchisms as anarchists”, and that anything defended by a self-styled anarchist has validity as part of “anarchism”. But this is not correct. Despite its diversity, when we look globally at the history of anarchism in its 150 years of struggle, we can extract a set of principles and elements that constituted it historically. To defend these principles and criticize reformist deviations – since anarchism has always had a revolutionary perspective – is not dogmatic or authoritarian. We cannot let others try to impose strategic perspectives on anarchism that are foreign to our ideology. Let’s start by talking about the Brazilian case of the experience of anarchism in the face of Varguism[1] and trade union corporatism. In 1930, in the midst of the political transformations that were taking place in Brazil with the rise of Getúlio Vargas to power, many unionists, socialists and anarchists – who had fought intensely the coronelista[2] policy known as the “coffee with milk Republic”[3] – came to welcome the new government. This is because, among other things, Varguism represented a fight against that prior political and economic phase, in addition to promoting some workers’ rights, which came from, at that point, the struggle of many militants. When a brutal repression against the most radical elements of the left was installed, together with the rise of union corporatism in an open confrontation with revolutionary trade unionism, most of these militants figured out that their old positions were wrong. However, during those years, even before this repression, other anarchist militants inserted[4] in their economic and political bodies had already denounced the illusions of Varguism. In this case, the São Paulo Workers Federation (FOSP) and the Rio Grande do Sul Workers Federation (FORGS), as well as the the newspapers The Plebe, The Syndicalist and The Lantern, were building a strategy to fortify the bases for the imminent attack. In 1934, these same militants sought to reorganize the Brazilian Workers’ Confederation (COB),[5] aiming to form “a single whole of the working class, for the common struggle against the common enemy that is the dominant and tyrannical capitalism”, respecting the “organization by local federations, these joined together in state federations and all these unified in the federations of industrial unions”. The call for common action was intended to reinforce the collective power of the class, since “associated, workers acquire the strength necessary for their interests”. This grassroots articulation could make “Brazil’s working class [have] a strong body of defense and struggle capable of placing the organization of our class at the height of the needs of the campaign in favor of our emancipation”. ...

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— Georgia & Henry Replogle - Egoism Vol. II. No. 12.

 

at 5/24/23 2:18pm

Author: Georgia & Henry ReplogleTitle: Egoism Vol. II. No. 12.Date: December, 1892Source: Retrieved 02/19/2023 from catalog.hathitrust.org Pointers. On the second page, note EGOISM’s change of address. Saintly John Wanamaker in his report for 1892 characterizes the shaking up that “Printers’ Ink” gave him as a case that has been “indecently pressed upon the public.” How about you, John? John Beverley Robinson of New York has recently undertaken in “Solidarity” to draw its editor into a course of reasoning, but that is impossible for the average Communist-Anarchist. Mr. Robinson can save postage by reading all the manuscripts he intends for those people to his cat. The effect will be just the same. The millionaires are losing confidence in the militia; its members are too much in touch with labor to properly shoot it down, so the Secretary of War proposes the job for the federal army, as the Indian sham won’t work much longer. Republicans are to be commended for the recklessness with which they rush to the destruction of the governmental idea. In that sense the triumph of the Democracy must be looked upon as a great calamity. Interference with commerce, a menacing concentration of troops at the great cities, and a few more charges of treason would have enlightened the masses more in one year in regard to the source of industrial oppression than can be done in ten under the temporizing of Democrats. The Oakland “Populist” of December 14; finds that there is a circular afloat purporting to have come from the pope of Rome directing the extermination of all heretics in the United States. There is of course nothing remarkable in such a discovery by such a paper, but it furnishes that disciple of liberty an occasion to get off the following choice piece of primitive rot: “.... It is only fair to presume that the charge is worthy of credence and steps should be taken by our general government to prevent and if need be crush out of our fair land all such insurrection, and restrict by the strong arms of the law all persons subject to the caprice of any king, prince or potentate outside of the United States of America.” All this and more like it under the flourished and humorously befitting headlines: “Patriotism vs. Priestcraft.” This is presumably another “Rationalist” with a Salvation Army frankness regrading his choice of superstitions. Well can the plumb-liner afford to stand by his irrepressible string ever emphasized by the weight of fact. That persistent little line, like a spider’s web in the morning light, annoys even J. W. Sullivan, of the “Twentieth Century.” Opportunist, with no action today that he holds himself accountable to consistency for tomorrow; propped like a true politician upon the esteem of numbers by his identity with their errors; in no immediate danger of reaping popular disgust for fooling with a temporizing policy, he is nevertheless found grasping at every shadow of a straw which might tend to fortify his alleged complacent position. Not long ago, finding that George Macdonald was editing a People’s Party paper he drew comfort from the fact by concluding that Mr. Macdonald, who is at heart a philosophical Anarchist, likes Anarchism only as a dream; which would mean that he regards State Socialism, of which political Individualism is a negative defender, as just the thing for practical everyday use. The paper with which Mr. Macdonald is identified was previously edited by him as a Republican paper, from which according to Mr. Sullivan’s inference, we should conclude that while Mr. Macdonald regarded Anarchism as the pinnacle of political science, he believed protective, supervising, monopolistic Republicanism the thing for everyday use. But the fact probably is, that, unfortunately, Mr. Macdonald had in both cases to turn out such political feed as the public would buy, and would give Mr. Sullivan little comfort if he were a millionaire publishing his best thoughts on political subjects. Now Dr. De Lespinasse who, as his large patronage of Mr. Sullivan’s sociologic opposition indicates is not always ideally consistent, has expressed a desire to “hit heads” with chunks of frozen direct legislation, and Mr. Sullivan congratulates himself on having captured one of the Anarchist class leaders. And he even sucks a little drop of solace of the same kind from Victor Yarros’s late political enthusiasm, believing that Mr. Yarros will want to use the “best make” when he goes into politics. If Mr. Sullivan were to separate the thoroughgoing, consistent, definite principle of anti-authoritarianism, known as Philosophical Anarchism, from the men who love to claim its prestige, he would have to congratulate himself upon there not being many Anarchists, instead of that he was capturing Anarchism with his political pain killer. The principle of No Rule will remain just the same when every biped has deserted it, and will be vindicated by its identity with social harmony when they shall seek its shelter. It is the social lesson and not untutored public expression that is needed. When the‘true lesson has been universally enough taught to make its political expression effective such a vote will be as useless as the untaught one now is. There is no rational excuse for Anarchists in the political camp. ...

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— anonymous - An Anarchist Anti-Gun Manifesto

 

at 5/24/23 2:15pm

Author: anonymousTitle: An Anarchist Anti-Gun ManifestoDate: May 2023Source: Retrieved on 5/24/2023 from anarchistnews.org/content/anarchist-anti-gun-manifesto For Reuel and all those who fight. Before I begin in earnest, let me be clear: this is not a call for pacifism. This is not some plea for non-violence in the face of the near incomprehensible brutality of the police, the prisons, of the state and its vigilante accomplices. If anything, this text is intended as a call for more explicit attack on our enemies, more direct antagonism against the institutions of our suffering, a more intentional incorporation of resistance to these brutalities into our daily lives until such resistance is as second nature as breathing. I believe in fighting back with anything and everything we can get our hands on, however, I have grown tired with the continued fetishization of guns in radical (specifically anarchist) spaces. I’ve grown tired of the borderline admission of defeat that leads to reactionary positionalities where we lose site on how our orientations reproduce the world around us. This text is an attempt to critique what I believe to be a culture of self-delusion as to what guns are, what they do, and how they impact our relation to the worlds and people around us. My goal is to articulate a broader position of antagonism so we might be better poised to draw blood and be this world’s undoing. Surviving is not enough. I still want to win. I want it more than anything. What the fuck do you want? Illusions and Delusions We exist in a world of incalculable, purposeful, brutality; most directed at the most marginalized. The institutions of our suffering are vast, near omnipresent in our lives, and ever expanding. The police are at our doors, their vigilante counterparts, ever eager for their chance to take part in the rituals that keep capital flowing, are waiting in the wings for their chance to crack skulls. Sometimes on a subway, sometimes outside of a Walgreens. Our bodily autonomy is stripped as abortion access is pushed further and further towards impossibility and trans existence is criminalized to the point where what bathroom we use becomes a game of Russian roulette. With each law passed, each drag story hour threatened, each captured display of violence on film, I see many with whom I find affinity echo some version a similar refrain: “This is why you need to buy a gun” Every time I see this refrain, I pause and sit with the unease that rises from my guts into my throat and out my nose. I sit in the unease until a question formulates “What do you think a gun changes?” I’ve been around guns my whole life. I learned how to shoot at a young age, first a shotgun, then a rifle, then a handgun. I learned how to clean and care for a gun. I learned to make eye contact and verbally confirm control when being handed a firearm. I am comfortable with a gun in my hand. I say all this, somewhat awkwardly in the middle of a thought, to assure the reader that no matter how outlandish you find my critiques, they are not coming from a place of irrational worry or fear of firearms. They are intentional and as precise as I can make them. In no subtle words, believing that gun ownership is a meaningful answer to the violence enacted on marginalized peoples is to reify the illusion that to possess a gun is to increase one’s proximity to “safety”, and that to possess more guns is to become even “safer”. Owning a gun will never make you safe, because there is no such thing as safety in this world for the marginalized, for the Black, the targeted nonwhite, for the poor, the visibly queer, for the immigrant, for the disabled, for the unhoused, for the incarcerated (in prison or in the all too similar psych wards). If you wish to continue breathing, there is no gun you can possess to prevent the sheriffs from carrying out an eviction. There is no gun you can possess to turn your heat back on. If someone really, truly, wants you dead, no gun will keep you alive, unless you turn yourself into a machine of pure vigilance, sacrificing living for the hope of survival that can never be guaranteed. If there is to be a path towards anything resembling “safety” it will not come from individually arming ourselves, even in large numbers. It will come from a generalized culture of antagonism towards both formal and informal institutions of power. It will come from a culture of spontaneous resistance, from insurrectional potential. Guns may be a part of some explicit actions within that culture; however, they are neither necessary nor sufficient for bringing it about and may (as I will touch on later) hinder its continued existence. The only chance we have at protecting each other is gaining ground in the social war of our time. But for the radical, for the anarchist especially, to recognize one’s position within a social war, to admit the stakes and the costs and begin to build that culture of antagonism, is to take on incredible risk. It is incredibly frightening to confront what we must be willing to lose if we are truly willing to win. So many don’t confront that risk at all. They look anywhere else, towards any other path. Rather than taking an offensive position of articulating worthwhile actions and carrying them out, many revert to a defensive (even reactionary) positioning of arming themselves and simply waiting for the coming genocide, for the coming collapse. They may have other projects that they take part in but they are mostly ways to kill time. They don’t attempt to gain ground and so they don’t risk losing ground. Still, they are convinced of their own radicality because they armed themselves, they have primed themselves to defend the marginalized (potentially including themselves), the most radical thing one can do. ...

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— Georgia & Henry Replogle - Egoism Vol. II. No. 11.

 

at 5/24/23 1:58pm

Author: Georgia & Henry ReplogleTitle: Egoism Vol. II. No. 11.Date: September, 1892Source: Retrieved 02/19/2023 from catalog.hathitrust.org Pointers. This is the first number of EGOISM that has been issued since May. One more number closes Vol. II. Although J. W. Sullivan, of the “Twentieth Century,” has discovered that the average citizen is a narrow, prejudiced, unteachable mental protozoan, he still prays for a closer representation of that biped’s foetal-inculcated judgment in political authority. Reflecting upon the matter from the standpoint of one who is not the guardian of Mr. Sullivan’s hobby, he could easily conclude that an ignorant fanatic’s indifference is to the intelligent of the community worth tons of his ballot wisdom. The Freethinkers who have labored in this vicinity, prominent among whom were the publishers of “Freethought,” and W. S. Bell, will be gratified at a little incident which lately occurred in an Oakland schoolroom of eight to twelve-year-old peace-torturers. The morning song was of God and angels, at which some undevout boy laughed. The teacher then asked as many as believed in God and angels to hold up a hand. Only three or four girls could assume so much. The teacher now asked the scoffing boy if he believed in God; whereupon without answering, he asked her the same, and she admitted that she did not. The work of the day was then resumed without further comment. A Mr. Van Ornum, in Chicago, who is a People’s party candidate for congress and claims to be an Anarchist, proposes to reach the Anarchistic goal by the election of a majority in one house to be always on hand to vote No, on every proposition. He asserts that under these circumstances “they can’t collect a tax, evict a tenant, foreclose a mortgage, collect a debt, keep men off the land, or oppress any one.” We fear it would not be a very ideal Anarchistic society in which a debt could not be collected. And how all this should result from an inactive congress with present statutes not repealed is not at all clear to us, but even if it were possible, we would suggest to Mr. Van Ornum that as much can be accomplished several weeks before such an intelligent majority can be drummed up, by employing private protection for life and property, and simply refusing to pay taxes. A minority of citizens actively refusing to pay taxes and giving the good reasons for so doing would soon create a public sentiment that would make statutes a dead letter without paying congressmen to sit for negative voting. Such a plan however, has the drawback of furnishing no pasture for political aspirants. The People’s party is scaring the old parties out of their wits, and the social question is discussed by monopolists of all sizes with a personal interest. It is amusing to listen to their puzzled expressions and note the primariness of their conceptions of the subject. And all this ripens such an opportunity for the propagation of Anarchism as has never before existed in this country. These people are anxious to hear anything that can down the People’s party, and Anarchistic argument alone can do that. If Anarchists were able to push their literature now they could get an effective hearing where it has hitherto been utterly impossible to secure the least notice. A half dozen papers, in as many strong People’s party centers, taking up and weekly discussing from the Anarchistic standpoint the issues of that party and distributing the papers by the thousands could before election day win the active sympathy of multitudes with dollars to put into the work. But unfortunately comparatively nothing will be done. EGOISM cannot appear often enough to make an impression, and “Liberty,” while issued weekly, is too small to contain the variety of phases and quantity of detail necessary to set the question comprehensibly before the popular mind. A few hundreds of dollars now spent for paper and presswork would yield thousands a little later. Thus the game passes by while the powderhorn is empty. The literary fodder-cutter now acting as chief editor of the “Twentieth Century,” characterizes Walt Whitman a “picturesque humbug” and charges him with making his living the past thirty years by affecting the “airs and mannerisms supposed by him” to belong to the untutored genius, Nature’s own child, and on shameless trading on his record as nurse in army hospitals. Whether Walt asked or accepted aid on his hospital record we do not know, and whether it was shameless to do so after losing his health through his sympathy for the suffering of men breathing their last, thousands of miles from the solicitous faces of those felt a necessity even to their well moments, we leave to the susceptibilities of cast-iron hitching posts, but of this word thresher’s innuendo that Walt “affected” and “supposed” there is a word. It is easily comprehensible how a mere letters-bag, a person depending altogether on others’ mental mastications for even his thought, could not conceive that another might really desire to do differently from the rest of the world, and would thus conclude affectation the only possible definition of such conduct. But the broad, deep, detailed, and faithful description of life, thought, being, that constitutes the charm of Whitman’s verse, and the response it found where it found it, are irrefutably conclusive that he not only knew Nature’s genius, but appreciated it as he sang it. And if the editor with “twenty years’ experience” had enough originality about him to do something else than make chop-feed from modern curiosity and the dry straw of contradictory old philosophers, he would not thus expose his intellectual insipidity with a magnificent stroke that is the despair of his most ardent critic. It is hoped that all those “radicals” who cannot support the few advanced papers that really champion their cause, and “cannot do without” the “Twentieth Century,” will fill up on its editorial sentiment in this instance and in those in which it sneers with so elevated a nostril at sexual freedom. ...

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— Georgia & Henry Replogle - Egoism Vol. II. No. 10.

 

at 5/24/23 1:48pm

Author: Georgia & Henry ReplogleTitle: Egoism Vol. II. No. 10.Date: May, 1892Source: Retrieved 02/19/2023 from catalog.hathitrust.org Pointers. It turns out that Herbert Spencer is capable of the rankest prejudices, just like very ordinary mortals. A letter in “Liberty” from a Mr. Frederick R. Burton, proves that Spencer condemned Proudhon without having read a line of his writings, and, as if to leave no doubt of his unqualified prejudice, declares he never shall. Thus tumble the great before the analytic eye of the unknown layman. After a few weeks’ suspension, “Liberty” is now issued from New York, P. O. Box 1312. It appears in a new dress of larger type, a change that will be hailed with delight by many of its readers. The subscription price has been raised to two dollars a year, while the paper remains a weekly of four pages. Its editor remarks that “few people care to read journals which tell the truth, and as a consequence the privilege is costly and very precious.” Further, he believes that the readers of the paper “sufficiently appreciate it to be willing to pay two dollars annually to help it in its struggle for existence.” Owing to engagements at a distance from the office of publication, Victor Yarros can no longer perform the duties of associate editor, but will contribute with reasonable frequency. John Henry Mackay, author of “The Anarchists,” has discovered the grave of Max Stirner and the house in which he spent his last, days. Mr. Mackay desires to erect a grave stone and memorial tablet, and solicits donations to that purpose. Max Stirner was the Proudhon of Egoism, and a plain monument erected by the hands of strangers would be a very effective way to call attention to the idea, as well as gratifying in the way of passive defiance of a Moralistic cant no less active now than when Stirner wrote. Since EGOISM is the most accented exponent of the philosophy in the world, it would not be unreasonable for Mr. Mackay to expect at least a square lift from its readers. We will contribute something on our own account, and will gladly acknowledge in these columns any amounts that others may forward us to send with it. As an expression of gratitude the mark cannot, of course, reach Stirner, but it gives us an opportunity to say “I,” before men. Ambrose Bierce getteth there to EGOISM’s delight in the following: “I am in receipt of a kind invitation to join the Theosophical Society, whose main object, it appears, is ‘the practical realization Of Universal Brotherhood.’ I must be excused—that is about the last thing that I could wish to bring about. Universal brotherhood, if it means anything, means (for me) a closer relation between me and the rest of the race. As a considerable majority of the rest of the race happens to be made up of knaves, dunces and savages, I am not seeking that kind of relations with it. The Society may tickle its ears with fantastic phrases babbled in gorgeous dreams until it is drunken with words, but I shall not join the debauch. ‘The universal brother, as I know him, has ever manifest in the manner of him an invitation to be slapped ‘on the back and addressed as ‘old feller’—to the which love-feast I am deeply disinclined. In the circumstance that many of us are descended from the same species of apes, I find a sufficiently near approach to universal brotherhood to satisfy my highest and holiest aspirations for spiritual gregariousness.” If the chief of police of this city were a German, his late grand “April fool” on the wrong end of the month might be accounted for on the hypothesis that Germans sometimes get things in an unfamiliar language wrong end before, but since the chief’s name smacks of tubers, no theory save that of magnificent stupidity can account for his action. On the night of April 30 he had every available man on his force concealed about the banks and millionaire residences of the city lying in wait for a shower of bombs predicted no doubt, by the inspiration of mince pie which the chief’s salary can furnish. He could feel it in his bones that the “anarchists” of the world would rise in their might that night and get a start for May day, and he wouldn’t be caught napping and lose the opportunity of his life to be heard of outside the offices of local monopolists and of beer tables. So all night long the smooth-fingered warriors kept awake and quivered and shivered in the fog while the demon Anarchist slept comfortably first on one side then on the other as he dreamed of Mutual Banks and one-half of one per cent interest till the distant-sounding cry of the newsboys’ “all about the ‘anarchists’” brought him back to the realization of privileged metal, a sensational press, and gullible mammals, and he wondered if a dreamograph had been invented and sprung upon him to aid the authority-priests in making capital even of his dreams. Then with intense curiosity he read of the valorous deeds at the ghost battle which probably left the blue—coat underwear in good sanitary condition, and he smiled a derisive, yet satisfied smile as he realized the enemy thus hacking away at its own throat according to the plan of his campaign. It had exposed the ignorance and childishness of State prestige, and this is his weapon and victory. The chief and his men should join the militia and play war in the day time at a summer resort, it is accompanied by less loss of sleep and does not provoke a smile on the carved figures of the keystones and cornices. ...

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— Georgia & Henry Replogle - Egoism Vol. II. No. 9.

 

at 5/24/23 1:28pm

Author: Georgia & Henry ReplogleTitle: Egoism Vol. II. No. 9.Date: February, 1892Source: Retrieved 02/19/2023 from catalog.hathitrust.org Pointers. Except four “Straws in the Breeze,” this number of EGOISM is homemade. This number, dated February, is the one that should have appeared in January under a normal condition of things. From a letter from El Reno, I. T., we note that the Indians, after receiving their supplies from the government, sell the clothes to the whites at twenty-five per cent of their value. There is nothing like a political institution for waste and stupidity. If the Indians do not want clothes, the bill could he saved since no part of it is due them. We have received the first number of “Free Trade,” a new and neat paper published by Albert Tarn, at 17 Johnson’s Court, Fleet Street, London, E. C. It exposes State superstition from the standpoint of absolute freetrade, and is destined to do a wide scope of good work. We think Mr. Tarn should concentrate all his energies on that publication alone. Its standpoint is primary enough to be appreciated by all, and fundamental enough to consistently cover the whole ground of freedom. As EGOISM goes to press, “Liberty” arrives, and we learn that ours is the only Anarchistic paper now published on this continent. The editor of “Liberty” is going to move to New York, and that journal will not appear again until about the 16th of April. When we note EGOISM falling behind its regular gait, and “Liberty” thus quickening its step there is not much reason to hurrah for ourselves, but as we cannot do this, then we will hurrah for our side. New York is the proper place for “Liberty” and we hope it will come out an 8-page instead of 4-page weekly. And this volley of good will shoots backward as well; EGOISM has no notion itself of becoming extinct. The California State Liberal Union at its this year’s convention in this city condemned, since it is popular to do so, Harman and Heywood’s imprisonment, but resolutions relating to more freedom in divorce and marriage were tabled. When others have made these questions popular the Liberal Weather Vane can indorse them also. Freethought organizations have succeeded in nothing else. Individuals have done some educating on their own account, but the organizations have only begged money and disdainfully held their skirts aloof when the advance guard came nigh. There is a kind of “eternal fitness of things” that is gratifying to grown people as they witness these Unions pandering to hairbrained prejudice till they die for lack of an issue. Ambrose Bierce has said many radical and admirable things, but his labored satire on Senator Ingalls’s remarks concerning the United States navy, was not one of them. Though conspicuously late, Senator Ingalls talked more good sense regarding the navy than we have heard from any politician. Defense is the watchword of wise people, and the land is the place to put it, just as Ingalls said. At any rate, peace does not depend in this commercial age upon presented arms. Subsequent consequences of conduct is what determines it. A man can snatch a purse from a child or ransack a house, but it does not follow that an armed man must accompany the child or stand guard at the door of every house. There is such a thing as common interests and consequences for violating them, and these are the great safeguards of any country just as they are of any community. If Mr. Bierce could show that the navy has done something useful since the civil war, there might be some reason why its men should not earn their living by production as better men do. The New York “Truth Seeker,” ever ready to slander Anarchism with any means at its command, attempts in its issue of Feb. 20 to emulate Anti-Theology by showing that all Anarchists are not Atheists, and to defame Anarchism through implying that it means violent revolution, by citing the case of some Spanish revolutionist-s who, upon their execution, are said to have accepted religious ministrations. If the “Truth Seeker” did not know the difference between press-dis patch “anarchists” and Anarchists proper, such a break might be excused on the grounds of ignorance, but it knows that the executed men were not Anarchists at all, and that those of its readers who are not posted on the matter will be led to believe that Anarchists and violent revolutionists are the same. This serious misrepresentation of a minority however, seems complacently affordable to that journal as it smarts under the castigation of a “lettered” and loyal Wisconsin monopolist. If it can translate the “handwriting on the wall,” it will at least not falsify a successive issue in an attempt to make a worthless point for a declining one. In the Helena daily “Independent,” we note an excellent article on “Chinese Exclusion,” by P. H. Burns, one of EGOISM’s readers. That is a step in the right direction. Let every reader post himself or herself or itself thoroughly in economic and social science, then take an active part in the discussion of every question that comes up in the community, treating it from an Egoistic and Anarchistic standpoint. This will bring the merits of our principles to public notice and stimulate thousands to inquiry who would otherwise never hear of the ideas. The literature necessary to fit any one for downing all opposition in argument is plenty, and everyone wastes time enough to make him master of the situation if he were to use it in reading and applying the ideas to the questions of the hour. ...

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— Georgia & Henry Replogle - Egoism Vol. II. No. 8.

 

at 5/24/23 1:10pm

Author: Georgia & Henry ReplogleTitle: Egoism Vol. II. No. 8.Date: December, 1891Source: Retrieved 02/19/2023 from catalog.hathitrust.org Pointers. Since last issue we have received “Holiday Stories,” by Stephen Fiske; “The Quintessence of Ibsenism,” by G. Bernard Shaw, and “The Duchess of Powysland,” by Grant Allen, all published by Benj. R. Tucker, Box 3366, Boston, Mass. And from London comes “The Individual and the State,” a 10-page leaflet by Albert Tarn. The “Examiner,” of this city, printed at the first of the year a list of communications from prominent citizens suggesting desired changes in affairs generally. Most of them appealed, of course, to the authority machine. But the one more loudly emphasizing the destructive tendency of that fetich, was the recommendation of Chief of Police Crowley to deprive persons arrested for vagrancy of the right of a jury trial. Inconvenience to citizens in serving on the jury is the bait set for facilitating the industry of vagrant fishing. Of all the outrages of this country’s political superstition, none is so stinging as persecution for unfortunate circumstances. First privilege legislation to plunder the weak, then legislation for convenient suppression to prevent squealing from the victim. No wonder hearty and smooth-handed beneficiaries so devoutly manipulate a superstition so convenient as the idea that the community needs watching. Nothing so thoroughly attests popular stupidity as the assurance with which the press can reveal the transparency of the governing prerogative without danger of injuring its influence. The capitalistic papers nonchalantly admit that the Mexican government is persecuting the priests, that the president rules more like an emperor than a president, that the government’s deafness to the appeals of the starving is giving, cause for revolution, and that the masses need only an able general to inaugurate it. But they say “all the governors and generals are well paid and rich, and have all to lose and nothing to gain” by a revolution. Aiter thus admitting that governing and wealth is only a matter of holding the gun, these weather vanes hope for Garza’s summary suppression, which means no disturbance of riches and good pay for governing, and starvation for being governed. And these moulders of popular mental dough can do this with safety, for who has the intellectual persistence to work out the same conclusion from the game of plundering at home. When “Liberty” gave its reason why female printers could not command as much wages as male, it replied to EGOISM’s citation that some women in this city are getting as much, by declaring that an isolated fact seldom proves anything; that if the death rate in San Francisco were decreasing, it would not follow that the death rate in the United States was not increasing. The illustration is certainly incomplex enough. However, EGOISM did not deduce its conclusion quite as that answer implies. Mr. Tucker does not dogmatically assert that women compositors cannot acquire the qualities for which he claims men’s superiority, and carrying the same idea still further we believed that the cited case of one-tenth of the working union printers of this city receiving equal wages was strong evidence that at least that fraction of the sex had practically mastered the accomplishment. San Francisco is not alone in this—every union town on the Coast makes similar showing; in one case a woman held the foremanship, and in another the advertising cases. Of course loose business management, sentimentalism, and other causes might account for the whole. But so far as personal observation goes, the women seem as useful as the men. They work as steadily, as fast, require no different accommodations, and their product sells for the same price in the market. However, “Liberty” is as willing as EGOISM that women shall get equal pay for really equal work, and it was the incomprehensible seeming contrary of this that raised the question. We have read “The Anarchists,” by John Henry Mackay, translated from the German by George Schumm, and published by Benj. R. Tucker. It is the pioneer of avowed Anarchistic propaganda in story, and espouses with deep earnestness and irresistible logic, the cause of Egoistic Anarchism, both in fine reasoning and through stinging exposure of the vagaries of Communism and the folly of force. It is not-fiction spun from the imagination, with putty characters performing impossible functions, but an accurate description of the lives of real leaders of social agitation, surrounded as they were by the wretchedness and horrors of London poverty and the tyranny of that city’s organized imperialism. The principal character of the story is Carrard Auban, an educated young man of keen sensibility, wiry temperament, relentless logic, and invincible determination, whose experience, thoughts, emotions, and mental agonies in the growth from Communism to Egoistic Anarchism are described in the delineating, artistic, and powerful language of the admirable poet-author. The book consists of eleven chapters, painting with stereoscopic effect the world-metropolis—a veritable great beast stretched over the face of the country, alluring and devouring human beings by the million and converting the fire and strength of their youth into its arterial blood, while it throws off their weakness and misery through reeking eruptions on its flat, vascular body. The reader plunges into its midst, and views with electric vividness the “The Empire of Hunger” where, in the words of the author: “The enormous debasement of life makes of one a butcher of another a victim! The one like the other overcome by illusion... And nowhere any escape for either! Both obeying the idol of duty created by men.” Here, in the desperation of hunger, men make a blind struggle for relief, and are beaten down by the hand of constituted power to sink through mental and physical weakness into death and oblivion. Then in painful reminiscence the libertarian rehearses with the author those gloomy days of hope and fear when the executioner’s sword was suspended by the thread of pretended deliberation over the heads of the Chicago martyrs, and anew the choking horror and crushing despair of November 11, ’87, seizes one as he reads of the nerve-rending agony and depression of London sympathizers who also could scarcely believe their own senses when they saw the thread of the fatal weapon parted by the cleaving superstition, submission to the form of law. Then to illustrate the folly of collectivism, the reader is carried from these scenes to the propaganda of Communism where, in spite of the example of useless sacrifice at Chicago, the victims’ comrades in London declaimed madly on, declaring themselves for the deed of the bomb thrower as well as the murdered men’s opinions—Communism, the doctrine of sacrifice, which, with the muteness of primitive self-assertion, fanatically lays its lambs on the altar as long as power cares to wallow in the gore. Resolutely, though calmly, Auban points out the way, illustrates, argues, defeats the grounds of the Opposition and makes a momentary impression, only to lose it at the first appeal from an emotionalist to the vagaries of a childish impulse that hopes to grow a ripened garden in a day; they spring to their feet, speechify, gesticulate, consecrate themselves once more to humanity, and like a group of pettish school girls pace away arm in arm to pout at the rude critic, leaving the power that crushes without the hindrance of a single thought that tends to dissolve it. Auban is more and more alone, and from the touch of all the years finally finds a single man who understands; and one mutually eloquent look and the pressure of the hand constitute the pledges of alliance that unite them in the work of a common cause. We heartly recommend this book above any novel in our list, and urge our readers to buy and circulate it. It contains 315 pages. We keep it constantly in stock, and sell it at 50 cents in paper cover, and for $1.00 in cloth. ...

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— Georgia & Henry Replogle - Egoism Vol. II. No. 7.

 

at 5/24/23 12:52pm

Author: Georgia & Henry ReplogleTitle: Egoism Vol. II. No. 7.Date: November, 1891Source: Retrieved 02/19/2023 from catalog.hathitrust.org Pointers. About the most promising business opening for morbid and somewhat attractive overripe girls is to take advantage of the monogamy monotony of wealthy men through matrimonial advertisements and work the damage suit blackmail racket. It is a big pull financially and a progressive propaganda as well, as it helps expose the ridiculousness of legal love. EGOISM is even later this month than last though with a better excuse, being a lack of money to pay the cash expense. The type was up nearly on time, but sickness and scarcity of work together prevented our securing the necessary gold to have it printed sooner. Each number will come in time but perhaps not always on time, unless interest enough can be generated to cause each subscriber to add at least one subscription besides his own to our list. Hugh O. Pentecost has done several neat hits lately. One, upon entering the legal profession while opposed to law, was his apology to Mr. Tucker of “Liberty” for having censured him for taking copyrights when he is opposed to such “rights.” Another was Mr. Pentecost’s review of Theosophy and Mrs. Besant. However, Mrs. Besant’s “essence of things” and Mr. Pentecost’s “union of beings” in our eyes bear a resemblance as close as that of the same individual of a pair of twins. We have never seen the mediocrity of the average caucasian so painfully illustrated as recently when witnessing the enthusiastic delight of an English-speaking Chinaman to whom the compliment was returned when inquiring after the health of a “good citizen’s” family. The ideal of the yellow man of the stationary race is an income and family. So little more can be said of the average caucasian that the Chinaman’s ready recognition of their mental level was even more painful than surprising. Those State Socialists who fondly look forward to the time when the efficiency of State control will be so far extended as to determine for them the amount of potatoes required for a year’s consumption, that they need not raise too many, can get another pointer on such efficiency in the fact that the government has accepted a new cruiser so top-heavy that she must have fifty tons of cement placed in her bottom to keep her from turning bottom upward when answering her rudder in an ordinary sea. The latest book published by Benj. R. Tucker is “The Anarchists,” by John Henry Mackay, translated from the German by George Schumm. We have only sketched it hurriedly here and there, but feel safe in advising all our readers to order it as soon as possible. None are too conservative, none too radical to regret ordering and reading it. On another page will be found an extract from it. It contains 315 pages and sells at $1.00 in cloth binding, and at 50 cents in paper cover. We will have it in stock by the time this reaches the reader. Private enterprise in New York is introducing and popularizing a parcel delivery service for the State to confiscate, as it out‘ rivals the postal service in price, convenience, and speed. Parcels weighing from an ounce or less to fifteen pounds are delivered anywhere in the city within three hours for fifteen cents. Large steel boxes for receiving the parcels are located at convenient distances and are emptied every hour. Stamp stations are located near the boxes, and each stamp has a numbered receipt to be detached by the depositor of the parcel, so that it may be traced if miscarried. This receipt also contains the company’s contract to deliver the package. The difference between the sentiments of a man in power and out is nicely illustrated in the case of Ex-Chief of Police Bonfield of Chicago. He loudly condemns the late invasion of the Socialists’ meeting by the police at that place, and declares that a bitter experience with these people has taught him to respect human rights. That much is well. But who paid for his valuable lesson. It is only a reflex pang from public conscience, however, and not the result of consistent thought, for in the same breath that expresses his sentiment on human rights, he holds that the late outrage and the Haymarket affair are not parallel at all. If not, where did he fail to respect human rights. Protective America raises a great howl when its own policy is carried to a consistent conclusion by the Chinese in their country. These people want home religion and home possession of wealth as badly as ours pretend to want home manufactures. They know too well that white people do not live in China for society or for their health, but in conquest for gold and religious prestige. And in the absence of the American opportunity to legislate against it, they are practically as justifiable in resorting to force before such legislation as we would be after it. To be sure the spirit is that of superstition and conscious weakness, but the same is true of all governmental interference with industry and commerce. California has a brand new law which provides for the collection of taxes twice a year for the purpose of allowing the “poor” taxpayer the use of half his taxes for six months longer. It turns out that poor men cannot afford for six months’ use of so small a sum to lose two days in which to pay taxes, so they pay it all the first time, while rich ones, whose taxes amount to a considerable sum, gladly avail themselves of the use of its half for a few months longer. This is a fair example of how law can help the poor, to whom it bears the same relation that feed does to a horse. The wise legislators perhaps failed to remember that the poor pay their taxes to their employers, landlords, and the capitalistic handlers of the products they consume. ...

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— Georgia & Henry Replogle - Egoism Vol. II. No. 6.

 

at 5/24/23 12:24pm

Author: Georgia & Henry ReplogleTitle: Egoism Vol. II. No. 6.Date: October, 1891Source: Retrieved 02/19/2023 from catalog.hathitrust.org Pointers. Owing to a number of trifling circumstances EGOISM is unusually late this time. We shall try to do better hereafter or have a better excuse for not doing so. We wish to call the reader’s attention in particular to Tak Kak’s present article on the “Philosophy of Egoism.” He exposes the fallacy which serves Spencer as a turntable to gain the collectivist track that justifies majority rule and makes his conclusion ordinary republicanism while his premises point straight to Anarchism politically and Egoism ethically. On the 9th of this month another United States steamer happening to be out of port after dark ran aground and was lost. Her crew knew enough to get ashore and stay about the life-saving station. There is nothing like governmental control where efficiency is not desired. The navy department should send its forces about in regular passenger steamers manned by experienced sailors or the clothes racks may all be drowned. The first number of the San Francisco “Beacon’s” successor has come to our den. It is now the “Enfant Terrible,” and voices the sentiments of Egoism and philosophical Anarchism. It is published fortnightly, contains four pages somewhat smaller than those of this paper, and is chock full of bright and witty things. The subscription price is 50 cents a year. Address “Enfant Terrible,” 101 Fifteenth street, San Francisco, Calif. It is reported that Hugh O. Pentecost has adopted the law as a profession. This step was taken it is said to more thoroughly secure the certainty of a livelihood such as his family has been accustomed to. Our good will accompanies his person, and so long as people employ lawyers we hope he will be liberally patronized. This also indicates that Mr. Pentecost has learned that men are justifiable in following their ideals only so far as they can afford such a luxury. Otherwise he would not become a legal limb. The reason why women are by forceful legislation prohibited from wearing men’s apparel is something we never could understand. The reason for the women struggling to make that, or some other change, is apparent. But now we learn that men are arrested for wearing women’s clothes as well as women for wearing men’s. The editor of the Livermore “Herald” was recently arrested in this City because he was found dressed in women’s garments. On examination he was found to be temporarily deranged in mind. There will be no need of legislating against the adoption of women’s clothes by men, for since it is only crazy men who would think of such a thing they will be cared for otherwise. Postmaster Backus of this city a few months ago petitioned the department at Washington to permit an electric plant to be erected for lighting the postoffice but was refused on the grounds of economy. The postoflice and appraisers’ building run up a monthly gas bill of about $700, the bulk of the amount coming from the mail department. An electric plant could be put in at a cost which would be saved in three years’ gas bills. This is another sample of the efficiency of centralized management of local affairs. The California coyote scalp crop is too big this fall and the governor believes a large part of it has been imported from Arizona and Nevada, and has refused to pay some of the claims until they are further investigated. But we fail to see why he should be so mean about it; he was elected on the Republican ticket, and if reciprocity is a good thing why not take some coyote scalps in exchange for the financial ones which congress has pulled from these states to pump the mud from our harbors or rather from the places at which we want harbors dug. Several months ago we noted in this paper a case in Oakland of a man being arrested on a charge of vagrancy for living off of and with a woman to whom he was not married. It was then claimed that she was under his psychological influence. He is still confined and she has even joined a holiness band hoping to see him when they go to the jail to hold services, but the jailers interest themselves in the petty tyranny of keeping her from getting near him. It is a longwinded psychological influence under the defeat from which the measly press refers to her as the Chambers female. In speaking of the refusal by Judge Thomas Paschal of Texas to naturalize a Socialist the “Examiner” of this city says: The doctrines of the abolitionists were much less consistent with the constitution as it existed before the war than those of the Socialists and Anarchists are now, but belief in slavery was not usually made a test of fitness for citizenship at that time. The constitution itself by providing for its own amendment, expressly contemplates legitimate opposition to its provisions. As a general rule men who have intelligence enough to think about public affairs and to form their own opinions are not dangerous citizens, even if their opinions be distasteful to the majority. “Liberty” has moved into new and commodious quarters on one of Boston’s principal thoroughfares. Its home now is a large and finely-fronted store which will be the headquarters for Mr. Tucker’s general publishing business, the office of his “Weekly Bulletin,” and a retail bookstore. The rear of the building will be fitted up fora reading room on the tables of which will be kept all the principal dailies in the English language, the magazines, radical papers, and many periodicals in other languages. We are heartily glad to see this evidence of prosperity with the old folks, and admit that we would ourselves enjoy a boom if it consisted of no more than to pay the cash running expenses of the paper, leaving us to shoulder the labor only. ...

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— Georgia & Henry Replogle - Egoism Vol. II. No. 5.

 

at 5/24/23 12:05pm

Author: Georgia & Henry ReplogleTitle: Egoism Vol. II. No. 5.Date: September, 1891Source: Retrieved 02/19/2023 from catalog.hathitrust.org Pointers. The article, “A Few Good Books,” by George Forrest, which appears on another page was originally written for “Fair Play” and forwarded to us after that magazine ceased publication. Paternalistic Russia’s censorial interest in its subjects is well known but now when hundreds of thousands of them are starving the State does not know of them. But of course when they have nothing to be plundered of it has no function to exercise in connection with them. The “Beacon,” of this city, hitherto published by Sigismund Danielewicz, announces Mr. Danielewicz’s retirement and its continuance by its former assistant editor, Clara Dixon Davidson, and by H. C. B. Cowell. The new management is evolutionistic in sentiment and the paper will no longer be an advocate of physical force revolution. While we esteem Mr. Danielewicz as a friend we welcome the change and his successors. What the press tries to conceal in its lines it usually exposes between them. “Life” is a paper devoted to caricaturing the living habit and exposing its frivolities and vanity. The striking feature is that it illustrates none but bourgeoisie life; all other animate function being realistically regarded as commodity—horses, cows, sheep, fowls, and the laboring biped. The existence of these is not legitimate “life,” only the blank lottery tickets that make drawing numbers be what they are. A Socialist paper in London has been suppressed for attacking the emperor and chancellor of Germany. The wealthiest families of this country are making it their chief accomplishment to marry their daughters to extra copies of the nobility. This collusion of the powers against kickers, and this social engrafting of the wealthy with members of the powers should impress even the dullest that government as a principle is the enemy of equality; the science of brigandage—absolute plundering prerogative combined with full social benefits and public honors. Quebec furnishes an example of the efficiency of municipal supervision. A fire recently broke out there which turned seventy-five families in the streets. The firemen could do nothing because the pipe of the water supply was too small to furnish sufficient water. Insurance companies maintaining private fire forces would never be caught in such a stupidity, for they would have money at stake. But the collectivity having only political obligation at stake Without competition, soon reaches the impossible and lets God, the next authority, fill the subscription list. San Francisco “Freethought” is no more. It has consolidated with the New York “Truth Seeker,” and Samuel P. Putnam’s “News and Notes” are published in that paper and a branch office with its books and pamphlets is kept at the old stand in this city. As usual, insufficient support was the cause of this change. EGOISM is now one of the only two radical papers on the Coast, and has just nine paid up subscribers in California. No other state is so near home, so the prophet. is much greater in many others. While support is yearningly desirable, the regular appearance of the paper does not absolutely depend upon it. It has a habit of materializing anyway. An employers’ union to be extended over the entire state has been organized in this city to resist trades unions. This will bring organization against organization. The proprietor backed by the government will be pitted against the sentiment bolstered laborer. It will expose the ineffectiveness of unionism to solve the labor question when it comes to the final test and tend to cause labor to-look deeper than the surface for the cause of its helplessness and a solution. But it will not swell the ranks of the economic solvers yet. Political demagogy must have a good long pull on labor before it will listen to a more profound canvassing of the subject. It is so easy to drop a little piece of paper in a slot and get a brand new legislator who will square things right up (gradually). Nearly all the leaders of the unions are State Socialists at heart, and as their proposition is only a consistent extension of present methods it will not be hard to get numbers, and we may look for a crop of that ism at no distant day. Ambitious political aspirants are as plenty and ravenous as fleas, and they use the same methods to a dot that are employed by the old party manipulators. The same glittering generalities, barrenness of logic, and appeal to gushing sentiment characterize their public efforts. There are probably not many of them aware that they will not effect any remedy, but their methods of propaganda are precisely as if they were so aware. They go straight for popularity and power and do not attempt to inculcate a solitary tenet of economic science. New men will get into office, some restrictions will be set, stagnation will follow, and the ox-eyed toiler will gaze in astonishment at the vacancy from which the phantom of alleged relief has vanished. If by that time the giants of fortune and men with superior natural endowments have paternal regulation enough, the handful of rationalists may secure a hearing for economic science, and the final start toward equal opportunity and the spontaneities of equal freedom will be made. ...

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