When trying to tell whether people support anarchism it doesn’t help a bit to know what accent they use, how they dress or were educated, how much money they have, whether they bear a title, own shares, run a business, work as labourers or in one of the professions. Neither does it help to know… read more »
A glance at Freedom, Black Flag, Our Generation, the Bulletin of Anarchist Research, or almost any other anarchist journal, will confirm that the groups and people who make up this movement spend much energy on criticising and opposing each other. This tendency, strong enough to prevent them consistently working together, sometimes provokes the assertion that… read more »
Genesis set the first people in Paradise, Hesiod spoke of a Golden Age at the beginning of things, and the belief that life used to be better than it is has persisted down to our own time. Anarchists often look back nostalgically to a time before the state appeared. The ancients had experience of people… read more »
In spite of all the horrors for which anarchists hold the state responsible, we have little reason to believe that getting rid of it would be enough, by itself, to bring the reign of sweetness and light. In 1989 the Italian authorities admitted that the state no longer controlled Sicily and parts of southern Italy,… read more »
The Spanish Civil War ended half a century ago. Anarchism has not approached its Spanish stature in any other country and does not seem likely to do so in the reasonably near future; this raises questions about that extraordinary flowering. In what follows I rely upon two books: The Spanish Civil War (1977), by Hugh… read more »
Raven, the anarchist quarterly, [1] includes a review-article by Brian Morris. Against the writers who seem to be kidding themselves that as a serious critique of Marxism anarchism doesn’t exist, he asserts that it does. He is, of course, right. Anarchism exists as a critique of Marxism, but Marxism has no theory capable of criticising… read more »
Anarchy means freedom. The phrase comes easily to the tongue, but when you try to envisage how it would work out in social life the difficulties begin to appear. You can’t have a number of people, who live together, all exercising unlimited freedom. By their actions they affect each other, and if you affect anybody… read more »
The Gnostics were the arch-rebels of Christian society from the second to the Fourth Century. The Pauline Christians of Rome set out to crush them and to hand over an obedient and conformist church to the Roman Emperor. These things they did, as Constantine is our witness. In those early days there were some 80… read more »
Anarchism offers a society in which everybody will be able to do what they want, provided only that they don’t interfere with the freedom of others. Yet most people do not support it. Anarchism claims to fight for the free spirit of humanity against oppression and coercion, but it remains a small movement of protest,… read more »
Talking about anarchism to a MENSA meeting, the speaker tried to make clear what he meant by the term: a movement holding (among other things) that people can perfectly well operate an orderly society without the use of authority. The chair in his closing remarks swept this aside, declaring bluntly that anarchy means chaos. It… read more »