Crooked Bough News Round-up

— Voltairine de Cleyre - Will this Struggle be Drowned in Blood?

 

at 8/7/26 12:57am

Author: Voltairine de CleyreTitle: Will this Struggle be Drowned in Blood?Date: 1911Notes: From ‘Regeneración’, English Section, November 11 to 18, 1911, Los Angeles, California, edited by William C. Owen. "The following is the English copy of an article contributed recently by the well-known writer Voltairine de Cleyre, to “Volne Listy,” the noted Bohemian weekly [… of] New York City." [-William C. Owen]Source: Retrieved on August 6, 2026 from historyiswhat.noblogs.org Since the publication of my report of the work of the Mexican Liberal Defense Conference I have received a number of requests, on the part of those interested and anxious to do work, for an article of explanation, giving some idea of the scope and present status of the revolution. And indeed, remembering my own ignorance of the subject no longer ago than last May, and the fact that our daily and weekly press, including the Socialist and other reform journals, is almost absolutely silent on the matter, and that the chief source of information is a paper but little known, even to our own comrades — I mean “Regeneración,” the organ of the Mexican Liberal party — I believe it is quite important that an explanatory article be written for the information of the readers of “Volne Listy.” It is important that all anarchists, and sympathizers with anarchistic tendencies and developments among the people, should know that the Mexican Revolution neither began nor ended with the spectacular military movements which culminated in the overthrow of Diaz and the substitution of the present government in Mexico. Those movements were but brief, though important, incidents in the whole mighty effort of a people to overthrow an economic system foisted upon them partly by politicians of their own people, but largely by capitalists of this and other countries, whereby they, the genuine children of Mexican soil, have been reduced to a most hateful slavery. The details of that slavery I do not intend to rehearse; those who wish to inform themselves as to its almost unbelievable horrors should read Turner’s “Barbarous Mexico.” Mexico and its People Mexico consists of twenty-nine States and Territories and a Federal district similar to the District of Columbia. The smaller, but more thickly populated States are those to the southward, in the vicinity of the Federal district. The entire population of Mexico is some fifteen millions, out of which four million are of unmixed Indian blood, descendants of its pre-European-invasion occupants. Of the remaining eleven million, the greater portion are of mixed breed, a relatively small number being of pure Spanish descent. The mass of the population is agriculturist by instinct, habit and the general conditions of economic development in the country. The various tribes of Indians have from time immemorial had communal land-holding arrangements which are very interesting, both for the insight they afford into the character of the people and for the comparisons they afford between theoretic and practical free communism. These Indians have within the last half century seen these communal lands of theirs granted away, thousands of acres at a time, to native or alien landlords, and themselves driven to a hateful toil merely to create profit for the landlords. They have rebelled, and, as the reward of their rebellion, have been shot, tortured or sent away to pestiferous districts where they were bound to die within a few months. Thus the landlords get rid of their “undesirable” tenants. The half-breed population is also communist, having harked back to their Indian forbears in this respect. And both Indian and half-breed have an utter hatred of work for work’s sake. They wish to work in order to live, but they have no wish to work to make others rich. A Rebel Against Slavery The Indian’s “laziness” is proverbial among white men; but, far from its being what the white man thinks it is, it is rather the intense protest of a free soul against a useless and degrading waste of life. He wishes to feel himself a child of the sun and sky, a being through whom moves the breath of life, a thing of the soil and the air, and not a tool for the aimless production of heaps of goods at some one else’s orders. The half-breeds, on the white side again, are the descendants of Latins; and, while the Latin peoples work, they have never hungered and thirsted after purely commercial gain as have northern nations; they have always preserved a devotion to the beautiful (even the useless beautiful) and the mere joys of life — song, dance and festival — unknown to the Anglo-Saxon. Add to all this the enervating climate of much of Mexico, and you have an understanding of what our grab-and-get system of life stigmatizes as “Mexican laziness.” These people want the land; they do not want to live in cities; they want to use the land in their own way, according to their inherited communal customs. Time and time gain they have rebelled, and their rebellions have been murderously put down, but this instinctive hunger for the free field of life is so essentially a part of their being that the only way to kill it to to kill the entire agrarian population. At the present time it has risen up more invincible than ever; and although the people are ignorant — less than 20 per cent being able to read and write — they need no book learning to convince them that the land is theirs by right. Passion of Mexicans for Liberty has been Unquenchable ...

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— Andy Durgan - Reflexions on the Spanish Revolution of 1936

 

at 8/6/26 6:48am

Author: Andy DurganTitle: Reflexions on the Spanish Revolution of 1936Date: 11 July 2026Notes: Translated by David Fagan for International Viewpoint from viento sur 201.Source: Retrieved on August 6, 2026 from https://internationalviewpoint.org/Reflexions-on-the-Spanish-Revolution-of-1936 In the vast body of literature surrounding the Spanish Civil War, it is often presented as a struggle between democracy and fascism. This view is almost hegemonic among sectors of the left, many of them historically influenced by Stalinism. But such an approach clashes with the sociopolitical reality of Spain in the 1930s. The democratic failure The social, economic and political polarisation in the Spanish State in the years prior to the Civil War and the consequent failure of bourgeois democracy determined the outbreak of both the armed conflict and the revolution.[1] The electoral victory of the Popular Front in February 1936, instead of opening a new stage of social reforms, highlighted the inability of republican democracy to defeat the dominant classes determined to avoid any challenge to their power. The victory of the Popular Front unleashed a new wave of mobilisations by the working masses, both urban and rural, which the Republican government, as in 1931, attempted to repress. For its part, the right wing abandoned any hope of destroying Republican democracy from within and opted for a military coup. The future of the Republic itself depended not only on its right-wing enemies, but also on the workers’ movement. In the case of the socialists, the revolutionary faction, led by Largo Caballero, refused to repeat the experience of 1931-1933 and insisted that the PSOE (social-democratic Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) not participate in the new government, leaving the republicans with the task of "finishing the bourgeois revolution." This schematic vision of Marxism meant that Largo Caballero and his followers lacked a strategy for seizing power and remained passively waiting for the Republicans to pave the way for a socialist government. In contrast, the more social democratic faction of Indalecio Prieto, supported by the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), defended the need to return to a coalition government to complete the Republican reformist programme. It was this latter position that was adopted by the socialist movement in the midst of the Civil War. The left wing of the PSOE, having lost part of its base to Stalinism—especially the Socialist Youth (FJS), which would unite with the Union of Communist Youth to found the Unified Socialist Youth (JSU)—was overtaken by events and ended up accepting the same position as its social-democratic rivals. On the eve of the Civil War, the anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labour (CNT) continued to wield considerable influence within the Catalan labour movement—the most important on the Iberian Peninsula—and maintained a significant presence in Andalusia, Aragon, and the Valencian Community. Furthermore, in Asturias and Madrid, where socialists had historically held a majority within the labour movement, the CNT possessed a considerable strength.[2] Activists and union leaders were divided between anarcho-syndicalists and various more purely anarchist sectors, the most important being the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI). All these tendencies shared a common characteristic: apoliticism. However, weakened by repression and ideologically divided, during the first months of 1936, the CNT adopted a less intransigent position in its relations with the political left, which can be considered a prelude to its direct participation in the government during the war. In the February 1936 elections, in order to secure the release of its thousands of imprisoned members, the CNT did not promote an abstention campaign, as it had done in 1933, and its "freedom of the vote" was a factor contributing to the Popular Front’s victory. In May 1936, the CNT held its Fourth Congress in Zaragoza, a landmark in the CNT’s history, both ideologically and for its apparent call for workers’ unity. Shocked by the repression of the Asturian commune in October 1934, the delegates advocated for a revolutionary alliance with the social-democratic General Union of Workers (UGT) as a first step toward social revolution. But the Congress also revealed the limitations of the CNT’s political openness. While there was a long and abstract debate about the nature of libertarian communism, there was no discussion of the current situation or the threat of a military coup. The newly formed POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) also advocated workers’ unity, but through the reorganisation of the Workers’ Alliances that had played a key role in the revolutionary movement of 1934. The POUM contrasted the Workers’ Alliance, as an essential element for overcoming capitalism, with the Popular Front, a political alliance subordinated to petty-bourgeois republicanism. At the same time, it insisted on the need for a large revolutionary party, a missing element that doomed the 1934 movement to failure. The new party hoped to win over the most radical sectors of the socialists, especially the youth. The fall of the Federation of Socialist Youth under Stalinist influence in the spring of 1936 dealt a fatal blow to that hope. ...

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— Kevin A. Carson - The Desktop Regulatory State

 

at 8/5/26 2:03am

Author: Kevin A. CarsonTitle: The Desktop Regulatory StateSubtitle: The Countervailing Power of Individuals and NetworksDate: March 2016Source: Retrieved on 8th April 2022 from kevinacarson.org Preface Like every book I’ve written since the first, this book was inspired by ideas I encountered in researching the previous one but was unable to explore and develop as much as I’d have liked within that framework. In writing the material on crisis tendencies of capitalism in Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, the writings by Paul Goodman and Ivan Illich on the hegemony of bureaucratic culture set a train of thought in motion that eventually lead to writing Organization Theory. Researching the chapter on decentralized manufacturing technology in Organization Theory led, in turn, to a stand-alone book on micro-manufacturing (Homebrew Industrial Revolution). This book, in turn, is the development of ideas on network organization and stigmergy I touched on in Homebrew Industrial Revolution. It applies many of the same ideas in the realm of information that I developed earlier in regard to physical production in that book. It also ties in some of the ideas I discussed in the chapter on labor organization in Organization Theory, like open-mouth sabotage, but in much greater scope. This book was a much longer time writing than any of my others, and because so much of its content involved ongoing current news I had much greater difficulty in either finding a cutoff point or setting parameters to filter out excessive detail. In the Appendix I wound up deleting a great deal of detail I’d previously incorporated on the activities of the various networked social movements starting with the Arab Spring, and shifted instead to a greater relative focus on the general principles behind the wave of networked movements since the EZLN uprising in 1994. My judgments on the level of detail to preserve were necessarily somewhat arbitrary; whether the result is satisfactory is up to the reader to decide. This book, in keeping with the spirit of the subject matter, is far more a product of stigmergic organization and the wisdom of crowds than anything I’ve previously written. In an attempt to adhere to Eric Raymond’s principle that “many eyeballs make shallow bugs,” I first posted the roughly eight-month-old draft online at desktopregulatorystate.wordpress.com, warts and all, in March 2011. At the time it was four chapters (which have since fissioned into twelve), consisting mostly of placeholder notes in many places and containing some sections entirely blank except for the title. Since then I’ve automatically updated the online text whenever it was edited. I have benefited from many suggestions and tips from those following the progress of the book, including Steve Herrick’s wonderful job formatting the online word processor template for the online text, as well as all the information I get from email discussion lists (particularly the P2P Foundation, C4SS working group and Networked Labor lists), the leads from friends on Twitter, and the blogs and news sites I follow via RSS reader. And many thanks in particular to my friend Gary Chartier at La Sierra University, who has formatted this as well as two of my previous books for print! 1. The Stigmergic Revolution Several parallel developments are driving a trend toward the growing obsolescence of large, highly capitalized, hierarchical organizations, and the ability of networked individuals with comparatively cheap capital equipment to perform the functions formerly performed by such organizations. They include the drastically reduced cost of capital goods required for informational and material production, as well as drastically reduced transaction costs of coordinating efforts between individuals. I. Reduced Capital Outlays For most of the past two hundred years, the trend has been toward increasing capital outlays for most forms of production. The cost of the basic capital equipment required for production—the mass-production factory, the large printing press, the radio or TV station—was the primary justification for the large organization. The economy was dominated by large, hierarchical organizations administering enormous masses of capital. And the astronomical cost of production machinery was also the main justification for the wage system: production machinery was so expensive that only the rich could afford it, and hire others to work it. In recent decades we’ve seen a reversal of this trend: a shift back from expensive, specialized machinery to inexpensive, general-purpose tools. Although this is true of both material and immaterial production—as attested by the recent revolution in garage-scale CNC machine tools[1]—it was true first and most dramatically in the immaterial sphere. The desktop computer is the primary item of capital equipment required for entering a growing number of industries, like music, desktop publishing and software design. The desktop computer, supplemented by assorted packages of increasingly cheap printing or sound editing equipment, is capable of doing what previously required a minimum investment of hundreds of thousands of dollars. In the words of Yochai Benkler: “declining price of computation, communication, and storage have, as a practical matter, placed the material means of information and cultural production in the hands of a significant fraction of the world’s population—on the order of a billion people around the globe.”[2](Of course since that passage was written the proliferation of cheapening smartphones has probably expanded the latter figure to include over half the world’s population.) ...

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— Nikos Maziotis and Pola Roupa - Interview of the prisoners members of Revolutionary Struggle Pola Roupa and Nikos Maziotis to the International Red Help

 

at 8/5/26 1:56am

Author: Nikos Maziotis and Pola RoupaTitle: Interview of the prisoners members of Revolutionary Struggle Pola Roupa and Nikos Maziotis to the International Red HelpDate: 2019Notes: The interview is included in the book-edition of 2019, “Proclamations — Texts of Revolutionary Struggle 2003–2018”. Introduction In 2017 Red Help International sent some (30) questions to the imprisoned members of the anarchist armed group Revolutionary Struggle, Pola Roupa and Nikos Maziotis. These questions are devided in 4 chapters: The 1st under the title “Context and Genesis”, the 2nd “Political and Strategic Project”, the 3rd “History strictly speaking” and the 4th, “Temporary assessment of Revolutionary Struggle and of the movement in Greece”. Through the answers of the comrades, one can understand the historical conditions in which Revolutionary Struggle was created in 2003 and acted until 2017, the social, political and economical conditions of the entire era. Revolutionary Struggle since September of 2003 until January of 2017 carried out 18 attacks-acts against targets of the regime, state and capital. Bombing attacks against courts, police stations, ministries, banks, against the Stock Exchange of Athens, the Bank of Greece-IMF, armed attacks against officers of riot police, attack against the USA embassy in Athens with antitank rocket, attempt against the former minister of Public Order, and an escape attempt (hijacking a helicopter). The first arrests of the comrades happened in 10 April of 2010, exactly a month after Lambros Foundas –a member of Revolutionary Struggle– was killed by gunfiring with the police in a preparatory action of the group. Pola Roupa and Nikos Maziotis who from the first moment took the political responsibility of their participation in Revolutionary Struggle, were temporary imprisoned until 11 October of 2011 because according to the greek law, nobody can remain in prison over 18 months without sentence and in October of 2011 the first trial against the group had just started and they had not been condemned yet. After 9 months while the first trial was in progress, Pola Roupa and Nikos Maziotis with their almost 2 years old son, who was born in prison as in April of 2010 Pola Roupa was 6 months pregnant, went underground to continue the armed struggle. So, in April of 2014, Revolutionary Struggle carried out the attack with a car-bomb with 75 kilos of explosives, against the building of Bank of Greece close to Syntagma square in Athens, where was also located the office of the permanent representative of IMF (International Monetary Foundation) in Athens. The attack was dedicated to comrade Lambros Foundas, who had been killed 4 years ago. Nikos Maziotis was arrested in 16 July 2014 injured after gunfiring with policemen and pursuit. Pola Roupa attempted alone to hijack a helicopter in 21 February of 2016 for the liberation of Nikos Maziotis and other prisoners from Koridallos prison, but she didn’t complete the operation because the pilot was α former police officer and he was armed. So, after a fight inside the cockpit, the pilot landed the helicopter and comrade Roupa succeeded to escape. Finally the “antiterrorist” service with the help of special units arrested Pola in 5 January of 2017. As a newspaper wrote, the capture of Pola Roupa was carried out after provided information. Pola Roupa and Nikos Maziotis were wanted for 1 million euro each since January of 2014. It was the second time that members of Revolutionary Struggle were wanted with a price on their heads. In 2007, the State Department of USA offered 1 million dollars and the greek state 800.000 euro for the capture of the members of the group after the attack with an antitank rocket against the U.S. embassy in Athens. The interview is included in the book-edition of 2019, “Proclamations — Texts of Revolutionary Struggle 2003–2018”. Pola Roupa and Nikos Maziotis have been convicted to life sentence (for the attack against the Bank of Greece and the office of the IMF) and a hundred years for the rest of the attacks of Revolutionary Struggle. After the completion of all courts of appeal, their sentence has been reduced to 20 years in prison. Roupa was released on parole in November 2023 when she completed the 3/5 of her sentence (8 years and 4 months in prison and 4 years work) and Maziotis will be released in September 2026 when he will have completed the total of his sentence (14 years in prison and 6 years work). Interview of the prisoners members of Revolutionary Struggle Pola Roupa and Nikos Maziotis to the International Red Help 1) Context and genesis. From which militant encounters and which political scene was the Revolutionary Struggle project born? Revolutionary Struggle originates from the Greek anarchist/anti-authoritarian political space and more specifically from the more “classical” anarchist tendency, which has references to class and social struggle and social Revolution aimed at the dissolution of capitalism and the state and the creation of a stateless-classless society. Because of our political backgrounds and political education, we believed and still believe that the formation of social and political consciousnesses arises from the alienating relationship between organized authority and society. A relationship imposed as a necessary condition of social existence itself through violence. State power is imposed through violence, coercion, oppression, fear. ...

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— Martin Sostre - Follow the Principles that Won My Freedom

 

at 8/4/26 2:37pm

Author: Martin SostreTitle: Follow the Principles that Won My FreedomDate: 1976Notes: The following speech, “Follow the Principles that Won My Freedom,” was delivered by Sostre in 1976 shortly after his release from prison and offers a message of revolutionary optimism about how collective action can succeed—as it did for him—in freeing political prisoners and building a new egalitarian society. It is a message that feels as urgent today as it did then... “Follow the Same Principles that Won My Freedom” by Martin Sostre is excerpted from I Cannot Submit to Injustices: Collected Works of Martin Sostre, edited by Garrett Felber and published by AK Press, reproduced with permission of Felber and AK Press.Source: Retrieved on August 4, 2026, from inquest.org It is a great pleasure to be here after being in prison for nine years. I was the victim of a frame-up because I fought for human rights and because I had the only bookstore in Buffalo, New York, that was disseminating socialist and political literature—literature dealing with the struggle for Black liberation here in this country, the struggle for Puerto Rican independence, literature against the war in Vietnam, and all progressive literature. That bookstore in Buffalo became a center for persons of conscience, for youths who were seeking guidance, for college students. Naturally, the power structure did not like this, and as a result I was framed. And this is what happened in all of the Black ghettos, especially during the 1960s, and is still happening now. As a political prisoner and a person of conscience, I suffered eleven beatings in solitary confinement. After one of those beatings I was framed by the same guards who assaulted me. They claimed I was the one who jumped the goon squad of seven that assaulted me. This resulted in another conviction and another four years to run consecutively with the savage sentence I was already serving. This is how they operate in this country. They make everything legal. That’s how this country can claim that there aren’t any political prisoners, because they use the law to repress. I don’t have to tell you about all of the scandals. It is in the press even today about the FBI agents who are burglars, the CIA agents who are murderers. All the disclosures show that this whole country—from the chief executive in the White House down to the little corrupt cop on the beat who shakes down drug peddlers and frames them when they don’t pay—this entire system is corrupt, racist, and repressive. As a former political prisoner, I consider Mustafa as well as other political prisoners throughout the world my brothers because I can really identify with political frame-up and repression of persons of conscience who fought for human rights and dignity. And I oppose all regimes who oppress and silence the opposition. But the very fact that I am here now, after being given forty-one years and then four consecutive years on top of that, is proof positive that even the most repressive state can be forced to disgorge its political prisoners and victims of its oppression. Why did they release me after giving me forty-one years and then four years? Certainly they didn’t have a change of heart all of a sudden. My case is the classic case of what can be done to free a political prisoner. The only reason they released me, or were forced to release me, was because of pressure. That is the only thing that repressive governments understand. Massive pressure, using all means necessary. There were about eight defense committees throughout this country that were formed in my behalf. In addition to that, many political groups and individuals joined with my defense committees in picketing and demonstrations, sit-ins, letter-writing campaigns, and petitions. We flooded them with thousands upon thousands of letters. My defense committee went to Albany and picketed Governor Rockefeller right at the state office building. We gave him no rest. Father Dan Berrigan and his crew sat in at [New York] Governor Carey’s office and forced him to have a meeting with them. Amnesty International in Germany, which was the group that adopted my case in that country, sent contingents to the American ambassador demanding my release. In Holland also, the American ambassador was confronted by delegations of persons from Amnesty International demanding that they release Martin Sostre. Placards, posters, that’s the only language they understand. You have to put a fire to their butts. My being here is a victory of the people. Of course, I served nine years, but I had forty-one years and four years consecutive. So actually, I’m not supposed to be here. When they gave me that forty-one years, I was not a kid; I was forty-four years old then. That sentence meant that I would never see daylight again. It was the equivalent of a death sentence. And yet here I am in the struggle, and they know that they have a staunch revolutionary against them because they never succeeded in breaking my spirit despite the eleven beatings, despite the years in solitary confinement, despite the tear gassings, despite being taken out-of-doors in subfreezing weather buck naked to try to destroy my health. And they will do everything in order to break spirits and obtain complete obedience to their repression. That I could never submit to. Not even the threat of death could force me to do that. As a matter of fact, in the combined eight years that I spent in solitary confinement I have lost that fear of death. Because I have been through hell, and I know how to fight the devil. So these are the tactics that we have to use to release Mustafa and all other political prisoners. This is the most repressive country in the world, oppressive on a world scale. It is a colonialist country that still has colonies like Puerto Rico, a country that, along with South Africa, is one of the most racist regimes in the world. It is a country whose very foundations are on slavery and genocide. The slaughter of the Indians, the enslavement and importation of Blacks, who at this very moment are still maintained in segregated communities. And our president has proclaimed that he will try to do everything possible in order to continue the forced segregation of schoolchildren. ...

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— Raoul Vaneigem - Abolish Predation, Become Human Again

 

at 8/4/26 7:15am

Author: Raoul VaneigemTitle: Abolish Predation, Become Human AgainSubtitle: A call for the global creation of collectivities that struggle for a free and authentic human lifeDate: 2024, JanuaryNotes: Raoul Vaneigem, «ABOLIR LA PRÉDATION, REDEVENIR HUMAIN: Appel à la création mondiale de collectivités en lutte pour une vie humaine libre et authentique». Dated January 2024. Publication by Fayard as a multi-language pamphlet (French, Italian, German and English) forthcoming. Translated by NOT BORED! 28 January 2024. All footnotes by the translator. PDF: <notbored.org/Abolish Predation.pdf>.Source: Retrieved on August 4, 2026 from <autonomies.org/2026/07/for-raoul-vaneigem-1934-2026> We have made Mankind the shame of humanity. From the most ancient times to the present day, no society has attained the degree of ignominy and abjection reached by an agro-mercantile civilization that, for two thousand years, has passed for Civilization par excellence. It is undeniable that, as trans-hominids, we have inherited an instinct for predation and an instinct for mutual assistance. They constitute our share of residual animalism. But while the awareness of an interweaved solidarity has favored our progressive humanization, predatory aggressiveness has developed in us a tendency for self-destruction. Is this so difficult to understand? The appearance of an economy that sacrifices life for work, for Power, for Profit, has marked a break with the egalitarianism and the symbiotic evolution of pre-agrarian civilizations. Agriculture and livestock breeding have privileged the predatory instinct, at the expense of a life drive that has never renounced the reestablishment of its usurped sovereignty. Appropriation, competition and rivalry have pleased themselves by exalting the “civilized wild animal,” whose spiritual sublimation serves to legitimatize their enterprises. In its emblematic form, the lion thus lets one believe that it is natural to hunt and oppress the beasts. What is in fact required is the denaturation of the human being. In vain does one seek among the most pitiless carnivores the cruelty that is as deliberate or the ferociousness that is as inventive, as those demonstrated by Justice, Religion, Ideology, Empire, State and Bureaucracy. We must see the fixed grin of the arms dealers at the moment when their billable products are tearing apart women, children, men, animals, forests and [whole] landscapes. “Make do with what you have,”[1] right? Profit has the cynicism of a done deal [fait accompli]. It hides nothing from us about those heartless restaurants in which the fashionable ladies and gentlemen stuff themselves while their luxury shoes drip blood and excrement. Why get involved when pre-formatted public opinion takes the side of one or another belligerent, as if it were a soccer match between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine? The bets are on and the cheers of the spectators cover the screams of the massacred crowds. Simply cursing a foul civilization does not prevent it from perpetuating itself when we let the laws of financial rapacity orchestrate our denaturation, form the patterns of our apathy, and punctuate our frustrations by triggering explosions of a blind and murderous hatred. Add insult to injury? What would be the point? Doing so would only reinforce a personal sense of guilt that is relieved by making the others feel guilty. The predatory reflex would once again find its niche there. The exhortations addressed to the greatest number of people are subject to a double discredit: on the one hand, the slogans and militant incitements restart the old motor of Power in which radicalism quickly hinders the radicalism of lived experience; on the other hand, what chooses to be announced from the podium of generalities is easily diluted in the hodge-podge of ideas cut off from life. Except, that is, if the reader discovers [in that radicalism] the occasion for an intimate dialogue with herself. In other words, if she drinks from the source of the human consciousness that is in her. Rather than address myself to the greatest number of people, I prefer to speak directly to the autonomous individual. Because she is not ignorant of the fact that my sole intention is to confide my way of seeing things to her, in a fraternal debate in which there is no need to know each other in order to recognize each other. What better guarantee for the awakening of consciousness is there than mutual aid? It is not by chance that it is reborn spontaneously to the extent that predation ceases to hide the facts that it devours itself and makes its own self-destruction profitable. The bankruptcy of having propagates an ennui that is worse than death, the specter of which it ceaselessly raises. And the breath of life rehabilitates being. The subject frees itself from the object, it frees itself from the thing to which reification had reduced it. Isn’t this what is implied by the adage “men and women are not commodities”? The simple changing of roles – men taking on femininity and women taking on masculinity – doesn’t change anything. From the moment that we spare children from the ravages of predatory education, we have only to leave to their spontaneous radicalism the care of awakening them to their destinies as human beings. There is no need for prophets to foresee what is going to happen: either the triumph of the idiot who thinks with a bludgeon or the surging of a life that has regained awareness of the sovereignty that can be exerted by its humanity. The usefulness of fascism and anti-fascism is that they hide the true final struggle, the one that – inseparably both existential and social – implies the eradication of predation, the disappearance of hierarchical Power, and the end of the barking out of orders. ...

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— Eric Fleischmann - Don’t Tax My Credit Union

 

at 7/31/26 6:00pm

Author: Eric FleischmannTitle: Don’t Tax My Credit UnionDate: May 13th, 2025Source: https://c4ss.org/content/60411 If there are two types of policies that I most vehemently oppose—alongside all pro-war policies—they are attempts to regulate society in favor of corporations and attempts to extract from and/or weaken the working class. Under state capitalism, these sort of policies tend to go hand in hand, and, unsurprisingly, have continued to do so under the current U.S. administration. Now the attack comes against credit unions specifically, as banks are currently lobbying to end the federal income tax status of credit unions across the country. The trade association America’s Credit Unions outlines how… credit unions do not pay federal income tax on profits because those profits are returned back to members in a variety of ways, – and credit unions DO pay many local, state, and federal taxes and fees. That includes payroll and property taxes, and the dividends that credit unions pay to their members are taxed as personal income. Keith Taylor and Nathan Goodman, in their paper on Edward Filene for the Journal of Institutional Economics, analyze how forming financial cooperatives has often been cost prohibitive and required outside grants to establish and maintain the credit union sector. To force credit unions to pay this extra tax would add a whole new layer of costs upon these not-for-profit financial institutions and their member-owners. Not only do credit unions, as I argue, offer immediate alternatives to free (and mutual) banking—alongside proposals like Gary Elkin’s mutual banking clearinghouse and numerous community currencies—but they also work in favor of greater working class autonomy. Credit unions tend to cater to lower-income clients more than traditional banks, function upon a cooperative/democratic basis, and circulate funds within the communities they serve. As ACU’s site Don’t Tax My Credit Union writes: Even as the credit union movement has grown, it remains a small but vital part of the financial landscape: Credit unions serve 43% of all Americans, but hold only 8.8% of assets in financial institutions, a clear indication of efforts to help people build their savings and improve their finances. The remaining 91.2% of Americans’ assets are held by banks. But that hasn’t stopped banks’ greed and desire to eliminate any competition. That’s why they want Congress to eliminate the credit union federal income tax status. This cannot be allowed to happen. Credit unions need to be defended, as they are some of the very few democratic financial entities that exist under American state capitalism. In response to this threat, America’s Credit Unions has launched the aforementioned website to offer an opportunity for folks to contact their legislators and express their opposition to this attack on economic self-governance in working class communities. Check it out!

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— Laurance Labadie - Anarchism Applied to Economics

 

at 7/30/26 10:37pm

Author: Laurance LabadieTitle: Anarchism Applied to EconomicsDate: 1933Source: Retrived on September 22nd 2019 from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/labadie/LabadieEssays.pdf Value is exchange equivalency of something measured in terms of another thing. The fundamental quality upon which value depends is utility in satisfying desire. In economics, utility doesn't mean the 'real' or 'actual' ability of a thing to accomplish or assist in accomplishing a result, but means the human estimate of the ability of a thing to satisfy desire. This estimate may be erroneous but it is in effect the measure of the desire for it. In economics, therefore, desire and utility may be considered convertible terms. Now in procuring anything, there is a hardship to be overcome. Without this hardship nothing would possess value for no one would exchange one thing for another thing which could be had without effort. So two factors are necessary in order for a thing to have value, desire and effort to be overcome, - utility and labor. Value may be enhanced by stimulating desire or by creating an artificial hindrance to production thereby affecting the equalizing forces of the law of supply and demand under competition. Now presupposing effort to be necessary for the acquirement of two things of exchange, will they not be exchanged of the basis of equal effort? Not necessarily, for if A can produce one thing with effort of 10 and another thing for effort of 20, and the measure of effort for B to produce the things is in inverse ration, it will be to the advantage of both to produce and exchange in any ration between the limit of which means a decreased effort for both parties. If A gains 10 times as much as B it is still to B's advantage to exchange as long as he gains, because of reduced effort, in acquiring what he ultimately wants. The actual ratio of exchange would be determined by psychological and material conditions. But when producers increase in numbers there arises competition in offering articles in exchange to benefit by the decrease of effort due to the division of labor. And presupposing enough producers of each commodity to satisfy the respective demands for them, competition will tend to make them exchange on a basis of labor time or effort necessary to overcome the obstacle of production. For, should the demand for any article be more than the supply of this article offered for exchange, the probability is that a rise in the price or value will ensue. And presupposing a number of marginal workers, that is, producers whose aptitude is producing different articles is approximately equal, there will be an influx of capital and labor into production of the article which as increased in exchange value. So it may be said that, granting free competition, that is, free and equal access to the means of production, to the raw materials, and to an unrestricted market, the price of all articles will always tend to be measured by the effort necessary for their production. In other words, labor as factor in measuring value will become predominant. Should there be any restrictions, however, to these phases necessary to free competition, the desire or utility factor will tend to become more prominent as a factor in the exchange value of those things to which artificial hindrances to production have been applied. From the Anarchist standpoint, these artificial hindrances which are the cause of three main forms of usury - interest, profit, and rent, are, in the order of their importance, monopoly in the control of the circulating medium - money and credit private property in land not based on occupancy and use, patent rights and copyrights, and tariffs. It is also the claim of anarchists that government and States are involuntary and invasive institutions originated and maintained for the purpose of protecting and enforcing antisocial rights. They claim that the very first act of governments, the compulsory payment of taxes, is not only a denial of the right of the individual to determine what he shall buy and how much he shall choose to offer, but is nothing more than adding insult to injury when the very money extorted from him should be used to his disadvantage. They therefore attempt to instruct people in the belief that government, whether it be the rule of the mass by a few or of the minority by the majority, is both tyrannical and unjust, that any form of ruler-ship is bound to redound to the detriment of the ruled. How the government protects the privileges by which usurious exploitation is made possible is easily seen upon investigation. Money interest is due to the privilege attributed to a certain kind of wealth, gold to be used as a basis for the reissuance of money, thereby putting the control of the monetizing of other kinds of credit indirectly into the hands of those holding this kind of wealth. Interest, therefore, is simply a royalty paid to the privileged class for the right to monetize one's credit. And the rate of interest on money fixes the rate of interest on all other capital the production of which is subject to competition. The rate of interest is an index to the 'use value' of money and bears no relation to the labor cost of furnishing money because competition in the right to monetize wealth has been restricted to the holders of a certain kind of wealth. ...

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— Frank Miroslav - The Future of Digital Proudhonism

 

at 7/30/26 6:00pm

Author: Frank MiroslavTitle: The Future of Digital ProudhonismDate: September 24th, 2018Source: https://c4ss.org/content/51323 Gavin Mueller’s recent article for the boundary 2 online journal, “Digital Proudhonism” is a Marxist critique of what Mueller describes as “Digital Proudhonism,” a catchall term for those who believe that technology is lowering class barriers. Digital Proudhonism is not a formal ideology but rather an undercurrent expressed by a variety of individuals from all over the political spectrum. For Mueller, Digital Proudhonism is the unofficial ideology of those who think that simply by removing intellectual property we can destroy concentrated wealth and unjust power structures in society. He sees this as a pro-capitalist position, or at least one that lends itself to use by capitalists. In particular, he claims many of its proponents have capitalist leanings or sympathies. The first problem is that the Digital Proudhonists he describes are from a variety of political and economic backgrounds. To make my analysis easier I’ll only include the main left wing thinkers he discusses (as those on the right/center presumably don’t care about ending capitalism all that much). But even restricting our search to this group, the thinkers he critiques are not as simplistic as claimed. A survey of their beliefs: Cory Doctorow is some sort of uncommitted generic libertarian leftist, and has openly entertained the idea of a planned economy. Paul Mason is a self-described “radical social democrat” who sees government intervention in the financial and energy sectors as vital for a transition to a postcapitalist society as well as supporting reforms like universal basic income. Finally, Kevin Carson is an anarchist without adjectives who wants to move as much economic activity as possible outside the cash nexus, while also recognizing the utility of markets for coordinating activity. But even beyond the complexities these thinkers display, Mueller is wrong about how essential intellectual property is for modern capitalism. The statement that most demonstrates his ignorance of how capitalism works is his assertion that capitalism without intellectual property is “capitalism precisely as Marx described it.” Such a statement reveals a deep, deep lack of understanding of our modern economy. Today profits are not primarily generated through extracting surplus value from workers, but instead by deriving various rents on economic activity. While some of this rent extraction is through the physical ownership of property, much of it stems from financialized rents on products or services, as well as intellectual property. I’m curious as to what Mueller sees as the post-intellectual-property business model of various companies. Off the top of my head, intellectual property no longer being enforceable would annihilate the entertainment industry and the software industry, as well as cripple the hardware and biotech industry (and that’s just the short term effects). Sure we’d probably still have industries like agriculture, manufacturing, retail, and energy production in the hands of capitalists, but refusing to enforce intellectual property would still result in the biggest transfer of wealth ever seen in human history and could be done entirely by simply refusing to enforce the law against those who transgress. Unlike physical property, which can be protected even without the state, intellectual property quickly escapes individual ownership once freed. Mueller also argues markets naturally concentrate over time, but gives no justification for why other than Marx’s 150+ year old critique. But as we’ve already seen, modern capitalism is reliant on rent extraction through artificial scarcity backed by the state which means that orthodox Marxism is horribly out of date as an analytic model through which to understand modern capitalism. Dismissing the arguments of Kevin Carson as “petty producer fantasies” ignores his rigorous, radical analysis of modern capitalism and various alternatives. In Mueller’s description of how Digital Proudhonism might work for the production of physical goods, he conflates Chris Anderson’s (liberal) vision of how makers might send CAD files to manufacturers to have things built with Kevin Carson’s significantly more radical proposal. Because Carson is not just against such economic approaches for ethical reasons but also economic ones! Mueller’s critique of him completely overlooks his extremely detailed argument for why we should return to localized peer production of material goods. Such calls aren’t the dreams of returning to yeoman self-sufficiency, deliberately crippling economic output so to live out fantasies of information age makers, but are instead the result of a radical analysis of how markets were deliberately bent towards mass production and mass distribution for the benefit of the state and capital. Kevin Carson has shown in painstaking detail how the industrial factory model of production was only sustainable in the 20th century thanks to unprecedented levels of state intervention in the economy, as well as the supremacy of the United States in the postwar era, which led to this industrial model being exported around the world.1 Conflating a radical economic analysis with that of Chris Anderson who writes for a popular audience is obviously fallacious. ...

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— Timothy C. May - Libertaria in Cyberspace

 

at 7/30/26 6:00pm

Author: Timothy C. MayTitle: Libertaria in CyberspaceSubtitle: Cyberspace more hospitable to ideas of liberty and crypto anarchyDate: September 1st, 1992Source: https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/libertaria.html Here are a few points about why "cyberspace," or a computer-mediated network, is more hospitable than physical locations for the kind of "crypto anarchy" libertarian system I've been describing. Several folks have commented recently about ocean-going libertarian havens, supertankers used as data havens, and so forth. In the 1970s, especially, there were several unsuccessful attempts to acquire islands in the Pacific for the site of what some called "Libertaria." (Some keywords: Vanuatu, Minerva, Mike Oliver, Tonga) Obtaining an entire island is problematic. Getting the consent of the residents is one issue (familiar to those on the this list who weathered the Hurrican Andrew diversion debate). Being _allowed_ to operate by the leading world powers is another....the U.S. has enforced trade embargoes and blockades against many nations in the past several decades, including Cuba, North Korea, Libya, Iran, Iraq, andothers. Further, the U.S. has invaded some countries---Panama- is a good example---whose government it disliked. How long would a supertanker "data haven" or libertarian regime last in such an environment? (Stephenson's fascinating Snow Crash didn't address tthe issue of why the "Raft" wasn't simply sunk by the remaining military forces.) I should note that the recent splintering of countries may provide opportunities for libertarian (or PPL, if your prefer to think of it in this way) regions. Some have speculated that Russia itself is a candidate, given that it has little vested in the previous system and may be willing to abandon statism. If several dozen new countries are formed, some opportunities exist.. The basic problem is that physical space is too small, too exposed to the view of others. "Libertaria" in the form of, say, an island, is too exposed to the retaliatation of world powers. (I won't go into the "private nukes" strategy, which I need to think about further.) A floating private nation (or whatever it's called) is too vulnerable to a single well-placed torpedo. Even if it serves as a kind of Swiss bank, and thus gets some of the same protection Switzerland got (to wit, many leaders kept their loot there), it is too vulnerable to a single attacker or invader. Piracy will be just one of the problems. Finally, how many of us want to move to a South Pacific island? Or a North Sea oil rig? Or even to Russia? Cyberspace looks more promising. There is more "space" in cyberspace, thus allowing more security and more colonizable space. And this space is coterminous with our physical space, accessible with proper terminals from any place in the world (though there may be attempts in physical space to block access, to restrict access to necessay cryptographic methods, etc.). I won't go into the various cryptographic methods here (see my earlier posting on the "Dining Cryptographers" protocol and various other postings on public key systems, digital mixes, electronic cash, etc.). Interested readers have many sources. (I have just read a superb survey of these new techniques, the 1992 Ph.D. thesis of Jurgen Bos, "Practical Privacy," which deals with these various protocols in a nice little book.) Alice and Bob, our favorite cryptographic stand-ins, can communicate and transact business without ever meeting or even knowing who the other is. This can be extended to create virtual communities subject only to rules they themselves reach agreement on, much like this very Extropians list. Private law is the only law, as there is no appeal to some higher authority like the Pope or police. (This is why I said in several of my potings on the Hurricane Andrew debate that I am sympathetic to the PPL view.) And this is the most compelling advantage of "Crypto Libertaria": an arbitrarily large number of separate "nations" can simultaneously exist. This allows for rapid experimentation, self-selection, and evolution. If folks get tired of some virtual community, they can leave. The cryptographic aspects mean their membership in some community is unknown to others (vis-a-vis the physical or outside world, i.e., their "true names") and physical coercion is reduced. Communalists are free to create a communal environment, Creative Anachronists are free to create their own idea of a space, and so on. I'm not even getting into the virtual reality-photorealistic images-Jaron Lanier sort of thing, as even current text-based systems are demonstrably enough to allow the kind of virtual communities I'm describing here (and described in Vinge's "True Names," in Gibson's Neuromancer, in Sterling's Islands in the Net, and in Stephenson's Snow Crash...though all of them missed out on some of the most exciting aspects...perhaps my novel will hit the mark?). But will the government allow these sorts of things? Won't they just torpedo it, just as they'd torpedo an offshore ooirig data haven? The key is that distributed systems have no nexus which can be knocked out. Neither Usenet norFidoNet can be disabled by any single government, as they are worldwide. Shutting them down would mean banning computer-to-computer communication. And despite the talk of mandatory "trap doors" in encryption systems, encryption is fundamentally easy to do and hard to detect. (For those who doubt this, let me describe a simple system I posted to sci.crypt several years ago. An ordinary digital audio tape (DAT) carries more than a gigabyte of data. This means that thhe least significant bit (LSB) of an audio DAT recordingng carries about 8megabytes of data! So Alice is stopped by the Data Police. They ask if she's carrying illegal data. She smiles inocently and say "No. I know you'll search me." They find her Sony DATman and ask about her collection of tapes and live recordings. Alice is carrying 80 MB of data---about 3 entire days worth of Usenet feeds!---on each and every tape. The data are stored in the LSBs, completely indistinguishable from microphone and quantization noise...unless you know the key. Similar methods allow data to be undetectably packed into LSBs of the PICT and GIF pictures now flooding the Net, into sampled sounds, and even into messages like this...the "whitespace" on the right margin of this message carries a hidden message readable only to a few chosen Extropians.) ...

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— Blazing Truth - On Lockean Self-Ownership and the New Mutualist Manifesto

 

at 7/30/26 6:00pm

Author: Blazing TruthTitle: On Lockean Self-Ownership and the New Mutualist ManifestoDate: September 25th, 2012Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20120927020806/http://www.blazingtruth.com/mutualism-lockeanism/ Well, for most libertarians, Self-ownership is most unshakeable fundamental conviction: In The Ethics of Liberty, Murray Rothbard argues that "100 percent self-ownership" is the only principle compatible with a moral code that applies to every person - a "universal ethic" - and that it is a natural law by being what is naturally best for man. The controversial thesis that I am going to put forward is that the anti-capitalist thinker need not disagree with Rothbard when he makes this statement. After all, as an axiom, Self-ownership apparently cannot be rejected without seeming irrational or nonsensical. Moreover, so as to avoid playing in to an ideological field dominated by uncompromising libertarian dogma (i.e. if you reject self-ownership, you apparently are in favor of others owning your organs, etc.), one is left with very few options of addressing it. The first and most popular way of approaching this "concrete universality" (which is like a double disagreement in Hegelian terminology), seems to be ignoring libertarians altogether and moving on with your life. That always works, and maybe I just have too much time on my hands. Instead, in solving both of these two problems, I think one ought to agree with Rothbard on this matter. Yes, you heard me correctly. Yet more than just an agreement, however, I think one ought to super-agree in order to over-load the libertarian ideological framework from the inside. In a fairly Zizekian move, we can say along the anarcho-capitalist "Yes, yes, of course I agree with you, we do indeed have 100% full Self-ownership, and this principle does in fact obtain universally to every person." Here, one has successfully "penetrated the castle" so to speak, and this approach completely destabilizes any rehearsed replies to the matter and prompts genuine new thought. In presenting my New Mutualist Manifesto, my point was precisely to keep the Lockean mechanism of Self-ownership in place, but to throw a brand new twist on its interpretation through analysing the implications of a split subject. The reason for this is that libertarian ideology completely neglects the subject. However, through their interpretations of Self-ownership as implying absolute private property, they implicitly assume a unified subject, or absolutely sovereign individual as such. Given our historical and contingent limitations, the thesis of a unified subject cannot obtain due also to the nature of our subjectivity in the world. This is the crucial lesson of the phenomenological tradition of Husserl through Heidegger, and the thesis of a split subject is one of the most important concepts in modern (especially continental) philosophy, perhaps first and most famously articulated by the poet Arthur Rimbaud when he states "Je est un Autre" (I is another). In responding to complaints that my writing was unclear, I would like to outline a general logical sequence of my argument in more depth so as to make myself better understood: New Mutualist Manifesto: General Sequence of Logical Argument A. Subject and Self (Sections I and II of the Manifesto) The subject is undergoing a process of subjectification. (definition 1) The process of subjectification is limited by a particular contingent framework. (definition 3) The subject is limited by a particular contingent framework. (from 1, 2) The subject is not complete, i.e. it cannot know itself fully. (from 3) The Self is the incomplete subject. (4, definition 2) B. Self and Property (Sections III and IV of the Manifesto) Property is to be determined on the basis of Lockean Self-Ownership (see definition 4) The Self is the incomplete subject. (conclusion of argument A) The Self is incapable of completely or absolutely mixing its labour. (2) In Lockean Self-Ownership, the mixing of labour is a continual process. (3) Property is to be determined on the basis of possession. (1, 4, definition 5) C. Definitions: The subject – one individual and unique subjectivity. The Self – the subject as it experiences itself. Process of subjectification – the subject's phenomenological experience. Lockean Self-ownership – The theory that the Self can justly acquire property through the “mixing of labour” with land natural resources, coming to own it exclusively as an extension of the subject itself. Possession – continual occupancy and use. D. Notes and other implications: In order for absolute private property to take hold, either a unified or complete subject must be proven, the historical framework must be denied, Lockean Self-ownership must be denied, etc. Property cannot be determined a priori. All ownership is in fact use-based ownership, with differing criteria for what qualifies as “use”. Absolute ownership – whether individual or collective – is impossible. For more on what property on the basis of possession might look like, see section IV and V of the New Mutualist Manifesto. Now, I would like to push the issue back to vulgar libertarians, who lack a theory of the subject but require a theory of the unified subject in order to justify themselves. ...

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— JJ - A Colonizing Anarchism

 

at 7/30/26 5:52pm

Author: JJTitle: A Colonizing AnarchismDate: 2020Source: Retrieved on July 30, 2026 from cico3.com AK Press in 2009 published James Horrox’s A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement, an examination of European anarchism’s influences on Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine that aspires to locate anarchism in Israeli kibbutzim. His efforts instead expose failures of the European Left canons, a misstep from a respected Left publisher, and a willingness to embrace colonial violence and anti-semitism if it can be read as vaguely anarchistic. Horrox’s text contains numerous factual errors as when he writes that Bar Giora “grew out of an organization known as the Hashomer” (p.20) and not the other way around. These inaccuracies are less a problem than how Horrox immediately follows writing Hashomer’s “members were, from an early stage, ‘motivated by a conviction that the commune was the best way of life for themselves and their families.’ The group developed an ‘alternative model based upon cooperative settlement,’” (p.20) without noting Hashomer’s primary motivation was establishing settler relations of force to create a racialized labor caste of colony guards. Their idea of a “commune” was explicitly defined as one without Palestinians. Horrox’s idealized spaces are settler sovereignties created through and in order to extend ethnic cleansing. Horrox notes in the introduction that “Many see the kibbutz’s very existence as predicated on the forcible displacement and subjugation of the region’s native Arab population, and would consider any progressive ideals of equality and social justice that the kibbutzim profess to hold nullified by the massive inequality on which the practical manifestation of these ideals has come to be based,” [emphases in original] (p.8-9). He immediately dismisses the harm kibbutzim enact writing, “Throughout history, all projects attempting to self-organize have been caught in different types of power networks that have complicated their existence. The kibbutz is no different,” (p.9). Horrox doesn’t elucidate which projects he is talking about but surely not all of them create the “power networks” that othered populations are then “caught in”. It’s telling that Horrox cites Gershon Shafir’s 2002 work (with Yoav Peled) Being Israeli but not his celebrated 1989 text Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict that directly contradicts Horrox’s thesis about socialist ideologies being the driving factors in the Zionist settler colonial forms of the kibbutz and moshav. Horrox contradicts himself, seemingly without knowing, throughout the text on this. “In 1909, a strike broke out when Kinneret’s Jewish workers decided they could no longer put up with the oppressive, arbitrary administration,” which sounds like something we hope anarchists would do. The sentence continues, “and the use of hired Arab labor,” (p.17). Oops. Doesn’t seem so anarchistic now. Settlers refusing to share the same labor fields as Palestinians is the point of Avoda Ivrit (Hebrew labor). Because Palestinian laborers had lower costs of living due to kinship networks, subsistence farming and, especially, because large landowners and agricultural interests already exploited Palestinian labor and depressed their wages, Jewish settlers could not compete with Palestinian labor. Instead of organizing alongside Palestinian laborers fighting exploitation, non-Palestinian Jews cooperated to exclude Palestinians from labor fields to increase their bargaining power by creating exclusive labor castes. Separation was the goal, not cooperation. Horrox even quotes Nachman Syrkin on this but finds different meaning. “In the planned cooperative settlement, the question of Jewish labor will find a solution, because the main problem, that of labor and capital, will be solved,” (p.16). Separation as the source of settler labor prosperity is the topic of an influential thesis by Chaim Arlosoroff, a major Labor Zionism intellectual who Horrox cites throughout the text as an anarchist figure and thinker. Arlosoroff’s 1926 essay “On the Question of Joint Organization” argues for Zionists to follow South African settlers’ Color Bar – later termed apartheid – programs of labor separation instead of struggling jointly with Palestinians laborers on the railways, post offices and other British colonial infrastructures. Arlosoroff writes that wherever Jewish settlers labor in Palestine, they do so “in the shadow of cheap Arab labor,” a “primitive rival” whose “needs are little more than zero.” Arlosoroff both naturalizes the pre-Zionism exploitation of Palestinian workers while justifying settlers displacing them. For all of Horrox’s waxing about how Gustav Landauer and Pyotr Kropotkin – both of whom opposed Zionism – heavily influenced Arlosoroff, A.D. Gordon and others, he fails to note that the Second and Third Aliya settlers he idolizes aimed for, in their own terms, the “conquest of land” and not the “conquest of bread.” Zionists sought to enclose the land from the indigenous Palestinian peasantry. Claiming anarchism or not, this is an enclosure, not a creation of commons. This is the narrative gap Horrox constructs when noting the excitement over “workers cultivating publicly-owned land” (p.19) while not mentioning that Palestinians are neither the “workers” nor the “public” in that sentence despite being the vast majority of Palestine’s pre-Nakba population. As a Living Revolution continues its major conflict is not settlers espousing anarchism while dispossessing Palestinians but settlers espousing anarchism losing ground to settlers espousing Marxism in Zionist discourse and colonization. Instead of the common Colonizer Left trope of the revolutionaries and capitalists fighting for control over colonial plunder, Horrox has sects of a Colonizer Left fighting for the ability to guide colonial plunder. This is more akin to how Budour Hassan finds many anarchists fetishizing the “Republicans of the Spanish Revolution [while neglecting] Spanish colonialism in North Africa.” Horrox reproduces another oppressive formation in endorsing European anti-semitic ideas of Jewish degredation. Horrox writes of Zionism as the “reconstruction of an entire people,” the “Jewish renaissance” (p.2), a “national revival” (p.13) and “regeneration” (p.25). But what is wrong with we Jews that requires “renaissance”, “regeneration” or “revival”? Anti-semitism presupposes that something is wrong with Jews and this is evident in the writings Horrox cites as well as his own text. Horrox spends copious pages on A.D. Gordon as an anarchist. Ze’ev Sternhell, whose The Founding Myths of Israel Horrox cites only to ignore, quotes Gordon writing that Jews are “broken and crushed … sick and diseased in body and soul.” That “we are a parasitic people. We have no roots in the soil; there is no ground beneath our feet. And we are parasites not only in an economic sense but in spirit, in thought, in poetry, in literature, and in our virtues, our ideals, our higher human aspirations. Every alien movement sweeps us along, every wind in the world carries us. We in ourselves are almost nonexistent, so of course we are nothing in the eyes of other peoples either.” Horrox slightly cleans up this crude anti-semitism in one of the brief moments he even mentions Palestinians in the text writing that Gordon was “anything but naive about Arab resistance to Zionism, which he viewed as a perfectly understandable reaction to Jews’ westernized and rootless lifestyle,” (p.27). This and Horrox writing that his anarchist settlers “felt that the First Aliya Jews had succeeded merely in replicating the exploitative socio-economic structure of the Pale of Settlement, where Jews worked in clean jobs, far from the point of production, and relied on other groups to do the so-called dirty work,” (p.17). Either Horrox doesn’t understand that Zionism’s “New Jews” are an anti-semitic idea or he’s ok with the anti-semitsm. It’s an anti-semitic text either way. Colonialism and anti-semitism are foundational to European fascism so it makes horrible sense that Horrox celebrates the white supremacist eugenicist Arthur Ruppin and the early Revisionist Zionist Josef Trumpeldor. He mines their work for anarchist influences in the same way that Jacobin recently printed a hagiography for fascist Eduard Limonov. These decontextualized, highly selective readings do nothing to expand the reach of liberation movements but instead attempt to rehabilitate fascism, colonialism and ethnic cleansing and pretend they are not oppression. This mining has more in common with the Israeli military using Derrida, Deleuze and Gautari to plan attacks on Palestinians than it does anything remotely progressive. Could this mess have been avoided? Horrox describes “anarchism’s social vision” at the beginning of the book and begins with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who promoted genociding Europe’s Jews as part of his political philosophy. At least 150 years before Proudhon was born, and 200 years before A.D. Gordon, kidnapped Africans in Jamaica had already secured their freedom and established agricultural communities in the Blue Mountains in opposition to African Slavery and capitalist agricultural exploitation. Three years before Marx was born Black fighters at Negro Fort inside Seminole sovereignty raided southern Georgia for supplies and to free kin in direct opposition to the US settler slaver empire. Where are these communes in Horrox’s canon? Why are settler colonial geographies like the agricultural kibbutzim in the canon but the anti-colonial fugitive agricultural communes established in the Great Dismal Swamp ignored? The works Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Zoé Samudzi and William C. Anderson, Marquis Bey and others are doing conceive resistance lineages and practices that do not need to do like Horrox with the kibbutzim or Jacobin with Limonov and try to crop out the horror to create the image of revolution. Instead they create and learn from resistance lineages established in opposition to capitalist, colonialist, anti-Black systems. The latter two examples, Samudzi & Anderson and Bey, I note above are also published by AK Press the same as A Living Revolution which remains in AK’s catalogue. A few years back investigators showed that one of AK’s authors, Michael Schmidt, was espousing white nationalism under the rubrick of anarchism and AK reacted swiftly to cease publishing Schmidt’s works and remove him from their catalogue. They should do the same with A Living Revolution. Thanks for reading. ...

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— Ursula K. Le Guin - The Shobies’ Story

 

at 7/30/26 12:28am

Author: Ursula K. Le GuinTitle: The Shobies’ StoryDate: April 1990 Foreword In my crustier moments I’ve been known to assert that, while science fiction boasts any number of enthralling yarn spinners, brilliant visionaries, and witty satirists, it has produced only one wholly literary voice. That’s not true, of course. It’s certainly not fair to Samuel R. Delany, Thomas Disch, Lucius Shepard, Karen Joy Fowler, Judith Moffet, Michael Bishop, and perhaps a dozen others. And yet if SFWA ever got itself into a literary jousting tournament with some rival guild, the prize being a government grant or a small planet or a subscription to The New Yorker or something, there’s no question whom I’d want to send onto the field. Ursula K. Le Guin received the National Book Award for The Farthest Shore, the third novel in the Earthsea cycle, as well as a Hugo and a Nebula for The Left Hand of Darkness and the same pair of trophies for The Dispossessed. This volume celebrates her most recent literary honor—a Nebula for Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea—by offering up another Le Guin work from the final ballot, a complex and audacious novelette called “The Shobies’ Story.” Even if Tehanu had not taken the top prize, I would have accorded “The Shobies’ Story” a prime spot in this volume, for I believe that—through its marvelous conceit of “churten” travel— it raises crucial questions about social hierarchies, interspecies bonding, and the consensus model of reality. Le Guin aficionados will quickly notice that it belongs to the “Hainish League” saga, her ongoing narrative of galactic exploration. “This story grew out of an idea I have been chewing on for years about the importance of story, of narrative,” Le Guin reports. “Speaking not metaphorically but fairly literally, it seems that people who can see their life as a story, with a ‘plot’ or at least narrative continuity (possibly even a happy ending), get along okay, while people who lose that narrative sense are in a lot of trouble, maybe to the point of psychopathy. I’m not talking about personal control, being the ‘author of your fate,’ because in cultures where individuals don’t control their lives much at all, people can be totally content with the cultural narrative, and live it beautifully. Even if the story itself is stupid or psychopathic, like the war story or the white-supremacy story, if we believe in it and it makes some sense to us we get along, we stay alive, we even think we know what we’re doing. “Well, then, the idea of using narrative as a means of travel is really just an extension of this basic idea of narrative as means of existence. So the Shobies showed up and started telling their story. Their stories. Of course they were science fiction stories, what else?” The Shobies’ Story They met at the Port more than a month before their first flight together, and there, calling themselves after their ship as most crews did, became the Shobies. Their first consensual decision was to spend their isyeye in the coastal village of Liden, on Hain, where the negative ions could do their thing. Liden was a fishing port with an eighty-thousand-year history and a population of four hundred. Its fisherfolk farmed the rich shoal waters of their bay, shipped the catch inland to the cities, and managed the Liden Resort for vacationers and tourists and new space crews on isyeye (the word is Hainish and means “making a beginning together,” or “beginning to be together,” or, used technically, “the period of time and area of space in which a group forms if it is going to form.” A honeymoon is an isyeye of two). The fisherwomen and fishermen of Liden were as weathered as driftwood and about as talkative. Six-year-old Asten, who had misunderstood slightly, asked one of them if they were all eighty thousand years old. “Nope,” she said. Like most crews, the Shobies used Hainish as their common language. So the name of the one Hainish crew member, Sweet Today, carried its meaning as words as well as name, and at first seemed a silly thing to call a big, tall, heavy woman in her late fifties, imposing of carriage and almost as taciturn as the villagers. But her reserve proved to be a deep well of congeniality and tact, to be called upon as needed, and her name soon began to sound quite right. She had family—all Hainish have family—kinfolk of all denominations, grandchildren and cross-cousins, affines and cosines, scattered all over the Ekumen, but no relatives in this crew. She asked to be Grandmother to Rig, Asten, and Betton, and was accepted. The only Shoby older than Sweet Today was the Terran Lidi, who was seventy-two EYs and not interested in grandmothering. Lidi had been navigating for fifty years, and there was nothing she didn’t know about NAFAL ships, although occasionally she forgot that their ship was the Shoby and called it the Soso or the Alterra. And there were things she didn’t know, none of them knew, about the Shoby. They talked, as human beings do, about what they didn’t know. Churten theory was the main topic of conversation, evenings at the driftwood fire on the beach after dinner. The adults had read whatever there was to read about it, of course, before they ever volunteered for the test mission. Gveter had more recent information and presumably a better understanding of it than the others, but it had to be pried out of him. Only twenty-five, the only Cetian in the crew, much hairier than the others, and not gifted in language, he spent a lot of time on the defensive. Assuming that as an Anarresti he was more proficient at mutual aid and more adept at cooperation than the others, he lectured them about their propertarian habits; but he held tight to his knowledge, because he needed the advantage it gave him. For a while he would speak only in negatives: don’t call it the churten “drive,” it isn’t a drive, don’t call it the churten “effect,” it isn’t an effect. What is it, then? A long lecture ensued, beginning with the rebirth of Cetian physics since the revision of Shevekian temporalism by the Intervallists, and ending with the general conceptual framework of the churten. Everyone listened very carefully, and finally Sweet Today spoke, carefully. “So the ship will be moved,” she said, “by ideas?” ...

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— Benjamin Tucker - Why I Am an Anarchist

 

at 7/29/26 1:44am

Author: Benjamin TuckerTitle: Why I Am an AnarchistDate: 1890Source: https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/anarchist-beginnings/benjamin-r-tucker-why-i-am-an-anarchist-1892/ Why am I an Anarchist? That is the question which the editor of the Twentieth Century has requested me to answer for his readers. I comply; but, to be frank, I find it a difficult task. If the editor or one of his contributors had only suggested a reason why I should be anything other than an Anarchist, I am sure I should have no difficulty in disputing the argument. And does not this very fact, after all, furnish in itself the best of all reasons why I should be an Anarchist – namely, the impossibility of discovering any good reason for being anything else? To show the invalidity of the claims of State Socialism, Nationalism, Communism, Single-taxism, the prevailing capitalism, and all the numerous forms of Archism existing or proposed, is at the same blow to show the validity of the claims of Anarchism. Archism once denied, only Anarchism can be affirmed. That is a matter of logic. But evidently the present demand upon me is not to be met satisfactorily in this way. The error and puerility of State Socialism and all the despotisms to which it is akin have been repeatedly and effectively shown in many ways and in many places. There is no reason why I should traverse this ground with the readers of the Twentieth Century, even though it is all sufficient for proof of Anarchism. Something positive is wanted, I suppose. Well, then, to start with the broadest generalization. I am an Anarchist because Anarchism and the philosophy of Anarchism are conducive to my own happiness. “Oh, yes, if that were the case, of course we should all be Anarchists,” the Archists will shout with one voice – at least all that are emancipated from religious and ethical superstitions – “but you beg the question; we deny that Anarchism is conducive to our happiness.” Do you, my friends? Really, I don’t believe you when you say so; or, to put it more courteously, I don’t believe you will say so when you once understand Anarchism. For what are the conditions of happiness? Of perfect happiness, many. But the primal and main conditions are few and simple. Are they not liberty and material prosperity? Is it not essential to the happiness of every developed being that he and those around him should be free, and that he and those around him should know no anxiety regarding the satisfaction of their material needs? It seems idle to deny it, and, in the event of denial, it would seem equally idle to argue it. No amount of evidence that human happiness has increased with human liberty would convince a man incapable of appreciating the value of liberty without reinforcement by induction. And to all but such a man it is also self-evident that of these two conditions – liberty and wealth – the former takes precedence as a factor in the production of happiness. It would be but a poor apology for happiness that either factor alone could give, if it could not produce nor be accompanied by the other; but, on the whole, much liberty and little wealth would be preferable to much wealth and little liberty. The complaint of Archistic Socialists that the Anarchists are bourgeois is true to this extent and no further – that, great as is their detestation for a bourgeois society, they prefer its partial liberty to the complete slavery of State Socialism. For one, I certainly can look with more pleasure – no, less pain – upon the present seething, surging struggle, in which some are up and some are down, some falling and some rising, some rich and many poor, but none completely fettered or altogether hopeless of as better future, than I could upon Mr. Thaddeus Wakeman’s ideal, uniform, and miserable community of teamy, placid, and slavish oxen. To repeat, then, I do not believe that many of the Archists can be brought to say in so many words that liberty is not the prime condition of happiness, and in that case they cannot deny that Anarchism, which is but another name for liberty, is conducive to happiness. This being true, I have not begged the question and I have already established my case. Nothing is more needed to justify my Anarchistic creed. Even if some form of Archism could be devised that would create infinite wealth, and distribute it with perfect equity (pardon the absurd hypothesis of a distribution of the infinite), still the fact that in itself it is a denial of the prime condition of happiness, would compel its rejection and the acceptance of its sole alternative, Anarchism. But, though this is enough, it is not all. It is enough for justification, but not enough for inspiration. The happiness possible in any society that does not improve upon the present in the matter of the distribution of wealth, can hardly be described as beatific. No prospect can be positively alluring that does not promise both requisites of happiness – liberty and wealth. Now, Anarchism does promise both. In fact, it promises the second as the result of the first, and happiness as the result of both. This brings us into the sphere of economics. Will liberty abundantly produce and equitably distribute wealth? That is the remaining question to consider. And certainly it cannot be adequately treated in a single article in the Twentieth Century. A few generalizations are permissible at most. ...

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— Usufruct Collective - Philosophy of Freedom

 

at 7/29/26 1:05am

Author: Usufruct CollectiveTitle: Philosophy of FreedomSubtitle: From the Science of Logic to Dialectical NaturalismDate: 2026 July 28Notes: By the Usufruct Collective, first digitally published 07/28/26, public draft #1 (this will be iteratively updated)Source: Retrieved on 2026-07-29 from <usufructcollective.wordpress.com/2026/07/28/philosophy-of-freedom-from-the-science-of-logic-to-dialectical-naturalism> Introduction This essay will reason through a dialectical naturalist philosophy/worldview that develops from the general movements and determinacies of the Science of Logic, to natural philosophy, to social philosophy, to ethics, and politics. This essay will argue that dialectical naturalism– a philosophy initially developed by Murray Bookchin with significant influence from Hegel, Marx, and Kropotkin– is a worldview that is in harmony with the true and the good that can help us reason through plural wholes, parts, relations, social conditions, and possibilities towards practically changing the world through good processes towards good ends (creatively adapting universals to plural, particular, and unique contexts accordingly). Dialectical naturalism, as a whole is a system, is constituted by specific kinds of developmental/differentiating/unifying reasoning, ontology, and ethics. The spreading and development of dialectical naturalism can inform the ways we think and act and in turn be informed by further reasoning and practices to become more coherent. This philosophical worldview of dialectical naturalism will be developed through the following order of operations. First, it will begin with a condensed rearticulation of the general movements and determinacies of the Science of Logic (with some slight addendums in regards to ecology and the good). However, It is important to note that, “No general account of dialectical reason can be a substitute for reading Hegel’s works on logic,” as “Hegel’s Science of Logic is dialectical reason in its most elaborate and dynamic form,” (Bookchin 2017). This foundation will be followed by a section moving from the Science of Logic to nature and natural philosophy. This prior section will be a bridge to a section on natural and ecological development more broadly. After the above, there will be a section on spirit and nature. Then there will be a section on social philosophy (in the sense of second nature as will be defined later on). The final section will be on the ethical life, the good life, the good place, and the development of the above including related political and economic dimensions/extensions thereof. This final section will move from social nature+potentiality+needs to the good life and the good place, social+ecological freedom and flourishing, as well as related means and ends. The final section will be followed by concluding remarks on the whole of the worldview developed (that can potentially help contextualize the next readthrough from the beginning to the end). While this essay will in large part be working with the interplay between the philosophical worldviews of Bookchin and Hegel, this essay will also include unique lines of argumentation and will be informed by multiple sources, thinkers, as well as historical and contemporary social organizations+social constellations– enriched and glued together by a unique synthesis. And while this development of Dialectical Naturalism keeps all the necessary and sufficient features thereof, there will be aspects of this development of dialectical naturalism that differ from Bookchin.[1] The complexity of the philosophy espoused in this text, while likely to be out of the comfort zone of many, is indeed graspable to those less familiar with philosophy and political philosophy. However, this text will be a struggle in certain respects for both those familiar with the subject matter and those new to the subject matter.[2] The Science of Logic “The Logic…seeks to provide an immanent, presuppositionless derivation of the basic categories of thought and being. This derivation of the categories is ‘presuppositionless’ because it takes for granted no specific rules of thought and, indeed, is preceded by the act of setting aside all our familiar determinate assumptions about thought and being,” (Houlgate 2006). Doctrine of Being (Hegel 1999, Hegel 2010) Being without any determinateness is indeterminate being that “has no diversity within itself nor any with a reference outwards. It would not be held fast in its purity if it contained any determination or content which could be distinguished in it or by which it could be distinguished from an other,” (Hegel 2005). However, being without any determinations, by not having any determinations, passes into nothing. And nothing has an “absence of all determination and content – undifferentiatedness in itself,” (Hegel 2005). Nothing, by having the same content as indeterminate being passes into indeterminate being. Being has passed into nothing, and nothing has passed into being. And this coming to be and ceasing to be of being into nothing and nothing into being passes into becoming. Being and nothing are shown to be “absolutely distinct yet equally unseparated and inseparable” and are united in becoming (Hegel 2010). Being and nothing are sublated into becoming, and through this sublation: being is becoming and nothing becomes a processual negativity– through which being is processual and coming to be and ceasing to be. Negativity becomes part of the process of being in its movement of becoming. ...

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— Jeanne Deroin - Letter to Proudhon

 

at 7/28/26 8:32pm

Author: Jeanne DeroinTitle: Letter to ProudhonDate: January 28, 1849Notes: L’Opinion des Femmes. No. 1, Year 1. January 28, 1849.Source: Retrieved on 2026-07-25 from libertarian-labyrinth.org Monsieur, I know that, preoccupied most especially with questions of political economy, you have not accepted all the consequences of the principles on which our social future rests. You are one of the most formidable adversaries of the principle of equality—a principle which does not allow unjust exclusion and privileges of sex. I know that you do not wish to recognize the right of women to civil and political equality. This right, which contain in it the abolition of all social inequalities, of all oppressive privileges. But I also know that this opposition on your part is founded on a respectable motive. You fear that the application of this principle seriously undermines the holy laws of morality. If it was demonstrated to you that you are in error, I believe, Monsieur, in your honesty, in your sincere love for truth, and I do not doubt that you would use all your influence on the minds of the people, to destroy the direst of prejudices which hinder the march of humanity on the road of progress. You will yourself be the firmest supporter, the most ardent defender that holy cause—that of all the weak, and all the oppressed. I appeal to you, Monsieur, to examine more seriously all the aspects of this great question, so important in this epoch of transition where our social regeneration is prepared. Permit me to present to you some observations on this subject. The superiority of your knowledge and intelligence is one more reason for me to hope that they will be received with kindness. As a Christian socialist, I would say, like you, Monsieur, rather housewives than courtesans, if I wasn’t certain that a great number of women become courtesans only to escape the necessity of being housewives. Poor women, who would perhaps be preserved from shame if we found for them a place between the necessity of being housewives or courtesans, which would have favored the right to work over the run of the household To your dilemma, Monsieur, I will oppose another which is an axiom for me: slave and prostitute, or free and chaste, for woman there is no middle ground. Prostitution is the result of the slavery of women, of ignorance and poverty. Do not suppress any more the development of their most noble faculties; promote the free development of heir intelligence; give a noble aim to their activity, the weaknesses of the heart and the digressions of the imagination will no longer be anything to fear. You want to strengthen the links of the family, and you divide it: man in the forum or the workshop, woman at home by the hearth. Separated from their husbands and children, from their father and brothers, women, as in the past, will be consoled in their isolation and servitude by dreaming of the celestial homeland, where they would have the freedom of the city, where there would no longer be inequality or unjust privileges. Abandoned by you to the influence of the confessional, they will entwine you in a mysterious, and all your efforts towards progress will be vain; you will fight without success for liberty like those Polish barons who refused to free their serfs. You will try uselessly to establish equality between citizens: society is based on the family, and if the family remains based on inequality, society will always go back to its rut, and reenter, as you say, the natural order of things. Since the origin of the world there have been slaves and masters, oppressed and tyrants, privileges of sex, of race, of birth, caste and fortune, and it always will be as long as you refuse to practice fraternity towards those that God has given you as sisters and companions. You ask what the mission of woman will be outside of the family? She will come to help you reestablish order in that great, but badly administered household that we call the State, and to substitute a just division of the products for the permanent spoliation of the severe labors of the proletarian. The mother worthy of that name is predisposed to love the weak and suffering, but she is occupied with solicitude to preserve equally all her children from cold and hunger, and to give rise to a mutual sympathy in their heats; she will do for the great social family what she does in her home when she will widen the egoistic circle of domestic affections by rising to the height of humanitarian questions. I strongly desire, Monsieur, for you to share my profound conviction, that no serious reform can be accomplished in an enduring manner without the application of that great principle of the right of women to civil and political equality, which is the basis of our social redemption. Please accept, Monsieur, the assurance of my highest consideration. JEANNE DEROIN.

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— Anarcho - Proudhon: “start by being right”

 

at 7/28/26 8:30pm

Author: AnarchoTitle: Proudhon: “start by being right”Date: 2025Notes: This article discusses various claims made against Proudhon by the likes of Engels, Schapiro, Draper and others. Some are correct (if usually exaggerated), most are false. It argues that any critique Proudhon should start by being accurate, something which should go without saying but all-too-often is ignored. It first appeared in Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring 2025).Source: Retrieved on 2026-07-25 from anarchistfaq.org I will start with an admission. Once, a long time ago, I wrote a letter to a Marxist paper angrily proclaiming how dare they use Proudhon to attack anarchism when he was not an anarchist. Suffice to say, this just showed my ignorance – not least in being unaware of the source of the article’s attacks, it being a rehash of Hal Draper rather than some original piece. Luckily it remained unsent (not least because it got a bit long…) for I made a terrible mistake – I took the time to read Proudhon. This was driven by my work on An Anarchist FAQ and the need to present anarchist views on capitalism. As many have noted, unlike Marxism, there is not a huge amount of anarchist writings on economics. The exception is Proudhon, particularly in the 1840s. So I read the first two Memoirs on property (as translated by Tucker) and these opened my eyes. I then moved onto volume 1 of System of Economic Contradictions and, while hard going in certain chapters (whose relevance to analysing capitalism is hard to grasp), it was not the book I had been led to think it was by Marxist accounts. All this motivated me to work on Property is Theft![1] and whilst working on other projects, I have kept an interest on Proudhon ever since. I mention this to put the following discussions in context for it is all too easy to think that just become someone proclaims something it means they know what they are talking about, particularly if they have academic credentials. Worse, it is all too easy to assume that they are being accurate and would not just distort or make things up. Even “peer review” can mean little, if the subject is relative obscure and the peers in question know little about the subject and assume an honesty which may, with a little investigation, be proven to be lacking. So nothing should be taken for granted when reading about Proudhon (or anarchism in general). If a claim looks strange, it is always worthwhile investigating whether it is actually true or not. If a reference is provided, I’ve discovered it is always wise to check the source to confirm that it is as suggested (I’ve found that in far too many cases it does not). However, I appreciate – from experience! – that this can be time consuming and difficult to do as the material can be hard to access. Still, it should be done. Distortions, however, can sometimes have an element of truth about them. This makes them plausible – as will be shown, Proudhon did write “All this democracy disgusts me” and he was anti-Semitic. However, context and accuracy matter. This may involve discussing unpleasant subjects but that does not mean allowing inaccuracies or exaggerations to go unchallenged. Doing so may see the accusation of “apologetics” levelled but that would be a superficial response. Yet criticism can be valid in spite of this. Marxists, for example, never note that the valid criticisms they make of Proudhon – his racism, sexism, opposition to strikes[2] – are those made by later anarchists. They also rarely criticise him on any substantial aspect of his ideas, preferring to recount flaws in his personality. Rarely is any context presented, such as noting that his (measured) support for small-scale property was reflective of his era (and that he was resolutely in favour of collective property where appropriate), nor any alternative (if Proudhon is to be denounced for opposing forced collectivisation of peasants, then that should be clearly stated). Nor do they mention the overlap in Proudhon’s disgraceful views with others of his time, including Marx and Engels. In his marginal notes to The Poverty of Philosophy, Proudhon wrote “You always joke beforehand: start by being right.” This applies to the criticisms levelled at Proudhon I am about to discuss. There is plenty to criticise in his ideas and we should do so – but let us do so accurately. We must reject invention, caricature and exaggeration when we discuss his ideas, we must provide the necessary context not to excuse, minimise or downplay things but to understand them and their relative importance within his ideas as a whole. If we “start by being right” then our critique will be all the more valid and our understanding of his strengths and weaknesses will be stronger. The Housing Question It is not only The Poverty of Philosophy which saw the founders of Marxism distort Proudhon’s ideas. While questionable commentary on Proudhon exists in Capital and Theories of Surplus Value, Engels’ The Housing Question is worth discussing. Engels’ 1872 work is part of a polemic within German socialist circles and sought to defend the Marxist orthodoxy against those influenced by the French anarchist seeking “to transplant the Proudhonist school to Germany”. He also somewhat incredulously suggested that Marx had “delivered a decisive blow precisely to the Proudhonist ideas as far back as twenty-five years ago” – if so, then why was he having to do so in 1872?[3] Engels suggests that Proudhon’s aimed to solve the housing question involves a scheme in which the workers “become part-owner” of dwellings by “paying annual instalments” via their rent. So, if a worker lives in a rented property then the rent they pay goes towards buying the house. For the amusement of his readers, he paints a picture of a worker moving from rented accommodation to rented accommodation and accruing a tiny fraction of each one: ...

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— Anonymous - Confidence. Courage. Connection. Trust

 

at 7/28/26 8:24pm

Author: AnonymousTitle: Confidence. Courage. Connection. TrustSubtitle: A proposal for security cultureDate: 2019, NovemberSource: Retrieved on December 29, 2019 from https://north-shore.info/2019/11/05/confidence-courage-connection-trust-a-proposal-for-security-culture/ When we talk about security culture, people tend to have one of two kinds of experiences. The first is of building walls and keeping people out, the second is of being excluded or mistrusted. Both of these come with negative feelings – fear and suspicion for the former and alienation and resentment for the latter. I would say that they are two sides of the same coin, two experiences of a security culture that isn’t working well. I want to be welcoming and open to new people in my organizing. I also want to protect myself as best I can from efforts to disrupt that organizing, especially from the state but also from bosses or the far-right. That means I want to have the kinds of security practices that allow me to be open while knowing that I’ve assessed the risk I face and am taking smart steps to minimize it. Security culture should make openness more possible, not less. This proposal for security culture is based on reframing — on shifting our focus from fear to confidence, from risk-aversion to courage, from isolation to connection, and from suspicion to trust. It makes sense to feel fear – the state is very powerful, repression is common, and it has the power to crush us and all our projects. But I don’t want to stay in that fear, and with accurate information and good plans we can begin to transform fear into confidence, knowing we have security practices that are up to the risk we face. In fact, without transforming fear, it’s hard to imagine how we could manage to take action at all in face of the power of our enemies. I don’t want to be risk-averse. I want to decide on my actions based on effectiveness, appropriateness, my analysis, and my ethics. Good security culture lays the groundwork for us to show courage in our tactics collectively, since we know we can handle the risk. When we don’t transform risk-aversion, we self-police and stay narrowly in the space for symbolic opposition that is provided to us. Repression functions by isolating people. I don’t want to contribute to isolation through the things I do to keep myself and my friends safe. I want a security culture rooted in deepening our connection with each other. When we don’t transform isolation, organizing can feel no different than work and we don’t build the kinds of relationships that truly transform us, such that we can begin to feel the world we wish to create. I don’t want to feel suspicion when I meet people, that’s toxic and erodes the spaces of struggle we create. Rather than feel suspicious of someone, I want to ask myself “what would it take for me to trust this person?” I want to go towards people and try to transform suspicion into trust. I would like to offer a definition of security culture to frame this conversation. Security culture refers to a set of practices developed to assess risks, control the flow of information through your networks, and to build solid organizing relationships. There are countless different possible security cultures, but the important thing is that they come from clear, explicit conversations about risk that are ongoing and respond to change. In the following example, the ongoing conversation about risk reacts to changes in our actions and in how we are being targeted. The various security culture practices mentioned will be explained further down. In a pipeline campaign where I live, we wanted to emphasize mass direct actions targeting oil infrastructure. We decided that our risk for the early stages of that campaign as we focused on outreach and research was very slight and that we could safely involve many people in that work and share information about it openly on any platform. As we began planning symbolic protest actions, this consideration didn’t significantly change, but when we began planning things like blocking roads or picketing a police station, the element of surprise became a larger consideration. Regardless of possible criminal charges, our actions would simply be less effective if they were known in advance. So we stopped using public or easily surveilled means to communicate and began asking that people only share details to trusted individuals who intended to participate. Soon after this phase of the campaign began, a national-level policing apparatus called a Joint Intelligence Group (JIG) came together around defending pipelines, involving many levels of police and intelligence services. JIGs and configurations like them are a specific threat to struggles of all kinds, since they aim vast resources directly at disrupting organizing. So even though our actions didn’t change, we revisited our conversation about risk and decided to insulate the organizers of actions from possible conspiracy charges by doing the planning in a small, opaque group. We could invite people to participate who we trusted, and we might take steps to build up that trust, like doing identity checks of each other. But we would no longer plan actions openly in the larger network of people interested in the education and outreach work. This shift meant that when we moved on to shutting down critical infrastructure, we just had to scale up from this organizing node we had formed and encourage other crews to organize similarly, coordinating through a meeting of representatives from vouched groups to take on different roles. ...

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— Anonymous - The Disunity of White Women

 

at 7/28/26 8:21pm

Author: AnonymousTitle: The Disunity of White WomenSubtitle: Against Collaboration and TransmisogynyDate: 2026-07-27Notes: “Nothing for Snitches: For a Revolutionary Anti-Repression”: https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/35212/ The hetero-settler nation remains the political center of gravity here in the 2020’s. While wannabe radicals find any neocolonial male warlord to throw their support behind, the hetero-settler nation continues to roll over the rest of us. In our new world of repression and resistance the Prairieland case has lit signalfires all over the country. A group of mixed white and latinx, some trans, anarchists have each received 30–100 year sentences for little more than owning a box of anarcho zines. While revs around the empire try and figure out what exactly this means for us, calls for the defense of the Prairieland 9 have proliferated. Only there’s one problem. One defendant, a white trans woman named Meagan Morris, is a snitch. This is, dialectically, both complicated and fairly straight forward. We will get into all the various reasons why a trans woman might feel the kind of disconnect from her comrades and sisters that allows someone to snitch. We will break down the ways that male supremacy writ large and transmisogyny specifically have been allowed to fester in radical left spaces and have informed this case. We will look at transmisogynistic responses to Morris’ betrayal and the way that male chauvinist radicals (men and women and NB alike) downplay the dangers trans women face in male prisons. This is the mess we will wade through. First and foremost though: white radicals snitch because we can, as Marilyn Buck taught us, return to the settler fold at any time, at least up to now. When the going gets tough settler rads either disappear or, if they get caught, throw whoever they can under the bus in order to get life back to normal. Even the most despised members of settler society, in this instance a trans woman, have it ingrained in us to reach back towards the hetero-settler nest and go home when times get hard. Interestingly enough it didn’t seem to work for Morris, who did not get a lighter sentence despite flipping immediately and giving up her own girlfriend. We’ll explore what that means also. Women and the Male Left As of this writing the situation for the left is at a 15 year low. After a decade of New Afrikan uprisings culminated in the 2020 George Floyd-Breonna Taylor rebellion, after fascist organizing sparked the most widespread antifascist street-fighting movement in decades, after the fabric of everyday life was torn by the pandemic, the decidedly male dominated communist and anarchist left completely failed to build on any of the developments of the 2010’s. They had plenty of opportunities, even after the nadir of 2022 was briefly overshadowed by the Palestine solidarity movement after October 7th, 2023. But that too quickly degenerated amongst widespread repression, petty bourgeois opportunism, and outright male chauvinism. You can throw a funeral for Nasrallah in NYC if you want, it doesn’t mean anyone’s going to give a shit. Since 2021 there have been radical women trying to shine light on this situation. When the energy of the 2020 uprising was diverted into the existing left, itself largely a holdover from the 2010’s, new recruits found their rebellious energy stifled amidst an environment of rank male supremacy. Women who had been politically activated for the first time were thrown into groups with men who had been preying on women for years and years. Groups like the PSL and FRSO and men like Jared Rourk and Fergie Chambers all used the cover of a radical social movement to abuse women. This and plainly this is the primary reason for the collapse of the left in the last six years. State repression is an element but, as the old man taught us, the internal factors are primary. Trans women have experienced this generalized misogyny in a much more pointed manner. The transmisogyny of the movement has been overwhelming and in some instances violent. The old Red Guards, despite at one point being made up significantly of trans women, eventually took a hostile stance towards trans women. This hostility was eventually revealed to be violent when the org dissolved in 2022 and the abuses within it were revealed. PSL, who even old school New Afrikan nationalists have recently latched onto, happily de-genders and expels any trans woman who tries to object to being sexually harassed within the party. Fergie Chambers, who we are all apparently duty bound to defend (don’t laugh!) regularly blames us trannies for the degeneration of the Palestine solidarity movement. State sponsored transfemicide has ramped up continuously since we started to see glimpses of it out of Florida and Texas in 2022. The current american regime has turned it into one of their favorite weapons. State after state has instituted sports bans, bathroom bans, revoked passports and drivers licenses, and shipped trans women off to male prisons to be raped en masse, a policy known as v-coding (the practice of housing trans women in cells with sexually violent male prisoners so as to subject them to rape). The feds have even recently classified both “gender extremism” and “transgender ideology-inspired violent extremism” as causes of terrorism, along with any connection to the nebulously defined “antifa” movement. To be a transsexual woman really is to be consigned to outlaw status, and some of our settler sisters miss home. ...

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— Dan Gallin and Pat Horn - Women’s Unions in Bolivia

 

at 7/28/26 8:20pm

Author: Dan Gallin and Pat HornTitle: Women’s Unions in BoliviaDate: 2005Source: Excerpted from Organizing Informal Women Workers. Women workers’ unions in Bolivia were formed in the 1920s as part of the anarcho-syndicalist Federación Obrera Local (FOL), at that time the leading trade union organization in the country. (The FOL was actually a national trade union center, but the anarcho-syndicalists considered themselves to be merely the “local” (Bolivian) branch of a world-wide organization: the syndicalist International Workers’ Association formed in 1920).[1] In 1927 a group of anarchist women workers, led by Catalina Mendoza, Rosa Rodríguez de Calderón, Susana Rada, Felipa Aquize, and others, created the General Women Workers’ Union (Sindicato Feminino de Oficios Varios (SFOV)) under the auspices of the FOL. The (male) FOL leadership considered that the basic principle of the First International, that “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves”, also applied to women and fully supported this initiative. Relations between male and female unions remained mutually supportive, in this case probably because of a serious commitment to a shared anarchist philosophy.[2] On the other hand, the anarchist trade union women soon came into conflict with the women’s rights movement, dominated by women from the creole oligarchy. In 1929, a delegation from the SFOV participated in the National Women’s Convention where it submitted a document entitled “Ignorance is the mother of slavery”, denouncing the social situation of working class women. They got a hostile reception and withdrew from the Convention. According to Petronila Infantes, later a leader of the Cooks’ Union, “the ladies were upset because the “cholas” (working class Indian women) came to mix with them.”[3] The SFOV included cooks working in households, laundry workers, dairy workers, flower vendors and other street and market vendors. As membership grew, separate unions were established for the different categories of workers and the SFOV was eventually reorganized as the Women Workers’ Federation (Federación Obrera Feminina (FOF)). At its peak, the FOF had sixty unions the most important of which were the Cooks’ Union (Unión Sindical de Culinarias (USC)), founded in 1935, and the Flower Vendors’ Union (Unión Feminina de Floristas (UFF)), founded in 1936. Both these unions were the outcome of specific struggles. The USC originated in a struggle against discrimination in public transport: middle class ladies had objected that cooks, with their bags of purchases, were taking too much space in the streetcars. The municipality then prohibited the cooks from using streetcars; in response, the cooks held a mass meeting at city hall and got the prohibition rescinded. Subsequently, a raise in streetcar fares was also cancelled after another mass demonstration of the cooks at city hall. The USC was organized shortly after these incidents and met with a mixed response from the employers (the middle class ladies): some refused to hire USC members, others on the contrary preferred to hire union cooks because “they were guaranteed by the union” and more responsible in their work. The main demands of the USC were: recognition of cooking as a skilled trade, the eight-hour day for domestic work (later the five-hour day, from 09:00 to 14:00, with cooking only, to the exclusion of other domestic tasks), the establishment of public child care centers, freedom of expression (the right to say what they pleased, at work and off duty, without reprisals), the abolition of the “health certificate” imposed by the municipal authorities and increased wages. The UFF became organized after a flash flood at the end of 1935 wiped out the street markets in La Paz. The flower vendors and, through them, other street vendors became organized to demand the establishment of municipal markets. In 1938, several municipal markets were opened, but they turned out to be far too small, with a capacity of 600 places, although 2,000 were needed for union members alone. On the grounds that “official” markets now existed, the police started repressing vendors selling elsewhere in the city. Violent clashes took place, with police beating and arresting the vendors and destroying their property and produce. In 1940 and 1941 the FOF lodged complaints with the authorities against police abuses and demanded that street vendors be recognized as a “social function.” As they were getting no response, they threatened a general strike and obtained the resignation of the mayor. They also sued 25 policemen known for harassing vendors in different street markets and, although they did not obtain the destitution of the policemen, the abuses ceased for a time. In 1943, the UFF again led a protest action of the FOF against another mayor held responsible for the arbitrary conduct and the abuses of the municipal authorities. The FOF now also demanded municipal price controls of basic commodities, the punishment of abusive policemen and an end to favoritism at the markets. The women workers’ unions of the FOL not only confronted municipal authorities but, as Indian women (“cholas”), also the creole upper class, in the households and in society, as shown in the streetcar incident, which raised basic civil rights issues. The markets became spaces of communication where social relations were cemented, not only among vendors but also among cooks who would do their shopping there and thus break out of the isolation of their workplaces. Because of their strong roots in specific social and cultural struggles, the women’s unions outlasted their male counterparts. In the 1940s the FOL went into decline because of the combined effect of repression by successive authoritarian governments and the competition from new unions led by political parties of the radical Left. By 1947 it had practically ceased to exist. The FOF however, continued, still under anarcho-syndicalist leadership, and eventually joined the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB) in 1953. ...

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As of 8/9/26 11:21am. Last new 8/7/26 5:24am.