CHRISTMAS cards, Birthday cards, Get Well cards, Mother’s Day cards… IC introduces the GO AWAY! card. Carry a supply, hand them out to bores, pests, and botherers. EDMUND Burke: “the British House of Commons… is… filled with everything illustrious in rank, in descent, in hereditary and acquired opulence, in cultivated talents, in military, civil, naval… read more »
If there is one thing on which anarchists agree it is that anarchy would be a society of freedom. This has no sooner been said than it has to be qualified: under anarchy all would be free to do as they liked, provided they didn’t interfere with the freedom of others. That sounds innocent enough,… read more »
When a conservative government clamps down on people who want to publish books about the security forces, when it restricts demonstrations, strengthen the police and imposes a uniform curriculum on the schools, and does all this while claiming to promote freedom, the reformers and revolutionaries find the combination difficult to accept. When socialists, communists and… read more »
“Anarchism is probably about nine-tenths discussion and one-tenth action.” (Freedom October 1989) The remark appears with a suggestion that anarchists should work for redistribution of goods and services, but the value of such a change is doubtful; it would mean duplicating the efforts of other groups. Ten years ago there were, for example, already some… read more »
Anarcho-capitalists, and others in favour of the free market, will be please to learn that the Association of European Airlines is on their side. Faced with EC attempts to ban the cartel-like arrangements between airlines and force them to compete with each other, the incoming AEA president protests, and calls upon free market theories for… read more »
1. “The left remains hopelessly fragmented.” (Robet Harris, Sunday Times 20 May) 2. “The ‘fragmentation’ of the left is something to be applauded, not regretted. Not from a ‘victory of the free market’ angle, but from a need to construct theory which is based on the experience of people living today. […] In a sense,… read more »
Obedience is all around us; has it been imposed upon people yearning for freedom, or volunteered by people who don’t value independence? Everybody interested in social affairs will have an opinion, and most of us are ready to give voice to our belief. Stanley Milgram took a different approach, setting up a series of experiments… read more »
The Trades Description Act says, more or less, that dealers must not tell lies about their goods. When it was going through Parliament one MP asked whether it would apply to politicians’ promises, and the House dissolved in laughter. Yet the temptation to accept the politicians’ words at their own valuation has to be resisted;… read more »
This article is reprinted from Raven, the anarchist quarterly, Volume 2, No. 1, June 1988. [1] It has been slightly revised, clarifying the argument. How do people come to be anarchists? At first sight this seems to be an easy one to answer. There may be a few original minds who work it out for… read more »
In a piece entitled Canon to the Left of Them, IC 32 spoke of: … the enduring absorptive power of the ediostatic ideologies, of the Establishment… the process that turned Darwin, Newton, Galileo and Copernicus, each of them a revolutionary in his time, into heroes of orthodoxy, the process that is not far from having… read more »