Crooked Bough News Round-up

— Margaret Killjoy - Mythmakers & Lawbreakers

 

at 4/2/25 7:26pm

Author: Margaret KilljoyTitle: Mythmakers & LawbreakersSubtitle: Anarchist Writers on FictionDate: 2009Source: Archive.org Introduction by Kim Stanley Robinson THIS BOOK COLLECTS FOURTEEN INTERVIEWS WITH WRITERS who have either described themselves as anarchists, written about anarchists in historical or contemporary settings, or invented fictional cultures that they or others have called anarchist. Each person’s story is different, naturally, and the definitions they have given for anarchism are not the same either. Anarchy: absence of rulers, or absence of law? The original Greek suggests the former, common English usage since the seventeenth century, the latter; and it makes quite a difference which definition you use. So we find those interviewed here circling repeatedly around questions of definition, both of what the concept means, and how it can be applied to writing and to life, not only the lives of those included here, but the lives of everyone. These are knotty problems, and it’s no surprise that the questions and answers here keep pulling and prodding at them, hoping for some clarity. Another problem the interviews return to again and again is how to reconcile anarchist beliefs with actual life in the globalized capitalist system. Some of the writers here live by anarchist beliefs to a certain extent, publishing or distributing their writing outside the conventional publishing world, or living in alternative arrangements of one kind or another. Others live more outwardly conventional lives, while writing about anarchism and supporting it in their political action, of which writing is one part. No one can escape a certain amount of contradiction here; the world economy is almost entirely capitalist in structure, and state rule is an overarching reality in human affairs. So the interest in anarchism expressed by these writers, and the effect this complex of ideas has on their lives, has necessarily to involve various compromises and what might be called symbolic actions—as long as one remembers that symbolic actions are also real actions, not at all to be dismissed. Voting is a symbolic action, going to church is a symbolic action, speaking and writing and talking are symbolic actions; all are also real actions, and have real effects in the real world—partly by themselves, and partly by what they suggest symbolically we should do in all the rest of our actions. Here, therefore we are talking about ideology. I mean this in the way defined by Louis Althusser, which is roughly that an ideology is an imaginary relationship to a real situation. Both parts of the definition exist: there is a real situation, and by necessity our relationship to it is partly an imaginary one. So we all have an ideology, and in fact would be disabled or overwhelmed without one. The question then becomes, can we improve our ideology, in terms of both individual and collective function, and if so, how? Here is where anarchist ideas come strongly into play. We live in a destructive and unjust system, which is nevertheless so massively entrenched, so protected by money, law, and armed force, as to seem unchangeable, even nature itself; it strives to seem natural, so much so that it would be very difficult to imagine a way out or a way forward from the current state. Given this reality of our moment in history, what should we do? What can we do, right now, that would change the situation? One of the first and most obvious answers is: resist the current system in every way that is likely to do some good. That answer might rule out certain responses: people have — been resisting capitalism for well over a century now, and many of the first methods to occur to people have been tried and have failed. Spontaneous mass revolt has been tried and has usually failed. Organized insurrection has sometimes done better, but over the long haul has often rebounded in ways that worsened the situation. Labor action and legal reform often seem possible and sometimes have achieved tangible success, but again, ultimately, despite what they have achieved, we find ourselves in the situation we are in now, so obviously labor action and legal reform are not as effective as one would hope. Mass political education has for a long time been a goal of those interested in promoting change, and again successes can be pointed to, but the overall impact has not yet been effective enough to avoid the danger we find ourselves in. What then should we do? One thing that would help is to have some idea of what we might be trying to change toward; and this is where anarchism plays its part. As such it is a utopian political vision, and this is why several of the writers interviewed in this book are science fiction writers who have written stories describing anarchist situations as utopian spaces, as better systems that we should be struggling to achieve. This is my own situation; as a leftist, interested in opposing capitalism and to changing it to something more just and sustainable, I have once or twice tried to depict societies with anarchist aspects or roots. These, like the work of other science fiction writers, are thought experiments, designed to explore ideas by way of fictional scenarios. Problems can be discussed by way of dramatizations, and the appeal of an alternative society can be evoked for people to contemplate, to wish for, to work for. Until we have a vision of what we are working for, it is very hard to choose what to do in the present to get there. ...

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— Julian Langer - When We Are Human, by John Zerzan – a review

 

at 4/2/25 3:18pm

Author: Julian LangerTitle: When We Are Human, by John Zerzan – a reviewDate: 17 July 2021Source: <ecorevoltblog.wordpress.com/2021/07/17/when-we-are-human-by-john-zerzan-a-review> [DISCLAIMER] – following the publication of this review Zerzan has apologised publicly on his radio show for his piece on autism and I personally consider the matter to be resolved, though I can’t speak for anyone else. If you want to hear the apology, the episode can be listened to here – https://archive.org/details/anarchy-radio-07-20-2021_202107. I’ve made no changes to this review following this, but want it to be acknowledged openly. When I found that a copy of Zerzan’s new book, When We Are Human, had reached me I was immediately excited and keen to read. I am continually moved by Zerzan’s thought and writings, despite many points of difference in perspective or approach. It was largely a desire to encounter these differences that motivated me to email John and ask him to send me a copy of the book, to review. As I encountered these points of difference in perspective I was mostly very glad to experience them, because they affirmed my experience of John Zerzan as someone who is not me and someone I can appreciate for being-them and the thought being-theirs – there is one point of the text, which I go into more detail on in a more critical section of this review, that, I will share at this point, did offend me and is in my eyes the worst thing I’ve ever read by Zerzan; but I will state that much of this text is some of the best and most beautiful writings by Zerzan. This book, in my eyes, is largely a response to anti-humanist thought – thought that is critical of the concept of “human” – and misanthropic thought – thought pertaining to human-hating collectivised bigotry – within anarchist and environmentalist theory and practice. I have described my thought as anti-humanist and feel that label is somewhat fair placed on me, and with this encounter this quality of the book as an attempt to save an aspect of Zerzan’s thought that is very intense – anthropological-realism. It seems clear to me that Zerzan believes in Humanity, very much from an anthropologically-centred world-view, and I appreciate this quality of his thought, as Zerzan seeks to defend Humanity from misanthropic hatred, bigotry and abuse – though it is undeniable that there is a strong anthropocentrism within Zerzan’s thought, with animal, floral and mineral life being all-but-excluded from the thought within this text (perhaps there is potential for a follow up from Zerzan, drawing from anthrozoology and zoopoetics[?]). There are some stunningly beautiful pieces of writing in this collection. An example of this early on in the text is a section on fire, where Zerzan shares personal encounters with fire in a way that I thoroughly enjoyed. While the book is somewhat history-dense, I enjoyed Zerzan’s affirmation of the Luddite rebellions, his (attempted) destruction of Enlightenment thought and a section affirming anti-history that also acknowledges that “this book … is a testimony to the need for historical awareness” – a wonderful contradiction/paradox, which I feel truly embodies so much of Zerzan’s work. Like many other of his books, there are excellent diatribes seeking to destroy time, technology and the failure that is civilisation. My favourite section of this book, which I think might be Zerzan’s best piece of writing, is the section titled Experience, where he affirms that “(w)e must uncover, reclaim, the immediacy of lived experience …” and that “(t)he absence of mediation doesn’t last …”. These are all aspects of the book that I value and feel appreciation for. The positioning of this critical turn is very intentional and I believe that this would likely be obvious if I were not stating it outright here. I go into more detail on the aspects of the book that I am critiquing here than those I am affirming as valuable, as I feel that the desirable qualities of this book need my affirmation less than the undesirable qualities deserve my destruction. It should be clear that I am positing value in this book as worth-reading-and-considering and I encourage no one reading these critical points to reject the book because of them. The three areas being critiqued are a section on autism, Zerzan’s anti-philosophy and the matters of individualism, egoism, nihilism and postmodernism (and how much [perhaps] John misses the fucking point[!]). The piece on autism is the only piece of writing by Zerzan that has ever left me feeling utterly disgusted by him and I will not deny that it is offensive to try and save John some face. Zerzan attempts to make the argument that autism is a product of civilisation and contemporary domesticating-distance, and that Humanity is losing its humanness to becoming-autistic, relying on many stereotypes regarding individuals we call autistic that I can tell you, from my lived experience of working with autistic individuals, are often bullshit. From a primitivist historical-anthropological-realist ideology, Zerzan’s positioning of autism is easily rejectable, given the likelihood of autistic individuals having distinct advantages in hunter-gather contexts[1] and the likelihood of their being “championed” in the context of pre-civilised communities[2]. Positioning individuals this culture calls autistic as being not-desirable, or less-than(-Human), is the worst part of this book and the worst I’ve ever read by Zerzan. ...

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— Crimethinc, Anonymous - The Only Immigrant Trying to Steal My Job Is Elon Musk

 

at 4/2/25 1:59am

Author: Crimethinc, AnonymousTitle: The Only Immigrant Trying to Steal My Job Is Elon MuskSubtitle: A Bus Driver’s Perspective on Elon Musk’s Austerity MeasuresDate: February 24th, 2025Source: https://crimethinc.com/2025/02/24/the-only-immigrant-trying-to-steal-my-job-is-elon-musk-a-bus-drivers-account-of-life-in-the-trump-era Introduction In the following narrative, a bus driver describes how the cuts that Elon Musk is carrying out in the federal government are affecting ordinary public transit workers. There is a poetic opposition between the figure of the anonymous bus driver and Elon Musk, the billionaire car mogul. The bus driver and the automobile profiteer represent different modes of transportation—public and private—that imply different models for society. On the one hand, a vision of collectivity emerging from common resources and public service; on the other, an unbridled profit motive justifying privatization, isolation, and immiseration. Everyone riding together—or the lone plutocrat speeding away from a betrayed community. Why else market the “Cybertruck” as bulletproof? Elon Musk made much of his fortune from taxpayer-funded subsidies; now he is trying to delete all of the functions of the government except the ones that benefit him personally. The irony of a man who made his fortune selling cars implying that impoverished bus drivers are parasites on the public should not be lost on anyone. As much as Elon Musk pretends to be an enemy of big government, billionaires like him need the state more than anyone else does. It is easy enough to imagine public transit without the state—all it would take would be to abolish the mechanisms (such as property rights) that impose artificial scarcity, so that those who enjoy doing things for others’ benefit could do so without fear of going hungry. But it is not possible to imagine Elon Musk without a government forcefully extracting hundreds of billions of dollars of taxes with which to protect him from those he exploits and oppresses. People around the country have begun expressing their displeasure against Elon Musk by demonstrating at Tesla dealerships. Another round of demonstrations is scheduled for March 1, this Saturday. Without further ado, the bus driver’s story. “The Only Immigrant Trying to Steal My Job Is Elon Musk” “Did you see that Facebook post about the budget cuts?” my co-worker asks. “What the fuck, no,” I reply. She hands me her phone. I see a headline announcing that, due to the push to slash basic services coming from Elon Musk and Donald Trump, 20% of our funding for local public transportation is now threatened. Lawyers are fighting it out in the courts, but if these cuts go through, it will mean less service, possible layoffs, and lots of people not having access to a system that is one of the few lifelines for poor people in our area. People depend on these buses to get to their jobs, to medical appointments, to programs for special needs adults, to court dates. I sit back down, staring out the window at the cold, grey parking lot. I am waiting for a member of the morning shift to come in with a bus so I can take it out. A few buses dot the bus yard. They’re sitting idle because the parts on order haven’t come in for months—even years, in some cases—and because the city refuses to hire enough mechanics to keep up with daily maintenance. This means that drivers on night shift, like me, sometimes have to wait hours for a bus to arrive. Our transit agency, which contracts out to a huge multi-national corporation, is already dramatically underfunded. The new cuts will only compound our existing problems. “Fucking Musk, man,” I say with a sigh. Another co-worker on the night shift agrees with me. He’s in his mid-70s, but he’s still working full time because he recently burned through all his savings burying his parents. I launch into a long rant about how both Musk and Trump hate labor unions and workers and want to replace us all with artificial intelligence. A third co-worker, presumably a Trump supporter, grumbles about how “they” just want to blame the cuts threatening our jobs on the “administration.” Who else would you blame it on? It’s pitch-dark when I enter the trailer park, passing a metal gate, I drive slowly through the ever-growing rows of manufactured homes. Some of them have signs reading “For sale.” “Lots of people moving out?” I ask my only passenger. “Yeah, no one can afford to live here anymore,” she replies. As I turn the corner, she launches into a long tirade about the corporation who owns the trailer park and how they keep raising the cost of “space rent,” the monthly fee that mobile home owners pay to trailer park owners. “Every year the rent here goes up. New people move in from out of town and they can pay more, and that’s pushing us out,” she says, as I unhook her walker inside the cold, dark bus cab. “I don’t know why the landlords are so greedy. Do they just want everything?” I lower her and her walker down onto the pavement outside her trailer. As the electronic ramp whirls its gears, I turn to my left. In her front window, there is a strange collage of images of Donald Trump. It is faded and worn from the sun. I shake my head and chuckle, resisting the temptation to point out the obvious. How can you complain about a corporate landlord ruining your life, but place all of your hopes in another landlord who is trying to become a dictator? ...

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— Jean Dreze - Chomsky in India

 

at 4/1/25 6:00pm

Author: Jean DrezeTitle: Chomsky in IndiaDate: 2014Notes: This is Jean Dreze’s introduction to the book Democracy and Power, by Noam Chomsky (OpenBook, 2014).Source: Democracy and Power Sometime around 1991 I wrote to Noam Chomsky and invited him to give a few lectures in India. It felt like wishful thinking – for one thing, I had no idea how his visit would be financed, if he agreed. I did not even expect him to reply, flooded as he must have been with more important mail. So I was pleasantly surprised to receive a short letter from him just a few days later (these were the good old times when real letters were delivered at home by a live postperson). He wrote that he would be happy to come, and that the first week he was free was January 1996 – several years down the line. I wrote back that January 1996 would be fine, and that’s when he came. Easy Guest Astonishing as it may seem today, Chomsky was not particularly well known in India at that time. Even among left intellectuals, few had paid serious attention to his writings. That was, in fact, one of the reasons why I was hoping that he would accept my invitation. I felt that his ideas needed to be better known in India, where the tenets of Marxism did not do justice to the country’s rich experience of popular struggles. There is certainly much to learn from Marx, but it requires some serious suspension of common sense to think that the key to India’s social problems today lie in the writings of a 19th century German philosopher. India, of course, has its own galaxy of inspiring thinkers, within as well as outside the Marxist tradition. Yet Chomsky’s ideas seemed to me to fill some important gaps. Beyond that, I was hoping that Noam’s visit to India would lead to a better appreciation of anarchist thought, which tends to be widely misunderstood. These hopes have been fulfilled to some extent – Chomsky and other anarchist thinkers are much better known in India today than they were twenty years ago, and I think that his visits have contributed to this. Some leading left intellectuals in India, notably Arundhati Roy (herself strongly influenced by Chomsky), even seem to have anarchist leanings. But there has been some resistance too: in 2001, when Noam visited India again, the venue of one of his lectures had to be shifted from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) to Delhi University at the last minute due to firm opposition from a few faculty members at JNU who seemed to think of him as some sort of “left deviationist”. Others had doubts of a different sort. In October 1997, my friend Milan Rai (who wrote an excellent book on Chomsky’s Politics) gave a seminar on Chomsky’s life and thought at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi. He talked, among other things, about Chomsky’s propaganda model and the subversion of democracy. Ashis Nandy commented, “All this is fine, but why do we in India need Noam Chomsky?”. I am not sure whether he meant that Chomsky’s arguments did not apply in India, or that relying on them would reflect a colonized intellectual mindset. I felt that his question contained its own answer. For the bulk of his Indian audience, however, Noam Chomsky was mainly a famous scholar they had vaguely heard of. It did not take long for him to win the interest and affection of the Indian public. Soon after his arrival in India on 11 January 1996, his interviews received wide publicity and his lectures attracted larger and larger crowds. After a few days in Delhi he went to Kolkata in West Bengal, where the ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist) made up for the reluctance of some of their comrades at JNU by receiving Noam as a state guest. From there his lecture tour took him to Hyderabad, Chennai, and Thiruvananthapuram, in that order. This book, however, covers the Delhi lectures only. Noam was a very easy and accommodating guest. He was never worried about where we would put him up, what he would eat or what class he would be travelling. His main concern seemed to be to make good use of his time. When I sent him a draft schedule for his visit, he replied, “One lecture a day is not a full day for me”. So we packed more lectures and other engagements in his programme. On 17 January 1996, he gave three lectures in Hyderabad: one on “Intellectuals in the Emerging World Order” at 9.30 am, one on “Globalization and Media” at 3.15 pm and one on “American Foreign Policy” at 7 pm. When I apologized for the low (virtually nil) sight-seeing content of his India programme, Noam wrote back: “No problem... I’ll save that for some time when it’s more relaxed”. I guess that time is yet to come, if it ever does. I hasten to clarify that Noam did not come to India as a kind of preacher, and certainly not as a preacher of anarchism (none of his lectures were on that subject). He came to share his ideas as well as to learn. The discussion sessions that followed his lectures were always lively and often lasted well beyond the anticipated time (ample extracts are included in this book). In between these engagements, Noam had occasions to learn in other ways. For instance, in West Bengal he spent some time with a rural Gram Panchayat (village council), an experience he greatly appreciated. Alas, much of this happened outside Delhi and is not reflected in this book. ...

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— David S. D’Amato - Military Revolution and the New State Power

 

at 4/1/25 1:18pm

Author: David S. D’AmatoTitle: Military Revolution and the New State PowerSubtitle: The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648)Date: March 30, 2025Source: Retrieved on March 30, 2025 from https://dsdamato.substack.com/p/military-revolution-and-the-new-state Introduction: the Empire and the Thirty Years’ War The dimensions of the modern state are remarkably little well understood given its dominant role in social and economic life today. As Peter Kropotkin argued in The State: Its Historic Role, to confuse society and the state “is to forget that for European nations the State is of recent origin—that it hardly dates from the sixteenth century.” Though he was writing before the dominant contemporary view of the Westphalian peace as ushering in the modern understanding of sovereignty, it was nonetheless clear to Kropotkin that something had changed, that the modern state did in fact represent a meaningful break from preceding forms of political government. The truth is that war transformed the nature of political power much more deeply than did Westphalian sovereignty, however construed. The fire and pressure that first fused capital and the modern state came from war. And throughout the modern age into the present day, the alliance between capital and the state remained on its firmest footing on matters of war and empire. War has been a highly lucrative business for private capital, and it has served the interests of the state by allowing it to extend its will—both geographically and against its own people. As the modern world develops, particularly during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), we find the growth of a different kind of sovereignty, forged not through carefully worded legal instruments, but through sheer centralized might—that is, through the power of a new, stronger kind of military. As we shall see, modern warfare changed the state in a number of measurable and direct ways, leading to the kind of consolidated, geographically contained power we associate with today’s states. Contemporaries discussed the Thirty Years’ War in terms that can only be described as apocalyptic, reflecting an “obsession with prophesy, conspiracy and end-times imagery.” The war’s generation of horrors connects several related trends at the center of which is a revolution in military capacity and practice whose transformation of weapons and warfare demanded an increase in state capacity fiscally and administratively. Though we will never have a fully accurate accounting of the death that reigned in Europe from 1618 to 1638, some 8 million died. This was a massive portion of the overall population, and large swaths of present-day Germany lost up to half of their people to fighting, wanton pillaging and murder, disease, and famine. In polling after World War II, Germans still placed the Thirty Years’ War ahead of both Nazism and the Black Death as Germany’s worst disaster. In the early seventeenth century, “the dynasty was, with few exceptions, more important in European diplomacy than the nation.” Powerful families like the Habsburgs in Austria and Spain and the Bourbons in France ruled over the Empire’s many principalities, the territories of which were often not contiguous. Partly due to the way that the princes of the Empire had passed their lands to their sons for centuries, territories were forever being divided and redivided. The German nation, such as it was, became more fragmented and decentralized over time. “Thus a population of twenty-one millions depended for its government on more than two thousand separate authorities.” Political power was layered and divided. There was no single, central place in which to look for it. “In the old world, religious loyalties counted for just as much, if not more, than loyalty to the state. Meanwhile, political borders sat awkwardly beside overlapping networks of personal fealty and obligation leftover from the medieval era. In the post-1648 world, the political sovereignty of the state would reign paramount.” Many historians have counseled caution against the extraction of deeper meanings from the chaos and destruction of the war. The historian C.V. Wedgwood, for example, writes, “Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its causes, devious in its results, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict.” Wedgwood, who had an incredibly deep knowledge of the primary materials and preferred them to scholarship, adjudged the Thirty Years’ War “unnecessary” and said that it “need not have happened” and “settled nothing worth settling.” If it settled nothing and should never have happened, the war nonetheless contained fundamental alterations to the political order that remain with us today. By 1600, the Holy Roman Empire was home to at least 20 million people, in thousands of “semi-autonomous political units, many of them very small.” Many of these polities were geographically fragmented or divided between a number of territories. While the vast majority were small duchies, counties, and bishoprics with little power or political importance, there were several powerful kingdoms with power and populations rivaling those of the other major European kingdoms outside of the Empire. The Empire had a deep history and a venerable constitutional order. The bond between the Papacy and the Empire had centuries-deep history, arguably preceding the founding of the Empire itself and including even older episodes such as the Donation of Pepin, the Frankish king whose son, Charlemagne, would become the first emperor in the West since the fall of Rome. The emperor was chosen by seven electors, representing the most powerful crowns and territories in an empire that, while predominantly German, spanned by 1618 from its western boundaries in the present-day Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Italy to the Baltic coasts of present-day Poland in the northeast. The empire’s easternmost boundaries ran down through present-day Austria, dominated traditionally by the Habsburg dynasty, the Czech Republic (roughly corresponding with the Kingdom of Bohemia), and parts of Slovenia. By the time of the war, the Empire had a defined constitutional system, which had long required a level of autonomy for the electors and the various lesser crowns and estates. Within this system, the Pope looms large. Though the Vatican was far away, the power of the Church was real and tangible in the lives of the Empire’s peoples. Church officials were often members of important noble families, with great landholdings—often even whole principalities—and real-world political power. Perhaps one-seventh of the Empire fell under these ecclesiastical principalities, but this does not fully reflect the power or importance of the Church in its politics. There were dozens of clergymen in the Imperial Diet in 1618, and the electoral system itself prescribed that three of the seven prince-electors be senior members of the Catholic clergy, the Archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne. ...

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— Benjamin Tucker - Liberty Vol. V. No. 12.

 

at 4/1/25 5:37am

Author: Benjamin TuckerTitle: Liberty Vol. V. No. 12.Subtitle: Not the Daughter but the Mother of OrderDate: January 14, 1888Notes: Whole No. 116. — Many thanks to www.readliberty.org for the readily-available transcription and www.libertarian-labyrinth.org for the original scans.Source: Retrieved on April 1, 2025 from http://www.readliberty.org “For always in thine eyes, O Liberty! Shines that high light whereby the world is saved; And though thou slay us, we will trust in thee.” John Hay. On Picket Duty. “Compulsory Voting” is the title of an article in the “North American Review” and the author’s remedy for the evils now threatening our free and glorious institutions. “Those who have faith in anything court candid criticism of it,” says the Providence “People.” Yes, and such criticism they try to answer. This test makes it plain that Henry George has no faith in his land-value tax. A Chicago woman was dressing for her wedding when her dress caught fire and she was burned to death. Moral: have no wedding and marriage ceremonies. As to the unfortunate woman, a sudden death is always preferable to slow roasting over the consuming fire of the hell of marriage slavery. One of the most interesting features of Liberty hereafter will be Comrade Labadie’s contribution of “Cranky Notions.” He tells me that I must not hold him strictly to an appearance in each issue; but I may at least tell my readers that he has made me the Irishman’s promise to be regular, and, if he can’t be regular, to be as regular as he can. His first instalment will be found on the seventh page. His suggestive paragraph on the telegraph monopoly is especially rich in food for thought. When asked if he would accept the nomination of the United Labor party for the presidency, Henry George replied as all politicians do that he is “in the hands of his friends.” In other words, “Barkis is willing.” But his “friends” don’t seem to have much enthusiasm for their prophet. Rev. H. O. Pentecost, to whose admonition that principle, not policy, should govern the action of the labor party Mr. George, in the interval between an after-election and the opening of a new campaign, is “very sensitive,” favors the putting up of a candidate, “but not necessarily Mr. George.” Many of his followers call him a demagogue, and others are astonished to hear William Morris denounce him as a “traitor.” The way of the transgressor is hard, and George now pays the penalty of his shameful stand on the Chicago executions during the election campaign when he was not “sensitive” to the brave and noble attitude of his follower, Pentecost. James Parton touchingly describes the attractions of presidential campaigns in the “Forum.” The people, after all, decide for the right and the good, he says; and if his most cherished and strongest convictions were an issue in a campaign, and the people declared against them, he would begin to doubt them. The people generally, it seems, by some mysterious process, obtain wisdom and scientific information from a source entirely inaccessible to poor individual mortals, for whom it is impossible to form any valuable opinions except by study, mental work, and varied experiences. Mr. Parton contemptuously refers to the Protectionist school, and believes in free trade. Yet, though the arguments of the learned economists and able writers who stand for protection failed to convince Mr. Parton of the good of protection, he would begin to doubt his free trade theories if this mass of ignorant and illiterate people should vote for protection. In theology Mr. Parton is a freethinker, but in politics he is a slave of the blindest superstition. The debate at the last meeting of the Anarchists’ Club between Victor Yarros and E. M. White upon the Henry George remedy for social ills drew a large audience in spite of the severe storm. In opening in opposition to the land-value tax Mr. Yarros suffered from the disadvantage of having to devote a portion of his time to a statement of the position which he intended to attack. Nevertheless, in the time left him, he assailed it with thrusts so keen that Mr. White did not deem it prudent to try to parry them, but devoted nearly all his effort to combatting the free money theory, which was not at all in question at the time. Mr. Yarros, in his subsequent speeches, strove hard to hold his opponent to the matter in hand, but in vain; Mr. White remained possessed of the idea that he had been challenged to attack Anarchism instead of to defend the George theory of taxation. At the next meeting of the Club, to be held in Codman Hall, 176 Tremont Street, on Sunday, January 15, at half past two o’clock, H. M. Bearce will read a paper entitled, “Monopoly the Foundation of Usury.” Mr. Bearce has given a great deal of thought to the money question, and all that he has to say upon it is well worthy of attention. That is a very important point which Ernest Lesigne discusses in the “Socialistic Letter” printed in this number. The main strength of the argument for State Socialism has always resided in the claim, till lately undisputed, that the permanent tendency of progress in the production and distribution of wealth is in the direction of more and more complicated and costly processes, requiring greater and greater concentration of capital and labor. But, as M. Lesigne points out, the idea is beginning to dawn upon minds — there are scientists who even profess to demonstrate it by facts — that the tendency referred to is but a phase of progress, and one which will not endure. On the contrary, a reversal of it is confidently looked for. Processes are expected to become cheaper, more compact, and more easily manageable, until they shall again come within the capacity of individuals and small combinations. Such a reversal has already been experienced in the course taken by improvements in implements and materials of destruction. Military progress was for a long time toward the complex and the large scale, requiring immense armies and vast outlays. But the tendency of more recent discoveries and devices has been toward placing individuals on a par with armies by enabling them to wield powers which no aggregation of troops can withstand. Already, it is believed, Lieutenant Zalinski with his dynamite gun could shield any seaport against the entire British navy. With the supplanting of steam by electricity and other advances of which we know not, it seems more than likely that the constructive capacity of the individual will keep pace with his destructive. In that case what will become of State Socialism? ...

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— Joe Peabody - Peter Kropotkin, prophet of subsidiarity, inspired Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin

 

at 3/31/25 4:28pm

Author: Joe PeabodyTitle: Peter Kropotkin, prophet of subsidiarity, inspired Dorothy Day and Peter MaurinDate: 1997Notes: This is the eleventh article in the series about the roots of the Catholic Worker movement, the saints and philosophers who influenced Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in the movement’s development. It features Peter Kropotkin, whose works were known and studied by Peter and Dorothy even before they met.Source: Retrieved on March 31, 2025 from https://spanish.cjd.org/1997/11/01/peter-kropotkin-profeta-de-subsidiaridad-inspiro-a-dorothy-day-y-peter-maurin/# More than ten years ago, Marcos and Luisa Zwick gave a presentation to an ecumenical group of church people who formed a committee to distribute funds that had been raised to help the destitute. The diocese really wanted us to receive a portion of these funds since the majority of the funds had been raised in Catholic parishes. Trying to describe Casa Juan Diego, Marcos spoke about the Catholic Worker values of voluntary poverty and pacifism, but he made a glaring error when he mentioned that a core Catholic Worker value was anarchism. People gasped! The Catholic representative who supported giving us the money fell off his chair! “Wait a minute, wait a minute!” What we meant was that Casa Juan Diego is a voluntary, non-bureaucratic organization where Catholics exercise their freedom to work without pay to better serve the poor. That was what anarchism meant. Needless to say, they gave us some money, but it took a long time for the Catholic representative to recover. The founders of the Catholic Worker preferred to use the word personalism rather than anarchism because of the confusion between the word anarchy and chaos. As early as 1913, Dorothy Day, still very young, had read Kropotkin. She and Peter Maurin had been together for twenty years, and she had no explicit religious faith. However, like Maurin, she was drawn to Kropotkin and his vision of how society could be reorganized to eliminate the injustice of wage slavery. She described Kropotkin’s influence on her in her autobiography, The Long Solitude: “Kropotkin especially brought to my mind the condition of the poor, the working people. Although my only experience of the destitute was in books, the very fact that The Jungle (by Upton Sinclair) was about Chicago, where I live, whose streets I walk, made me feel that from then on my life would be intertwined with theirs, their interests would be mine; I had received a calling, a vocation, a direction for my life.” Dorothy Day later described in The Long Solitude (Madrid: Editorial Sal Terrae) what the Catholic Worker movement had in mind when it adopted many of the ideas of Peter Kropotkin, who was known as an anarchist: “Kropotkin very much wanted the same kind of social origin that Father Vincent McNabb, the Dominican preacher, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and other distributives favored, though they would have been horrified to hear the word anarchist, thinking it synonymous with chaos, not self-government as Proudhon defined it. Distributism is the English term for a society in which man has enough of this world’s goods to enable him to lead a good life. Other words have been used to describe this theory: mutualism, federalism, pluralism, regionalism; but anarchism—the word first used as a taunt by its Marxist opponents—best brings to mind the tension that always exists between the concept of authority and liberty that haunts man until now.” Peter Kropotkin was born on December 21, 1842, in Moscow. His direct descent from the tsars of the old Rurik dynasty meant that he held the title of prince. He led a life of privilege and security from birth, pursuing a military career in obedience to his father, although Kropotkin’s true interests lay in science, especially geography. In Memoirs of a Revolutionist, Kropotkin recounts that his recognition of social injustice began in his childhood. He witnessed the mistreatment of family servants and heard of the truly brutal practices common among the nobility. Peter Kropotkin chose to be assigned to an army regiment in Siberia after military school. He spent five years as an officer, during which time he was allowed to explore unknown parts of the Sino-Russian border and conduct geographical research. He already showed little or no concern for seeking conventional success or a place in the political system. He also demonstrated an absolute faith in the basic goodness of ordinary people—a quality that would make his ideas attractive to Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day. He developed many of his social theories by studying medieval village communities in Russia. He also developed a close relationship with the members of the Swiss watchmaking cooperative, which was organized in a non-authoritarian structure. Dorothy Day said in The Long Solitude that “He lived and worked so closely with villagers and artisans that his writings were practical manuals.” His books and pamphlets made him the best-known and most respected anarchist by the end of the century. From 1880 to 1917, Kropotkin lived in London. Dorothy Day recounted that, “Kropotkin and Tolstoy, the modern proponents of anarchism, were sincere and peaceful men. Kropotkin’s classic book, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1898. After the Russian Revolution, Kropotkin returned to Russia and, revered by workers and schoolchildren, lived in a provincial town outside Moscow until his early twenties. He in no way sympathized with the revolution, which had begun a dictatorship in the name of the proletariat, which would accomplish by terrorist force what Kropotkin sought to achieve through brotherly love.” ...

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— Pierre Ramus - Francisco Ferrer

 

at 3/31/25 3:13pm

Author: Pierre RamusTitle: Francisco FerrerSubtitle: The Modern SchoolSource: Retrieved on March 31, 2025 from https://www.anarchismus.at/anarchistische-klassiker/pierre-ramus/6344-ramus-francisco-ferrer-die-moderne-schule The Modern School The “Escuela Moderna,” which Ferrer opened in Barcelona in August 1901, was not the first of its kind in Spain. The organized freethinker movement itself had long recognized the urgent need to counter religious superstition and its pernicious consequences through rationalist and non-ecclesiastical schools. As early as 1885, the non-ecclesiastical school “La Verdad” (The Truth) was founded in San Felice de Guipolo. It was the best-equipped school in the entire city and was attended by a large number of students. In 1888, the freethinker association “The Friends of Progress” established a similar school in Madrid. The association’s statutes stated its primary purpose as “The creation and defense of non-ecclesiastical schools for boys and girls with all necessary classes and grades.” Sixty Spanish freethinkers’ associations were represented at the International Freethinkers’ Congress in 1889, and the report read out shows that they saw their primary task as the fight for non-church education. Several of these associations maintain non-church schools, and their aim is to exert their influence to ensure that religious instruction is completely eliminated from all elementary schools. This was the atmosphere and sentiment regarding religion in schools during the few years of experimentation and preparation before the founding of the “Escuela Moderna.” During all this time, groups of advanced thinkers—socialists, anarchists, freethinkers, syndicalists, and co-operatives—had collected and pooled their funds, formed their joint committees, founded schools, purchased teaching materials, and rented premises to free themselves and their children from ignorance, superstition, and spiritual slavery. They were determined to do for themselves what the government would not do for them. And when Ferrer set about organizing the efforts of the anti-clerical schools in 1901, providing them with new textbooks, and raising their teaching to the highest standards of modern pedagogy, this was a most severe blow to the forces of religious superstition and clerical domination. The intellectual ground was thus well prepared for the seeds sown by Ferrer’s Modern School in Barcelona. His great merit lay not only in having given the movement a new lease of life, but primarily in devoting his enthusiasm, his wealth, and his organizational talent to the task of ripening the seeds already sown, perfecting teaching methods, and providing the schools with a rich and diverse range of textbooks. Ferrer’s Modern School was not the first of its kind, but it was certainly the most vibrant of all non-ecclesiastical schools in Spain. The first school founded in Barcelona soon multiplied, its influence spread, and by 1906, there were already sixty schools based on its model in Catalonia and elsewhere. Let us now consider the basic principles of Ferrer’s aspirations and their practical implementation. In the manifesto that Ferrer issued on the occasion of the opening of the first school in Barcelona, he expressed his ideas as follows: “The real question for us is to use the school as the most effective means to achieve the complete spiritual, intellectual, and economic emancipation of the working class. If we all agree that the workers, or rather, all of humanity, can expect nothing from any god or any supernatural power, can we replace this power with another, such as the state? No, the emancipation of the proletariat can only be the direct and self-conscious work of the working class itself, of its will to learn and to know. If the working people remain ignorant, they will always remain in bondage to the church or the state, i.e., to capitalism, which represents these two powers. If, on the contrary, they draw their strength from reason and knowledge, their well-understood interest will soon lead them to put an end to exploitation so that the worker can take the fate of humanity into their own hands. Therefore, in our opinion, the most important thing is to enable the working class to understand these truths. Let us establish a system of education through which the child can quickly and easily learn the origin of scientific inequality, religious lies, pernicious patriotism, and the long-standing customs in the family and elsewhere that keep them in slavery. It is not the state, the expression of the will of an exploitative minority, that can help us achieve this goal. To believe this would be the most pernicious madness. If you want good merchants, skilled accountants, capable civil servants—in a word, people who think only of securing their own future without concern for others—then turn to the state, to the chambers of commerce, to all patriotic clubs and societies. But if you want to prepare a future of brotherhood, peace, and happiness for all—as you must want! — then turn to yourselves, to those who suffer under the existing system, and establish schools like ours, where you can teach all the truths that humanity has acquired.” ...

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— Pierre Ramus - Learn Esperanto!

 

at 3/31/25 2:55pm

Author: Pierre RamusTitle: Learn Esperanto!Date: 1907Source: Retrieved on March 31, 2025 from https://www.anarchismus.at/anarchistische-klassiker/pierre-ramus/7173-pierre-ramus-lernt-esperanto Doing one thing doesn’t mean leaving the other! And it’s very easy for every comrade to practice their native language, to give it that individual strength that truly does justice to the expression of their personality, to enhance its formal beauty—and at the same time to be a good Esperantist. About nine months ago, Landauer’s statements would have met with my unconditional approval. I advocated them myself back then, using the same logic and the same arguments. And this logic of mine—notoriously insidious!—was strengthened and significantly enhanced by reading an article by Max Nettlau in the London newspaper “Freedom” entitled “An Anarchist’s View of Esperanto.” There, too, the same claims were made, denying Esperanto any deeper intimacy and potential for internalization—just as Landauer does, as I have done, as countless others still do. Nevertheless, we were wrong; At least I, who studied Esperanto very cursorily and was only trying to acquire something like the ability to read the language, must admit this today. And the arguments I used, and which Landauer is now citing again, have only the deceptive appearance of correctness. In truth, we deceive ourselves about their soundness and completely fail to recognize and overlook the fact that the thing we have seemingly refuted has already demonstrated its vitality and thus its legitimacy through massive evidence, and has already undergone so many stages of development, perfection and improvement, that it is quite impossible that Esperanto could ever disappear again. I am happy to admit that from a certain aesthetic standpoint, I must agree with Comrade L. But aesthetics plays a conceivably minor role in the questions of daily hardship and its confusion, for which, and thus for the overcoming of which, Esperanto was created. And don’t be alarmed by the little word “created,” compared to which Landauer’s use seems far prettier and only seemingly more natural. For it only emphasizes half the point when I say that our languages are something “grown,” or something that has become, not something made. In any case, the fact is that this growth signifies their creation and creation, unless one wants to view this growth as something purely mechanical, which Landauer does not. And in such a sense, Esperanto, too, is something “grown,” something that grew and emerged because it meets very eminent needs and that, continuing to grow in the flow of its development of use, will achieve a future, and thus a past. After all, everything has grown, gradually become, but nothing that wasn’t made simultaneously; the action provides the impetus, development and becoming follow after it. Even existing languages have an infinite amount of madeness in them! Esperantists have never made it their mission to abolish or obliterate the differences between languages, all that wonderful diversity that has emerged from millennia of development and that creates the charm of life, the “splendid gestures” of different nations, expressing their passions and dispositions in colorful diversity. Comrade Landauer, Esperantists have always emphasized that Esperanto is only an auxiliary language for everyday use and the most necessary intellectual communication, in short, that it may be used precisely for the “crudeness, trivialities, and ordinariness” of life—and unfortunately, life consists largely of precisely such inadequacies. But if you believe that Esperanto is also misleading and unsuitable because different nations think and therefore speak in their own specific national idiosyncrasies, then you have expressed a profound truth, which Mauthner, in particular, vividly points out in his “Critique of Language.” I by no means deny the correctness of this assertion, but I would like to assert that it applies not only to Esperanto, but to every language, that the fatality of the language of even one and the same people—of course, we can only imagine such a people philosophically—is that it is spoken by individuals who, thanks to their varying hereditary influences and the gradual differences in their sensory and psychological impressionability, also only understand each other misunderstandings and can never fully understand each other. Nevertheless, just as the common national language allows individuals of different dispositions to communicate on the general questions of their existence, Esperanto also allows, or rather, enables, this among individuals of different nations. Its development is not yet foreseeable, and with each introduction into wider and wider circles, it gains such elements of flexibility, literal meaning, and generalization of the self-evident—and this is what language actually means to us—that its future evolution becomes a matter of assurance. Certainly: let us acquire all that beautiful clarity and richness of language that our classics have left us as a sublime legacy. But let us also enrich it! And the possibility of going to a foreign land and, at the moment of my arrival, calling out a few mutual, heartfelt words to those who are no longer “foreigners,” of being able to speak with them immediately about the necessities and needs of my personality—not only does none of the existing national languages offer this possibility to the proletarian, but for the newcomer, its realization means the expansion of their intellectual horizons on the most significant scale, an immediate, rapidly acquired sharpness of observation, which can also have a retroactive effect on their proficiency in their mother tongue. Esperanto is the everyday, necessary practice of exchanging ideas; Esperanto can become that broad linguistic stream on whose back all the cultural elements of the various nations can be brought reciprocally and in an internationalizing way to the diverse shores and coasts of their homeland.

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— Anonymous - Tolstoy’s Christian Anarchism

 

at 3/31/25 2:47pm

Author: AnonymousTitle: Tolstoy’s Christian AnarchismSubtitle: On the 100th anniversary of Leo Tolstoy’s deathDate: 2010Source: Retrieved on March 31, 2025 from https://www.anarchismus.at/anarchistische-klassiker/leo-tolstoi/6823-tolstois-christlicher-anarchismus According to the Julian calendar (which was still valid in Russia until February 14, 1918), Lev (Leo) Nikolayevich Tolstoy died on November 7, 1910, according to the Gregorian calendar, at the Astapovo railway station (since 1918 Lev Tolstoy) at the age of 82. This is important to know, because various biographies cite either one or the other date of death. According to his own account, Tolstoy had a very happy childhood, then from his entry in 1844 at the age of 16 into Kazan University, to study oriental languages, then law, and in 1847 to his death, he had a very eventful life: He incurred gambling debts, borrowed heavily, fled from his creditors into the military, took part in the suppression of an uprising of Caucasian mountain peoples (e.g. Chechens), as well as in the Crimean War from 1854 to 1856, then resigned, returned to his inherited estate Yasnaya Polyana, where he had been born into a family of Russian nobility, built a school there for the children of his serfs (there were four such school experiments on his estate), undertook two trips to Europe, made a personal acquaintance with Proudhon and made a name for himself as a great writer, participated in the so-called peasant emancipation (abolition of serfdom), he had a rather unhappy marriage, turned to religious topics, clashed with the Orthodox Church, the Tsarist state, and the feudal-bourgeois society into which he was born and from which he strove to break free, refused the Nobel Prize intended for him in 1901, was excommunicated by the Church in the same year (which is why he was not allowed to be buried in any cemetery), and spoke out against the death penalty very early on after witnessing a guillotine execution in Paris. This execution was so abhorrent to him that he stated in a letter that he would never again serve any government anywhere. In his later years, although once a passionate hunter himself, he turned against hunting game and slaughtering animals and advocated an exclusively vegetarian diet. He wanted to leave all his possessions, including his works, to the Russian people in his will, but the notary prevented this, citing the fact that the law did not allow for the transfer of his property to the public. Tolstoy was considered not only an anti-authoritarian educator, an outstanding writer, and ultimately a preacher of a non-church-based Christianity based on reason and absolute non-violence, but – especially for at least the last twenty years of his life – also an anarchist, although he never described himself as such. Although he corresponded very diligently with Kropotkin (whom he never met personally), he otherwise kept his distance from the anarchist movement because the majority of the movement did not share his fundamental non-violence. Tolstoy’s anarchism is quite easy to identify: Due to his preoccupation with religious questions, which began in 1879, he was guided by Christian values, primarily by the Sermon on the Mount in the New Testament Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 5–7), which was written about 40 to 50 years after Jesus’ death. Thus, it is questionable whether this Gospel faithfully reproduced the aforementioned sermon. However, the theological community may quarrel about that. In any case, this was irrelevant to Tolstoy; he guided himself exclusively by the biblical text and, in doing so, made the discovery, contrary to all Christian church dogma, that the text does not refer to an afterlife after death, but rather promises a redemption (one could also say liberation) of humanity in the present. It does not say “Blessed are those who...”, but rather “Blessed are those who...”. The text becomes more understandable as a very early liberation theology document if the word “blessed” is replaced with “blessed is he” (which the original Greek text certainly allows as a possible translation). From this Sermon on the Mount, which is considered the core of Christian doctrine, Tolstoy accordingly derived a “Kingdom of God on Earth” as a human society in which there would be no private property (which Tolstoy, like Proudhon, viewed as a fundamental evil), but only communal property. For the earth’s riches were created for all, not just for a privileged few. These views on the earth’s riches were by no means new in Tolstoy’s time; they can already be found in some so-called Church Fathers of the 4th century AD (e.g., Basil of Caesarea, John Chrysostom of Antioch). For Tolstoy, his concept of the “Kingdom of God” was associated with a path that leads humanity out of tyranny, slavery, oppression, and domination. This “Kingdom of God on Earth,” to which human rule is supposedly alien, thus also knows no wars or other forms of violence. In his religious-critical treatise “The Kingdom of God is Within You!” (based on an almost identical, alleged saying of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke [Luke 17:21]), he developed his religious-political principles: religion is a matter of reason, from which the law of love and mutual aid follows. And this can only be achieved on the basis of strict non-violence. Instead of what he considered a violent revolution, Tolstoy focused on a pursuit of individual perfection. ...

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— Pierre Ramus - Leo Tolstoy as a thinker and revolutionary of anarchism

 

at 3/31/25 2:34pm

Author: Pierre RamusTitle: Leo Tolstoy as a thinker and revolutionary of anarchismDate: 1920Source: Retrieved on March 31, 2025 from https://www.anarchismus.at/anarchistische-klassiker/pierre-ramus/6813-pierre-ramus-leo-tolstoi-als-denker-und-revolutionaer-des-anarchismus Considering Leo Tolstoy and his anarchist teachings and worldview at the present time, in a world shaken by significant stages of political and social revolution, amounts to a fundamental and decisive examination of his views, but also to a review of one’s own understanding of goals and practical activities. The World War and the period following it overthrew and eliminated much that had previously been untested, the recognition or rejection of which had been theoretical on both sides. Social and economic laws of development, ideological postulates, the labor movement in its manifold forms, aspirations, and expectations—all these have had the potential for revelation, and it is no longer difficult to assess their usefulness and correctness. But also the attitude of individual people, the principles and thoughts and elements of will that uplift or depress them—in short, all those peculiar conscious processes that manifest themselves in the individual at moments of greatest significance—these too have had, and still have, the opportunity for manifestation. To what extent have you withstood the tremendous event of the World War, this touchstone for nations and continents in their sociological, political, and economic nature? To what extent have the means and methods of action following the (...) teachings proven effective? And to what extent has the effectiveness and activity of the social idea and its embodiments in society been demonstrated, creating new things, displacing the old, and liberating and gratifying both mankind and society? If today, ten years after Tolstoy’s death, since which so much has happened and can never be undone, we consider his teachings in the light of events, taking stock of his will and aspirations alongside the events that have taken place, then the figure of the great spiritual leader of Yasnaya Polyana rises to such gigantic proportions that, if we are able to appreciate Leo Tolstoy’s significance for human culture, we find ourselves almost overwhelmed by the immense contours of the spiritual sky that Tolstoy occupies. It should not be considered a banal exaggeration when I say: It is thanks to Tolstoy alone that anarchism still rises as a shining tower of human culture, offering a goal of salvation, a liberating ideal, and a blissful fulfillment of the present to all the oppressed, all the exploited, and all those crushed by political, clerical-theological, and economic exploitation. It is only to Tolstoy’s teachings that we owe the invincibility and ever-flaming triumph of the idea of anarchy over the state, militarism, war, and revolutionary rhetoric. From the womb of the modern labor movement, two wings have emerged that set themselves the goal of abolishing the existing system. These two strands of socialist thought—whose earlier stages of evolution we will disregard entirely—can be called, in succinct terms, social democracy and anarchism. At its cradle stands Leo Tolstoy, born on September 9, 1828. He thus experienced the modern labor movement, the intellectual development of socialism and anarchism, almost more than another glorious, luminous spirit of humanity: Peter Kropotkin. In his prime, Tolstoy met Proudhon, and as a struggling man, inwardly driven by the fervor of ceaseless searching, the various metamorphoses of the proletarian movement passed him by. Today, this phase of the socialist movement, which began in the 1830s, allowed itself to be transformed into the precursor to bourgeois democracy and was naturally shamefully betrayed by it, which then temporarily placed the power of the state in the hands of the Parisian proletariat and its socialist democracy, made a new start in 1864, crystallized, but only relapsed into the same old mistakes. Today, this phase, which lasted until 1914, is dead and gone, and its aftereffects, like its epigones, leave behind only the same disappointment as the former one; they must remain just as barren for human liberation as this entire era, which has sunk in the sea of blood of the World War and the international dismemberment of peoples. In this sea of blood, madness, and nationalist-militaristic idiocy, three ideas in particular have been lost, which, in their entirety, can best be expressed by the title: bankruptcy, the complete self-destruction of Marxism. But quite apart from its dogmatic doctrinal structure, the distinctive features of the collapse of the social movement as such are the collapse of the belief that the proletariat would be united into an international unity through the labor movement; the collapse of the belief that a new cultural and spiritual conception, that of socialism and humanity, had so overwhelmingly taken hold of the proletarian psyche as to render it incapable of war; and finally, the collapse of the belief that the proletariat, through capitalism and the state—that is, its essential economic and political conditions—would be led to embrace revolution rather than allow itself to be used as an international sacrificial victim for war purposes, preferring to proclaim political or social revolution. ...

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— Pierre Ramus - Police and proletariat

 

at 3/31/25 1:38pm

Author: Pierre RamusTitle: Police and proletariatDate: 1920Source: Retrieved on March 31, 2025 from https://www.anarchismus.at/anarchistische-klassiker/pierre-ramus/6811-pierre-ramus-polizei-und-proletariat In view of the police’s attitude toward the Viennese proletariat, their use of armed force against its movement, we must recall two circumstances that are not insignificant in assessing the steps to be taken against the police. It seems to us that far too much attention has been paid to the fact that the Viennese police are subject to the authority of the Social Democratic Secretary of State for the Interior, Eldersch, and thus act under his responsibility and certainly with his consent, and furthermore, that the police themselves are represented in the Workers’ Council. These two factors must be keenly considered if one wants to understand what must be done to neutralize the police and make a repetition of their intervention against the working class impossible. All the more so since the disregard of these factors, which is common to both Social Democrats and “Communists,” must lead to a renewed misleading of the proletariat, which will result in its renewed disappointment. Let us recall, above all, that the writer of these lines was the one who most relentlessly opposed the admission of the police to the Workers’ Council. He found support in this regard from neither the Social Democrats nor the “Communists”; the former actively supported, the latter passively supported, the admission of the police to the Workers’ Council. In light of today’s facts, one must read the evidence presented by the Viennese “Arbeiterzeitung” at the time in order to fully appreciate the shameful deception that this paper perpetrated against the proletariat in the name of its party. In an article entitled “Policeman and Worker,” the “Arbeiterzeitung” deceived its readers by telling them that the Workers’ Council’s rejection of the police could merely stem from a mistrust of the working class dating back to the past, but that it would diminish over time as the police transformed themselves into a so-called “People’s Police”—a beautiful name! The “Arbeiterzeitung” had no objections to the work of the police as such. On the contrary, it writes: “The security guard is a proletarian; he undoubtedly performs very useful and necessary work by serving the legal order and strengthening legal security.” Today, workers are experiencing firsthand how true these lies from the “Arbeiterzeitung” are! Certainly, the policeman is also a proletarian, but ultimately, so is every lackey and informer. However, one is only a proletarian in the sense of the proletarian liberation struggle if one does not voluntarily take a position that defends capitalism, the state, and militarism. And the role of a security guard is not that of a member of society who performs useful work, but rather that of a positively unproductive, parasitic service; the service of the policeman consists in maintaining a legal order that is based on the exploiter’s right to plunder the exploited, and is thus an unjust order. We are by no means generalizing or unjust in our opinion. We know that among police officers and similar henchmen of the ruling power there are undoubtedly many individuals who only practice their trade because they are compelled to do so by economic constraints. But this does not change the fact: their activity consists exclusively in maintaining the existing disorder of power, which can only exist through them and their kind. It is precisely those in the police who understand this who are the most respectable elements of the police, and they should strive to leave their profession as quickly as possible. Such men will never strive, as long as they are still in it, to introduce themselves into the labor movement—which they can serve in no way through their professional activities, but only by failing to practice them or by violating their regulations! In order to achieve this at all, it is best not to bring such police officers, who are honorable in our sense, into direct contact with the labor movement. What position does the Social Democrats take in this regard, and what position do their “radicals,” the “Communists,” represent? This is best illustrated by the proposals they made on both sides in the Vienna District Workers’ Council. Not a single voice, even now, after the proletariat has experienced through its own bloody wounds that not only a priest always remains a priest, but a policeman always remains a policeman—not a single voice was heard there that would have represented our position: dissolution and elimination of the police as an institution! Both parties squabble over trivialities while actually advocating the same false and popularly deluded position. The “Communists” demand: “Transformation of the reactionary security forces, especially the police, into proletarian security troops. Consequently, the immediate removal of the highest police organs and their replacement by representatives of the workers under the control of the Vienna District Workers’ Council.” The Social Democrats demand: “The reactionary police bureaucrats and police officers must be retired... All vacancies thus created must be filled with the most talented and capable security personnel.” “The security guard must be supplemented by a thousand, and the group of security agents (detectives!) by two hundred class-conscious workers.” ...

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— Anonymous - Kropotkin: Inspiration for Catholic Workers

 

at 3/31/25 1:32pm

Author: AnonymousTitle: Kropotkin: Inspiration for Catholic WorkersDate: 2021Source: Retrieved on March 31, 2025 from https://korrelzout.noelhuis.nl/article/33.1/kropotkin-inspiratiebron-voor-catholic-workers/ In February of this year we read in our reading club about Peter Kropotkin, the Russian geographer, anarcho-communist and visionary. His ideas are one of the sources of inspiration for the Catholic Worker movement. Kropotkin is best known for his book Mutual Aid. In this book he criticizes Darwin’s theory that progress mainly occurs through mutual struggle and survival of the fittest. Kropotkin argues that there is indeed mutual struggle, but that when studying both groups of people and groups of animals he mainly sees mutual aid. In the book he asks whether mutual aid has not been a much more important factor for progress in history than mutual struggle. Anarchist watchmakers Kropotkin (1842–1921) grew up in Tsarist Russia as a child of the aristocracy. His father had thousands of serfs (a kind of slave) who worked for him. As a teenager, he joined the Tsar’s Page Corps. He then joined the army, but made the remarkable choice to be sent to Siberia. At the age of 20, he left to do research on the penal system. In Siberia, he was impressed by the self-reliance of the communities in remote villages and he studied the animal kingdom. He became increasingly critical of the system of serfdom and the penal system. When a revolt among prisoners was brutally suppressed, he resigned. He went on to study mathematics and geography. At the age of thirty, Kropotkin traveled to Switzerland and met anarchist watchmakers. In his memoirs he wrote: “And when I came out of the mountains after a week with the watchmakers, I had made up my mind. I was an anarchist.” Two years later, he ends up in prison in Russia for his activism. He is allowed to finish his book on the Ice Age and the map of Siberia in prison. He escapes two years later and lives in Switzerland, France and England, where he founds and writes anarchist-communist magazines. Kropotkin develops into an enormous visionary for a different kind of society. He believes that a revolution is needed to an anarchist-communist society, characterized by communal production of goods, free distribution of the produced and mutual aid. He rejects any form of central authority (such as a government) and believes in small, autonomous communities, where all property is communal and where production is in the hands of the community. Everyone contributes according to their ability and takes according to their needs. Activist and scientist After the February Revolution in 1917, he returns to Russia, hoping to contribute to the new communist society. However, the October Revolution follows and the Bolsheviks build a system of state communism with centralist authority. Kropotkin is deeply disappointed. He writes a letter to Lenin several times to point out the excesses and dies four years later. Kropotkin was an activist throughout his life. At the same time, he was also a valued scientist; as a geographer, he published on the Ice Age and worked on the map of Siberia. He published in the journal Nature. His book Mutual Aid is a scientific argument about the behavior of groups of animals and people. (As a reading club, we found Mutual Aid quite tough material.) He wrote books focused on the revolution, which read like propaganda against the state and capitalism (such as the book The Conquest of Bread). He then worked out in detail how cooperation should be organized after the revolution (in the book Fields, Factories and Workshops). Giving according to ability During the reading group, we discussed how Kropotkin influenced the Catholic Worker movement. Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the founders of the Catholic Worker, were certainly familiar with Kropotkin’s work. Dorothy Day read his Memoirs of a Revolutionary as a student. She adopted the concept of cooperation based on free choice into the Catholic Worker movement. The Catholic Worker movement itself is anarchist in nature; there is no central office, anyone can start a Catholic Worker house, and all communities are autonomous (although we also know that when Dorothy Day was alive, she felt responsible for – and involved herself with – all the communities that existed at the time). In some communities, there is still an emphatically anarchist wind blowing; visitors and housemates are not expected to help keep the house running, in the spirit of ‘who am I to tell you what to do?’. Co-founder Peter Maurin had also clearly read Kropotkin. We immediately thought of him in the chapter Brain Work and Manual Work in the book Fields, Factories and Workshops. Peter Maurin was convinced that the worker and the scientist should discuss and work together on the land. The influence of Peter Maurin’s ideas led to the creation of Catholic Worker farms. When it comes to the anarchist wind in our Catholic Worker community, we find that the Noël House is a healthier version of an anarchist house: everyone contributes according to their ability and can choose what they want to contribute, but everyone helps with the washing up and cleaning. The evening about Kropotkin provided much food for thought. One wondered how Kropotkin’s faith in a different society affected his life and choices; another wondered whether you can believe in a society in which you give according to your ability and take according to your need if you believe less than Kropotkin in the goodness of man. A third was particularly impressed by the fearless choices that Kropotkin made from an early age. Finally, faith was missed; Every human being also has spiritual needs about which Kropotkin remains silent. But still: Kropotkin is definitely worth reading!

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— Kevin Daugherty - A Short History of Religious Anarchism

 

at 3/31/25 1:24pm

Author: Kevin DaughertyTitle: A Short History of Religious AnarchismDate: 2013Source: Retrieved on March 31, 2025 from https://www.jesusradicals.com/blog-archives-2005---2017/a-short-history-of-religious-anarchism1 I recently visited my mother’s side of the family in Rhode Island. Unlike my father’s side, my maternal family is not your usual white, American Protestant family. For example, while having tea after dinner, my grandparents lectured to my mom about communism, and how authoritarianism is why, sometimes, it goes in the wrong direction. My grandfather compared the communistic endeavors of the early church (Acts 2:44, 4:32), and their eventual failure (Acts 5:1–11), to the failed Bolshevik Revolution. What is interesting about my family is that the day before, a preacher in my family, who happens to wear a Jesus fish belt buckle, was quoting David Barton and talking about America being a “Christian nation.” In my family, I have experienced all sides of Christianity. I have experienced the radical discipleship of my grandparents, the cultural Christianity of my mother, and the hyper-nationalist evangelicalism of my aunt and cousins. Many, however, are not as fortunate as I have been. When many experience Christianity, it is in the nationalistic and oppressive form. On one hand, some experience these negative expressions of religion and stick to them, and perpetuate them. On the other hand, many of the radicals today outright reject Christianity as oppressive and fundamentalist, and then lump religion in general into that category. I have especially found this trend in anarchist communities who dismiss religious anarchism as some sort of oxymoronic, recent invention. The truth of the matter, however, is that religious anarchism has always been there, right beside secular anarchism, and some anarchists even recognize its religious roots. While far from complete, the purpose of this post is to provide a summary of the history of religious anarchism. Since we Christian anarchists find ourselves marginalized by both the established church and most anarchists, it is important to realize that we have a long tradition—a foundation—to build from. There were anarchistic tendencies among certain religious sects, even before the rise of modern anarchism. Two popular secular anarchists—Peter Kropotkin and Rudolf Rocker—both described the anarchistic tendencies in religion and philosophy that predated modern anarchism. Peter Kropotkin outlined a small religious history of anarchism in his Encyclopaedia Britannica article “Anarchism,” and Rudolf Rocker gave a similar history in Anarchosyndicalism, specifically in the introductory chapter. Kropotkin and Rocker’s histories of anarchism offer the same general description of the religious tendencies of the movement. They trace anarchism throughout history to diverse philosophers and religious reformers. They begin with Lao-Tse, the father of the Chinese religion and philosophy Taoism. Then, they trace anarchism through many of the Greek philosophers and to the Gnostics. In fact, Gnosticism typically taught against spiritual beings called “archons,” so it is “anarchistic” in one sense of the word. Finally, Rocker and Kropotkin mention numerous movements in Christianity such as the early church, the Hussites, Peter Chelcicky, early Anabaptists, Gerrard Winstanley, and the Diggers. Even in the modern anarchist movement, which largely originated with people such as William Godwin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, one can still find religious anarchists. Beginning with the nineteenth century, when anarchism really formed a coherent political theory, there were a number of religious anarchist movements. Jewish anarchism, of both secular and religious varieties, became a prominent movement in the 1800s and early 1900s. From the secular side, many famous anarchists such as Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Noam Chomsky have Jewish roots, but what is of particular interest is religious Jewish anarchism. Within this movement, there was Yehuda Ashlag and Yankev-Meyer Zalkind, both Orthodox rabbis and libertarian communists—the latter being a friend of Rudolf Rocker. Rocker entered into the anarchist movement through the Jewish anarchist community, even though he was not Jewish. On the more mystical side of Jewish anarchism, some have drawn similarities between anarchism and Kabbalah, and Gustav Landauer had an interesting form of messianic anarchism. The group of most interest to us, and perhaps the largest group of religious anarchists, is the modern Christian anarchist movement. As with other forms of anarchism, Christian anarchism has its roots in the 1800s (though there are anarchistic sects that did exist earlier). Beginning with the United States, Christian anarchism can be traced to Adin Ballou, Lysander Spooner, and some in the Transcendentalist movement—each linked to the Unitarian church. Ballou simply identified as a socialist, but he was a colleague of Tolstoy, and lived in a time when anarchism, Marxism, and others were not entirely separate forms of socialism. I am sure one could also list some parts of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), Mennonites, and other similar traditions. ...

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— Miguel Brea - We Are Anarchists

 

at 3/31/25 6:54am

Author: Miguel BreaTitle: We Are AnarchistsSubtitle: A Plea Against Political IndefinitionDate: 11/01/2024Source: https://www.regeneracionlibertaria.org/2024/01/11/alegato-contra-la-indefinicion-politica/ Talking with some comrades from the libertarian movement and sharing the ideas and practices that guide our activism, the question has arisen more than once as to whether it is necessary to define ourselves as anarchists, even though we all are and understand ourselves as such. It is important to start from the premise that anarchism is a very broad movement that encompasses different currents, although some discourses and interested critiques attempt to portray it as a single undifferentiated monster. These currents within the anarchist spectrum stem from specific and distinct theoretical assumptions, analyses, and strategic proposals, placing anarchists from each of these “lines” in separate positions. Although there is broad agreement on principles and values, as well as on emancipatory goals, the interpretations and commitments of each current mean we cannot speak of a single anarchism. The question of whether it is necessary or counterproductive for a collective to define itself openly as anarchist must be addressed from a strategic, not an identity-based, analysis. In other words, making a position and affiliation to a specific current public is a tactical matter that responds to specific analyses and goals within a broader strategy. Let me explain: a very large part of anarchists believe that libertarian militant activity should take place in mass spaces, as broad as possible, to support processes of self-organization and awareness-raising. So far, this aligns with social and organizational anarchism, especially from platformist or especifist organizations, which support this view. The difference arises because some of us believe that such activity is much more effective when it is carried out in an organized manner with those with whom we share a high degree of strategic and ideological agreement. We call this way of organizing dual militancy and argue that it does not involve any ideological contradiction as long as it operates in favor of building social power, awareness, self-organization, and under clear ethical codes. As we can see, we understand that making our political orientation explicit in the environments where we are actively involved is also a libertarian and anti-authoritarian guarantee. What we achieve by not hiding that we are anarchists, that we belong to a specific current and organization, that we carry out specific and public conjunctural analyses, and that we propose a determined (also public) strategic line is to make our objectives explicit in contrast to those hidden vanguards that operate in the shadows and corridors and are capable of undermining spaces they do not control. Although we advocate the dual strategy enunciated by Bakunin, we radically distance ourselves from his proposal to do so clandestinely. Alongside these two benefits of explicit militancy as anarchists—clarity and strength—we find other objectives we can address with an explicit practice: confronting the idea that there is only one anarchism and countering a negative image sometimes associated with anarchists (at times due to the portrayals made by other socialist currents and, in others, due to our own practices). Why Some Libertarian Comrades Do Not Want to Define Themselves as Anarchists It is not that they do not want to define themselves as such. In fact, if you ask them, they have no problem admitting it and feel proud of it. What they consider is that tactically it does not add value; in fact, it can even be a detriment. As we said, they try to dissociate themselves from the prejudices created around the figure of the anarchist, which have been constructed by political rivals and adversaries and, why not say it, in some cases, by some militants who identified as libertarians but whose behavior left much to be desired. Here there is a clear tactical difference: as we believe that anarchism is an ideology that can contribute to the workers’ struggle for emancipation and the overcoming of capitalism, we believe that behaving in accordance with these objectives is a way to combat that negative image that precedes us, whether constructed or deserved. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, we do not share the assumption that the most effective and coherent tactic with anarchist principles and objectives is to dilute ourselves among the workers, the people, or social movements. This position is closely related to how we define the revolutionary subject (the people, the proletariat, the citizenry...) and what it means to be vanguardist. To elaborate briefly: those libertarians who believe the emancipatory subject is an interclassist subject tend to adopt less “traditional” or clear self-definitions, unlike those who believe the struggle depends on the creation of class consciousness. At the same time, those who believe that organizing to intervene in mass movements necessarily involves aggression against the principles of equality and freedom defended by the Idea will participate individually, as affected persons, neighbors, and workers. From our perspective, trying to endow mass movements with the most developed class consciousness possible does not imply falling into authoritarian practices, nor does intervening under political pseudonyms guarantee that your practice lacks directive intentions. ...

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— Liza — Plataforma Anarquista de Madrid - Popular Power and Especifist Anarchism

 

at 3/31/25 6:22am

Author: Liza — Plataforma Anarquista de MadridTitle: Popular Power and Especifist AnarchismDate: 29/05/2024Source: www.regeneracionlibertaria.org Ideas for Creating the Revolution to Come: Popular Power and Specifist Anarchism The objective of this article is to reflect on Popular Power as an emancipatory strategy and examine how it relates (to a greater or lesser extent) with different revolutionary trends and currents, particularly those associated with the libertarian movement and its families. Given constraints of length and the intention to make these reflections useful and accessible, we will not meticulously cover all nuances and variants that could be explored in a more exhaustive approach. This is an introductory text aiming to meet basic yet essential objectives during the current period of anarchism’s reorganization: Introducing the idea of Popular Power Supporting the adherence to this strategy as meaningful and justifiable Examining how various revolutionary trends relate to it Specifically discussing the especifist current, or more precisely, our proposal What is Popular Power? Popular Power refers to the strategic proposition advocating that a socialist revolution can occur through accumulating social strength among the working class and dispossessed. Although this definition may not initially clarify the debate fully, it highlights key elements: Strategy as a deliberate plan to achieve clear objectives Revolution as a certainty that the existing criminal system can and must be overthrown Essential condition of mass social support capable of overcoming capitalist resistance Additionally, Popular Power explicitly includes an essential strategic consideration, both for the revolutionary phase and the possibility of building an alternative society characterized by equality, freedom, and justice. It identifies spaces of struggle and self-organization as arenas where social strength capable of surpassing capitalist resistance accumulates, forming the embryo of popular institutions upon which we will construct our desired society. Following this broad introduction, many comrades sharing our political tradition will likely feel identified. However, concrete strategic developments and theories regarding how capitalism sustains and reproduces itself lead to diverse, sometimes contradictory tendencies. To delve deeper, we will first justify the basis of our revolutionary “belief,” then explain how our analysis of the current social system shapes our proposals. Not a Matter of Faith Although we sometimes discuss revolution almost esoterically, our proposal is based on rigorous analysis. Our prognosis and practice are founded upon two certainties: 1. Capitalism is incapable of preventing severe crises—social, economic, political, ecological, and health crises. 2. Historical evidence shows that increased pressure on the exploited masses fosters revolutionary responses. The Theory of Social Reproduction Behind Each Emancipatory Proposal Every strategic proposal arises from an explicit or implicit conception of how capitalist systemic reproduction occurs. Thus, every political proposal involves understanding: How prevailing power sustains itself Its weaknesses Opportunities for resistance Its future evolution Anarchism has extensively documented capitalism’s mechanisms of repression and reproduction—prisons, police, armies, schools, labor, advertising—all targeted by our criticism. However, libertarian movements lack systematic knowledge integration and strategic reasoning to guide praxis, often operating based on identity and tradition. Returning to our central topic, our proposals depend on theories of capitalist reproduction. If capitalism is deemed insurmountable, proposals focus on escape or resistance. If unpredictability is emphasized, insurrectionist tactics prevail. Each theory guides different strategies, shaping their limitations or possibilities. Insurrectionism and Popular Power Insurrectionist libertarian sectors recognize revolution as possible and necessary but argue unpredictability in social conflicts necessitates intensifying or provoking conflicts spontaneously. This spontaneous approach contrasts with their critiques of other trends for vanguardism and neglects planning post-revolution scenarios, leaving vulnerabilities to reformist interventions or co-option. Revolutionary Syndicalism, Anarcho-Syndicalism, and Popular Power Spain historically exemplifies revolution based on class self-organization. Anarcho-syndicalism combines: Daily struggles Consciousness-building through experience Strength accumulation via self-organization Creation of alternative infrastructures However, contemporary critiques highlight limitations imposed by precarious labor conditions, bureaucratized mainstream unions, and the state’s absorption of previously autonomous social services. Furthermore, syndicalism’s ideological heterogeneity complicates revolutionary orientation, especially in rapidly evolving contexts. Autonomism and Popular Power Libertarian autonomism varies strategically, often proposing building alternative spaces immediately within capitalism’s margins. Municipalist strategies advocate capturing pre-capitalist institutions as preliminary socialist spheres. Others emphasize creating anticipatory spaces for emerging struggles. Limitations emerge repeatedly through state repression, cooperative failures, and ineffective federation-building. ...

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— Regue - The Trap of Horizontalism

 

at 3/31/25 5:24am

Author: RegueTitle: The Trap of HorizontalismDate: 13/02/2024Source: www.regeneracionlibertaria.org The Trap of Horizontalism, within anarchism, has been a burden for nearly half a century. It’s time now to shed that weight in order to move forward. Experiential and activist anarchism has emphasized personal experience, navigating between the individual and the small community. Experimentation as a means to “live anarchism” here and now. And in doing so, it has neglected collective responsibility—anarchist ideology as a committed and militant way of life. This approach, tending toward individualism, often becomes an end in itself—seeking personal or group well-being in a hostile world. A kind of self-help refuge, full of personal (and collective) deceptions. Since it is disconnected from a revolutionary project, it becomes confined to mere experiences lived within capitalism—or at best, on its margins. But not only that: revolutionary anarchism has been dragged by these tendencies, elevating the lack of organization and direction as an inherent trait of anarchism. Individuals prioritize their personal experiences over collective action and the historical trajectory of previous militant efforts. This trap, as we’ve said, has led anarchism—especially in many places in the Western Global North—to lose its transformative and revolutionary potential. It’s become just another item on the “ideological menu” of social movements and activism. Relegated to a vague ideal, reserved for a future that never arrives, and won’t arrive, as long as it remains hijacked by the tactics exposed here. To overcome this trap, we must move forward and recover a more concise and militant form of anarchism that prioritizes organized, revolutionary social action. This means developing a clear set of objectives and strategies, and working toward planning—both tactical strategies for the present and the development of collective forces capable of managing the complex economy of libertarian socialism in the near future. Economic planning within a framework of federal political organization is essential to building a free society in harmony with the Earth’s metabolism. But this requires a deep understanding of the mechanisms, options, and resources we are likely to have starting now. As revolutionaries, anarchists must work to create the conditions necessary to reach the social system they advocate for, starting from the development of the collective forces available to them in the reality they inhabit. They must analyze the limits and opportunities on the battlefield of life under capitalism. A sweeping critique, no matter how lucid, is useless if it becomes paralyzing—and if we fail to see or go beyond it. Communities, organizations, unions, cooperatives, collectives, bookshops, ateneos, etc.—if they are not embedded in a revolutionary project, in a movement—they remain isolated islands floating in a capitalist sea, with no real potential to transform beyond providing temporary “well-being” and fleeting feelings of “doing something” for their participants. Or worse, they serve to feed egos that need their “safe space” in which to grow. But why are we talking about horizontalism if we’re reviewing issues that go beyond how groups democratize decision-making? Because we want to clarify the concepts that surround this trap and give it a fertile context—trying to understand it fully and deeply. The context of ideas that lead to certain choices. Horizontalism, as we know it, stems from such dynamics. In fact, it originates from the anti-war assemblies of the 1960s–70s (USA vs. Vietnam), heavily influenced by Quaker practices. It was adopted as a democratizing method for decision-making in diverse groups where consensus was prioritized. And consensus is relatively easy to achieve when there’s a clear, limited objective (a campaign, a specific platform, etc.). As in Quaker communities, many groups and collectives operate with a strong informal hierarchy and group cohesion that allows for supposed consensus to be reached easily. Making this strategy the only path to democratizing society—or even a broad organization (political, union, etc.)—is to reproduce a tactical tradition without proper analysis or context. Without considering its limitations. In a complex society, forcing action to fit tools designed for small groups (or activist campaigns) traps our imagination in that same frame. How many times have you heard: “That’s fine, but only for small groups”? Every contemporary anarchist has heard that at least once. This situation is deeply connected to what’s discussed here and raises questions we don’t intend to answer—but want to put on the table. How did we go from an anarchism that sought to study and transform complex society the very next day, to one stuck in a mindset of “keeping it small”? The answer is multifactorial. Here, we’re focusing on a couple of symptoms—signals of that self-inflicted defeat. Like the belief that there’s only one way to democratize political decisions: through assemblies. Assembly-based decision-making—or horizontalism—understood as the only “just” form of decision-making, has significant limitations. These might not be obvious in small or cohesive groups. But if we aim for deep social transformation—a revolution—those limits matter. ...

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— Miguel Brea - Occupy and Resist?

 

at 3/31/25 4:55am

Author: Miguel BreaTitle: Occupy and Resist?Date: 11/04/2024Source: www.regeneracionlibertaria.org On March 13, La Ferroviaria, a self-managed social center (CSO) in Madrid, awoke surrounded by state repressive forces ensuring its eviction, despite the dozens of activists from various currents and organizations gathered at its doors. In Sabadell and Zaragoza, the same scene played out at the social centers L’Obrera and Loira. A week later, the threat loomed over La BanKarrota, where the police did not deploy a sufficient operation to carry out the eviction. This self-managed space in the popular neighborhood of Moratalaz survived only a few more days and was unfortunately evicted, jeopardizing the continuity of many projects it hosted. Fortunately, not all news is bad. On March 10, La Rosa was presented—a reclaimed space in the very center of Madrid, in the heart of the capital. A week later, it held its “constituent” assembly and raised its voice under the slogan “10, 100, 1000 Social Centers.” We know writing a political and strategic reflection on squatting and opening self-managed social centers amid a wave of repression is risky—but we also consider it necessary. In this article, we aim to reflect on the potential and limitations of squatting social centers and the autonomist strategy, not as a critique of our comrades involved in these projects, but as an exercise in self-critique based on our two decades of militant experience within the autonomous and neighborhood movement. An Undeniable Need for Space The power that resides in opening a space for gathering and self-management is undeniable. Anyone resisting this voracious system needs places for meeting and debate, storage and workshops, leisure and education, funding and mutual aid... The capacity of these projects to foster and sustain struggle in hostile environments such as large cities is so clear that opening and offering abandoned spaces—otherwise left to speculation—has become common sense among activists, militants, and libertarians. Their strength lies not only in the synergies created through these encounters or their potential as political schools. They also serve as tools for denouncing and highlighting speculative real estate practices, mobility plans tailored for elites, the plunder of public resources, and extreme inequality. Squatted and self-managed social centers fulfill the role once held by unions, neighborhood associations, and cultural centers (ateneos); and they are direct heirs to practices of expropriation and resource socialization. As operation bases from which to fight—often our trench and banner—their defense becomes unquestionable and central to our political activity. The Limits of the Bubble For those of us who’ve been in the squat movement for years, the issues associated with this practice are no secret. Beyond the legal and financial risks from state repression, there’s the immense workload involved in opening, maintaining, and caring for the space. This means many hours, many hands, and many minds devoted to improving infrastructure, cleaning and maintaining, organizing activities, monitoring and defending the space... These are practical tasks, but no less political. However, they can bury collectives in day-to-day management, limiting our ability to engage in other activities like training, critical reflection, or political projection based on strategic analysis and contextual reading. Many of these issues stem from the difficulty of achieving both quantitative and qualitative growth within a “spatial” project. In practice, this often leads to a range of political participants we might label as tourists, activists, bureaucrats, users… Some projects with greater internal diversity tend to reproduce a kind of division resembling a real “maneuvering base.” That is, while the center’s daily activity supports the project with events, leisure, and parties organized through a management assembly, a different, more politically oriented space and assembly arises to articulate a concrete message. This wouldn’t be problematic if there were a clear, accessible, and explicit connection between both assemblies—but that’s not always the case. To the workload and difficulty of integrating various political actors without generating a damaging divide, we must add at least three more problems: The relationship with the surrounding community The fragility of our position The clear inability to form a combat-ready, effective federation The first issue refers to the difficulty of connecting these social and combative processes with political practices and social agents increasingly distinct from the “autonomous us.” Neighborhood associations, residents, small business owners, institutions... There’s no easy answer that doesn’t involve establishing an explicit political project—nonexistent in many of our spaces and inflexible in others. Why do so few neighbors support us during repressive processes and evictions? How can we build alliances with more institutional political projects like neighborhood associations? These are questions that, when we finally confront them, are often already too late. ...

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— Miguel Brea - From the Outside?

 

at 3/31/25 4:46am

Author: Miguel BreaTitle: From the Outside?Subtitle: A Reading of Fifty Shades on BonannoDate: 18/04/2024Source: www.regeneracionlibertaria.org In March of this year, Miquel Amorós published Reading Fifty Shades of Bonanno with Calumnia—a work of research and critique on the thought of the Italian author who passed away just six months ago. While reading it, we couldn’t help but repeatedly think about two things: first, the striking similarity between Amorós’s dismantling of the anarcho-insurrectionalist tendency and Bonanno’s ideas, and a scene from the infamous movie Billy Madison starring Adam Sandler. From that so-called comedy, a sequence became popular in which the protagonist dominates a group of kids in dodgeball, taking advantage of the physical disparity between an adult and elementary school children. This essentially defines the bulk of the text: Amorós throws punches without mercy at a proposal that lacks analysis, strategy, and self-critique. From this spectacle of “abuse” arises the second question: why now? Insurrectionalism within the libertarian praxis of our immediate environment is perhaps at its most famished state, both practically and theoretically. Even so, Amorós delivers a thorough study and critique while bypassing more urgent debates such as: the recomposition of the far left after the neo-reformist cycle that restored the status quo questioned post-2008 crisis; the importance and form of strategic discussions; the need to produce critical thought in preparation for the coming social and climate crisis; and critical analyses of the hegemonic positions in the libertarian movement over the past decades... All essential to drawing conclusions that could shape the alternatives we build. This essay arrives at least twenty years too late, and frankly, we don’t see a compelling reason for its timing. Without delving further into this dynamic that so surprises us, in this article we want to open a debate with Miquel Amorós’s proposal, which can be summarized in no more than three of the 87 pages. The essay we’re working on is richly documented, reflecting an admirable political commitment. We stress that we’re not reducing his entire argument to a few paragraphs to dismiss his ideas, but because we see them as highly representative of the hegemonic current within the libertarian movement of the past 30 years: libertarian autonomism. We thus hope for a calm yet intense debate, an honest dialogue free from absurd reductions or gatekeeping. To be clear from the start: our analysis is not against insurrectionalism. In fact, we share many of Amorós’s critiques, and would go even further in emphasizing its anti-intellectual tendencies and, above all, its complete irresponsibility—not just regarding repression following their actions, but in the demobilization of struggle due to the inevitable defeats of implementing a reckless and childish non-strategy. This is a debate with Autonomist proposals, consistent with the one we published in dialogue with Pablo Carmona’s strategic line (zonaestrategia.net), which has become hegemonic to the point of being rendered invisible and deeply embedded in anarchist practice, often referred to as Common Sense or Tradition, in the worst sense of those words. What do we mean when we say that the autonomist strategy is hegemonic in the libertarian movement and functions as common sense? In his book Envisioning Real Utopias, Erik Olin Wright lays out three clearly differentiated strategies that emerged from classical socialist movements and persist today: Social Democracy, which has evolved into a reformist path fully integrated into the system; the rupturist or revolutionary path associated with various forms of Marxism that see capitalism as irreformable and advocate its destruction to build an alternative; and lastly, the Interstitial path, commonly known as the autonomist strategy. This last proposal emphasizes building alternative spaces on the margins of capitalism, believing their accumulation will eventually replace the dominant system. Needless to say, all three have evolved and are not homogeneous within themselves. Wright’s link between autonomism and anarchism is painful to us but contains some truth. While anarchism has historically produced radically revolutionary ideas—Bakunin being its main figure—the autonomist current has always been present within it. From Landauer to Bookchin, from grassroots libertarian autonomism to collapse-based proposals, from the legacy of 20th-century anarcho-syndicalism to many insurrectionalist ideas, the notion that liberated spaces can accumulate and serve as the foundation for an alternative to capitalism is nearly a constant. This proposal has often been based on an idealization of pre-capitalist periods and an exoticization of other societies. Perhaps when Landauer, at the beginning of the last century, spoke of building socialism outside capitalism’s grasp, such spaces existed. Later proposals—from anarcho-syndicalist institution-building to Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism—have shown that such bubbles are only feasible during exceptional historical moments (like armed conflicts in Kurdistan, Zapatista Mexico, or the Spanish Revolution). They’ve also revealed their fragility and difficulty in expanding their influence or building federations to broaden impact. ...

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— Benjamin Tucker - Liberty Vol. V. No. 11.

 

at 3/30/25 2:01pm

Author: Benjamin TuckerTitle: Liberty Vol. V. No. 11.Subtitle: Not the Daughter but the Mother of OrderDate: December 31, 1887Notes: Whole No. 115. — Many thanks to www.readliberty.org for the readily-available transcription and www.libertarian-labyrinth.org for the original scans.Source: Retrieved on March 30, 2025 from http://www.readliberty.org “For always in thine eyes, O Liberty! Shines that high light whereby the world is saved; And though thou slay us, we will trust in thee.” John Hay. On Picket Duty. My old friend, A. H. Wood, of Lunenburg, refers, in a private letter, to a remark made by the late William Sparrell of Boston to the effect that he could govern himself much cheaper than he could hire it done. I never heard of Mr. Sparrell before, but I am already convinced that he was a rare philosopher. As that phase of the Egoistic discussion which Mr. Babcock and Mr. Yarros have been conducting seems to have reached a point where the disputants are at a deadlock, it is useless to devote more space to it. Readers not already convinced one way or the other are not likely to be affected by further repetitions. Therefore this phase of the controversy is declared closed. That newspaper lying is a commodity furnished in answer to a demand, as “F. F. K.” points out in another column, is a truism among close observers. But how does this excuse the newspapers, or make it less necessary to bring and keep this lamentable fact before the eyes of those who observe less closely? What is the persistent exposure of this among other evils but a constant spreading of the light? Our statutes are manufactured in answer to a demand. Are they less to be denounced on that account? Superstition is supplied in answer to a demand. Is the church to be shielded for that reason from the withering shafts of ridicule? How are we to decrease these demands except by showing the evils of the things demanded? The next meeting of the Anarchists’ Club will be more than usually interesting. Instead of an essay followed by general discussion, there will be a debate between two speakers. The question, in substance if not in form, will be: “Does Henry George’s plan of the taxation of land values offer a scientific, just, and adequate solution of the labor problem?” E. M. White, a prominent member of the Land and Labor Club, will affirm; Victor Yarros will deny. The exact order of proceedings has not been determined, but the speakers will alternate in addresses ranging from half an hour to ten minutes in length. The meeting will be held on Sunday, January 1, at half past two o’clock, in Codman Hall, 176 Tremont Street. Liberty wishes the Club a happy and prosperous New Year. Many persons at a distance have expressed a desire to see the Constitution of the Anarchists’ Club. They may now gratify it by ordering a copy of Victor Yarros’s pamphlet, “Anarchism: Its Aims and Methods,” advertised elsewhere. The Constitution is contained in the pamphlet. Persons who desire to distribute this pamphlet can procure it at the very low rate of three cents a copy, if they will take a hundred copies. At the same terms they can procure Olive Schreiner’s “Three Dreams in a Desert,” which Sarah E. Holmes has published in pamphlet form in response to a demand created by its recent appearance in Liberty. She will also publish shortly, as a four page tract, the keen and brilliant “Socialistic Letter” by Ernest Lessigue which appeared in the last issue of Liberty, giving it the title: “The Two Socialisms: Governmental and Anarchistic.” All these additions to the Anarchistic propaganda will greatly increase its efficacy. Liberty and the Communists. To the Editor of Liberty: I remember a note in one of the earlier numbers of Liberty in which you objected to “La Révolte's” calling you or your paper “comrade.” Now I see in the article, “To the Breach, Comrades,” that you call Parsons, Spies, et als. comrades. This seems the more contrary to your plumb-line, since in the same issue you prove that the Chicago men’s conception of Anarchism was the same as Kropotkine’s. If you disapprove of the aims and methods of the Chicago Anarchists, or Communists, if you please, how was it that you eulogized them and wrote the poem, “They never fail who die in a great cause;. . .and conduct the world at last to freedom”? In fact, the brilliancy of your eulogy on Chicago’s dead Anarchists is dimmed by what you wrote on those men when they were alive. There is another thing to which I like to call the attention of your readers. In the article, “General Walker and the Anarchists,” you stated that the Chicago Anarchists would have the working men’s societies (Communes) “suppress by whatever heroic measures all rebellious individuals who should at any time practically assert their rights to produce and exchange for themselves.” This is not true, and I think you would find it very hard to point to any article written by the Chicago Anarchists which would prove your assertion. But, on the contrary, if your readers will search in the back numbers of Liberty, they will find that Mr. Appleton (X) once put the same question to John Most and that the latter emphatically (with a big “Ja!”) answered that the individual will have the right to produce and exchange according to his taste. As a matter of fact, the main difference between the Chicago and Boston Anarchists seems to be this: The former based their theories on the collectivity, and never cared to say anything about the individual,— in fact, they ignored him,— while the latter, the Boston Anarchists, took the individual as the foundation of their teachings, and practically destroyed the right of the collectivity. “Society has no rights,” said Mr. Tucker in some issue of Liberty. In all the quotations from Kropotkine’s “Expropriation” I fail to find that he advocates expropriation of anything but the means of exploiting human beings. But that does not prove that he would deprive the individual laborer of his tools. M. Franklin. ...

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