What People Are Saying about The Anarchist Library

If the anarchist library had bookshop cafes all around the world where you could see archivists typing away digitizing old badly scanned books, printing them out, and filling the shelves with newly restored books, what do you think the visitor’s guestbook would look like? And what note would you leave? E.g. After a day of reading and sipping sugarcane juice on a balcony looking over the Mekong river.

Acknowledgements & Citations

Books

Oxford Bibliographies in Sociology by Lynette Spillman

The Anarchist Library specializes in contemporary anarchist writing, though it also holds historical texts: the collection is constructed by free, open subscription, and it is fast becoming the most significant repository for anarchist scholarship. The collection is mainly, but not exclusively, English language.

Tor Browser Handbook by S.K. Masterson

The Anarchism Library Mirror — Mirrors books from The Anarchist Library 4zeottxi5qmnnjhd.onion

Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives by Olga Castro, Emek Ergun

There have been two main trends in the translational dissemination of anarchist and anarcha-feminist writings: (1) translations of print-books, released mostly by alternative publishers and (2) more commonly, collective translations appearing online. Indeed, as Caroline Kaltefleiter notes, new technologies have played a particularly central role in facilitating cross-border dialogues of social justice along the lines of anarchism (2009, 225). Open access online publications, in particular, have become a key arena for anarchists, who fight for the abolition of intellectual property regulations since for most, “freedom of expression is impossible without the abolition of intellectual property laws” (Clement and Oppenheim 2003, 42). Rote Zora can either be bought for a very low price (€5) as a print copy or downloaded for free as a PDF from the Internet. Similarly, on the website of “The Anarchist Library”, all documents, both source texts and translations, can be downloaded in PDF format, “anti-copyright” stated at the end of each.

The Accumulation of Freedom: Writings on Anarchist Economics by Deric Shannon, Anthony J. Nocella II & John Asimakopoulos

[...] Malatesta suggested that people “meet, discuss, agree and differ, and then divide according to their various opinions, putting into practice the methods which they respectively hold to be the best,” so that “that method, which when tried, produces the best results, will triumph in the end.”² [...]

2. Errico Malatesta, Anarchy, theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Errico_Malatesta... (accessed October 26, 2011). Although this quote from Malatesta is from his original 1891 text, a better translation then that found in the Anarchist Library online appears in Charles Bufe, The Heretic’s Handbook of Quotations (Tucson: See Sharp Press, 2001). It is from this more recently published text that I quote Malatesta from for this chapter.

Future Primitive Revisited by John Zerzan

Much of anarcho-primitivism today, however small the milieu may be, seems to falling into the thrall of a simplistic ideology that pretends to have a global response to an unprecedented crisis in what it means to be human .... It is a kind of “clash of civilizations” idea that compresses a multiplicity of human experience into a binary opposition ... a reductionist legend in which primordial paradise is undermined by an ur-act of domestication.¹⁵ [...]

15. David Watson, “Swamp Fever, Primitivism and the ‘Ideological Vortex’: Farewell to All That,” in the Anarchist Library, theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/David_Watson... (1997).

The Politics of Attack by Michael Loadenthal

Propaganda of the deed carries with it the presumption that “the population bearing witness to these acts would both see the fallibility of power AND would rise up to fill this void” (Aragorn! 2009, 25). [...]

Stop the Machines by Mauro Lubrano

There has been much speculation about episodes in his life that might or might not have contributed to this increasing hostility. [...]

The Anarchist Turn in Twenty-First Century Leftwing Activism by John Markoff, Hillary Lazar, Benjamin S. Case and Daniel P. Burridge

The combination of favorable conditions with the direct participation and mentorship of veteran anarchists, many of whom had participated in Seattle, the Zapatista encuentros, or even decades earlier in New Left activism, injected an “anarchist DNA” into the mobilizations (Milkman et al. 2012; Williams 2012). As a result, there was an even greater deepening of shared commitment to horizontality, more inclusive participatory politics, and the establishment of prefigurative communities based on principles of mutual aid (Sitrin 2012; Williams 2012; Benski et al. 2013; Bray 2013; Schneider 2013; Graeber 2014; Hammond 2015).

Articles

Archival Parties and Parties to the Archive by Andrew Cornell

Interference Archive encourages visitors to become collaborators. Collective members invite guests who enjoy the collection to participate in biweekly “cataloguing parties,” where professionally trained librarians, volunteering their time, teach them to create standardized records of pieces in the collection in a convivial environment. Staffers also encourage researchers to scan or digitally photograph materials, with the caveat that they share copies of the files to be incorporated into the online catalog. This form of participatory digitization enacts another iteration of the “use is preservation” motto.⁷ [...]

7. This process of collaborative cataloging and digitization builds on earlier precedents. Radical organizers and educators have long recognized the power of information technology to make obscure political materials widely accessible. They have crafted a series of online repositories, including the Anarchy Archives, initiated by Pitzer College professor Dana Ward in 1996 (dwardmac. pitzer.edu), the Anarchist Library (theanarchistlibrary.org), multipurpose websites such as LibCom (libcom.org/library), and transitory “shadow libraries” of PDFs, such as AAARG (Artists, Architects, and Activists Reading Group). On the latter, see Jonathon Basile, “Who’s Afraid of AAARG? The Crisis of Academic Publishing and the Uncertain Future of the Humanities,” Guernica, August 25, 2016, https://www.guernicamag.com/jonathan-basile-whos-afraid-of-aaarg/.

The Content Analysis of the Georgian Left-wing Internet Publications by Giorgi Beridze

The study examines three Georgian leftist websites: the Anarchist Library, European.ge, and the Tbilisi Fabian Society. The Anarchist Library represents the interests of Georgian anarchists, while the other two have more social-democratic orientation. The research is relevant, because in recent years, the leftist groups from these internet platforms were the main participants of the frequent social protests. We can consider these websites as the tool for organization and the dissemination of ideas, and communication with broader society. [...]

The first post of the Anarchist Library dates back to January 2012. It is worth noting that this online publication has a Western counterpart, “The Anarchist Library”, where a huge archive is collected. It can be said that the Georgian Anarchist Library is the Georgian version of this publication.

About this library

We live in the age of the inflation of the word. Its presence is so ubiquitous, its quantity is so overwhelming that its value tends to be zero, carrying no meaning. Technology has made publishing easy and inflated. The idea this library is built upon is not to collect everything coming out from the internet, but instead to save from this deluge meaningful, purposeful, useful texts, texts with live ideas, texts which could be printed and which wouldn’t feel off on the tables of an anarchist distribution. The outcome of this endeavour is still unclear.

This project was forked from theanarchistlibrary.org by some substantial contributors embarrassed by what is being published there. The archive has been cleaned up, new texts are being added, the mess of topics sorted out as much as possible.

Aragorn!—Elegy for an Antagonist by Crimethinc

Among the most important resources he leaves to us is theanarchistlibrary.org, a far-reaching collection of anarchist texts. You can find a selection of his work there. A good starting place is his essay “Anarchy without Road Maps or Adjectives,” which still feels fresh today.

Intellectual Property is Theft by Luke Ray Di Marco Campbell

Many works are uploaded to websites like The Anarchist Library, which, though more specialised than being a Sci-Hub ‘PirateBay of Academia’, thus makes material freely available to all with access to the website (important caveats remaining about digital literacy, internet affordability, connectivity, and online censorship). The team operating The Anarchist Library ‘actively encourage the DIY printing and the distribution of the texts’, allowing folk to help others with access to these digital stored texts.

That The Anarchist Library is able to host multilingual collections (currently articles are offered in abour twenty-six languages, with dedicated libraries for many), circumvents an entire publishing industry that would seek to privatise, monopolise, and gain financially from the (re)distribution of these texts; ‘[m]onopoly consists in the attempt to make property of liberties, discoveries, sciences, and arts by a pretended or forced alienation’ (Walker, 1891).

A remaining barrier, however, is the reliance on individual or collective capacity to undertake this work voluntarily during one’s own time, as it’s incredibly rare for capitalist funders to back projects that don’t align with state ambitions (e.g. adaptations to state policy). Systemic change doesn’t match corporate ambition. Private ownership allows publishers to decide as and when to release material into new languages when – or if – new markets emerge, meaning that, as Gilles (2011) states, ‘the focus of investigation is largely determined from the top down in order to maximize short term benefits to those in power’. Consequently, speakers of languages without ‘enough market viability’ – and going from The Anarchist Library’s collections we might include Macedonian, Finnish, Tagalog, and Vietnamese among them – are either pressed to learn English or another language such as French, or face missing out on access entirely.

A Hell of a Mistress, the Beautiful Idea by Aragorn!

Q: Tech stuff hasn’t really come up in the story so far. So I’m really curious how you got on board with that.

A: I am utterly unimpressed with technology. I do it for a living. I’m a plumber. My vocation is technology, but almost everyone else we know became a techie because they love it, because this is who they are, this is what they’ve been waiting for. That’s absolutely not the case for me. I have always been clear about this. It’s one of the reasons why I’m not more known as a techie, because I just don’t care. If I’m not getting paid to do it, I don’t want to do it.

Q: Yet you ran Anarchist News, and The Anarchist Library, and et cetera.

A: If I were a plumber, I would fix your plumbing. To the extent to which I was discovering that I was a publisher, that I was a propagandist of anarchist ideas, someone had to step up. If my ideas were going to get treated fairly, it’s always been a matter of: I have the skills, therefore I’m doing the thing. But fundamentally, the thing that I do that’s my free offering to the anarchist space is plumbing. I’m not a particularly good graphic designer; I’m not a programmer. I’m a plumber. [...]

Q: So in the “media empire” in quotes, there’s the print publication, there’s the real time conversation, and then there’s the archival and research aspect. Can you talk about how The Anarchist Library came about?

A: Yeah. So again, I’m basically opposed to what’s called anarchist security culture. I believe that if anarchists want to build things together they have to meet each other. They can’t meet each other by Dukie McGee and secret hideout names. I mean, they can, but by and large, those relationships end up being ephemeral, because those names are ephemeral. And so for me, it’s always been important to be a person with a name and a history and, and to try to—I mean I’ve basically been desperately attempting to collaborate with people for two decades in the service of this media umbrella. So at one point I opened up a basically a chat server, inviting people to participate to talk about creating an archive that was going to replace Spunk, Anarchy Archives, and the scattered things that were around the world. My idea was really simple: just put ‘em all in one place and make sure that place lasts for a long time. And another person came in and they added a real incredible bonus feature, which was to do everything in this markup language called LaTeX. It’s a techie thing that’s really old, but what’s amazing about it is that it’s what allows you to submit a text and then the anarchist library to be able to output a PDF version of that text, a European PDF, an imposed PDF, an EPUB. That’s all because of what this other person brought to the project, and they just recently left it. Which is sad, but it happens. And it was after ten years, so.

Q: When you find the people that you collaborate with on any one of these different projects, are you mostly finding folks that you know face to face in the Bay Area, or people in a far-flung network that you correspond with online or whatever?

A: Far flung. And mostly, most anarchist projects over time boil down to one person. It sucks, it’s terrible, it’s horrible, and I wish I had intelligence on how to do it. Even in our publishing project, too few people do too much. And it’s why a ton of things slip through the cracks.

Dossier on Contemporary Anarchism by Felipe Corrêa

Certain initiatives have been very important. Physical databases, such as the Kate Sharpley Library, England [https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/]; the International Centre for Anarchist Research (CIRA), Switzerland [https://www.cira.ch/home]; the International Institute of Social History (IIHS), the Netherlands [https://iisg.amsterdam/en]; and virtual databases, such as the internet portals Libcom [https://libcom.org/], The Anarchist Library [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/special/index] and Zabalaza Books [https://zabalazabooks.net/]. Research institutes and networks, magazines and journals, academic groups and conferences. Examples of initiatives in this field are the Anarchist Studies Network (ASN) [https://anarchiststudiesnetwork.org/], its international conferences, as well as the journal Anarchist Studies [https://anarchiststudies.org/].

Understanding Resistance: An Introduction To Anarchism by Joshua Finnell and Jerome Marcantel

The Anarchist Library. With the aim of becoming the main digital library for anarchist texts, this collection currently consists of books, articles, stories, and essays. The collection may be keyword searched or browsed by title, topic, or author. New titles are added weekly as the library expands in scope and depth. Access: theanarchistlibrary.org.

Q&A with a Librarian of Southeast Asian Anarchist Library by thecollective

How did the idea to start the Southeast Asian Anarchist Library come about? How long did it take to get off the ground?

One of the librarians liked the idea of The Anarchist Library as a place to archive anarchist texts that are at risk of being lost to time and neglect. Indeed, being lost to time and neglect is also a problem for anarchist literature in Southeast Asia. Writings are haphazardly scattered across the internet and in selectively-printed zines. We feel a certain horror that such literature remains obscure, or worse, lost to time. So we asked the good librarians at The Anarchist Library for a Southeast Asian section last year. It generally did not take long to get started, but in the months since we started we now have hundreds of texts in multiple languages.

A Fair Question

It should be noted that, for 15 years before I signed a publishing contract with Eris Books, my translation of Resistance to Christianity was available for free on my website (notbored.org). The manuscript was also copied and pasted to several anarchist websites, including the Anarchist Library, by administrators who believed that their readers would also be interested in its contents and relevance to contemporary society.

As a result, I received dozens of emails from attentive and enthusiastic people who had questions, comments, and/or corrections, and so I was able to improve the manuscript as well as be reassured that there was an audience for it. Though I have done so before, I would like to take this opportunity to thank them all for the help I have received along the way.

Letter to the Editor by Marie Louise

In order to decide for oneself, it is best to read some of Goldman’s articles and books directly rather than accept anyone else’s interpretation of what she says. Her writings can be found in bookstores, libraries and on the internet, especially in the Anarchist Library at theanarchistlibrary.org/authors/emmagoldman where there are currently more than 40 articles and books available.

Anarchy: Deep in the Woods by Andy

It may be coincidence, but the closure of the blog seems to have been followed by the d0xxing of its alleged editor, ‘Abe Cabrera’ (details of which can be found on the 325 site), and the repudiation of the zine by some of those associated with it. The controversy over Atassa and ITS also appears to have resulted in a split among the admins of ‘The Anarchist Library’, which hosts a number of ITS writings. See : An Anarchist Librarian From North America / 10 Years Later, A Reflection And A Response / On An English Language Anarchist Library Project (August 28, 2018) | ‘About’, AnarchistLibraries.net.

Beats, Bums, and Buddhist Intellectuals by Gabriel Jessop-Smith

[...] Snyder is a popular poet and activist who has influenced the understanding of both Buddhism and environmentalism in the West. This article considers Snyder’s work as significant to the greening of Buddhism and the Easternization of the West (Campbell 1999). Countercultural anxieties about the frayed relationship between humans and nature led Westerners to search Eastern religions for alternative worldviews. Japanese intellectuals, namely D. T. Suzuki, presented Zen as a transcultural experience that could heal the human/nature divide. Snyder’s writings in the 1960s combined the Freudo-Marxian critique of industrial society with Suzuki’s transcultural Zen. Snyder’s Zen provides the blueprint for an ecologically conscious, community-based living; a formulation that would prove influential in the ensuing environmental movement. [...]

Culture-creating activities in the city space by Grażyna Ewa Karpińska

Space, in both its physical and symbolic dimensions, creates certain living conditions; it breeds potentials and limitations; it is explored, tamed and furnished, filled with layers of values and meanings; it is fashioned through human work. [...] Many scholars pointed to these characteristics of space, among them the socially sensitive Henri Lefebvre, who credited the city’s residents with a particular title to repossessing it, and thus also its spaces, through action, David Harvey, who proclaimed the right to the city, that is “a right to change and reinvent the city more after our hearts’ desire”, and stressed the shared decisiveness with respect to the surrounding space and the role of civic activity, especially in creating the common good, [...]

Videos

What Is Anarcho-Nihilism? by Anansi’s Library

The author of a text entitled Blessed is the Flame calls that feeling one receives when rejecting this tendency and enacting individualist, militant resistance as rosence if I’m pronouncing that correctly, which is French for delight, ecstasy, or joy.

Nihilism asks us to cut ourselves from any attachment to reproductive futurity. [...]

On Anarchist Anthropology by Erica Lagalisse

If the book is idealistic, it is also partly because of how David liked to work with the idea of the imagination and its power, for better or for worse, right? Which we can see, for example, in the essay, “Revolution in Reverse” which was originally published by RAG! [...]

Audio

The Anarchist Library talk at 2020 London Anarchist Bookfair by librarian

Reader: Brilliant. Yeah. OK. Last question plans for the future for the library, you said it’s been going 13 years. That’s a long time, 13 more? I mean what’s the plan?

Librarian: Yes, the plan is to stick around. We’re not going anywhere. You know, our as you mentioned, great friends passed away earlier this year, he was someone that provided the infrastructure and so many things for the project. So it took us a while, but we’ve gotten back on our feet here and I would say that the English language projects Library has never been more active than it has been in these last couple years currently. So we’re just going to keep on trucking as they say and no really big plans other than just; I was thinking about it would be really cool if there was like audio links to texts as well, or like an anarchist library audio that you could click on it and then you could hear like an MP3 or podcast of some text being read, something along those lines. Another thing too, like I mentioned earlier, but other languages if people are interested in your you know and you really want to put forth some time and become involved in like an online anarchist archival project. Yes, we can help you out and some know how the technical aspects and you know your project is otherwise autonomous from that and you can e-mail us at library at angrylists.com.

Anarchism in Gran Columbia by Andrew Sage & Garrison Davis

I actually recently read what is considered the first manifesto of anarchism, and it was written by this French anarchist named Anseel Bella Garide, and he was actually an individualist anarchist, and you're actually, in reading that end up seeing a lot of the influences that would later sort of develop further into anarchist individualism from the very beginning, you know, I highly recommend reading it.

It's called Anarchy a Journal of Order, it's available on the Anarchist Library. It's a surprisingly contemporary piece in my opinion. It was translated by Sean Wilbows, another anarchist scholar who I'm really inspired by lately, and it really gets into some of the ideas that I think we've forgotten in terms of what it takes to achieve the complete liberation of all people.

Comments on The Website Broadly

Praise

Origami_psych

The anarchist library is pretty well done. Clean, good enough search function, nice palette. Though the tag system could be a little better.

tigredepapel420

The anarchist library makes me so so happy, few movements are this willing and open to spread knowledge. Recently one of my friends started getting into radfem (I know) and she got on a discussion group at her school, she mentioned they had a very big and complete online library on feminism in general and when I asked her for a link to check it out, she mentioned that they do not share that kind of information to anybody, especially men, and I was astonished with that and made me appreciate anarchy even more.

QueenofMars321

I personally got into my theory through a Marxist pal of mine. Ended up reading quite a bit of Marx and enjoying him a bunch before getting into anarchism and falling in love with Malatestas work. I mainly read stuff from Marxists.org and the Anarchist Library. Both are fantastic resources. I would suggest Malatesta. His work Anarchy is quite good and I really like At the Cafe as well. Rudolf Rocker with Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice is fantastic as well. For Marx I would suggest starting with the manifesto and than taking a detour into Engels with Socialism: Utopian and Scientific before going into Critique of the Gotha Program. Good luck with your journey and hopefully this helped!

R2unit69

Libcom and the anarchist library are wonderful websites that archive an enormous amount of anarchic political thought and discussion. The Anarchist Library is really robust, has a lot of documents, speeches, pamphlets, plays, transcripts, manifestos, essays.

sisterofaugustine

There’s a reason one of the greatest anarchist sites online is called The Anarchist Library. Libraries are tools of the people. Librarians are keepers of knowledge, and so often, guardians of the weak, innocent, forgotten, and downtrodden.

TeddyArgentum

The Anarchist Library is a great and free archive of tons of socialist texts on all kinds of subjects. My personal recommendations would be An Anarchist Program by Errico Malatesta, Mutual Aid by Pyotr Kropotkin and My Disillusionment In Russia by Emma Goldman.

Critiques

Searching for Ecoterrorism by Sean Fleming

Some of the material in the Labadie Collection and the UNABOM Collection has been reproduced on websites, such Yahoo News and The Anarchist Library, without permission. Researchers should be wary of these reproductions not only for copyright reasons, but also because they may be inauthentic, incomplete, or inaccurately transcribed.

SnowyKnave

The Anarchist Library is a really good resource for learning about anarchy but it has archived lots of weird and terrible books/publications in the past. Sometimes this is corrected, sometimes not. Like there are other pretty terrible publications on there from Leninists, the PKK and fuck knows what else.

rechelon

Non-syndicalists reacted so violently to The Anarchist FAQ, saw it as such an existential threat, that many spent over a decade embracing the defensive response that it’s impossible to define anarchism and excluding anything (including fascists) from the tradition is tyranny.

I’ve spent more than my fair share of evenings ranting about the evils of Mckay’s FAQ and Black Flame. I fully recognize how horrible the partisan red historians are, but the opposite direction (muddying the historical waters to let literally anything in) was just as bad.

Aragorn repeatedly let national-anarchists into anarchist spaces, refused to expel them, and gave them a platform. From anti-politics to the brkeley study group to anews. This followed directly from his overall strategy to counter the reds by leaning into hyper inclusion.

This wasn’t just the project of one notoriously shitty person tho, it was a broadly embraced strategy. For example post-anarchist academics (who A! talked shit on) provided ideological justifications for refusing to draw lines or admit concrete points of unity.

Moreover there was a cornucopia of spurious historiographies of anarchism that tied together or laid claim to very different movements, that rewrote historical perspectives into modern vernaculars and theoretical frames they would have rejected, etc. All defensive widenings.

What’s frustrating about the terms of this debate is either you have to be the most inane and ahistorical red who excludes virtually everything from anarchism like incredibly important currents like primitivism and mutualism, OR you let everything in including absolute garbage.

When I was like “I dunno if people who openly identify as enemies of anarchists, tried to bomb an infoshop, and call for murdering billions of people should be called anarchists” folks responded with OUTRAGE and said “pretty cocky for a mutualist to say anyone’s not an anarchist”

It’s a completely poisonous dichotomy and it encourages the most extreme historical dishonesty, sweepingly writing off huge chapters of our shared history OR just outright lying and saying folks were anarchists when they explicitly rejected that term.

Anyway, in my mind the Anarchist Library is just as bad as the Anarchist FAQ. Both are repulsively centralized projects with core crews with strong ideological axes to grind attempting to construct a canonical movement in often underhanded ways.

If Black Flame and the FAQ’s main strategy was exclusion (although Iain cribbed metric tons directly from Kevin Carson), the Library’s underhanded maneuvering often comes through inclusion. Overly targeting some circles for inclusion while moving slower on others.

One of A!‘s standard games with inclusion was to 1) include the most provocative garbage like ITS to widen the overton window so his shit could sit pretty, but also 2) select the weakest examples from currents he was hostile to in order to serve as punching bags for mockery.

All of this was justified — and I mean in quite explicit terms directly to me repeatedly — because of the existential threat that are inane syndicalists who believe they can just sneeringly erase all other currents and traditions in anarchism.

“If you’re not with us, you’re against us” became the watchword of a powerful circle of people in the post-left, who at the very same time decried historical dishonesty and in-group rank-closing. The result was the attempted inclusion of “national anarchism” and “eco-extremism.”

I dunno how to best fight off the exclusionists who would reduce anarchism to three historical white guys and nothing else, but I damn well know the opposite direction, letting actual fullblown fucking fascists into our spaces because “definitions are fascist” is not a solution.

And I don’t know what the best solution is to centralized infrastructure like the AFAQ and AnarchistLibrary. It’s certainly not “just participate and contribute under the power of an entrenched core crew that steadfastly refuse to remove shit like ITS”

For all that the kids probably disagree with me and sometimes gobble up dishonest histories of shit from A!‘s broader circles, I think the distroism current is at least more in keeping with our decentralized values instead of One Big Repository.

AgainstSomeLogic

I have been reading some anarcho-communist writings and stuff from the anarchist library and the more I read the dumber it gets. Saying all crime is a result of heirarchies and capitalism so crime will not exist under anarchy and repeating for every ill of society is not terribly convincing.

Comments on Various Authors

Popular Authors

Aragorn!

Aragorn!—Elegy for an Antagonist by Crimethinc

Aragorn! helped to foster a variety of contentious currents in the anarchist milieu while critiquing each of them in turn. These include “post-left” anarchism (though he came to believe that “post-left” was an insufficient framework); green anarchism (though he criticized anarcho-primitivism); queer anarchism (he helped publish the Bash Back! Anthology, while suggesting that the authors did not realize that they had failed to escape the tractor beam of identity politics); the French current exemplified by Tiqqun, Appel, and The Coming Insurrection (though he charged that their US adherents were trying to start a cult); and insurrectionist anarchism of the Italian variety (though once again, he believed that US anarchists reduced it to its most superficial aspects). He paid to print a free newspaper collecting all the communiqués from the student occupation movement of 2009–2010 that set the stage for the Occupy movement, despite being critical of the new trend of “anti-state communism” exemplified therein.

A Requiem for Aragorn by Anonymous

Even if you didn't know him, if you've been engaged at all by anarchist writings, tendencies, or memes over the last few decades chances are Aragorn! was in part responsible for getting them to you.

Remembering Aragorn!: A Zine, a Video, and a Poem by CrimethInc.

Aragorn! could be a polarizing figure, but it is impossible to understand the contemporary US anarchist movement without recognizing his contributions.

Aragorn! A Provocation Even in Death

Aragorn!'s contribution to this site helped steer me into a life long love affair with anarchy. Thank you and we miss you still.

Cindy Milstein

The Ethical Anarchism of Cindy Milstein by Wayne Price

Cindy Milstein is a speaker and writer who is well-known to US anarchists. There seems to be hardly an anarchist conference or bookfair which she does not speak at and usually has been involved in organizing. Her rapid-fire speech is as well-known as her open-mindedness and friendliness to people from all trends within anarchism. She is also prominent as a former student of Murray Bookchin [...]

CrimethInc.

Rethinking Crimethinc. by W

The lack of any critical analysis and focus on spontaneity are serious shortcomings for crimethinc which lead me to believe they do not believe in revolution and are quite possibly happy to be the kids living on the “edge” of Capitalism, a system whose excess supports their drop-out lifestyles anyway. This would explain why crimethinc have no theory for revolution, how to build to overthrow this system and how to make sure that once we do we hold on to our gains, how to organise a post-revolutionary world so that we don’t repeat the failures of the CNT and other historical precedents. A spontaneous revolution leaves the working class no means to defend itself from reactionaries and state socialists. Crimethinc call for a revolution in everyday lifestyles and not life, they seek to define a subculture of individualists who care only about themselves and those immediately around them. A revolution of restless and spoiled middle class Americans that is contemptuous of workers and organised anarchists because in them they see the greatest threat to their bourgeois lifestyles.

David Graeber

Review of Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber by Wayne Price

David Graeber’s Debt, The First 5,000 Years, is an interesting and thought-provoking book. It is worth reading as a history of debt, credit, and money. However, it has a mistaken basic concept, that debt is at the center of human economics and society, generally downplaying the significance of human labor (which was correctly emphasized in Marx’s economic theory). For this reason, Graeber has a mistaken analysis of the Great Recession and the current economy. He presents a limited and nonrevolutionary vision of a post-capitalist future, quite in contrast to the revolutionary anarchist-communist (libertarian socialist) program of Kropotkin and others.

Emma Goldman

Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution by David Porter

As an official representative of the CNT-FAI during the revolution, Emma Goldman made three trips to Spain to observe first-hand the most thoroughgoing social revolution in history. Her selected writings not only chronicle the debates, fights, and revolutionary zeal of the Spanish Revolution, but provide a sophisticated dialogue concerning revolution and social change—a dialogue which activists will turn to again and again as we confront these same issues in our own times, under new circumstances.

Errico Malatesta

Top 10 Anarchists by Jon D. White

His most famous work is a pamphlet titled Anarchy, and he participated in the First International alongside Bakunin, with whom he was a close friend.

Recommended reading on anarchist society? forum thread

I've got much love for Malatesta, tho. Personally as an introduction I think Malatesta's "talk between two peasants" is pretty engaging and solid... the simple discussion between two men in a village has stuck with me more.

Iain McKay

Review of An Anarchist FAQ by Jon Bekken, Anarcho-Syndicalist Review

McKay and his fellow contributors have made a substantial contribution in creating and maintaining the online introduction to anarchism, and refutation of the endless objections of those who can not conceive of a society free of oppression and exploitation. It will serve as an invaluable reference to those unfamiliar with our ideas and our movement, or to those who have recently embraced anarchism but have yet to explore and reflect upon the tradition.

Review of Anarchist FAQ by Effluvia Magazine

A couple of years ago An Anarchist Frequently Asked Questions (AFAQ) migrated from the internet to a 555 page tome, put out by Effluvia favorites AK Press. Iain McKay’s excellent introduction elucidates the general goals and motivations of the project: to stand as a resource for those interested in anarchism and to convince people why they should become anarchists.

Kristian Williams

Review: Whither Anarchism? by Iain McKay

Kristian Williams [...] has been active in the American anarchist movement since the early 1990s and [is] the author of Between the Bullet and the Lie: Essays on Orwell [...]

Williams is right to note that the likes of Zerzan come from a non-anarchist position and surely Zerzan’s previous Marxism explains his position on technology – like Engels in “On Authority,” he sees technology and liberty as being incompatible and while Zerzan and Engels may embrace and reject the opposite options, they share the same (non-anarchist) analysis.

Peter Gelderloos

Peter Gelderloos Visits Boston by James Herod

I suspect that over time Anarchy Works will come to be known as one of the finest books ever written about anarchy. Its author, Peter Gelderloos, had been thinking about writing a book about what anarchy would look like, but then, in a slight shift of focus, thought it better to write first about what anarchy has looked like. So he scoured the historical and anthropological literature for examples of lived anarchy. Then he mined these case studies (around ninety altogether he says) for insights about the whole range of theoretical and practical problems facing anarchists, everything from crime to exchange to work. This is a book that is thoroughly grounded in reality, in actually existing anarchy, both past and present. It can be put on the shelf along side Colin Ward’s 1973 classic, Anarchy in Action, which was also based on existing concrete social practices. As the title suggests, the book is an attempt (and a successful one) to refute the oft-voiced objection: Anarchy could never work.

Peter Kropotkin

Kropotkin was no crackpot by Stephen Jay Gould

Kropotkin begins by acknowledging that struggle plays a central role in the lives of organisms and also provides the chief impetus for their evolution. But Kropotkin holds that struggle must not be viewed as a unitary phenomenon. It must be divided into two fundamentally different forms with contrary evolutionary meanings. We must recognize, first of all, the struggle of organism against organism for limited resources – the theme that Malthus imparted to Darwin and that Huxley described as gladiatorial. This form of direct struggle does lead to competition for personal benefit.

Saul Newman

Book Review: The Politics of Postanarchism by Leonard Williams

Newman’s understanding of postanarchism is largely elucidated through contrast. We learn, for example, that it does not share the Manichean, even reductionist assumptions of classical anarchism. We learn that postanarchism rejects both the essentialist ontology of Enlightenment thought and the rationalist prescriptions found in the Marxist tradition. Because of its non-foundational, contingent nature, though, it is not surprising that Newman does not entirely succeed when it comes to giving postanarchism any positive content. We know where to find postanarchism at work — in the space between society and state — but we do not quite know if it could be identified on sight. We might be able to pick it out of a line-up, but perhaps could not find it among the crowds on the streets. Some positive content for postanarchism can be found in the ideal of equal-liberty, a key notion for Newman; but for the most part, the concept is defined in straightforward, minimalist, even self-evident terms. It just is not discussed in any significant detail. To the extent that postanarchism appears as a utopianism, it would help us all to know a bit more about the direction in which we should head.

Uri Gordon

The Two Main Trends in Anarchism by Wayne Price

The broad anarchist tradition (class struggle anarchist-communism or Old School anarchism or whatever) has always been revolutionary. That is, its members have believed that the ruling class is extremely unlikely to give up power without resistance, a resistance which will center on its state. A vast movement of the oppressed and exploited must rise up and smash the state and dismantle the capitalist economy and all other forms of oppression. These must be replaced by new forms of popular self-organization and self-management. This does not contradict the struggle for present-day reforms and improvements, but sets a strategic end-goal.

Gordon is typical of the New School anarchists (or whatever) in that he rejects such a revolutionary approach. Traditional anarchists, he writes, used to argue about a how to organize society after a revolution. “Today, in contrast, anarchist discourse lacks both the expectation of eventual revolutionary closure...” or interest in visions of a post-revolutionary society (Gordon 2008; p. 40). Further, “anarchists today do not tend to think of revolution — if they even use the term — as a future event but rather as a present-day process...” (p. 41). Instead of changing all society, which may or may not be possible, he writes, anarchists should promote “anarchy as culture” which may include large events but also “fleeting moments of nonconformism and carefree egalitarianism” (same). Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zones are cited, which, he says, might include a “quilting bee” or “dinner party”.

Controversial Authors

Abdullah Ocalan

Imprisoned Kurdish PKK founder whose later writings, developed from a prison cell in Turkey and influenced by Murray Bookchin, advocate “democratic confederalism” — a model of stateless, directly democratic self-governance implemented in Rojava (northern Syria) that draws on, but is distinct from, classical anarchism.

sadeofdarkness

All in all honesty this mostly reads as Ocalan inheriting Bookchins hang ups with anarchists, the last two definitely read as the ghost of a bitter man who was pissed that his municipal system of democracy was rejected by anarchists, who he saw fit to first label as “lifestylists” in contrast to a social anarchism which would be foreign to every social anarchists before abandoning anarchism as a label all together.

Alfredo Bonanno

Italian insurrectionist anarchist whose The Anarchist Tension and Armed Joy remain foundational for insurrectionist and nihilist-adjacent currents, translated and circulated widely through outlets like Elephant Editions.

Siddiq Khan

There are a few obviously stupid excesses which explain why its publication got the author imprisoned (there is a line that literally says “hurry comrades, shoot the cop, shoot the judge” — how he could write that in his own name and not expect to get fucked over I have no idea, because he is clearly a very intelligent guy) but on the whole it reads like something uncannily close to an accessible repackaging of situationist ideas, without ever mentioning the term. The concept of the spectacle is very heavily drawn on in that book, as is the emphasis on joy and play as a central factor in revolt, the critique of the militant role, the rejection of work, vanguardism, quantity over quality, etc, etc. Also, he is very funny.

Bring out your dead by Endnotes

It should be noted that something like a communisation thesis was arrived at independently by Alfredo Bonanno and other ‘insurrectionary anarchists’ in the 1980s. Yet they tended to understand it as a lesson to be applied to every particular struggle. As Debord says of anarchism in general, such an idealist and normative methodology ‘abandons the historical terrain’ in assuming that the adequate forms of practice have all been found (Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Rebel Press, 1992), § 93 p.49). Like a broken clock, such anarchism is always capable of telling the right time, but only at a single instant, so that when the time finally comes it will make little difference that it is finally right.

Critical Notes on Developments in the Anarchist Movement by Matthew Crossin

If insurrectionary anarchists – tired of endless riots, and disoriented by the return of organising on the shop floor – can bring themselves as far as Bonanno’s best work, perhaps they can also allow themselves to concede that the mass-anarchist tradition is something worth reviving.

Let the affinity group stick around; think together about the world and how to change it; write down your ideas and share them with comrades; talk with your co-workers about how to act against the boss; spread news of struggle everywhere; recognize where our power is within capitalist society, and use that power.

Professional anarchy and theoretical disarmament: On insurrectionism by Miguel Amorós

We say that the revolution in societies based on class antagonism will be carried out by the oppressed masses, rather than by formal or informal minorities. The organization will be the one that is produced by the social struggles, rather than one that is the product of activist voluntarism or propaganda. If the times are not mature this is because there are no conscious mass movements. For a lack of anything better one does what one can, but the absence of massive struggles can never be compensated for by activism on the part of a handful of groups. A strategic defense must consist in organizing the theater of the social war for the purpose of fighting the class enemy. This means liberating spaces for the development of consciousness in the masses; in other words, for the emergence of autonomous struggles. In a contrary sense, activism not only replaces these struggles but sets itself up as their radical spectacle, which is why, rather than assisting the resurgence of revolutionary protest, it lays the ground-work for its disarticulation. The incredible confusion of the insurrectionist theses was not acceptable, but the inconsistency and superficiality of these analyses never bothered Bonanno, who was possessed by a desire for action that he knew how to transmit to those anarchists disillusioned with the inactivity of the traditional organizations. These anarchists had become followers of his ideas in spite of all logic, since logic was not exactly his most characteristic means of attracting followers. Insurrectionism made headway in certain youth milieus not because of its lucidity or its theoretical superiority. Nor was its impact in these milieus the result of the efficacy of its actions, which were often seasoned with the bitter gall of prison and personal tragedy; much less was it due to its having transformed Bonanno’s Mediterranean prophecy into a reality. The reasons for its relative success were of a psychological nature: for those who want action, it gave them action. Action was a kind of emotional discharge.

Ausonia Calabrese

Pen name (initials T.F.G.) attached to an obscure, occult-inflected anti-civilization zine that frames cannibalism as a critique of capitalism before veering into literal advocacy, prompting controversy over its place in anti-civ and post-left circles.

thejuryissleepless

ok at first I thought it was a bit the author was doing! you know, funny anarchists posting jokes on the library. classic! then upon first reading, it seemed like this is not actually about defending cannibalism but using cannibalism as a lens to understand capitalism and civilization. how could we justify this world where we must figuratively eat each other to survive “as civilized people” but make taboo a more literal type of cannibalism?

alas — upon arriving at the final “chapter” in this zine is just saying that cannibalism is a true spiritual connection to nature we lost with civilization. goes to show you can take any political theory and bend it to resolve your own distorted version of the world.

when I was very into anticiv, around the time DESERT was making wide circulation, I saw a controversy in anarchyland around the publishing of atassa and the “organization” ITS defend the r*pe and murder of anarchists in their communities in Mexico.

there’s a certain aspect of political action and theory that you can see a tendency take on extremes that shed the ethics that spurned it. an anarchist could become an authoritarian, and vise-verse (not some overton window or horseshoe theory but a linear trajectory where someone sheds their ethics as they attempt to apply their ideals to the world).

with anticiv, most people describe it as a tendency of anarchism or the post-left where an analysis of civilization is central to the ethics applied in anarchism (praxis, direct action, etc). however, like all of these political theories, people can just cherry pick and call it whatever. we have “anarcho”-capitalists, we have MAGA Communists, and we have (likely) a single anticiv cannibal now. it’s good to remember that the exception does not define the rule.

and of course this author, Ausonia Calabrese (T.F.G), writes from a place of obscure, almost occult type of theory.

Bob Black

American individualist anarchist and essayist best known for “The Abolition of Work,” a polemic calling for the elimination of work as such; a frequent and combative figure in post-left anarchist debates, with a long history of public feuds and a widely circulated 1996 incident in which he informed on a fellow writer to police.

In Defense of Bob Black by Aragorn!

Bob has never had an ally (or accomplice in the modern vernacular) as he made it structurally impossible for anybody to be (or become) one. There are many private examples of how this looked in practice but it’s an obvious point that if you are fighting for your interpretation of the singular right and correct position anyone who would join you has to convince you that they think the same way that you do and for the same reasons.

Bob’s life is a series of breaks from limited collaborations that is not disconnected from the Stirnerite postulation about organization only lasting as long as the participants in it gain satisfaction in that arrangement. Bob’s innovation, if it could be called that, was to (mostly) set fire to any possibility of future collaboration by way of personal insults and public declarations of acrimony. Let’s call this practice “angry egoism,” which can only be ameliorated by its target bending knee, thereby placing future collaboration on the unstable base of an explicit power-over relationship.

And these dysfunctions ultimately rise from the fact that every battle, every idea, and every break happened for Bob alone. He has had lovers and temporary friends but largely his life was one lived alone, with no voice cautioning consequences or suggesting a different pacing, no daily consultations in bed. The only voice in his head was his, amplified by a Debordesque diet of spirits.

The Elephant in the Room by narcissus

Yet, we must ask why many other reactionary texts remain on the Library’s catalogue for reasons we cannot guess. Take, for example [...] Bob Black’s “Feminism as Fascism,” which describes rape as something feminists “insist has been inflicted on them (or rather, as it usually turns out, on some other suppositious ‘sister’: the typical radical feminist has it pretty good)” — the implication being that feminists’ claims about rape are fabricated, the victims “suppositious.” [...] [A]nd it is our personal experience that, (as usual when anarchists reject this style of pseudo-radical top-down oppressive rhetoric, especially misogynistic, transphobic, and adult-supremacist rhetoric,) those who see it as a problem are sneeringly dismissed as moralists, hysterical prudes, and so on.[1] [...]

Sea Sharp Press

The following is a photocopy of the narcing letter that “citizen informant” attorney Bob Black (Robert C. Black, author of the aptly titled — given his “job” — “The Abolition of Work”) sent to the Seattle Police on February 21, 1996 informing on author Jim Hogshire. This letter was reproduced on page 17 of the Fall 1996 Loompanics Unlimited Supplement. (Loompanics was Jim Hogshire’s publisher, and also was, until this disgraceful incident, Black’s publisher; following this incident, they dropped Bob Black and pulped his books.)

rechelon

blah blah if morality was objective everyone would arrive at the same conclusion with a little thought

This line of argument is always so flagrantly bullshit and lazy. It’s very easy to understand that there are laws of physics or structural relationship in math that can’t be determined with just a “little thought” but are nevertheless objective in the sense of reflecting deep structures in material reality. If anti-moralists actually read ethical philosophy rather than skimming some corners of it like Bob has, they’d realize many folks in many different traditions regularly make the argument that the amount of thought, reflection, study, etc, necessary to arrive at the objective conclusions they believe are accurate are too extensive for anyone to really have arrived at before. And indeed many argue that it’s quite plausible morality is objective but we would need infinite intelligence and time beyond what frail homo sapiens have to reach it conclusively.

Bob could scoff at the idea that there are objectively emergent value structures in minds the same way that there are objectively emergent models those minds make of the physical universe, but for him to reject claims on the premise that “if it was objective everyone could easily grasp it” is to entirely miss what objectivity means and also to banish huge sections of modern science and math as not objective merely because they’re non-trivial.

Informal Anarchist Federation

Loose-knit insurrectionist tendency (FAI, also FAI/IRF when linked with the International Revolutionary Front) emerging in Italy and Mexico in the late 2000s, carrying out bombings and shootings against nuclear, state, and corporate targets; noted for its decentralized "informal" structure of autonomous affinity-group cells acting without central coordination.

The Anarchist Federation statement on the kneecapping of a nuclear executive perpetrated by the Informal Anarchist Federation by Anarchist Federation

On the 11^th of May Roberto Adinolfi, CEO of an Italian state controlled nuclear engineering company, was shot and wounded. A cell of the insurrectionist Informal Anarchist Federation have claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement, saying that it was an act of vengeance for deaths and environmental damage caused by the nuclear industry. Previous acts claimed by Informal Anarchist Federation cells include sending a letter bomb to the Italian tax collection office, almost blinding a worker at the office* and risking the lives of the postal and clerical workers who unwittingly carried the bomb. …

In our aims and principles, the Anarchist Federation states that “It is not possible to abolish Capitalism without a revolution, which will arise out of class conflict. The ruling class must be completely overthrown to achieve anarchist communism. Because the ruling class will not relinquish power without their use of armed force, this revolution will be a time of violence as well as liberation”. We are not a pacifist organisation and do not condemn insurrection itself or all insurrectionist tactics; however, as Anarchist Communists we strongly criticise individualist and vanguardist tactics that do not come out of a broad-based class struggle movement. We condemn actions that put workers in danger without their knowledge and consent, and we reject elitist statements, such as that made by the Informals, which consider the working class to be too ignorant and invested in Capitalism to be relevant to struggle.

Capitalism is, fundamentally, a social relationship; it can no more be harmed by small groups who are disconnected from the wider class struggle shooting individual bosses or sending bombs through the post than it can by passively marching from one place to another or consuming “ethical” commodities. Instead, the Anarchist Federation advocates organising with other working class people to take direct action for ourselves in order to both defend ourselves against attacks by capital and the state in our everyday lives and build a culture of resistance that can seriously challenge capitalism. As well as being tactically more effective than isolated acts of violence, organising in this way allows us a glimpse of a better world, free of exploitation, alienation and oppression. By acting collectively and making ourselves accountable to others, we prepare ourselves for a world where our whole lives are really under our own control.

Say You Want an Insurrection by CrimethInc

If we have never called ourselves insurrectionists, it is not because we do not wish for insurrection, but because our own temperament predisposes us to an anarchism without adjectives. The important thing is to fight for freedom and against hierarchy; we imagine that this will demand different approaches in different situations, and that these approaches may need one another to succeed. We are anarcho-syndicalists on the shop floor, green anarchists in the woods, social anarchists in our communities, individualists when you catch us alone, anarcho-communists when there’s something to share, insurrectionists when we strike a blow.

Anarchism without adjectives not only refuses to prioritize one approach over the others, but emphasizes the importance of each aspect of anarchism to its supposed opposites. The riot needs the bake sale to be repeatable; the arson needs the public campaign to be intelligible; the supermarket heist needs the neighborhood grocery distribution to pass on the goods.

All dichotomies are false dichotomies to some extent, masking not only the common threads between the terms but also the other dichotomies one might experiment with instead. On close inspection, successful insurrectionism seems to depend so much on “community building” and even “lifestyle anarchism” as to be virtually indistinguishable in practice. If we retired this particular distinction, what other distinctions might arise in its place? What other questions might we ask?

All this is not to say that individual anarchists can’t focus on their particular skills and preferred strategies—simply that it is an error to frame anyone’s personal preferences as universals. In the end, as always, it comes down to a question of which problems you want to wrestle with, which shortcomings you feel most equipped to overcome. Do you prefer to struggle against invisible hierarchies in informal networks, or brave the stultifying inertia of formal organizations? Would you rather risk acting rashly, or not acting at all? Which is more important to you, security or visibility—and which do you think will keep you safer in the long run?

We can’t tell anyone which problems to choose. We can only do our best to outline them. Best of luck in your insurrections—may they intersect with ours.

Eco-Extremists

A current associated with the group Individualidades Tendiendo a lo Salvaje (ITS), which carried out bombings and killings in Mexico and Chile beginning in the early 2010s, framing indiscriminate attacks as a nihilistic rejection of civilization partly inspired by, and later critical of, Ted Kaczynski.

The Elephant in the Room by narcissus

Yet, we must ask why many other reactionary texts remain on the Library’s catalogue for reasons we cannot guess. Take, for example [...] the communiques of ITS,[2] a group heavily criticized by anarchists for claiming credit for the femicide of 22-year-old Lesvy Rivera, promoting rape and reveling in misogyny, and even attempting to bomb an anarchist squat.[3] [...] [A]nd it is our personal experience that, (as usual when anarchists reject this style of pseudo-radical top-down oppressive rhetoric, especially misogynistic, transphobic, and adult-supremacist rhetoric,) those who see it as a problem are sneeringly dismissed as moralists, hysterical prudes, and so on. [...]

Clay

Eight communiques (plus a brief note) over three years from Mexico. Things would never be the same again.

It’s psychologically interesting reading, seeing a group of people so slavishly invested in one person’s philosophy:

“Many parts of the group’s communiqués are merely paraphrases of [Ted K’s] Manifesto: ‘The essence of the power process has four parts: setting out of the goal, effort, attainment of the goal, and Autonomy’.”

I think they reflect Ted K when he was at his most hopeless, trying to bomb airplanes out the sky because of how annoyed he was by the noise of them flying over where he lived:

“Ted in prison has argued to the extent they are organising with others they should be working to bring about a primitivist revolution in going after riskier targets like electricity grid stations. But it’s almost as if ITS feel being able to do random attacks is what’s owed to them by being free and that to listen to Ted now would be helping serve his needs as a theorist from prison, to the detriment of their own desires.”

Further reading: Ted Kaczynski’s Various Ethical & Political Flirtations

A text dump on wildism

I do not understand how you can “reject” physics or other such things. Clearly these things are at least mostly accurate, or else they wouldn’t work as well as they do. And I suspect that if you truly “reject” them, meaning you do not accept them as true at all, you may turn out to be like the indigenous people who believed in “Ghost Shirts.” Consider an excerpt from a letter I responded to when I was editor of The Wildernist:

I’m always reminded of the story of the Ghost Dance, which was a religious movement that some Native Indians adopted in the late 1800s. It stemmed from a prophecy by the messianic spiritual leader Wovoka, who preached that if the “Ghost Dance” was done just right, the spirits of the dead would fight on behalf of the Natives and make the colonists leave. Part of this was a belief that the dancers had “ghost shirts” that would protect them from bullets. I’ve heard a radical environmentalist actually say— actually say—that this was an example of their spiritual superiority, their “oneness with the Earth.” Apparently she hadn’t heard the end of the story, because in 1890 soldiers opened fire on Natives at Wounded Knee, and the ghost shirts did not, in fact, protect the two hundred plus individuals who died that day. The only “oneness with the Earth” they ended up experiencing was the oneness of their corpses with ashes and dust.

The moral of the story isn’t, “Ha! Look at those ignorant Natives.” To the contrary, Wovoka-ish mysticism has played out plenty enough times throughout history for us to know that humans just seem to be prone to these sorts of things. The moral of the story is, however, that radical environmentalist talk of “the inarticulable,” “oneness with Nature” and other such gobbley-gook is very likely or at least prone to becoming yet another example. So far I’ve seen no other tools able to combat this better than science and reason.

Edward Abbey

American writer and self-described anarchist best known for the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang and the essay collection Desert Solitaire, both touchstones for radical environmentalism and Earth First!-style direct action; his legacy is contested due to his expressed anti-immigration views.

rechelon

Reminder that Edward Abbey was virulently racist trash. His “anarchism” was shallow and inane, and venerating his influence only prevents environmental and green circles from expunging the dark legacy haunting them.

Desert Solidarity by Max Granger

Abbey was eerily prescient in his assessment that “…most of the border could be easily ‘sealed;’ a force of 20,000, or ten men per mile, properly armed and equipped, would have no difficulty—short of a military attack—in keeping out unwelcome intruders.” In the early 90s, the number of Border Patrol agents nationwide totaled about 4,000. In 2009, that number had grown fivefold, to 20,119. Since then, it has hovered steadily at around 20,000, with about 85% of all agents stationed along the southwest border. It’s difficult to imagine Abbey applauding as thousands of armed federal police occupy a beautiful desert wilderness, but perhaps his fear of the “Latino invasion,” as he put it, surpassed his distaste for the “technological military industrial planetary superstate” that he frequently and fervently condemned. In a letter published in the New York Review of Books in 1981, Abbey put it bluntly: “[T]he tendency of mass immigration from Mexico is to degrade and cheapen American life downward to the Hispanic standard.”

Continuing along the western slope of the mountains, we find four or five partial human skeletons at different points throughout the afternoon. White human skulls, bleached from the sun. Other bones scattered around. Pieces of clothing. Backpacks, blanched and brittle. We mark the location of what we find with plastic orange flagging, log the GPS coordinates, then continue on. When we get back to town, we will call the sheriff’s office and report what we have found. We will follow up with the police to ensure that they collect the remains and transfer them to the Pima County Medical Examiner, who, with the help of the nonprofit Colibrí Center for Human Rights, will attempt to identify the deceased and notify their families.

Friedrich Nietzsche

19^th-century German philosopher not himself an anarchist and explicitly hostile to anarchism in his writing, but whose concepts of ressentiment, will to power, and critique of slave morality have been taken up by post-anarchist and individualist theorists, including Saul Newman.

Anarchism and the politics of ressentiment by Saul Newman

Nietzsche sees anarchism as poisoned at the root by the pestiferous weed of ressentiment — the spiteful politics of the weak and pitiful, the morality of the slave. Is Nietzsche here merely venting his conservative wrath against radical politics, or is he diagnosing a real sickness that has infected our radical political imaginary?

The Surre(gion)alist Manifesto and Other Writings by Max Cafard

Even a cursory survey of Nietzsche’s works reveals that the term “anarchist” is for him invariably a term of abuse. He sees anarchism as one of the most baneful expressions of that psychic malaise called ressentiment, and a symptom of modern society’s grave and perhaps terminal illness — destructive nihilism. What better friend could anarchists possibly wish for than this brilliant and uncompromising enemy?

Georges Palante

Early 20^th-century French philosopher and sociologist of individualism, largely forgotten until his rediscovery and championing by Michel Onfray; argued for an irreconcilable antagonism between the individual and society, with friendship and irony as the individual’s last defenses.

Aristocratic Individualism by Georges Palante & Michel Onfray

Against Nietzsche, for example, he would argue, from his Précis de sociologie onward, and later in Combat pour l’individu, for the possibility of combining aristocratization with socialism. At the time, he believed socialism could provide the best conditions for each singular life, that it could be the condition of possibility for individualism, its revealer, its best medium. The First World War, in all likelihood, if not the deepening of his own pessimism, would put an end to this conviction, and he would move toward a social atheism which, without tipping into nihilism, would assert the radical irreducibility of the antinomy between the individual and society: politics, left and right alike, is the realm of herd instinct and number, ever the enemy of individuals. Life, the world’s, certainly, but also his own, would lead him to despair of any possible collective or political solution to the question of the individual.

What is left to the individual, then? Elective and antisocial virtues. Friendship and irony, for instance. Friendship, because it is a principle of affinities, of choice. With it, one builds a micro-society whose laws are consideration, delicacy, attentiveness, hedonism. Against a society that is coarse, vulgar, brutal, heavy, and thick, friendship wards off solitude on the terrain of a contract whose terms are pleasure for one another, pleasure through one another. Philia draws close, while irony draws away: holding things at a distance, exploding social machinery, group lies, communal myths. Through irony, gregarious monuments come apart, holistic logics unravel. The ironist practices eviction with virtuosity. Where friendship is an invitation to a voluptuous contract, irony is propaedeutic to the rupture of the social bond. So that the individual is left, with these two weapons, with levers to move, to shift the world, and to make a place for himself within it. If possible.

Hakim Bey

Full name: Peter Lamborn Wilson

American writer best known for coining the concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (T.A.Z.); also documented, including by anarchist critics cited below, as having defended adult-child sexual contact in his writing and reportedly preyed on children.

The Left Overs: How Fascists Court the Post-Left by Alexander Reid Ross

[...] an occultist named Hakim Bey developed the idea of the “Temporary Autonomous Zone” (TAZ). For Bey, a TAZ would actualize a liberated and erotic space of orgiastic, revolutionary poesis. Yet within his 1991 text, Temporary Autonomous Zone, Bey included extensive praise for D’Annunzio’s proto-fascist occupation of Fiume, revealing the disturbing historical trends of attempts to transcend right and left. …

Thus, the post-left began to assemble through the writings of ultra-leftists, green anarchists, spiritualists, and egoists published in zines, books, and journals like Anarchy: Journal of Desire Armed and Fifth Estate. Although these thinkers and publications differ in many ways, key tenets of the post-left included an eschatological anticipation of the collapse of civilization accompanied by a synthesis of individualism and collectivism that rejected left, right, and center in favor of a deep connection with the earth and more organic, tribal communities as opposed to humanism, the Enlightenment tradition, and democracy. That post-left texts included copious references to Stirner, Nietzsche, Jünger, Heidegger, Artaud, and Bataille suggests that they form a syncretic intellectual tendency that unites left and right, individualism and “conservative revolution.” As we will see, this situation has provided ample space for the fascist creep. …

An important aspect of the Anti-Politics Board was the articulation of nihilist and insurrectionary theories, both of which gained popularity after the 2008 financial crisis. In an article titled, “The New Nihilism,” Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey) pointed out that the rising wave of nihilism that emerged during the late 2000s and into the second decade could not immediately be distinguished from the far right, due to myriad cross-over points. Indeed, Stormfront is riddled with users like “TAZriot” and “whitepunx” who promote the basic, individualist tenets of post-leftism from the original, racist position of Stirnerism. Rejecting “political correctness” and “white guilt,” these post-left racists desire separate, radical spaces and autonomous zones for whites.

Spencer Beswick

In May-July 1989, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed published a ‘Special issue on children’s sexuality’ beginning with ‘Pedophilia: Views from the other side.’ This sparked years of articles and letters defending sex with children (read: rape) from editors and regular contributors.

This reflects a wing of the anarchist movement that has long defended the ‘freedom’ of people (usually men) to assault children using anarchist language.

I’ve been thinking about this since Hakim Bey/Peter Lamborn Wilson died a few months ago. As an expose of him put it years ago, Bey “uses anarchism in an ethically warped, opportunistic way by pretending that adult-child sex is a natural freedom.” (libcom.org)

When Bey died, I was doing research at the University of Michigan’s Labadie Collection. I read through numerous issues of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed from the 1980s-90s and was shocked to see how central and prevalent the defense of sex with children (rape) was. One anarchist who lived in NYC in the 90s told me that it was an open secret that Hakim Bey preyed on young boys, and that parents warned each other to watch out for him. This is usually left out of his history, and of the history of anarchism in general.

Needless to say, this is a shameful aspect of the anarchist movement which should be ruthlessly exposed, criticized, and rejected. It calls into question the entire political and ethical approach of this wing of the anarchist movement. I refuse to defend or associate with it.

Paedophilia and American anarchism by Robert P. Helms

In this writer’s opinion, the pedophile writings of Hakim Bey indicate a general deceit in his philosophy, and are evidence that his concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone is inspired by opportunism, not by good will. He presents arguments for human freedom while actually wishing to create situations where he is free to put his deranged sexuality into practice. This is an abuse of anarchism, and new readers of Hakim Bey should take the pedophilia into consideration before being led “down the garden path.” Once the awkwardness has been overcome and we look at pedophilia as an item for discussion, we will make very short work of it. All attempts to justify the practice are morally idiotic, and the TAZ is no more than a “Neverland” on the anarchist landscape.

Leaving Out the Ugly Part — On Hakim Bey by Robert P. Helms

Bey’s best-known book Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) describes spiritual zones in which anything goes, where the oppressive rules of the outside society need not interfere with what feels good to do. I realise that many honest people have read TAZ without taking any sleazy impression from it. I hope they’ll forgive me for pointing out that paedophiles say these same things to children. In his essay “Obsessive Love” (Moorish Science Monitor, Vol. 7, #5, Summer 1995), in which he pretends to be quite the classical scholar, he talks about ancient religious views on romantic and obsessive love. “The Greco-Egypto-Islamic ferment adds a pederastic [i.e. paedophile] element... the ideal woman of romance is neither wife nor concubine but someone in the forbidden category...” He uses the term “spiritual alchemy” for witnessing the “Devine Beloved in certain beautiful boys,” and remarks that, “since all homosexuality is forbidden in Islamic law, a boy-loving sufi has no ‘safe’ category for sensual realisation.”

Hostis

A theory journal and small publishing project associated with insurrectionary and queer anarchist currents, notable for the anthology Queer Ultraviolence and its framing of vengeance as a political practice distinct from liberal accountability or restorative justice models.

Letter to the Editor

Shortly after the publication of the anthology, a rather opaque and short debate played out within the anarchist milieu around the question of vengeance. If we are dissatisfied with the depth of the appraisal of the question, we are all the more grateful for your effort to raise it again. Some critics of the anthology were concerned with the emergence of a ‘politics of vengeance’ and saw in it a repackaging of the old ideas of ‘justice’ and ‘accountability.’ We tend to see this reading as overly simplistic, willfully conflating vengeance with that which would mediate it. Perhaps much of this misreading might have to do with the shift from a ‘praxis of vengeance’ (as gestured toward by the texts in Queer Ultraviolence) and the ‘politics of vengeance’ feared by its critics. If we conceive of vengeance, like you, as the destruction of what destroys us, then in what way is this conception undermined by the subtle shift from ‘praxis’ to ‘politics’? How could a praxis of vengeance evade the traps of accounting or the specter of justice? Could we enact it otherwise?

John Jacobi

Founder of the Wildist Institute, advancing “wildism” — a current distinct from anarcho-primitivism that draws on sociobiology to argue for organized opposition to industrial civilization while rejecting the primitivist “noble savage” framing of pre-civilized life.

rechelon

One of the things I appreciated about John Jacobi of the Wildist Institute was he got explicit about valuing rocks more than humans. Humans chiseling away at rocks creates “artifice” which is bad and the opposite of “wilderness”, human agency must be suppressed to save the rocks.

Wildism: The Nasty End-Game of Primitivism by Anonymous

Wildists are essentially conservative and scientifically informed primitivists. They believe that all the same things that primitivists and anti-civvers believe: leftism is bad, we should all live closer to nature, civilization must be destroyed. Their differences are enough to warrant a separate name, however. They focus on industry far more than the normal primitivist does, they do not hide their reactionary conservatism, they rely on sociobiology and other biologically reductionist ideologies for their theory, and they are unabashed about proposing an organized effort against industry in the same vein as the Russian Revolution. They also seem to suffer from the same problems as DGR if DGR was less tied to traditional activist causes. (They could NOT be called primitivists.)

Jacobi puts it this way: although the primitivists want mostly the same things, they want them for different reasons, or “on the basis of different values.” Primitivists tend to rely on the myth of the noble savage, but wildists, who derive their knowledge of indigenous lifeways from the sociobiologists and ethologists, believe that indigenous people were violent and patriarchal, but still advocate returning to that way of life.

John Zerzan

Leading voice of anarcho-primitivism. Future Primitive, Running on Emptiness, and Twilight of the Machines argue that civilization, symbolic culture, and even language and time-consciousness are root sources of domination.

The Politics of Postanarchism by Saul Newman

Where Zerzan’s argument becomes problematic is in the essentialist notion that there is a rationally intelligible presence, a social objectivity that is beyond language and discourse. To speak in Lacanian terms, the prelinguistic state of jouissance is precisely unattainable: it is always mediated by language that at the same time alienates and distorts it. It is an imaginary jouissance, an illusion created by the symbolic order itself, as the secret behind its veil. We live in a symbolic and linguistic universe, and to speculate about an original condition of authenticity and immediacy, or to imagine that an authentic presence is attainable behind the veils of the symbolic order or beyond the grasp of language, is futile. There is no getting outside language and the symbolic; nor can there be any return to the pre Oedipal real. To speak in terms of alienation, as Zerzan does, is to imagine a pure presence or fullness beyond alienation, which is an impossibility. While Zerzan’s attack on technology and domestication is no doubt important and valid, it is based on a highly problematic essentialism implicit in his notion of alienation.

To question this discourse of alienation is not a conservative gesture. It does not rob us of normative reasons for resisting domination, as Zerzan claims. It is to suggest that projects of resistance and emancipation do not need to be grounded in an immediate presence or positive fullness that exists beyond power and discourse. Rather, radical politics can be seen as being based on a moment of negativity: an emptiness or lack that is productive of new modes of political subjectivity and action. Instead of hearkening back to a primordial authenticity that has been alienated and yet which can be recaptured – a state of harmony which would be the very eclipse of politics – I believe it is more fruitful to think in terms of a constitutive rift that is at the base of any identity, a rift that produces radical openings for political articulation and action.

A Quick and Dirty Critique of Primitivist & Anti-Civ Thought by William Gillis

We have the capacity not just to avert global warming and ocean acidification but to reclaim the Sahara and restore the megafauna that hunter gatherers killed off. (Contrary to the myth that primitive peoples were somehow aware of ecological externalities beyond their immediate contexts, recent global statistical analyses have conclusively settled that hunter gatherers were responsible for the ecological destruction of the late Quaternary). With the broader insight and perspective provided by science and global communication we finally have an opportunity to repair the mistakes of past generations as we move asymptotically towards greater understanding of our world and thus greater agency within it.

That word, agency, is the core of this divide between anarchism and primitivism.

Primitivists would rather write agency out of the conversation. They want to pretend that we have No Alternative but collapse, no real choices or options to be expanded or diligently explored. Their opposition to technology and cosmopolitanism make perfect sense when the very notion of expanding our choices is taken to be incomprehensible. Physical freedom? What nonsense, you can’t be oppressed by nature! What’s happened to get someone to such a ludicrous position is a divorcing of oppression from anything concrete. Now oppression isn’t controlling people or constraining their options in life, it’s just anything that conjures bad feels. Freedom? Well there’s no such thing really. Just the freedom from thought, the freedom from choice, complexity, vigilance, etc.

This kind of obsession with the delusion of certainty is the hallmark of depression. The desperate hunger for the pain of having no real options. Many commentators have noted the turn of our milieu towards treating depression, anxiety and other mental health issues as the essential experience of our radicalism. We bond over sharing in it; and end up fetishizing and reinforcing these ailments.

Only in such light primitivism can pretend to be coherent with anarchism.

But to hunger for the genocide and ecocide of a collapse is to mistake mental health issues for radicalism. Misanthropic edginess for critique. Emotional states for vigilant pursuit of root dynamics.

rechelon

What I’ll forever give to Zerzan and Tucker is that however horribly wrong their prescriptions, they remained true anarchists with enough conscience to oppose the followup waves of Jensen/DGR’s TERF shit, ITS/Atassa’s reactionary mass murderer shit, and BlackSeed’s edgelord shit.

Zerzan openly admits that the question of physical agency in their bodies for trans and disabled people is a serious one that green anarchists should hesitate on, dwell in serious reflection, and have the humility to recognize that their prescriptions hurt people.

No prescription, no blueprint or tactic or strategy will ever avoid throwing some people under the bus. When Zerzan admits the existence of innocent lives as collateral damage and that he is troubled by it, he’s has more backbone than everyone else calling for The Collapse.

While Tucker has abandoned the label “anarcho-primitivist” for alternative labels because of the sheer level of fascist and reactionary creep in that space, I do think it matters that the original anprims are a lot better than most generic anticivs shitting on them.

Anyway, not to get Kids These Days, but yall do realize that most of the modern anarchist movement exists today as a direct consequence of the battle of seattle, and while Zerzan wasn’t the mastermind the media made him out to be, anarcho-primitivism was a VERY big deal then.

laymagdalene

can yall get rid of the fash sheet

like i don’t care about the rank and file radicalism of the ku klux klan in the 1920s.

A Conversation with John Zerzan on Direct Action, School Shootings, Authenticity, Veganism & More by Ishkah

[...] in terms of this term presence, whether we should desire an authenticity of a long period of our evolutionary history as humans. I don’t know, like I think potentially we could be suffering more now for sure, but it could be suffering that we desire to take on if we can get to this left-anarchist, pro technology future. It could be a source of virtue for us, striving for these intellectual skills.

And then authenticity, as a concept it’s only developed recently, like we used to think of authenticity differently as like sincerity. So, the effort you put into helping your family would be an indication of whether you were being authentic to yourself, if you were being just and fair to your family in taking on your responsibilities.

So, I don’t know whether it would be authentic for me to desire hunter-gather life, I think I would desire hunter-gatherer life more than the middle ages if I could be born into a fairly egalitarian tribe like the Penan, but I think rather than just settling for primitive life or just settling for the middle ages, I think we should try and be aspirational to this future world of still being able to use some technology, like printing presses and penicillin. [...]

I still don’t think a strong argument has been given for justifying direct action which attempts to harm or kill people. And so, unfortunately I think for people who take this stance like yourself and Kaczynski, some important disclaimers need to be made whenever discussing your work if – as members of campaign groups, mutual aid networks and affinity groups – we want to recruit and maintain members or advocate others over to our political philosophy.

But, I’m open to you expanding more on this in the future, here for example are a collection of statements made that I take issue with the most, mostly referencing the Unabomber case and including one from this same interview:

“The concept of justice should not be overlooked in considering the Unabomber phenomenon. In fact, except for his targets, when have the many little Eichmanns who are preparing the Brave New World ever been called to account?... Is it unethical to try to stop those whose contributions are bringing an unprecedented assault on life?”

“They ain’t innocent. Which isn’t to say that I’m totally at ease with blowing them into pieces. Part of me is. And part of me isn’t.”

“I think the targets were relatively more appropriate as he went along, as they became more lethal, on that level anyway, I think you could argue that that’s the case.”

“I ended the speech with the suggestion that there might be a parallel between Kaczynski and John Brown. Brown made an anti-slavery attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia in 1859. Like Kaczynski, Brown was considered deranged, but he was tried and hung. Not long afterward he became a kind of American saint of the abolitionist movement. I offered the hope, if not the prediction, that T.K. might at some point also be considered in a more positive light for his resistance to industrial civilization.”

“Bonanno, it should be added, has been prosecuted repeatedly and imprisoned in Italy for his courageous resistance over the years.” Bonanno was imprisoned for armed robbery and promotes the strategy of kneecapping journalists.

Mallory Wournos

Contributor to the anti-civilization zine Black Seed, whose writing praising Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza as an anti-civilization “rebel” drew widespread condemnation from other anarchists and anti-civ writers.

The Elephant in the Room by narcissus

Yet, we must ask why many other reactionary texts remain on the Library’s catalogue for reasons we cannot guess. Take, for example [...] [a]rticles in praise of infanticide and elevating mass shooter³⁵ Adam Lanza for his acts of top-down authoritarian, adult-supremacist violence against children and youths remain in the Library’s catalogue,[4] and it is our personal experience that, (as usual when anarchists reject this style of pseudo-radical top-down oppressive rhetoric, especially misogynistic, transphobic, and adult-supremacist rhetoric,) those who see it as a problem are sneeringly dismissed as moralists, hysterical prudes, and so on. [...]

[...] In Black Seed #5, writer Mallory Wournos praises Adam Lanza as a rebel against civilization (with a sneering aside about “morally righteous anarchists”), writing, “People who cared to read what he wrote, knew exactly where Adam was coming from when he opened fire in that classroom. He couldn’t have been any clearer about his motivation.” Mallory is right, although not in the way they intended: Lanza wrote a heavily homophobic essay, (which, per Mallory’s suggestion, I did read) laying out a lengthy argument in defense of sex with children — mostly in the form of an imagined back-and-forth debate furiously “debunking” objections to adult-child sex. (It is 35 pages long. He is a bad writer.) In it, he sympathetically portrays men who seek sex with children as persecuted outcasts, rejected even by “their fellow LGBT activists.” He also wrote a screenplay called “Lovebound” about “the beauty in the romantic relationship between a ten-year-old boy and a thirty-year-old man,” as well as a misogynistic screed titled “Selfish,” in which he rants about the inherent selfishness of all women — or as he calls them, “females.” These documents can all be found on schoolshooters.info

Max Stirner

19^th-century German philosopher whose The Ego and Its Own is the foundational text of individualist and egoist anarchism, rejecting all fixed ideas, including the state, morality, and even “humanity,” in favor of the sovereign self; later claimed, controversially, by some on the far-right.

Max Stirner’s Egoism by John P. Clark

Stirner’s position is a form of anarchism; yet it is a greatly inadequate form. He opposes domination of the ego by the state, but he advises people to seek to dominate others in any other way they can manage. Ultimately, might makes right. It is difficult, in fact, to see why the union of egoists should be preferred by any egoist who happens to be in a position to exercise political authority. While Stirner completely rejects the state as a transcendent reality above the ego, there seems to be no reason why he should reject it as a practical means of extending the ego’s power and ownership (especially as the modern secular state sheds its mystical trappings and reveals its basis in raw power). Although Stirner is an anarchist, there seems to be no essential reason why, on the basis of his egoism, he necessarily should be one.

From Stirner to Mussolini

Certain currents of fascists have repeatedly embraced Stirner, not as in an attempt to claim something popular for themselves, as many egoists have dismissively assumed, but because they clearly and explicitly find personal resonances with Stirner. You’ll often find Stirner right beside Evola on fascist reading lists in 8chan or the like, not because they’re consciously trying to steal Stirner – the vast majority of their audience has never even heard of him – but because those recommending him have their own connection to and sincere fondness for him. These fascists see themselves as individualists par excellence and it’s vital that we understand fascism as not necessarily the exact opposite of individualism but often as a perversion or specific form of individualism. This requires going beyond the inane boomer mis-definitions of fascism in mere terms of totalitarianism, collectivism, or homogeneity. And it requires us to kick off from a defensive posturing that dare not concede any rhetorical ground.

Max Wilbert

Co-author, with Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith, of Bright Green Lies, a critique of renewable energy and mainstream environmentalism from a Deep Green Resistance perspective; the book’s reception has been contested both inside and outside green/anarchist circles.

Bright Green Lies and Deep Green Deceptions by Craig Collins

Bright Green Lies (BGL) is a Trojan horse. Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert offer their readers a valuable critique of renewable energy in order to ambush the environmental movement. But before I say more about BGL, let me state my own values and biases. Like many Greens, I’m an eco-humanist. My deepest political and philosophical loyalty is to the long-rangesurvival of our species. Unfortunately, humanism is still quite radical in a world where race, religion, nationality, wealth, and power remain the dominant concerns. I’m an ECO-humanist because our species will go from invasive to endangered if we allow malignant industrialism to continue trashing Mother Earth. This existential threat compels us to question every cultural contrivance that overrides our common biological identity.

Should our loyalties remain confined to our nation, class, culture, race, ideology, or religion? Or are we, first and foremost, members of one human family, struggling to raise our children, strengthen our communities, and coexist with the other inhabitants of Earth? Will blind patriotism and corporate power reduce us to carbon-addicted consumers fighting over the remains of a toxic planet? Or can we abolish this system that puts profit and power over people and the planet?

Michael Schmidt

South African anarchist historian and co-author of Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, whose later, separate admission of involvement with far-right networks (“the Michael Schmidt affair”) prompted significant controversy and reassessment within the anarchist movement.

Personal statement on the Michael Schmidt affair

In this letter, Schmidt admits for the first time that he drifted towards the radical right. He claims this took place in a period of deep personal crisis, and states that he has a history of mental illness and severe emotional and personal problems. He says he became secretly influenced by the right and its racist arguments, while maintaining sincere public positions on the left. He denies any project of infiltrating the anarchists, insisting that his views and actions became increasingly incoherent. He again affirms that he deliberately concealed this situation from a wide range of people and organisations. Lastly, he apologises for his actions, and the harm he caused, claiming to have repudiated the right, citing his ongoing current work in anti-racist and human rights causes.

Murray Bookchin

American social theorist (1921–2006) and founder of social ecology and later communalism/libertarian municipalism, whose work on hierarchy and ecology was hugely influential on anarchism even as he himself moved away from the anarchist label later in life and sharply criticized lifestyle-oriented and primitivist currents.

Municipal Dreams by John Clark

Communes, cooperatives, collectives and various other forms of organization are sometimes dismissed by Bookchin as “marginal projects” that cannot challenge the dominant system. And indeed, this has often been true (though the weakness of the economic collectives in the Spanish Revolution, to mention an important counter-example, was hardly that they were marginal or non-challenging). However, it is questionable whether there is convincing evidence — or indeed any evidence at all — that such approaches have less potential for liberatory transformation than do municipal or neighborhood assemblies or other municipalist proposals. An eco-communitarianism that claims the legacy of anarchism (as a critique of domination rather than as a dogmatic ideology) will eschew any narrowly-defined programs, whether they make municipalism, self-management, cooperatives, communalism or any other approach the privileged path to social transformation. On the other hand, it will see experiments in all of these areas as valuable steps toward discovering the way to a free, ecological society.

Noam Chomsky

American linguist and prominent self-described anarcho-syndicalist/libertarian socialist whose political writing on US foreign policy and media has reached a wide audience well beyond anarchist circles; his decades-long association with Jeffrey Epstein has drawn renewed scrutiny.

There Are Two Noam Chomskys. The One You Love, and the One That Was Friends With Jeffrey Epstein

Chomsky was accustomed to finding positives in people whom he would have shunned as criminals had he not encountered them via his professional life at MIT. [...] My long-term project to decode Chomsky came from a realisation that his deeply reactionary linguistic theories lay behind nearly everything that was wrong with the paths taken by anthropology, linguistics and the human sciences since the 1970s. I am referring here to the so-called “cognitive revolution” in these various branches of science.

The essence of this “revolution” can be summed up as philosophical idealism, a decisive reversal of the insights of Karl Marx. This idealism leads to a prioritising of mind over matter, internal computation over public action.

Ramon Elani

Former contributor to the anti-civilization publications Black Seed and Atassa, later reported to have moved toward traditionalist Catholic and far-right circles.

rechelon

lmao, I wonder what Ramon Elani (notorious contributor to Black Seed and Atassa) has gotten up to since those fuckers got run out and he stopped pretending to be an anarchist?

Translating esoteric fashy trad cath for a publisher of nazi spiritualism? Cool, cool, cool.

Samuel Edward Konkin III

Canadian-American libertarian theorist who coined “agorism,” a strategy combining anarcho-capitalist economics with counter-economic black/grey market activity and, distinctively, an openness to tactical alliance with the left.

rechelon

Konkin was basically an ancap that was like “the left is cool and Mao was right about dual power, let’s ally with them and use that tactic” and so his ideology was responsible for the few instances of ancaps doing shit in the actual real world / building actual things.

But it was still ultimately pretty marginal.

There are good agorist in left market anarchist circles, but the totality of “agorism” never really amounted to more than a couple thousand people. It’s always been a minority inclination.

Ted Kaczynski

Mathematician and domestic terrorist (1942–2023) known as the Unabomber, whose 1995 manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future briefly described his ideology as a “particular brand of anarchism”; his relevance to the anarchist tradition remains a contested and frequently revisited question, addressed at length below.

The Unabomber’s Ethics by Ole Martin Moen

When one reads ‘Industrial Society and its Future’ and Anti-Tech Revolution, it is hard not to notice that Kaczynski evaluates problems caused by technology very differently than how he evaluates problems that arise in technology’s absence. This is most apparent in the middle paragraphs of ‘Industrial Society and its Future,’ in which Kaczynski compares industrial and pre-industrial life. After he has given an elaborate account of human powerlessness in industrial societies, he makes a concession: ‘It is true that primitive man is powerless against some of the things that threaten him; disease for example.’ Kaczynski does not, however, seem to think that this is a very significant problem. Instead he writes: ‘But he can accept the risk of disease stoically.’ This response invites a follow-up question: If the badness of the problems faced by ‘primitive man’ can be avoided if one accepts them stoically, then why can’t the badness of the problems faced by people in industrialized societies also be avoided through stoicism? The only explanation given by Kaczynski is that whereas a problem caused in the absence of technology ‘is part of the nature of things, it is no one’s fault,’ a problem caused by technology is ‘imposed.’ Of course, it makes sense to hold that while no-one is responsible for what nature does, someone might be responsible for what humans do. Kaczynski, however, does not seem to be concerned with assigning responsibility or blame; he is concerned with comparing the quality of human life in industrial versus pre-industrial societies. It seems, therefore, that Kaczynski holds that while a problem caused by technology is very bad indeed, a problem caused by nature, though it can be frustrating, is not nearly as bad, at least not in an ethically relevant way. It appears that on Kaczynski’s view, two equally hopeless situations can differ dramatically in how bad they are depending on whether the situation is caused by technology or caused by things in nature that count as non-technological.

This evaluative asymmetry can help explain several of Kaczynski’s priorities and areas of focus. It can explain why he is worried that our lives now depend on the operation of power plants that might fail, but not worried that pre-industrial lives depended on rain showers that might fail to come as expected; worried that people today are oppressed by bureaucracies, but not worried that people were previously oppressed by their tribes; worried that people now do tedious office work but not worried that work in pre-industrial societies could also be tedious. The picture that emerges is that in Kaczynski’s view, the harms that are averted by technology were not ethically relevant harms to begin, and that what we gain from technology today does not count as ethically relevant benefits. Given this picture, it makes sense why Kaczynski counts only the downsides of technology: There are few or no ethically relevant upsides to count.

Does the Unabomber have any relevance to anarchism? by Theo Slade

People who argue in favor of Ted being an anarchist will point to examples such as a letter in June 1993 in which Ted began with the words: “We are an anarchist group calling ourselves FC.” A later communiqué from April 1995 repeated: “We call ourselves anarchists.” The Manifesto discusses “our particular brand of anarchism”.

Also, for many years after his arrest his message remained fairly consistent: “the social ideal I would put forward is that of the nomadic hunting-and-gathering society.”[5] Plus, that: “after the techno-industrial system has been eliminated, people can and should fight injustice wherever they find it.”[6]

However, when you dig a bit deeper, it’s easy to tell that Ted’s period of identification with anarchism was very opportunistic and shallow in that he simply thought it would be advantageous to have some recognized political identity when writing about the terrorist violence he hoped to incentivize in others:

In 1995 I described FC as ‘anarchist’ because I thought it would be advantageous to have some recognized political identity. At that time I knew very little about anarchism. Since then I’ve learned that anarchists, at least those of the U.S. and the U.K., are nothing but a lot of hopelessly ineffectual bunglers and dreamers, useless for any purpose. Needless to say, I now disavow any identification as an anarchist.[7]

Ted’s actual politics mostly just amounted to thinking it would be nice if we could click our fingers and all go back to the stone age where men had a lot of negative liberty to leave their tribe to live a solitary existence hunting and gathering and hardly ever have to meet another person.

Unlike anarcho-primitivists, he didn’t hold the view that life in primitive society would be one of egalitarian freedom, which though true, it is the false belief motivating anarcho-primitivists that make their desires still anarchist, which Ted Kaczynski and many of his followers explicitly renounce:

[M]y hope, is that certain inconvenient aspects of hunter-gatherer societies (e.g., male dominance, hard work) would turn off the leftists, the neurotics, and the lazies but that such societies, depicted realistically, would remain attractive to the kind of people who could be effective revolutionaries.[8]

Also, even if you were to grant this ideal end goal is still anarchist, it is as empty and illusory an end goal as when Stalinists claim to have the same ideal end goal as anarchists because Ted and his followers advocate a ‘means of getting there’ that has very little difference to setting up a cult like vanguard party:

(ii) If a member of the anti-tech organization can find a place on the editorial board of a radical environmentalist periodical (for instance, the Earth First! journal), he will be able to influence the content of the periodical. If a majority of anti-tech people can be placed on the editorial board, they will be able in effect to take the periodical over, minimize its leftist content, and use it systematically for the propagation of anti-tech ideas....

How can anti-tech revolutionaries get themselves into positions of power and influence in radical environmentalist groups? The most important way will be through the moral authority of hard work. In every organization which they seek to capture, the communists are the readiest volunteers, the most devoted committee workers, the most alert and active participants. In many groups, this is in itself sufficient to gain the leadership; it is almost always enough to justify candidacy [for leadership].

The [Communists] in penetrating an organization... become the ‘best workers’ for whatever goals the organization seeks to attain....

This writer has had no opportunity to study more than a few of the works of history, political science, sociology, and revolutionary theory that may be relevant to the anti-tech enterprise. Worthy of careful attention are the works of Alinsky, Selznick, Smelser, and Trotsky that appear in our List of Works Cited. But there is a vast amount of other relevant literature that deserves to be explored; for example, the literature of the academic field known as “Organizational Behavior,” and the works of Lenin to the extent that they deal with revolutionary strategy and tactics (his ideological hokum is merely of historical interest). Thorough library research will reveal an unending series of other relevant works. It is worth repeating that this literature will provide no recipes for action that can be applied mechanically. It will provide ideas, some of which can be applied, with suitable modifications, to the purposes of an anti-tech organization....

List of Works Cited ...

Selznick, Philip, The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics ...

Trotsky, Leon, History of the Russian Revolution ...

Christman, Henry M. (ed.), Essential Works of Lenin ...

Lenin, Vladimir Ilich, Lenin on Organization ...

Lenin, Vladimir Ilich, Collected Works ...

Historical Materialism (Marx, Engels, Lenin) ...

Stalin, J., Foundations of Leninism ...”[9]

Ted first publicly broke with anarchism when a vegan primitivist from Turkey wrote to Ted in 2006 with a long list of questions. Ted responded with a detailed critique of how many primitivists idealize primitive life, arguing that the hierarchical relationships found between many tribal members is natural and therefore neutral or good.[10]

Finally, it’s important to understand that Ted’s political foundations were built on being a young self-radicalized library loner who inherited a lot of the elitist aristocratic intuitions of the anti-modernist middle & upper classes in the 50s.[11] He cycled through a bunch of reactionary dispositions starting with fascism and ending on a kind of anti-tech vanguardism. In his final years he advocated an organizational strategy similar to Maoism and suggested seeing if alliances could be made with jihadists like Bin Laden.[12]

Simply put, there’s never any good reason why Kaczynski’s ideology should have any relevance to anarchists.

rechelon

If you go to an anarchist infoshop you expect to find either exclusively anarchists or a spread of ideas that reflects who’s inside and outside the circle of discourse anarchists take as legitimate.

If there’s a wall of Maoist texts that’s just a Maoist bookstore doing entryism.

If, for instance, you’re a certain anarchist bookstore in the 80s and you stock NAMBLA periodicals, that’s not mere decontextualized “provision of information,” that’s a social statement around affinities and norms that is read loud and clear by new anarchists that wander in.

It says “we might disagree with NAMBLA but they are an established part of our discursive circle and subcultural space.” Endorsement, normalization, and legitimization is inherent. Texts are not read in isolation, they are presented in contexts that declare and enforce norms.

I’ve shared a literal stage with people whose politics I’ve vehemently opposed, but who were validly within the movement.

I’ve also repeatedly refused to debate tankies on a stage or at an event. And I’ve repeatedly made fun of Bookchin for having debated nazis on a stage.

When organizers scheduled me to debate a fascist at a transhumanist conference in 2015 I raised hell, got the panel canceled and organized attendees to leave early.

I also checked in with a couple venerable antifascist groups and asked for insight and feedback on strategy.

No Platform absolutely does not mean Don’t Read Fascists. Antifascists endlessly beg you to actually read fascists. It’s actually really annoying that anti-antifa folks don’t know much about what fascists believe and argue!

But there are ethics around how to go about that.

For instance, everyone should know about and read Bronze Age Mindset (by Bronze Age Pervert / Costin Alamariu), as it’s one of the most influential and widely read fascist texts today, shared virally among young republicans.

But you shouldn’t fucking BUY it and give him money!

Ted K has strong overlap with fascist movements and has been explicitly opposed to anarchism for decades. Yet you should know what he argues and there’s a website with a complete archive of his works, but the entire site’s framing is clearly hostile to and critical of him.

Framing matters. When you put Ted K in an “anarchist library” you’re declaring “Ted K is inside anarchism”. If you put a unnoticeable “non-anarchist” tag on it you’re declaring “still within the circle of texts we think are anarchist-adjacent, in-group and respectable enough”

There are, after all, infinite “anarchist-adjacent” things. Mao came from anarchism, but if your “anarchist” library contains every maoist text you’re normalizing maoism.

There are tons of marxists, libertarians and liberals that anarchists engage with or are influenced by...

If an “anarchist” bookstore puts The Many Headed Hydra or Mumford in the window no one’s gonna blink but if they put Mao, that’s a fucking maoist bookstore. And if they put Hayek, that’s an ancap bookstore. If you put Ted K in the window you’re gonna get a lot of fascist vistors.

Antifascists have spent decades working out the ethics and the norms around No Platforming through consideration and worldwide trial and error.

Unfortunately there were some “radicals” who studiously ignored them and then got surprised to encounter those norms in 2016.

Wolfi Landstreicher

Other pen names: Apio Ludd & Feral Faun

American egoist and insurrectionary anarchist translator and theorist, prolific in post-left and nihilist anarchist circles; a 1990s essay defending “child love” under the Feral Faun pen name has since drawn condemnation as apologia for child sexual abuse.

The Elephant in the Room by narcissus

Yet, we must ask why many other reactionary texts remain on the Library’s catalogue for reasons we cannot guess. Take, for example [...] “The Ideology of Victimization” by Feral Faun, a.k.a. Wolfi Landstreicher, an anti-feminist reaction produced after Landstreicher saw some graffiti reading “men rape.”[13] [...] [A]nd it is our personal experience that, (as usual when anarchists reject this style of pseudo-radical top-down oppressive rhetoric, especially misogynistic, transphobic, and adult-supremacist rhetoric,) those who see it as a problem are sneeringly dismissed as moralists, hysterical prudes, and so on. [...]

Gender Disobedience: Antifeminism and Insurrectionist Non-dialogue by Lilith

The insurrectionist milieu has situated itself as an iconoclastic force within anarchist thought. Its critique often seeks to analyze and subvert the subtle leftism of much allegedly radical thought. This is important. This is valuable.

However, I find it disturbing that, in the midst of this, there lies gross generalizations, ignorance toward the material being criticized, and outright refusal to acknowledge the multifaceted nature of many frames of critique. With this piece, I will focus on the critique of feminism in the works of Feral Faun/Wolfi Landstreicher, as I find it to be generalizing, misinformed, and thus far without consolidated response from anarchists or feminists.

One of the key texts produced by insurrectionary anarchists to counteract feminist critique is Feral Faun’s “The Ideology of Victimization” found in the collection Feral Revolution. Within this, Feral Faun posits that feminism and victimization are inseparable and, because of this, feminism turns toward domination structures such as the state for support. There is much to be said for this argument; it undeniably does describe certain strains of feminist thought. Unfortunately, Faun transforms feminism into a monolithic ideology, stripping it of all subtleties and nuances.

I do not wish to claim that feminism is inherently whole or encompassing in its critique. I feel that an anarchist critique of feminism may be valuable and illuminating. What I do not wish for is more of the same anti-intellectualism and non-thought that seems to be the lot of post-Leftist critiques of feminist theory. If we continue to accept accusation in place of research and false representation in place of actual engagement with what is being critiqued, we are destined to be as theoretically empty as any ideology we can possibly imagine.

Wolfi Landstreicher: Child molestation apologist by heresy distro

Buried deep inside a barely-legible scan of Rants: Essays and Polemics of Feral Faun, is the short essay Child Molestation vs. Child Love. It would seem that very little, if any, attention has been given to this small piece. This is a shame — and not, of course, because we think it is, uh, important dialogue. Rather, it brings light to a very specific situation within the anarchist community, in which egoist rhetoric is appropriated by predatory individuals in order to justify and bury their sadistic need to victimize and subjugate individuals. We saw this with Dr. Bones, who seemed to enjoy manipulating and fetishizing trans* women on top of writing egoist critiques of society.

As anarchists we should be tending towards anarchy, not using anarchism as a vehicle to reproduce the same degrading authoritarian power structures we supposedly are fighting against. Further, if we claim to have “no gods or masters,” then we should be able to hold figures in our circles accountable.

Other Notes

Faux_Real_Guise

The Anarchist Library is hard to navigate and has even more ideological diversity— tread carefully and read about the authors in conjunction with their works or you might find yourself nodding along with Uncle Ted 😬. I think the easiest thing to do here is search or browse for topics you’re interested in.

Tequila_Wolf

In the library chat and between librarians there’s regular conversation about what should or shouldn’t be on the library. It’s mostly an open conversation with precedents based on librarians having curated the space for years. You can join the IRC and follow some of the chats.

It’s common for people to submit work and for it to be rejected, for example, because there’s a requirement that it’s published somewhere else and not just something somebody thought up and posted like the library is their personal blog. But I also know people who have gotten their work on there and who arranged to remove their work from there, for multiple reasons.

Just imagine a small collective of librarians with various anarchist politics doing what they can to maintain and curate the biggest anarchist library in history, usually as just one part of multiple anarchist projects they participate in.

ziq

The bitter book burners trying to turn librarians into censors need to stfu. The only criteria should be if the piece is anti-authority or related to anarchist culture / history. So obviously, pieces talking about diddling kids don’t belong on there because that’s pro-authority af. But if the diddler also wrote other pieces that are actually anti-authority, those pieces don’t need to be retroactively removed or have disclaimers placed on them.

The recent case of a diddler who stole some random woman’s face, used it to promote kiddy diddling and then faked that woman’s death is another story because that harms the real unknowing person who was used in his creepy game. And he also fucked over the librarians by trying to manipulate them into posting a fake obituary and kiddy diddling apologia, so they should absolutely retaliate by wiping his whole archive. That’s completely justified when someone uses you as a pawn to promote authoritarian shit like diddling and the demonization of an innocent woman whose image and identity was stolen to sell books. Letting the guy roll over them and muddy their credibility as an anarchist library would be counter to any anarchy I’m familiar with.

rocinante

The library aims to include a diverse array of anarchist texts and has tried to do this from the start (non-sectarian). I imagine that librarians and anonymous uploaders have sometimes chosen to upload certain texts because they resonate with the ideas found within the writing. It’s also a lot more fun to curate texts that you find an interest in. Their is no official policy of the library, the impossible aim of the archive starting off was all the anarchist texts (within anarchist criteria) in the world as mentioned on the podcast.

The Anarchist Library

Legend says that many of the founders of library project were so-called self-proclaimed self-styled “anti-civ anarchists” and the “green anarchist” lot.

Anark

Several works by Foucault should be on The Anarchist Library, 100%

stuff

Reading is dangerous!
The Anarchist Library

We introduce, for your pleasure, The Anarchist Library, an archive of anarchist texts: books, essays, and articles. We hope that this archive grows from its initial selection of over 400 titles (books, essays, and articles) into a comprehensive textual library that spans the entirety of anarchist thought.

The Internet has allowed us an amazing opportunity to share anarchist texts widely. This has allowed more people than ever access to obscure anarchist literature and propaganda. The few existing anarchist archives have all been helpful and inspirational to this project, which arises due to the inactivity of the existing online anarchist archives, with little sign that anyone is specifically serving as a librarian (commonly lacking introduction, curation, updating, or all of the above). A library is either active or dying and with the internet popping with new anarchist texts every day, we believe it would be a shame to not attend to them.

Our group is comprised of anarchists spread across 10 timezones that use conversational consensus to review, edit and update the site. We are an open group.

[1] Feminism as Fascism, Bob Black

[2] Communiques of ITS, Individualists Tending to the Wild

[3] Of Indiscriminate Attacks & Wild Reactions, by the Edelweiss Pirates

[4] Murder of the Civilized by Mallory Wuornos, in Black Seed #5

[5] Ted Kaczynski’s Letter Correspondence With David Skrbina

[6] Answer to Some Comments Made in Green Anarchist by Ted Kaczynski

[7] Industrial Society and Its Future by Ted Kaczynski

[8] Ted Kaczynski’s Letter Correspondence With David Skrbina

[9] Strategic Guidelines for an Anti-Tech Movement by Ted Kaczynski

[10] Ted Kaczynski’s Interview with a Turkish Primitivist

[11] Dangerous Reading by Edward M. White

[12] Ted Kaczynski’s Various Ethical & Political Flirtations

[13] The Ideology of Victimization, by Feral Faun, in Feral Revolution