Laws make criminals. True; without laws there can be no crime. But attractive though it sounds, the absence of crime does not make it easier for people to live together. Observation of hunter-gatherer communities, which have no laws, shows that although without crime they yet suffer from individuals who take things from others against their… 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 »
The noble savages did not live the sort of life Rousseau imagined for them. Far from being free to live as they wished they were immovably bound by custom; what seems to be freedom is better understood as an unawareness of restrictions, arising from their inability to conceive of any life other than that of… read more »
Readers will be almost as grateful as we are ourselves for a respite from Marxism. In At the Dawn of Tyranny, the Origin of Individualism, Political Oppression and the State (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), Eli Sagen presents the most substantial attempt we have yet encountered at a psychoanalytical interpretation of the development of… read more »
Dear John, I read Barclay, People Without Government, spluttering and fuming at the things he was saying, to find at the end I agreed with his final position. I was saying, at the meeting last Friday, that the prospect of a society running wholly or mainly on anarchist lines is probably an illusion. Barclay says,… read more »
From Byron onward the rebellious artist has appeared as a stock figure in the social drama, joined later by the revolutionary worker. The one character stands on no better ground than the other. Some artists have rebelled as some workers have taken part in revolutions, but artists as a group, like workers as a group,… read more »
In the phrase “Anarchist Research Group,” what does “research” mean? To judge from the Group’s meetings it means the accumulation of information about anarchism and anarchists. (The Bulletin also operates for the most part on this interpretation). At the last meeting, for example, John Moore delivered a highly informative talk on Perlman and the discussion… 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 »
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 »
We are now able to apply some of the results of the foregoing pages and describe in brief outline the main stages in the typical course of ideological development. In order to do this it will be convenient to choose the typical course of ontogenetic development, that is to say, the course of development pursued… read more »