Libertarian Socialism

Contents
1

Libertarian socialism

1.1

Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1.1.1

Anti-capitalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1.1.2

Anti-authoritarianism and opposition to the state . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1.1.3

Civil liberties and individual freedom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1.1.4

Violent and non-violent means . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1.1.5

Environmental issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Political roots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1.2.1

Within early modern socialist thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1.2.2

Anarchism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1.2.3

Marxism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Notable libertarian socialist tendencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

10

1.3.1

Classical anarchist tendencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

10

1.3.2

Libertarian Marxist tendencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

14

1.3.3

Other tendencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

17

1.4

Contemporary libertarian socialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

26

1.5

References

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27

1.6

Libertarian socialist periodicals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

38

1.7

See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

39

1.8

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

39

1.9

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

40

1.10 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

41

1.10.1 Libertarian socialist general resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

41

1.10.2 Introductory articles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

41

1.10.3 Libertarian socialist websites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

41

1.10.4 Libertarian socialist history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

41

1.10.5 Film . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

42

1.2

1.3

Anti-capitalism

43

2.1

Socialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

43

2.1.1

Anarchist and libertarian socialist criticisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

44

2.1.2

Marxism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

45

See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

46

2.2

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CONTENTS
2.3

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

46

2.4

Further reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

47

2.5

External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

47

Anti-statism

48

3.1

General categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

48

3.2

Anti-statist philosophies

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

48

3.3

See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

48

3.4

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

48

Anti-authoritarianism
4.1

Views and practice

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

49

4.2

See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

50

4.3

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

50

Anarchism and issues related to love and sex

52

5.1

Beginnings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

52

5.2

Free love and anarchism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

52

5.2.1

The United States

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

52

5.2.2

Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

53

5.3

5.4
5.5

49

Anarcha-feminism

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

54

5.3.1

Emma Goldman

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

55

5.3.2

Mujeres Libres . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

55

Queer anarchism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

56

5.4.1

57

Anarchist homophobia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Later 20th century and contemporary times

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

57

5.5.1

BDSM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

58

5.5.2

Pornography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

58

5.5.3

Anarchists in high heels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

59

5.6

Further reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

59

5.7

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

59

5.8

External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

60

Anarchism and religion

61

6.1

Anarchist clashes with religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

61

6.2

Religious anarchism and anarchist themes in religions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

62

6.2.1

Buddhism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

62

6.2.2

Christianity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

62

6.2.3

Gnosticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

63

6.2.4

Islam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

63

6.2.5

Judaism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

64

6.2.6

Neopaganism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

64

6.2.7

Taoism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

64

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6.3

Footnotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

64

6.4

References and further reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

65

6.5

See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

65

6.6

External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

65

Anarcha-feminism

66

7.1

Origins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

66

7.1.1

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

67

Anarcha-feminism, individualist anarchism and the free love movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

67

7.2.1

Voltairine de Cleyre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

68

7.2.2

Emma Goldman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

68

7.2.3

Milly Witkop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

69

7.2.4

Mujeres Libres . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

69

7.3

Contemporary developments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

70

7.4

See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

70

7.5

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

71

7.6

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

72

7.7

Further reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

72

7.8

External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

72

7.2

Virginia Bolten and La Voz de la Mujer

Anarchism and education

73

8.1

Early anarchist views on education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

73

8.1.1

William Godwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

73

8.1.2

Max Stirner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

73

8.1.3

Josiah Warren

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

74

The classics and the late 19th century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

74

8.2.1

Mikhail Bakunin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

74

8.2.2

Peter Kropotkin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

75

The Early 20th century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

76

8.3.1

Leo Tolstoy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

76

8.3.2

Francesc Ferrer i Gurdia and the Modern schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

76

8.3.3

Emma Goldman

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

77

Later 20th century and contemporary times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

78

8.4.1

Herbert Read . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

78

8.4.2

Paul Goodman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

79

8.4.3

Ivan Illich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

79

8.4.4

Colin Ward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

80

8.2

8.3

8.4

8.5

Bibliography

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80

8.6

See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

81

8.7

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

81

8.8

External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

82

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CONTENTS
Queer anarchism

83

9.1

History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

83

9.1.1

Contemporary Queer Anarchism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

86

9.2

See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

86

9.3

Further reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

86

9.4

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

86

9.5

External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

87

10 Individualist anarchism

88

10.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

88

10.2 Early inuences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

90

10.2.1 William Godwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

90

10.2.2 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

91

10.2.3 Max Stirner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

93

10.2.4 Early American individualist anarchism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

94

10.3 Developments and expansion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

95

10.3.1 Free Love, anarcha-feminism and LGBT issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

95

10.3.2 Freethought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

96

10.3.3 Anarcho-naturism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

96

10.3.4 Individualist anarchism and Friedrich Nietzsche . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

97

10.3.5 Anglo American individualist anarchism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

97

10.3.6 European individualist anarchism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

10.3.7 Latin American individualist anarchism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
10.4 Criticisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
10.5 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
10.6 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
10.7 Footnotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
10.8 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
10.9 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
11 Anarchism and violence

123

11.1 Propaganda of the deed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

11.2 Public perception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
11.3 Anarcho-pacism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
11.4 Anarchist theory
11.5 References

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124

11.6 Further reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

12 Green anarchism

126

12.1 Early ecoanarchism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126

12.1.1 Henry David Thoreau . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
12.1.2 lise Reclus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

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12.1.3 Anarcho-naturism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

12.1.4 Leo Tolstoy and tolstoyanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
12.2 Mid twentieth century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
12.2.1 Leopold Kohr

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130

12.2.2 Murray Bookchin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

12.2.3 Jacques Ellul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
12.3 Contemporary developments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
12.3.1 Social ecology and communalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
12.3.2 Green Anarchist

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132

12.3.3 Fredy Perlman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

12.3.4 Anarcho-primitivism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
12.3.5 Vegan anarchism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
12.3.6 Derrick Jensen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
12.3.7 CrimethInc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
12.3.8 Direct action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
12.4 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
12.5 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
12.6 Bibliography

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140

12.7 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142

13 Eco-socialism

143

13.1 Ideology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

13.2 History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
13.2.1 1880s-1930s - Marx, Morris and inuence on the Russian Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
13.2.2 Ecoanarchism

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144

13.2.3 1970s-1990s - Rise of environmentalism and engagement with Marxism and 'actually existing socialism' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
13.2.4 1990s onwards - Engagement with the anti-globalization movement and The Ecosocialist
Manifesto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
13.2.5 Inuence on current Green and socialist movements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
13.2.6 Inuence on existing socialist regimes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
13.2.7 Ecosocialist International Network (EIN) and other international eco-socialist organisations

146

13.3 Critique of capitalist expansion and globalisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146

13.3.1 Use and exchange value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
13.3.2 The second contradiction of capitalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
13.3.3 The role of the state and transnational organisations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
13.4 Tensions within the Eco-Socialist discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
13.5 Critique of other forms of green politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
13.5.1 Opposition to within-system approaches, voluntarism and technological xes . . . . . . . . 148
13.5.2 Critique of Green economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
13.5.3 Critique of Deep Ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
13.5.4 Critique of bioregionalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150

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13.5.5 Critique of variants of eco-feminism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
13.5.6 Critique of Social Ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
13.5.7 Opposition to Malthusianism and Neo-Malthusianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
13.5.8 The two varieties of environmentalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
13.6 Critique of other forms of socialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
13.6.1 Critique of 'Actually Existing Socialisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
13.6.2 Critique of the wider socialist movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
13.7 Eco-socialist strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
13.7.1 Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
13.7.2 Preguration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
13.7.3 Internationalization of preguration and the 'Eco-socialist Party' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
13.8 The Revolution and transition to eco-socialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
13.8.1 The immediate aftermath of the revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
13.8.2 Transnational trade and capital reform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
13.8.3 Ecological production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
13.8.4 Commons, property and usufruct . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
13.8.5 Non-violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
13.9 Criticisms of eco-socialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
13.10List of eco-socialists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
13.11See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
13.12References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
13.13External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

14 Libertarian Marxism

160

14.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160

14.2 Notable libertarian Marxist tendencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
14.2.1 De Leonism

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162

14.2.2 Council communism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163

14.2.3 Left communism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
14.2.4 Within Freudo-Marxism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
14.2.5 Socialisme ou Barbarie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
14.2.6 Situationist International . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
14.2.7 Solidarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
14.2.8 Autonomism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
14.2.9 Communization
14.3 References
14.4 Bibliography

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169

14.5 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169

15 Anarchism and Marxism

170

15.1 Historical relationships between anarchists and Marxists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170

15.1.1 International Workingmens Association . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170

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15.1.2 Industrial Workers of the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

15.1.3 Russian Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
15.1.4 Spanish Civil War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
15.1.5 Attempted theoretical syntheses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
15.1.6 Alliances and joint movements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
15.2 Arguments surrounding the issue of the state . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
15.2.1 The process of transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
15.2.2 Political parties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
15.2.3 Violence and revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
15.3 Arguments surrounding the issue of class . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
15.3.1 Other axes of oppression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
15.4 Nationalism and relationships with indigenous peoples and stateless nations . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
15.5 Methodological disagreements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
15.5.1 Determinism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
15.6 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
15.7 References

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

15.8 Further reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

15.9 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
16 Mutualism (economic theory)

179

16.1 History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179

16.1.1 Mutualism today . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
16.2 Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
16.2.1 Free association . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
16.2.2 Mutual credit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
16.2.3 Contract and federation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
16.2.4 Gradualism and dual-power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
16.3 Mutualism and capitalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
16.4 Criticisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
16.5 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
16.6 Notes and references . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
16.6.1 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
16.6.2 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
16.7 Bibliography

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188

16.8 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188

17 Collectivist anarchism

189

17.1 The First International . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

17.2 Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
17.2.1 Critique of Marxism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
17.2.2 Comparison with communist anarchism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192
17.3 Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

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17.4 People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
17.5 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
17.6 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
17.7 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194

18 Anarcho-syndicalism

195

18.1 History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195

18.1.1 Origins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
18.1.2 Revolutionary Syndicalism and the International Workers Association
18.1.3 The Spanish Revolution

. . . . . . . . . . . 195

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198

18.1.4 The Post World War II era . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200

18.1.5 Contemporary times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
18.2 Theory and politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
18.2.1 Notable theorists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
18.3 Anarcho-syndicalist groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
18.4 Criticisms and responses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
18.5 In popular culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
18.6 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
18.7 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
18.8 Further reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
18.9 Film . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
18.10Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
18.11External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
19 De Leonism

207

19.1 Tactics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207

19.2 Comparison to other forms of socialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
19.3 Political parties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
19.4 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
19.5 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
20 Council communism
20.1 History
20.2 Ideas

209

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210

20.3 Council communism and the Soviets in the Russian Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
20.4 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
20.5 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
20.6 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
20.7 Further reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
21 Left communism

212

21.1 Early history and overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212

21.2 Russian left communism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212

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21.3 Italian left communism until 1926

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213

21.4 German-Dutch left communism until 1933 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213

21.5 Left communism and the Communist International . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
21.6 Italian left communism 19261939 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
21.7 19391945 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
21.8 19451952 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216
21.9 19521968 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
21.10Since 1968

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

21.11See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

21.12References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
21.13Further reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
22 Socialisme ou Barbarie
22.1 History

219

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

22.2 Members . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220

22.3 Texts

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220

22.4 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220

22.5 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
22.6 References

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221

22.7 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221

23 JohnsonForest Tendency

222

23.1 History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222

23.2 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
23.3 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
23.4 Publications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
23.5 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
24 Autonomism

224

24.1 Etymology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224

24.2 The Marxist Autonomist theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
24.3 Italian autonomism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
24.3.1 Inuences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
24.3.2 Direct action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
24.4 The French autonome movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
24.5 The German Autonome movement in the 1970s and 1980s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
24.6 The Greek Anarcho-autonomoi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
24.7 Inuence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
24.8 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
24.8.1 Autonomist thinkers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
24.8.2 Movements and organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
24.8.3 Autonomist Publications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228

CONTENTS
24.8.4 Others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
24.9 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
24.10Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
24.11External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230
24.11.1 Archives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230
24.11.2 Others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230

25 Georgism

231

25.1 Main tenets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231

25.1.1 Economic properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
25.1.2 Sources of economic rent and related policy interventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
25.1.3 Georgism and environmental economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
25.1.4 Revenue uses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
25.2 Synonyms and variants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
25.3 Inuence

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234

25.3.1 Communities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235

25.3.2 Institutes and organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
25.4 Critical reception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
25.5 Notable Georgists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
25.5.1 Economists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
25.5.2 Heads of state

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236

25.5.3 Other political gures

25.5.4 Activists

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

25.5.5 Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

25.5.6 Journalists
25.5.7 Artists

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238

25.5.8 Philosophers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238

25.5.9 Other . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
25.6 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
25.7 References

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238

25.8 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247

26 Henry George

248

26.1 Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248

26.1.1 Life and career . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
26.1.2 Economic and political philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
26.1.3 Death . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
26.2 Policy proposals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
26.2.1 Tax on land and natural resource monopoly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
26.2.2 Free trade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
26.2.3 Secret ballot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
26.2.4 Currency and national debt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250

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26.2.5 Other proposals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251

26.3 Legacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
26.3.1 Henry George Theorem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252
26.4 Economic contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252
26.5 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
26.6 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
26.7 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
27 Guild socialism

257

27.1 History and development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257

27.2 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
27.3 Footnotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
27.4 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
28 Gandhism

258

28.1 Satyagraha . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258

28.1.1 Satya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258
28.2 Brahmacharya and ahimsa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
28.3 Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
28.3.1 Khadi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
28.4 Fasting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260
28.5 Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260
28.6 Nehrus India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261
28.7 Freedom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
28.8 Without truth, nothing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
28.9 Gandhians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
28.10Promotion of Gandhian Ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
28.11Criticism and controversy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
28.11.1 Concept of partition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
28.12See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264
28.13Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264
28.14References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
28.15External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
29 Gandhian economics

266

29.1 Gandhis economic ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266

29.2 Swaraj, self-rule . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266
29.3 Gandhian economics and ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
29.4 Social justice and equality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
29.5 Non-violent rural economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
29.6 Environmentalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
29.7 Concept of socialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268

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29.8 Implementation in India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268
29.9 Modern interpretations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268
29.10Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268
29.11References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269
29.12External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269

30 Platformism

270

30.1 Organisational ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270

30.2 Publication history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
30.3 Antecedents of the Platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
30.4 Problems caused by poor translations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
30.5 Other terms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
30.6 The Platform today . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
30.7 Criticisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
30.8 The synthesist alternative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
30.9 Malatestas shift to agreement with collective responsibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
30.10Further reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
30.11See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
30.12References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
30.13External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273
31 New Left

274

31.1 Historical origins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274

31.1.1 Britain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274
31.1.2 United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
31.1.3 Aliated groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276
31.1.4 1960s counterculture and the hippie movement

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276

31.1.5 Continental European New Left . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278

31.2 Inspirations and inuences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
31.3 Key gures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
31.4 Other associated people . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
31.5 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280
31.6 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280
31.7 Further reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
31.7.1 General . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
31.7.2 Australia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282
31.7.3 Canada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282
31.7.4 Germany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282
31.7.5 Japan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282
31.7.6 United Kingdom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282
31.7.7 United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283

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32 Social ecology

284

32.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284

32.2 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
32.3 References

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285

32.4 Further reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285

32.5 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
33 Communalism (political philosophy)

286

33.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286

33.2 Politics

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286

33.2.1 Libertarian municipalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286

33.2.2 Confederalism

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287

33.2.3 Policy and administration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287

33.2.4 Participation in currently existing political systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287
33.3 Economics

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287

33.4 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287

33.5 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288
33.6 References and external links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288
34 Participism

289

34.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289

34.1.1 Participatory politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
34.1.2 Participatory economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290
34.1.3 Feminist kinship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
34.1.4 Polycultural community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
34.2 Criticisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
34.2.1 Anarchism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
34.2.2 Capitalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292
34.3 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292
34.4 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292
35 Inclusive Democracy
35.1 Conception of Inclusive Democracy

293
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293

35.2 Institutional framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294

35.2.1 Political or direct democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294
35.2.2 Economic democracy and the role of an articial market . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294
35.2.3 Democracy in the social realm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296
35.2.4 Ecological democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297
35.3 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 298
35.4 References

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 298

35.5 Further reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299

35.5.1 Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299

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CONTENTS
35.5.2 Essays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299
35.5.3 Dialogues on Inclusive Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300
35.6 Videos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301
35.7 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301

36 Insurrectionary anarchism

302

36.1 Origins and evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302

36.1.1 19th century

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302

36.1.2 Illegalism and propaganda by the deed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302

36.1.3 Contemporary approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303
36.2 Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305
36.3 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306
36.4 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306
36.5 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307
36.5.1 Insurrectionary groups and publications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307
37 Zapatista Army of National Liberation
37.1 History

308

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308

37.1.1 1990s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308

37.1.2 2000s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309
37.2 Ideology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310
37.2.1 Womens Revolutionary Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
37.2.2 Postcolonial gaze . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
37.3 Political expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
37.3.1 Aguascalientes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
37.3.2 Caracoles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312
37.4 Communications

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312

37.5 20052013 activities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313

37.6 Horizontal Autonomy and Indigenous Leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314
37.7 Notable members . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314
37.8 New media technologies and the Zapatista idea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314
37.9 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314
37.10References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314
37.10.1 Footnotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314
37.10.2 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
37.11Further reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
37.12External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
37.12.1 Multimedia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 316
38 Emiliano Zapata

317

38.1 Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317

38.1.1 The 1910 Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 318

CONTENTS

xv

38.2 Revolutionary general . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 318

38.3 The Villa-Zapata alliance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320
38.4 Zapata rebuilds Morelos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321
38.5 Guerrilla warfare against Carranza . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322
38.6 Carranza consolidates power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322
38.7 Zapata under pressure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322
38.8 Death . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323
38.9 Aftermath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323
38.9.1 Legacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324
38.10In popular culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324
38.11Aliases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324
38.12References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
38.13Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
38.14External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
39 Magonism

326

39.1 Magonism and anarchism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 326

39.2 Magonism and indigenous movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 326
39.3 Legacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327
39.4 Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328
39.5 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328
39.6 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328
39.7 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328
40 Left-wing market anarchism
40.1 Precedents

329

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329

40.1.1 19th century: Mutualism, American individualist anarchism and Georgism . . . . . . . . . 329
40.1.2 The 1960s: American libertarianism and the New Left
40.2 Theory

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332

40.2.1 Labour rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333

40.2.2 Cultural politics

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333

40.2.3 Theorists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333

40.3 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334
40.4 References

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334

40.5 Further reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337

40.6 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337
41 Communization

338

41.1 Theory

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338

41.2 History

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338

41.2.1 Origins and precedents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338

41.2.2 Late 20th century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339

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CONTENTS
41.2.3 Early 21st century

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339

41.3 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340

41.4 References

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340

41.5 Further reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340

42 Contemporary anarchism

341

42.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341

42.2 Post-classical schools of thought and movements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342
42.3 New Anarchism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 344
42.4 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 344
42.5 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 344
42.6 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 346
42.7 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347
42.7.1 Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347
42.7.2 Images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355
42.7.3 Content license . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363

Chapter 1

Libertarian socialism
Libertarian socialism (sometimes called social anarchism,[1][2] left-libertarianism[3][4] and socialist libertarianism[5] ) is a group of political philosophies within
the socialist movement that reject the view of socialism as state ownership or command of the means of
production[6] within a more general criticism of the state
form itself[7][8] as well as of wage labour relationships
within the workplace.[9] Instead it emphasizes workers
self management of the workplace[10] and decentralized
structures of political government[11] asserting that a society based on freedom and equality can be achieved
through abolishing authoritarian institutions that control certain means of production and subordinate the
majority to an owning class or political and economic
elite.[12] Libertarian socialists generally place their hopes
in decentralized means of direct democracy and federal
or confederal associations[13] such as libertarian municipalism, citizens assemblies, trade unions, and workers
councils.[14][15] All of this is generally done within a general call for libertarian[16] and voluntary human relationships[17] through the identication, criticism, and practical dismantling of illegitimate authority in all aspects of
human life.[18][19][20][21][22][23][24]

pose that this economic system be executed in a manner that attempts to maximize the liberty of individuals and minimize concentration of power or authority
(libertarianism).

Past and present political philosophies and movements commonly described as libertarian socialist
include anarchism (especially anarchist communism,
anarchist collectivism, anarcho-syndicalism,[25] and
mutualism[26] ) as well as autonomism, communalism,
participism, revolutionary syndicalism, and libertarian
Marxist philosophies such as council communism and
Luxemburgism;[27] as well as some versions of "utopian
socialism"[28] and individualist anarchism.[29][30][31][32]
August 17, 1860 edition of libertarian Communist publication Le
Libertaire edited by Joseph Djacque.

Libertarian socialists are strongly critical of coercive institutions, which often leads them to reject the legitimacy
of the state in favor of anarchism.[34] Adherents propose
achieving this through decentralization of political and
economic power, usually involving the socialization of
most large-scale private property and enterprise (while
retaining respect for personal property). Libertarian socialism tends to deny the legitimacy of most forms of economically signicant private property, viewing capitalist
property relations as forms of domination that are antagonistic to individual freedom.[35][36]

1.1 Overview
Libertarian socialism is a Western philosophy with diverse interpretations, though some general commonalities can be found in its many incarnations. Its proponents
generally advocate a worker-oriented system of production and organization in the workplace that in some aspects radically departs from neoclassical economics in
favor of democratic cooperatives or common ownership
of the means of production (socialism).[33] They pro1

CHAPTER 1. LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM

The rst anarchist journal to use the term libertarian

was Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social and it
was published in New York City between 1858 and 1861
by French anarcho-communist Joseph Djacque.[37] The
next recorded use of the term was in Europe, when libertarian communism was used at a French regional anarchist Congress at Le Havre (1622 November 1880).
January the following year saw a French manifesto issued on Libertarian or Anarchist Communism. Finally,
1895 saw leading anarchists Sbastien Faure and Louise
Michel publish La Libertaire in France.[37] The word
stems from the French word libertaire, and was used to
evade the French ban on anarchist publications.[38] In this
tradition, the term libertarianism in libertarian socialism is generally used as a synonym for anarchism, which
some say is the original meaning of the term; hence libertarian socialism is equivalent to socialist anarchism
to these scholars.[2][39] In the context of the European
socialist movement, libertarian has conventionally been
used to describe those who opposed state socialism, such
as Mikhail Bakunin.
The association of socialism with libertarianism predates
that of capitalism, and many anti-authoritarians still decry
what they see as a mistaken association of capitalism with
libertarianism in the United States.[40] As Noam Chomsky put it, a consistent libertarian must oppose private
ownership of the means of production and wage slavery,
which is a component of this system, as incompatible with
the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.[41]
In a chapter recounting the history of libertarian socialism, economist Robin Hahnel relates that thus far the period where libertarian socialism has had its greatest impact was at the end of the 19th century through the rst
four decades of the twentieth century.
Early in the twentieth century, libertarian
socialism was as powerful a force as social
democracy and communism. The Libertarian
International founded at the Congress of Saint
Imier a few days after the split between Marxist
and libertarians at the congress of the Socialist
International held in The Hague in 1872 competed successfully against social democrats and
communists alike for the loyalty of anticapitalist activists, revolutionaries, workers, unions
and political parties for over fty years. Libertarian socialists played a major role in the
Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Libertarian socialists played a dominant role in the
Mexican Revolution of 1911. Twenty years after World War I was over, libertarian socialists
were still strong enough to spearhead the social
revolution that swept across Republican Spain
in 1936 and 1937.[42]

late 1910s mainly in reaction against Bolshevism and

Leninism rising to power and establishing the Soviet
Union. Contemporary libertarian Marxist Harry Cleaver
describes the situation as follows:
Outside and against this process of turning of Marxism into an ideology of domination, however, were various revolutionary tendencies which still drew on Marxs work to inform their struggles and which rejected both
social- democratic and Marxist-Leninist versions of his theory. The most interesting of
these, those that are relevant to my current purpose, have been those which insisted on the primacy of the self-activity and creativity of people in struggle against capitalism. Within the
space of these tendencies there has developed
a coherent critique of orthodox Marxism that
includes not only a rejection of the concept
of the transition but a reconceptualization of
the process of transcending capitalism that has
remarkable similarities to Kropotkin's thinking on this subject. ... Thus one of the earliest political tendencies within which this approach appeared after the Russian revolution
of 1917 was that of "Council Communism"
which saw the workers councils in Germany
(see Bavarian Soviet Republic), or the soviets
in Russia, as new organizational forms constructed by the people. As with the anarchists,
they too saw the Bolshevik take-over of the soviets (like that of the trade unions) as subverting the revolution and beginning the restoration of domination and exploitation. ... Over
the years this emphasis on working class autonomy has resulted in a reinterpretation of Marxist theory that has brought out the two-sided
character of the class struggle and shifted the
focus from capital (the preoccupation of orthodox Marxism) to the workers. ... As a result, not only has there been a recognition that
capitalism seeks to subordinate everyones life
(from the traditional factory proletariat to peasants, housewives and students) but that all those
peoples struggles involve both the resistance to
this subordination and the eort to construct
alternative ways of being.[43]

1.1.1 Anti-capitalism
Main article: Anti-capitalism

Libertarian socialists are anti-capitalist, and can thus

be distinguished from right-wing libertarians. Whereas
capitalist (and right-libertarian) principles concentrate
On the other hand a libertarian trend also developed economic power in the hands of those who own the most
within marxism which gained visibility around the capital, libertarian socialism aims to distribute power,

1.1. OVERVIEW

and thus freedom, more equally amongst members of society. A key dierence between libertarian socialism and
capitalist libertarianism is that advocates of the former
generally believe that ones degree of freedom is aected
by ones economic and social status, whereas advocates of
the latter focus on freedom of choice within a capitalist
framework. This is sometimes characterized as a desire
to maximize free creativity in a society in preference to
free enterprise.[44]

challenged and justied. Most libertarian socialists believe that when power is exercised, as exemplied by the
economic, social, or physical dominance of one individual over another, the burden of proof is always on the
authoritarian to justify their action as legitimate when
taken against its eect of narrowing the scope of human
freedom.[58] Libertarian socialists typically oppose rigid
and stratied structures of authority, be they political,
economic, or social.[59]

Within anarchism there emerged a critique of wage

slavery which refers to a situation perceived as quasivoluntary slavery,[45] where a persons livelihood depends
on wages, especially when the dependence is total and
immediate.[46][47] It is a negatively connoted term used to
draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor by focusing on similarities between owning and renting a person. The term wage slavery has been used to criticize
economic exploitation and social stratication, with the
former seen primarily as unequal bargaining power between labor and capital (particularly when workers are
paid comparatively low wages, e.g. in sweatshops),[48]
and the latter as a lack of workers self-management, fullling job choices and leisure in an economy.[49][50][51]
Libertarian socialists believe if freedom is valued, then
society must work towards a system in which individuals have the power to decide economic issues along
with political issues. Libertarian socialists seek to replace unjustied authority with direct democracy, voluntary federation, and popular autonomy in all aspects
of life,[52] including physical communities and economic
enterprises. With the advent of the industrial revolution, thinkers such as Proudhon and Marx elaborated
the comparison between wage labor and slavery in the
context of a critique of societal property not intended
for active personal use,[53][54] Luddites emphasized the
dehumanization brought about by machines while later
Emma Goldman famously denounced wage slavery by
saying: The only dierence is that you are hired slaves
instead of block slaves..[55]

In lieu of corporations and states, libertarian socialists

seek to organize society into voluntary associations (usually collectives, communes, municipalities, cooperatives,
commons, or syndicates) that use direct democracy or
consensus for their decision-making process. Some
libertarian socialists advocate combining these institutions using rotating, recallable delegates to higher-level
federations.[60] Spanish anarchism is a major example of
such federations in practice.

Many libertarian socialists argue that large-scale voluntary associations should manage industrial manufacture,
while workers retain rights to the individual products of
their labor.[56] As such, they see a distinction between the
concepts of private property and "personal possession".
Whereas private property grants an individual exclusive control over a thing whether it is in use or not, and
regardless of its productive capacity, possession grants
no rights to things that are not in use.[57]

1.1.2

Contemporary examples of libertarian socialist organizational and decision-making models in practice include a number of anti-capitalist and global justice
movements[61] including Zapatista Councils of Good
Government and the Global Indymedia network (which
covers 45 countries on six continents). There are also
many examples of indigenous societies around the world
whose political and economic systems can be accurately
described as anarchist or libertarian socialist, each of
which is unique and uniquely suited to the culture that
birthed it.[62] For libertarians, that diversity of practice
within a framework of common principles is proof of
the vitality of those principles and of their exibility and
strength.
Contrary to popular opinion, libertarian socialism has not
traditionally been a utopian movement, tending to avoid
dense theoretical analysis or prediction of what a future
society would or should look like. The tradition instead
has been that such decisions cannot be made now, and
must be made through struggle and experimentation, so
that the best solution can be arrived at democratically and
organically, and to base the direction for struggle on established historical example. They point out that the success of the scientic method comes from its adherence
to open rational exploration, not its conclusions, in sharp
contrast to dogma and predetermined predictions. To libertarian socialists, dogmatic approaches to social organization are doomed to failure; and thus they reject Marxist notions of linear and inevitable historical progression.
Noted anarchist Rudolf Rocker once stated, I am an anarchist not because I believe anarchism is the nal goal,
but because there is no such thing as a nal goal.[63]

Anti-authoritarianism and opposiBecause libertarian socialism encourages exploration and

tion to the state

embraces a diversity of ideas rather than forming a compact movement, there have arisen inevitable controversies
Main articles: Anti-statism and anti-authoritarianism
over individuals who describe themselves as libertarian
socialists but disagree with some of the core principles of
Libertarian socialists generally regard concentrations of libertarian socialism. For example, Peter Hain interprets
power as sources of oppression that must be continually

CHAPTER 1. LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM

libertarian socialism as minarchist rather than anarchist,

favoring radical decentralization of power without going
as far as the complete abolition of the state[64] and libertarian socialist Noam Chomsky supports dismantling all
forms of unjustied social or economic power, while also
emphasizing that state intervention should be supported
as a temporary protection while oppressive structures remain in existence.
Proponents are known for opposing the existence of states
or government and refusing to participate in coercive state
institutions. Indeed, in the past many refused to swear
oaths in court or to participate in trials, even when they
faced imprisonment[65] or deportation.[66]

1.1.3

Civil liberties and individual freedom

Main articles: Free love, Anarchism and issues related

to love and sex, Anarchism and religion, Anarchafeminism, Anarchism and education, Queer anarchism
and Individualist anarchism
Libertarian socialists have been strong advocates and activists of civil liberties that provide an individual specic
rights such as the freedom in issues of love and sex (free
love) (see Anarchism and issues related to love and sex)
and of thought and conscience (freethought). In this activism they have clashed with state and religious institutions which have limited such rights (see Anarchism
and religion). Anarchism has been an important advocate of free love since its birth. Later a strong tendency
of free love appeared alongside anarcha-feminism and advocacy of LGBT rights (see Anarchism and issues related
to LGBTI persons). In recent times anarchism has also
voiced opinions and taken action around certain sex related subjects such as pornography,[67] BDSM[68] and the
sex industry.[68]
Anarcha-feminism developed as a synthesis of radical
feminism and anarchism that views patriarchy (male
domination over women) as a fundamental manifestation
of compulsory government. It was inspired by the late
19th-century writings of early feminist anarchists such
as Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre
and Virginia Bolten. Anarcha-feminists, like other radical feminists, criticise and advocate the abolition of traditional conceptions of family, education and gender roles.
Also the council communist Sylvia Pankhurst was a feminist activist as well as a libertarian marxist. Anarchists
also took a pioneering interest in issues related to LGBTI
persons. An important current within anarchism is free
love.[69] Free love advocates sometimes traced their roots
back to the early anarchist Josiah Warren and to experimental communities, viewed sexual freedom as a clear,
direct expression of an individuals self-ownership. Free
love particularly stressed womens rights since most sexual laws discriminated against women: for example, mar-

American anarchist Emma Goldman, prominent anarchafeminist, free love and freethought activist

riage laws and anti-birth control measures.[70]

Libertarian socialists have traditionally been skeptical of
and opposed to organized religion.[71] Freethought is a
philosophical viewpoint that holds opinions should be
formed on the basis of science, logic, and reason, and
should not be inuenced by authority, tradition, or other
dogmas.[46][72] The cognitive application of freethought is
known as freethinking, and practitioners of freethought
are known as freethinkers.[46] In the United States,
freethought was a basically anti-Christian, anti-clerical
movement, whose purpose was to make the individual
politically and spiritually free to decide for himself on
religious matters. A number of contributors to Liberty
(anarchist publication) were prominent gures in both
freethought and anarchism. The individualist anarchist
George MacDonald was a co-editor of Freethought and,
for a time, The Truth Seeker. E.C. Walker was coeditor of the...free-thought / free love journal Lucifer, the
Light-Bearer".[73] Free Society (18951897 as The Firebrand; 18971904 as Free Society) was a major anarchist
newspaper in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.[74] The
publication staunchly advocated free love and womens
rights, and critiqued "Comstockery" censorship of sexual information. In 1901, Catalan anarchist and freethinker Francesc Ferrer i Gurdia established modern
or progressive schools in Barcelona in deance of an educational system controlled by the Catholic Church.[75]

1.2. POLITICAL ROOTS

The schools stated goal was to "educate the working class
in a rational, secular and non-coercive setting. Fiercely
anti-clerical, Ferrer believed in freedom in education,
education free from the authority of church and state[76]
(see Anarchism and education). Later in the 20th century
Austrian freudo-marxist Wilhelm Reich became a consistent propagandist for sexual freedom going as far as opening free sex-counselling clinics in Vienna for workingclass patients[77] as well as coining the phrase "sexual revolution" in one of his books from the 1940s.[78] During
the early 1970s the anarchist and pacist Alex Comfort
achieved international celebrity for writing the sex manuals The Joy of Sex and More Joy of Sex.

5
it was in fact their approval of such forms of opposition to power that lead many anarcho-pacists to endorse
the anarcho-syndicalist concept of the general strike as
the great revolutionary weapon. Later anarcho-pacists
have also come to endorse to non-violent strategy of dual
power.
Other anarchists have believed that violence (especially
self-defense) is justied as a way to provoke social upheaval which could lead to a social revolution.

1.1.5 Environmental issues

See also: Green anarchism and Eco-socialism

1.1.4

Violent and non-violent means

See also: Anarchism and violence

Some libertarian socialists see violent revolution as necessary in the abolition of capitalist society, while others
advocate non-violent methods. Along with many others,
Errico Malatesta argued that the use of violence was necessary; as he put it in Umanit Nova (no. 125, September
6, 1921):
It is our aspiration and our aim that everyone should become socially conscious and effective; but to achieve this end, it is necessary
to provide all with the means of life and for
development, and it is therefore necessary to
destroy with violence, since one cannot do otherwise, the violence that denies these means to
the workers.[79]
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon argued in favor of a non-violent
revolution through a process of dual power in which libertarian socialist institutions would be established and form
associations enabling the formation of an expanding network within the existing state-capitalist framework with
the intention of eventually rendering both the state and
the capitalist economy obsolete. The progression towards
violence in anarchism stemmed, in part, from the massacres of some of the communes inspired by the ideas of
Proudhon and others. Many anarcho-communists began
to see a need for revolutionary violence to counteract the
violence inherent in both capitalism and government.[80]
Anarcho-pacism is a tendency within the anarchist
movement which rejects the use of violence in the struggle for social change.[81][82] The main early inuences
were the thought of Henry David Thoreau[82] and Leo
Tolstoy.[81][82] It developed mostly in Holland (sic),
Britain, and the United States, before and during the Second World War.[83] Opposition to the use of violence has
not prohibited anarcho-pacists from accepting the principle of resistance or even revolutionary action (see: nonviolent revolution) provided it does not result in violence;

Green anarchism, or ecoanarchism, is a school of

thought within anarchism which puts a particular emphasis on environmental issues. An important early
inuence was the thought of the American anarchist
Henry David Thoreau and his book Walden,[84] as well
as Leo Tolstoy[85] and Elisee Reclus.[86][87] In the late
19th century there emerged anarcho-naturism as the
fusion of anarchism and naturist philosophies within
individualist anarchist circles in France, Spain, Cuba[88]
and Portugal.[84][85] Important contemporary currents are
anarcho-primitivism and social ecology.[89] An important meeting place for international libertarian socialism
in the early 1990s was the journal Democracy & Nature
in which prominent activists and theorists such as Takis
Fotopoulos, Noam Chomsky,[90] Murray Bookchin and
Cornelius Castoriadis[91] wrote. The journal promoted a
green libertarian socialism when it manifested as its aims
that:

1.2 Political roots

1.2.1 Within early
thought

modern

socialist

Peasant revolts in the post-reformation era

For Roderick T. Long libertarian socialists claim the
sevententh century English Levellers among their ideological forbears.[92] Various libertarian socialist authors
have identied the written work of English Protestant social reformer Gerrard Winstanley and the social activism
of his group, the Diggers, as anticipating this line of
thought.[93][94] For anarchist historian George Woodcock
although (Pierre Joseph) Proudhon was the rst writer to
call himself an anarchist, at least two predecessors outlined systems that contain all the basic elements of anarchism. The rst was Gerrard Winstanley (1609-c. 1660),
a linen draper who led the small movement of the Diggers
during the Commonwealth. Winstanley and his followers
protested in the name of a radical Christianity against the
economic distress that followed the Civil War and against

Woodcut from a Diggers document by William Everard.

CHAPTER 1. LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM

William Godwin

The Enlightenment
For Roderick T. Long libertarian socialists also often
the inequality that the grandees of the New Model Army share a view of ancentry in the eighteenth century French
seemed intent on preserving.[95]
encyclopedists alongside Thomas Jeerson[97][98][99] and
[92]
A more often mentioned name is
In 16491650 the Diggers squatted on stretches of com- Thomas Paine".
that of English enlightenment thinker William Godmon land in southern England and attempted to set up
[100]
For Woodcock a more elaborate sketch of anarcommunities based on work on the land and the sharing win.
chism, although still without the name, was provided by
of goods. The communities failed, but a series of pamphlets by Winstanley survived, of which The New Law William Godwin in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). Godwin was a gradualist anarchist rather than
of Righteousness (1649) was the most important. Advocating a rational Christianity, Winstanley equated Christ a revolutionary anarchist; he diered from most later anwith the universal liberty and declared the universally archists in preferring above revolutionary action the gradcorrupting nature of authority. He saw an equal priv- ual and, as it seemed to him, more natural process of disilege to share in the blessing of liberty and detected cussion among men of good will, by which he hoped truth
an intimate link between the institution of property and would eventually triumph through its own power. Godthe lack of freedom.[95] For Murray Bookchin In the win, who was inuenced by the English tradition of Dismodern world, anarchism rst appeared as a movement sent and the French philosophy of the Enlightenment, put
of the peasantry and yeomanry against declining feudal forward in a developed form the basic anarchist criticisms
delegainstitutions. In Germany its foremost spokesman dur- of the state, of accumulated property, and of the [95]
tion
of
authority
through
democratic
procedure.
ing the Peasant Wars was Thomas Muenzer; in England,
Gerrard Winstanley, a leading participant in the Digger
movement. The concepts held by Muenzer and Winstanley were superbly attuned to the needs of their time
a historical period when the majority of the population
lived in the countryside and when the most militant revolutionary forces came from an agrarian world. It would be
painfully academic to argue whether Muenzer and Winstanley could have achieved their ideals. What is of real
importance is that they spoke to their time; their anarchist concepts followed naturally from the rural society
that furnished the bands of the peasant armies in Germany and the New Model in England.[96]

During the French Revolution, Sylvain Marchal, in his

Manifesto of the Equals (1796), demanded the communal enjoyment of the fruits of the earth and looked forward to the disappearance of the revolting distinction of
rich and poor, of great and small, of masters and valets,
of governors and governed.[27][101] The term anarchist
rst entered the English language in 1642, during the
English Civil War, as a term of abuse, used by Royalists
against their Roundhead opponents.[102] By the time of
the French Revolution some, such as the Enrags, began
to use the term positively,[103] in opposition to Jacobin
centralisation of power, seeing revolutionary govern-

1.2. POLITICAL ROOTS

ment as oxymoronic.[102] By the turn of the 19th cen- (including the so-called free love movement). William
tury, the English word anarchism had lost its initial neg- Godwin's anarchism exerted an ideological inuence on
ative connotation.[102]
some of this, but more so the socialism of Robert Owen
and Charles Fourier. After success of his British venture, Owen himself established a cooperative community
The Romantic era and Utopian Socialism
within the United States at New Harmony, Indiana during
1825. One member of this commune was Josiah Warren
(17981874), considered to be the rst individualist anarchist".[107]

1.2.2 Anarchism
Main article: Anarchism
As Albert Meltzer and Stuart Christie stated in their book
The Floodgates of Anarchy, anarchism has:
...its particular inheritance, part of which
it shares with socialism, giving it a family
resemblance to certain of its enemies. Another part of its inheritance it shares with
liberalism, making it, at birth, kissing-cousins
with American-type radical individualism, a
large part of which has married out of the family into the Right Wing and is no longer on
speaking terms. (The Floodgates of Anarchy,
1970, p. 39.)
Charles Fourier

Kent Bromley, in his preface to Peter Kropotkin's book

The Conquest of Bread, considered early French socialist Charles Fourier to be the founder of the libertarian
branch of socialist thought, as opposed to the authoritarian socialist ideas of Babeuf and Buonarroti.[104] Anarchist Hakim Bey describes Fouriers ideas as follows:
In Fouriers system of Harmony all creative activity including industry, craft, agriculture, etc. will arise from
liberated passion this is the famous theory of attractive labor. Fourier sexualizes work itself the life of
the Phalanstery is a continual orgy of intense feeling, intellection, & activity, a society of lovers & wild enthusiasts. Fourierism manifested itself in the middle of
the 19th century (where) literally hundreds of communes
(phalansteries) were founded on fourierist principles in
France, N. America, Mexico, S. America, Algeria, Yugoslavia, etc. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Friedrich Engels,
and Peter Kropotkin all read him with fascination, as
did Andr Breton and Roland Barthes.[105] Herbert Marcuse in his inuential work Eros and Civilization praised
Fourier saying that Fourier comes closer than any other
utopian socialist to elucidating the dependence of freedom on non-repressive sublimation.[106]

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who is often considered the father of modern anarchism, coined the phrase "Property
is theft" to describe part of his view on the complex nature of ownership in relation to freedom. When he said
property is theft, he was referring to the capitalist who he
believed stole prot from laborers. For Proudhon, the
capitalists employee was subordinated, exploited: his
permanent condition is one of obedience.[108]
Seventeen years (1857) after Proudhon rst called himself an anarchist (1840), anarchist communist Joseph
Djacque was the rst person to describe himself as
a libertarian.[109] Outside the United States, libertarian generally refers to anti-authoritarian anti-capitalist
ideologies.[110]

Libertarian socialism has its roots in both classical liberalism and socialism, though it is often in conict with liberalism (especially neoliberalism and right-libertarianism)
and authoritarian State socialism simultaneously. While
libertarian socialism has roots in both socialism and liberalism, dierent forms have dierent levels of inuence
from the two traditions. For instance mutualist anarchism
is more inuenced by liberalism while communist and
syndicalist anarchism are more inuenced by socialism. It
is interesting to note, however, that mutualist anarchism
Anarchist Peter Sabatini reports that in the United States has its origins in 18th- and 19th-century European socialof early to mid-19th century, there appeared an ar- ism (such as Fourierian socialism)[111][112] while commuray of communal and utopian counterculture groups nist and syndicalist anarchism has its earliest origins in

CHAPTER 1. LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM

William Morris, early english libertarian marxist

Peter Kropotkin, main theorist of anarcho-communism

early 18th-century liberalism (such as the French Revolution).[101]

thought after specic circumstances. One does nd

early expressions of such perspectives in (William) Morris and the Socialist Party of Great Britain (the SPGB),
then again around the events of 1905, with the growing concern at the bureaucratisation and de-radicalisation
of international socialism.[113] Morris established the
Socialist League in December 1884, which was encouraged by Friedrich Engels and Eleanor Marx. As the leading gure in the organization Morris embarked on a relentless series of speeches and talks on street corners, in
working mens clubs and lecture theatres across England
and Scotland. From 1887, anarchists began to outnumber socialists in the Socialist League.[114] The 3rd Annual
Conference of the League, held in London on 29 May
1887 marked the change, with a majority of the 24 branch
delegates voting in favor of an anarchist-sponsored resolution declaring that This conference endorses the policy
of abstention from parliamentary action, hitherto pursued
by the League, and sees no sucient reason for altering
it.[115] Morris played peacemaker but sided with the antiParliamentarians, who won control of the League, which
consequently lost the support of Engels and saw the departure of Eleanor Marx and her partner Edward Aveling
to form the separate Bloomsbury Socialist Society.

Anarchism posed an early challenge to the vanguardism

and statism it detected in important sectors of the socialist movement. As such The consequences of the
growth of parliamentary action, ministerialism, and party
life, charged the anarchists, would be de-radicalism and
embourgeoisiement. Further, state politics would subvert
both true individuality and true community. In response,
many anarchists refused Marxist-type organisation, seeking to dissolve or undermine power and hierarchy by way
of loose political-cultural groupings, or by championing
organisation by a single, simultaneously economic and
political administrative unit (Ruhle, Syndicalism). The
power of the intellectual and of science were also rejected
by many anarchists: In conquering the state, in exalting the role of parties, they [intellectuals] reinforce the
hierarchical principle embodied in political and administrative institutions.[47] Revolutions could only come
through force of circumstances and/or the inherently rebellious instincts of the masses (the instinct for freedom
(Bakunin, Chomsky)). Thus, in Bakunins words: All
that individuals can do is to clarify, propagate, and work
However, the most important ruptures are to be traced to
out ideas corresponding to the popular instinct..[113]
the insurgency during and after the First World War. Disillusioned with the capitulation of the social democrats,
excited by the emergence of workers councils, and slowly
1.2.3 Marxism
distanced from Leninism, many communists came to reMain article: Libertarian Marxism
ject the claims of socialist parties and to put their faith inSee also: Anarchism and Marxism
stead in the masses. For these socialists, The intuition
Marxism started to develop a libertarian strand of of the masses in action can have more genius in it than

1.2. POLITICAL ROOTS

the work of the greatest individual genius. Luxemburgs
workerism and spontaneism are exemplary of positions
later taken up by the far-left of the period Pannekoek,
Roland Holst, and Gorter in Holland, Sylvia Pankhurst in
Britain, Gramsci in Italy, Lukacs in Hungary. In these
formulations, the dictatorship of the proletariat was to
be the dictatorship of a class, not of a party or of a
clique.[113] However within this line of thought The
tension between anti-vanguardism and vanguardism has
frequently resolved itself in two diametrically opposed
ways: the rst involved a drift towards the party; the second saw a move towards the idea of complete proletarian
spontaneity...The rst course is exemplied most clearly
in Gramsci and Lukacs...The second course is illustrated
in the tendency, developing from the Dutch and German
far-lefts, which inclined towards the complete eradication
of the party form.[113]
In the emerging Soviet state there appeared Left-wing
uprisings against the Bolsheviks which were a series of
rebellions and uprisings against the Bolsheviks led or supported by left wing groups including Socialist Revolutionaries,[116] Left Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks,
and anarchists.[117] Some were in support of the White
Movement while some tried to be an independent force.
The uprisings started in 1918 and continued through the
Russian Civil War and after until 1922. In response the
Bolsheviks increasingly abandoned attempts to get these
groups to join the government and suppressed them with
force. Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder is
a work by Vladimir Lenin himself attacking assorted critics of the Bolsheviks who claimed positions to their left.
For many Marxian libertarian socialists, the political
bankruptcy of socialist orthodoxy necessitated a theoretical break. This break took a number of forms. The
Bordigists and the SPGB championed a super-Marxian
intransigence in theoretical matters. Other socialists
made a return behind Marx to the anti-positivist programme of German idealism. Libertarian socialism has
frequently linked its anti-authoritarian political aspirations with this theoretical dierentiation from orthodoxy... Karl Korsch... remained a libertarian socialist
for a large part of his life and because of the persistent
urge towards theoretical openness in his work. Korsch
rejected the eternal and static, and he was obsessed by
the essential role of practice in a theorys truth. For Korsch, no theory could escape history, not even Marxism.
In this vein, Korsch even credited the stimulus for Marxs
Capital to the movement of the oppressed classes. "[113]
In rejecting both capitalism and the state, some libertarian marxists align themselves with anarchists in opposition to both capitalist representative democracy and to
authoritarian forms of Marxism. Although anarchists and
Marxists share an ultimate goal of a stateless society, anarchists criticise most Marxists for advocating a transitional phase under which the state is used to achieve this
aim. Nonetheless, libertarian Marxist tendencies such as
autonomist Marxism and council communism have his-

9
torically been intertwined with the anarchist movement.
Anarchist movements have come into conict with both
capitalist and Marxist forces, sometimes at the same time,
as in the Spanish Civil War, though as in that war Marxists themselves are often divided in support or opposition
to anarchism. Other political persecutions under bureaucratic parties have resulted in a strong historical antagonism between anarchists and libertarian Marxists on the
one hand and Leninist Marxists and their derivatives such
as Maoists on the other. In recent history, however, libertarian socialists have repeatedly formed temporary alliances with Marxist-Leninist groups for the purposes of
protest against institutions they both reject. Part of this
antagonism can be traced to the International Workingmens Association, the First International, a congress of
radical workers, where Mikhail Bakunin, who was fairly
representative of anarchist views, and Karl Marx, whom
anarchists accused of being an authoritarian, came into
conict on various issues. Bakunins viewpoint on the
illegitimacy of the state as an institution and the role
of electoral politics was starkly counterposed to Marxs
views in the First International. Marx and Bakunins disputes eventually led to Marx taking control of the First
International and expelling Bakunin and his followers
from the organization. This was the beginning of a longrunning feud and schism between libertarian socialists
and what they call authoritarian communists, or alternatively just authoritarians. Some Marxists have formulated views that closely resemble syndicalism, and thus
express more anity with anarchist ideas. Several libertarian socialists, notably Noam Chomsky, believe that
anarchism shares much in common with certain variants
of Marxism such as the council communism of Marxist Anton Pannekoek. In Chomskys Notes on Anarchism,[118] he suggests the possibility that some form of
council communism is the natural form of revolutionary
socialism in an industrial society. It reects the belief that
democracy is severely limited when the industrial system
is controlled by any form of autocratic elite, whether of
owners, managers, and technocrats, a 'vanguard' party, or
a State bureaucracy.
In the mid-20th century some libertarian socialist groups
emerged out of disagreements with Trotskyism which
presented itself as leninist anti-stalinism. As such the
french group Socialisme ou Barbarie emerged out of
the Trotskyist Fourth International, where Castoriadis
and Claude Lefort constituted a ChaulieuMontal Tendency in the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste
in 1946. In 1948, they experienced their nal disenchantment with Trotskyism,[119] leading them to break
away to form Socialisme ou Barbarie, whose journal began appearing in March 1949. Castoriadis later said of
this period that the main audience of the group and
of the journal was formed by groups of the old, radical
left: Bordigists, council communists, some anarchists and
some ospring of the German left of the 1920s.[120]
Also in the United Kingdom the group Solidarity was
founded in 1960 by a small group of expelled mem-

10
bers of the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League. Almost
from the start it was strongly inuenced by the French
Socialisme ou Barbarie group, in particular by its intellectual leader Cornelius Castoriadis, whose essays were
among the many pamphlets Solidarity produced. The intellectual leader of the group was Chris Pallis ( who wrote
under the name Maurice Brinton).[121]
In the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) since 1967,
the terms Ultra-Left and left communist refers to political theory and practice self-dened as further "left" than
that of the central Maoist leaders at the height of the
GPCR ("Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution"). The
terms are also used retroactively to describe some early
20th-century Chinese anarchist orientations. As a slur,
the Communist Party of China (CPC) has used the term
ultra-left more broadly to denounce any orientation it
considers further left than the party line. According
to the latter usage, in 1978 the CPC Central Committee denounced as ultra-left the line of Mao Zedong
from 1956 until his death in 1976. Ultra-Left refers
to those GPCR rebel positions that diverged from the
central Maoist line by identifying an antagonistic contradiction between the CPC-PRC party-state itself and the
masses of workers and peasants[122] conceived as a single proletarian class divorced from any meaningful control over production or distribution. Whereas the central Maoist line maintained that the masses controlled
the means of production through the Partys mediation,
the Ultra-Left argued that the objective interests of bureaucrats were structurally determined by the centralist state-form in direct opposition to the objective interests of the masses, regardless of however red a given
bureaucrats thought might be. Whereas the central
Maoist leaders encouraged the masses to criticize reactionary ideas and habits among the alleged 5% of bad
cadres, giving them a chance to turn over a new leaf after they had undergone "thought reform", the Ultra-Left
argued that cultural revolution had to give way to political revolution in which one class overthrows another
class.[123][124]
In 1969 french platformist anarcho-communist Daniel
Guerin published an essay called Libertarian Marxism?"
in which he dealt with the debate between Karl Marx and
Mikhail Bakunin at the First International and afterwards
he suggested that Libertarian marxism rejects determinism and fatalism, giving the greater place to individual
will, intuition, imagination, reex speeds, and to the deep
instincts of the masses, which are more far-seeing in
hours of crisis than the reasonings of the elites; libertarian marxism thinks of the eects of surprise, provocation
and boldness, refuses to be cluttered and paralysed by a
heavy scientic apparatus, doesnt equivocate or blu,
and guards itself from adventurism as much as from fear
of the unknown.[125] In the US from 1970 to 1981 there
existed the publication Root & Branch[126] which had as
a subtitle A Libertarian Marxist Journal.[127]

CHAPTER 1. LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM

ory are also regarded as being anti-authoritarian variants of Marxism that are rmly within the libertarian socialist tradition. For libcom.org In the 1980s and 90s,
a series of other groups developed, inuenced also by
much of the above work. The most notable are Kolinko,
Kurasje and Wildcat in Germany, Aufheben in England,
Theorie Communiste in France, TPTG in Greece and
Kamunist Kranti in India. They are also connected to
other groups in other countries, merging autonomia, operaismo, Hegelian Marxism, the work of the JFT, Open
Marxism, the ICO, the Situationist International, anarchism and post-68 German Marxism.[128] Related to
this were intellectuals who were inuenced by Italian left
communist Amadeo Bordiga but who disagreed with his
leninist positions and so these included the french publication Invariance edited by Jacques Camatte, published
since 1968 and Gilles Dauve who published Troploin with
Karl Nesic.

1.3 Notable libertarian socialist

tendencies
1.3.1 Classical anarchist tendencies
In a chronological and theoretical sense, there are classical those created throughout the 19th century and
post-classical anarchist schools those created since the
mid-20th century and after.
Mutualism
Main article: Mutualism (economic theory)
Mutualism is a political and economic theory largely as-

Proudhon and his children, by Gustave Courbet (1865).

sociated with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Proudhon argued

that all capital, whether material or mental, being the
result of collective labour, is, in consequence, collective
property.[67] This meant that artisans would manage the
Autonomist Marxism, Neo-Marxism and Situationist the- tools required for their own work while, in large-scale

1.3. NOTABLE LIBERTARIAN SOCIALIST TENDENCIES

11

enterprises, this meant replacing wage labour by workers co-operatives. He argued it is necessary to form
an ASSOCIATION among workers... because without
that, they would remain related as subordinates and superiors, and there would ensue two... castes of masters and
wage-workers, which is repugnant to a free and democratic society.[129] As he put it in 1848:

Proudhonian ideas, as interpreted by Pi, already provided much of the inspiration for the federalist movement
which sprang up in the early 1860s.[142] According to
the Encyclopedia Britannica During the Spanish revolution of 1873, Pi y Margall attempted to establish a decentralized, or cantonalist, political system on Proudhonian lines.[140] Kevin Carson is a contemporary muis the author of Studies in Mutualist
Under the law of association, transmission of wealth tualist theorist who[143]
Political Economy.
does not apply to the instruments of labour, so cannot
become a cause of inequality.... We are socialists... under universal association, ownership of the land and of Collectivist anarchism
the instruments of labour is social ownership... We want
the mines, canals, railways handed over to democratically Main article: Collectivist anarchism
organised workers associations... We want these associCollectivist anarchism (also known as anarchoations to be models for agriculture, industry and trade,
the pioneering core of that vast federation of companies
and societies, joined together in the common bond of the
democratic and social Republic.[130]
Mutualists believe that a free labor market would allow for conditions of equal income in proportion to exerted labor.[131][132] As Jonathan Beecher puts it, Proudhons aim was to, emancipate labor from the constraints
imposed by capital.[133] Proudhon supported individual
possession of land and argued that the land is indispensable to our existence, consequently a common thing,
consequently insusceptible of appropriation. [67] He believed that an individual only had a right to land while he
was using or occupying it. If the individual ceases doing
so, it reverts to unowned land.[134] Mutualists hold a labor
theory of value, arguing that in exchange labor should always be worth the amount of labor necessary to produce
an article of exactly similar and equal utility,[131] and
considering anything less to be exploitation, theft of labor, or usury. Mutualists oppose the institutions by which
individuals gain income through loans, investments, and
rent, as they believe the income received through these activities is not in direct accord with labor spent.[131][135] In
place of these capitalist institutions they advocate laborowned cooperative rms and associations.[136][137] Mutualists advocate mutual banks, owned by the workers,
that do not charge interest on secured loans. Most mutualists believe that anarchy should be achieved gradually
rather than through revolution.[138] Some individualist anarchists, such as Benjamin Tucker, were inuenced by
Proudhons Mutualism, but unlike Proudhon, they did not
call for association in large enterprises.[139]
Mutualist ideas found a fertile ground in the XIX century
in Spain. In Spain Ramn de la Sagra established anarchist journal El Porvenir in La Corua in 1845 which was
inspired by Proudhons ideas.[140] The catalan politician
Francesc Pi i Margall became the principal translator of
Proudhons works into Spanish[141] and later briey became president of Spain in 1873 while being the leader
of the Democratic Republican Federal Party. According to George Woodcock These translations were to
have a profound and lasting eect on the development
of Spanish anarchism after 1870, but before that time

Mikhail Bakunin

collectivism) is a revolutionary[144] doctrine that

advocates the abolition of the state and private ownership
of the means of production. Instead, it envisions the
means of production being owned collectively and
controlled and managed by the producers themselves.
For the collectivization of the means of production, it
was originally envisaged that workers will revolt and
forcibly collectivize the means of production[144] Once
collectivization takes place, workers salaries would be
determined in democratic organizations based on the
amount of time they contributed to production. These
salaries would be used to purchase goods in a communal
market.[145] This contrasts with anarcho-communism
where wages would be abolished, and where individuals
would take freely from a storehouse of goods to each
according to his need. Thus, Bakunins Collectivist
Anarchism, notwithstanding the title, is seen as a
blend of individualism and collectivism.[146] Collectivist

12

CHAPTER 1. LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM

anarchism is most commonly associated with Mikhail believing anarcho-communism is the best social system
Bakunin, the anti-authoritarian sections of the First for the realization of individual freedom.[155][156][157][158]
International, and the early Spanish anarchist movement. Most anarcho-communists view anarcho-communism as
a way of reconciling the opposition between the individual and society.[159][160][161]
Anarchist communism
To date, the best known examples of an anarchist communist society (i.e., established around the ideas as they
Main article: Anarchist communism
Anarchist communism (also known as anarcho- exist today and achieving worldwide attention and knowledge in the historical canon), are the anarchist territories during the Spanish Revolution[162] and the Free Territory during the Russian Revolution. Through the efforts and inuence of the Spanish Anarchists during the
Spanish Revolution within the Spanish Civil War, starting in 1936 anarchist communism existed in most of
Aragon, parts of the Levante and Andalusia, and in the
stronghold of Anarchist Catalonia before being crushed
by the combined forces of Francoism, Adolf Hitler,
Benito Mussolini, Spanish Communist Party repression
(backed by the USSR) as well as economic and armaments blockades from the capitalist countries and the
Spanish Republic itself.[163] During the Russian Revolution, anarchists such as Nestor Makhno worked to create
and defendthrough the Revolutionary Insurrectionary
Army of Ukraineanarchist communism in the Free
Territory of the Ukraine from 1919 before being conquered by the Bolsheviks in 1921. Anarcho-communist
currents include platformism and insurrectionary anarchism.

Within individualist anarchism

Main article: Individualist anarchism
Individualist anarchism refers to several traditions of
thought within the anarchist movement that emphasize
the individual and his or her will over external determinants such as groups, society, traditions, and ideological
communism and occasionally as free communism) is systems.[164][165]
a theory of anarchism which advocates the abolition Josiah Warren is widely regarded as the rst Ameriof the state, markets, money, capitalism and private can anarchist,[166] and the four-page weekly paper he
property (while retaining respect for personal prop- edited during 1833, The Peaceful Revolutionist, was the
erty),[147] in favor of common ownership of the means rst anarchist periodical published.[167] For American anof production,[148][149] direct democracy and a horizontal archist historian Eunice Minette Schuster It is apparnetwork of voluntary associations and workers councils ent...that Proudhonian Anarchism was to be found in the
with production and consumption based on the guiding United States at least as early as 1848 and that it was not
principle: "from each according to his ability, to each conscious of its anity to the Individualist Anarchism
according to his need".[150][151]
of Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews...William
Errico Malatesta, 1891, inuential italian activist and theorist of
anarcho-communism

Anarcho-communism developed out of radical socialist currents after the French revolution[27][101][152] but
was rst formulated as such in the Italian section of
the First International.[153] The theoretical work of Peter
Kropotkin took importance later as it expanded and developed pro-organizationalist and insurrectionary antiorganizationalist sections.[154] Some forms of anarchist
communism, such as insurrectionary anarchism, are
strongly inuenced by egoism and radical individualism,

B. Greene presented this Proudhonian Mutualism in its

purest and most systematic form..[168] Later the american individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker was against
both the state and capitalism, against both oppression and
exploitation. While not against the market and property
he was rmly against capitalism as it was, in his eyes,
a state-supported monopoly of social capital (tools, machinery, etc.) which allows owners to exploit their employees, i.e., to avoid paying workers the full value of

1.3. NOTABLE LIBERTARIAN SOCIALIST TENDENCIES

their labour. He thought that the labouring classes are
deprived of their earnings by usury in its three forms, interest, rent and prot.... Therefore "Liberty will abolish
interest; it will abolish prot; it will abolish monopolistic
rent; it will abolish taxation; it will abolish the exploitation
of labour; it will abolish all means whereby any labourer
can be deprived of any of his product....This stance puts
him squarely in the libertarian socialist tradition and, unsurprisingly, Tucker referred to himself many times as a
socialist and considered his philosophy to be Anarchistic
socialism.[169][170]

Oscar Wilde, famous anarchist Irish writer who published the

libertarian socialist work titled The Soul of Man under Socialism

French individualist anarchist Emile Armand shows

clearly opposition to capitalism and centralized
economies when he said that the individualist anarchist inwardly he remains refractory fatally refractory
morally, intellectually, economically (The capitalist
economy and the directed economy, the speculators
and the fabricators of single are equally repugnant to
him.)"[171] The spanish individualist anarchist Miguel
Gimenez Igualada thought that ""capitalism is an eect
of government; the disappearance of government means
capitalism falls from its pedestal vertiginously...That
which we call capitalism is not something else but a
product of the State, within which the only thing that is
being pushed forward is prot, good or badly acquired.
And so to ght against capitalism is a pointless task,
since be it State capitalism or Enterprise capitalism,

13
as long as Government exists, exploiting capital will
exist. The ght, but of consciousness, is against the
State.[172] His view on class division and technocracy
are as follows Since when no one works for another,
the proteer from wealth disappears, just as government
will disappear when no one pays attention to those who
learned four things at universities and from that fact
they pretend to govern men. Big industrial enterprises
will be transformed by men in big associations in which
everyone will work and enjoy the product of their work.
And from those easy as well as beautiful problems
anarchism deals with and he who puts them in practice
and lives them are anarchists.... The priority which
without rest an anarchist must make is that in which no
one has to exploit anyone, no man to no man, since that
non-exploitation will lead to the limitation of property to
individual needs.[173]
The anarchist[174] writer and bohemian Oscar Wilde
wrote in his famous essay The Soul of Man under Socialism that Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense
value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type,
slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of
man to the level of a machine.[175] For anarchist historian George Woodcock Wildes aim in The Soul of Man
under Socialism is to seek the society most favorable to
the artist... for Wilde art is the supreme end, containing
within itself enlightenment and regeneration, to which all
else in society must be subordinated.... Wilde represents
the anarchist as aesthete.[176] In a socialist society, people will have the possibility to realise their talents; each
member of the society will share in the general prosperity and happiness of the society. Wilde added that upon
the other hand, Socialism itself will be of value simply
because it will lead to individualism" since individuals
will no longer need to fear poverty or starvation. This individualism would, in turn, protect against governments
armed with economic power as they are now with political power over their citizens. However, Wilde advocated
non-capitalist individualism: of course, it might be said
that the Individualism generated under conditions of private property is not always, or even as a rule, of a ne
or wonderful type a critique which is quite true.[177]
In this way socialism, in Wildes imagination, would free
men from manual labour and allow them to devote their
time to creative pursuits, thus developing their soul. He
ended by declaring The new individualism is the new
hellenism.[177]

Anarcho-syndicalism
Main article: Anarcho-syndicalism
Anarcho-syndicalism is a branch of anarchism that focuses on the labor movement.[178] Anarcho-syndicalists
view labor unions as a potential force for revolutionary
social change, replacing capitalism and the state with a
new society democratically self-managed by workers.

14

CHAPTER 1. LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM

authoritarian aspects of Marxism. Early currents of libertarian Marxism, known as left communism,[180] emerged
in opposition to MarxismLeninism[181] and its derivatives, such as Stalinism, Maoism, and Trotskyism.[182]
Libertarian Marxism is also critical of reformist positions, such as those held by social democrats.[183] Libertarian Marxist currents often draw from Marx and Engels later works, specically the Grundrisse and The Civil
War in France;[184] emphasizing the Marxist belief in the
ability of the working class to forge its own destiny without the need for a revolutionary party or state to mediate
or aid its liberation.[185] Along with anarchism, Libertarian Marxism is one of the main currents of libertarian
May day demonstration of Spanish anarcho-syndicalist trade
socialism.[186]
union CNT in Bilbao, Basque Country in 2010. The red and
black ag is often used by anarcho-syndicalists and anarchocommunists

The basic principles of anarcho-syndicalism are Workers

solidarity, Direct action and Workers self-management.
Workers solidarity means that anarcho-syndicalists believe all workersno matter their race, gender, or ethnic groupare in a similar situation in regard to their
boss (class consciousness). Furthermore, it means that,
within capitalism, any gains or losses made by some
workers from or to bosses will eventually aect all workers. Therefore, to liberate themselves, all workers must
support one another in their class conict. Anarchosyndicalists believe that only direct actionthat is, action concentrated on directly attaining a goal, as opposed
to indirect action, such as electing a representative to
a government positionwill allow workers to liberate
themselves.[179] Moreover, anarcho-syndicalists believe
that workers organizations (the organizations that struggle against the wage system, which, in anarcho-syndicalist
theory, will eventually form the basis of a new society)
should be self-managing. They should not have bosses or
business agents"; rather, the workers should be able to
make all the decisions that aect them themselves.
Rudolf Rocker was one of the most popular voices in
the anarcho-syndicalist movement. He outlined a view
of the origins of the movement, what it sought, and why
it was important to the future of labor in his 1938 pamphlet Anarcho-Syndicalism. The International Workers
Association is an international anarcho-syndicalist federation of various labor unions from dierent countries.
The Spanish Confederacin Nacional del Trabajo played
and still plays a major role in the Spanish labor movement. It was also an important force in the Spanish Civil
War.

1.3.2

Libertarian Marxist tendencies

Main article: Libertarian Marxism

Libertarian Marxism refers to a broad scope of economic and political philosophies that emphasize the anti-

Libertarian Marxism includes such currents as

Luxemburgism, council communism, left communism, Socialisme ou Barbarie, the JohnsonForest
tendency, world socialism, Lettrism/Situationism and
operaismo/autonomism, and New Left.[187] Libertarian
Marxism has often had a strong inuence on both
post-left and social anarchists. Notable theorists of libertarian Marxism have included Anton Pannekoek, Raya
Dunayevskaya, CLR James, Antonio Negri, Cornelius
Castoriadis, Maurice Brinton, Guy Debord, Daniel
Gurin, Ernesto Screpanti and Raoul Vaneigem.
De Leonism
Main article: De Leonism
De Leonism, occasionally known as MarxismDeleonism, is a form of syndicalist Marxism developed
by Daniel De Leon. De Leon was an early leader of the
rst United States socialist political party, the Socialist
Labor Party of America. De Leon combined the rising
theories of syndicalism in his time with orthodox Marxism. According to De Leonist theory, militant industrial
unions (specialized trade unions) are the vehicle of
class struggle. Industrial Unions serving the interests
of the proletariat will bring about the change needed to
establish a socialist system. The only way this diers
from some currents in anarcho-syndicalism is that, according to De Leonist thinking, a revolutionary political
party is also necessary to ght for the proletariat on
the political eld. De Leonism lies outside the Leninist
tradition of communism. It predates Leninism as De
Leonisms principles developed in the early 1890s with
De Leons assuming leadership of the Socialist Labor
Party; Leninism and its vanguard party idea took shape
after the 1902 publication of Lenins "What Is to Be
Done?". The highly decentralized and democratic nature
of the proposed De Leonist government is in contrast
to the democratic centralism of MarxismLeninism and
what they see as the dictatorial nature of the Soviet
Union and the Peoples Republic of China and other
communist states. The success of the De Leonist plan
depends on achieving majority support among the people

1.3. NOTABLE LIBERTARIAN SOCIALIST TENDENCIES

15

both in the workplaces and at the polls, in contrast to the that a revolution led by a party will necessarily produce a
Leninist notion that a small vanguard party should lead party dictatorship. Council communists support a workthe working class to carry out the revolution.
ers democracy, which they want to produce through a
federation of workers councils.
The Russian word for council is "soviet", and during the
early years of the revolution workers councils were politically signicant in Russia. It was to take advantage
Main article: Council Communism
Council communism was a radical Left movement orig- of the aura of workplace power that the word became
used by Vladimir Lenin for various political organs. Indeed, the name "Supreme Soviet", by which the parliament was called; and that of the Soviet Union itself
make use of this terminology, but they do not imply any
decentralization. Furthermore, council communists held
a critique of the Soviet Union as a capitalist state, believing that the Bolshevik revolution in Russia became
a "bourgeois revolution when a party bureaucracy replaced the old feudal aristocracy. Although most felt the
Russian Revolution was working class in character, they
believed that, since capitalist relations still existed (because the workers had no say in running the economy),
the Soviet Union ended up as a state capitalist country,
with the state replacing the individual capitalist. Thus,
council communists support workers revolutions, but oppose one-party dictatorships. Council communists also
believed in diminishing the role of the party to one of
agitation and propaganda, rejected all participation in
elections or parliament, and argued that workers should
leave the reactionary trade unions and form one big revolutionary union.
Council communism

Left communism
Main article: Left communism

Antonie Pannekoek, one of the main theorists of council communism

Left communism is the range of communist viewpoints

held by the communist left, which criticizes the political ideas of the Bolsheviks at certain periods, from a position that is asserted to be more authentically Marxist
and proletarian than the views of Leninism held by the
Communist International after its rst and during its second congress. Left Communists see themselves to the left
of Leninists (whom they tend to see as 'left of capital', not
socialists), Anarchists (some of whom they consider internationalist socialists) as well as some other revolutionary socialist tendencies (for example De Leonists, who
they tend to see as being internationalist socialists only in
limited instances). Although she lived before left communism became a distinct tendency, Rosa Luxemburg has
heavily inuenced most left communists, both politically
and theoretically. Proponents of left communism have
included Amadeo Bordiga, Herman Gorter, Anton Pannekoek, Otto Rhle, Karl Korsch, Sylvia Pankhurst and
Paul Mattick.

inating in Germany and the Netherlands in the 1920s. Its

primary organization was the Communist Workers Party
of Germany (KAPD). Council communism continues today as a theoretical and activist position within Marxism, and also within libertarian socialism. The central
argument of council communism, in contrast to those
of Social democracy and Leninist communism, is that
workers councils arising in the factories and municipalities are the natural and legitimate form of working class
organisation and government power. This view is opposed to the reformist and Bolshevik stress on vanguard
parties, parliaments, or the state. The core principle of
council communism is that the state and the economy
should be managed by workers councils, composed of
delegates elected at workplaces and recallable at any moment. As such, council communists oppose state-run Prominent left communist groups existing today inbureaucratic socialism. They also oppose the idea of a clude the International Communist Current and the
revolutionary party, since council communists believe International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party. Also,

16

CHAPTER 1. LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM

dierent factions from the old Bordigist International

Communist Party are considered left communist organizations.
JohnsonForest tendency
Main article: JohnsonForest Tendency
The JohnsonForest tendency, sometimes called the
Johnsonites, refers to a radical left tendency in the United
States associated with Marxist theorists C.L.R. James
and Raya Dunayevskaya, who used the pseudonyms J.R.
Johnson and Freddie Forest respectively. They were
joined by Grace Lee Boggs, a Chinese-American woman
who was considered the third founder. After leaving
the trotskist Socialist Workers Party, JohnsonForest
founded their own organization for the rst time, called
Correspondence. This group changed its named to the
Correspondence Publishing Committee the next year.
However, tensions that had surfaced earlier presaged a
split, which took place in 1955. Through his theoretical
and political work of the late 1940s, James had concluded
that a vanguard party was no longer necessary, because
its teachings had been absorbed in the masses. In 1956,
James would see the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 as
conrmation of this. Those who endorsed the politics of
James took the name Facing Reality, after the 1958 book
by James co-written with Grace Lee Boggs and Pierre
Chaulieu, a pseudonym for Cornelius Castoriadis, on the
Hungarian working class revolt of 1956.
Socialisme ou Barbarie

Cornelius Castoriadis, libertarian socialist theorist

a new kind of society as aggressive as Western European

societies. Later he also published in Socialisme ou Barbarie.

Situationist International
Main article: Situationist International

The Situationist International was a restricted group of

international revolutionaries founded in 1957, and which
Main article: Socialisme ou Barbarie
had its peak in its inuence on the unprecedented general
Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism) was wildcat strikes of May 1968 in France.
a French-based radical libertarian socialist group of the
post-World War II period (the name comes from a phrase With their ideas rooted in Marxism and the 20th-century
Friedrich Engels used, and was cited by Rosa Luxem- European artistic avant-gardes, they advocated experiburg in a 1916 essay, 'The Junius Pamphlet'[188] ). It ex- ences of life being alternative to those admitted by the
isted from 1948 until 1965. The animating personality capitalist order, for the fulllment of human primitive
was Cornelius Castoriadis, also known as Pierre Chaulieu desires and the pursuing of a superior passional qualor Paul Cardan.[189] Because he explicitly both rejected ity. For this purpose they suggested and experimented
Leninist vanguardism and criticised spontaneism...(for) with the construction of situations, namely the setting up
Cornelius Castoriadis the emancipation of the mass of of environments favorable for the fulllment of such depeople was the task of those people; however, the socialist sires. Using methods drawn from the arts, they develthinker could not simply fold his or her arms. Castoriadis oped a series of experimental elds of study for the conargued that the special place accorded to the intellectual struction of such situations, like unitary urbanism and
should belong to each autonomous citizen. However, he psychogeography. In this vein a major theorectical work
was Raoul Vaneigems
rejected attentisme, maintaining that, in the struggle for a which emerged from this group [190]
The
Revolution
of
Everyday
Life.
new society, intellectuals needed to place themselves at
a distance from the everyday and from the real.[113] Po- They fought against the main obstacle on the fullllitical philosopher Claude Lefort was impressed by Cor- ment of such superior passional living, identied by them
nelius Castoriadis when he rst met him. They published in advanced capitalism. Their critical theoretical work
On the Regime and Against the Defence of the USSR, a peaked on the highly inuential book The Society of the
critique of both the Soviet Union and its Trotskyist sup- Spectacle by Guy Debord. Debord argued in 1967 that
porters. They suggested that the USSR was dominated spectacular features like mass media and advertising have
by a social layer of bureaucrats, and that it consisted of a central role in an advanced capitalist society, which is

1.3. NOTABLE LIBERTARIAN SOCIALIST TENDENCIES

17

to show a fake reality in order to mask the real capitalist

degradation of human life. To overthrow such a system,
the Situationist International supported the May '68 revolts, and asked the workers to occupy the factories and to
run them with direct democracy, through workers councils composed by instantly revocable delegates.

cal organization than other Marxists, focusing instead on

self-organized action outside of traditional organizational
structures. Autonomist Marxism is thus a bottom up
theory: it draws attention to activities that autonomists
see as everyday working class resistance to capitalism, for
example absenteeism, slow working, and socialization in
After publishing in the last issue of the magazine an anal- the workplace.
ysis of the May 1968 revolts, and the strategies that will All this inuenced the German and Dutch Autonomen,
need to be adopted in future revolutions,[191] the SI was the worldwide Social Centre movement, and today is
dissolved in 1972.[192]
inuential in Italy, France, and to a lesser extent the
English-speaking countries. Those who describe themselves as autonomists now vary from Marxists to postAutonomism
structuralists and anarchists. The Autonomist Marxist and Autonomen movements provided inspiration to
Main article: Autonomism
some on the revolutionary left in English speaking counAutonomism refers to a set of left-wing political and tries, particularly among anarchists, many of whom have
adopted autonomist tactics. Some English-speaking anarchists even describe themselves as Autonomists. The
Italian operaismo movement also inuenced Marxist academics such as Harry Cleaver, John Holloway, Steve
Wright, and Nick Dyer-Witheford. Today it is associated
also with the publication Multitudes.[193]

1.3.3 Other tendencies

This section is dedicated to post-classical anarchist tendencies as well as tendencies which cannot be easily classied within the anarchist/marxist division presented before.

Within the labour movement and parliamentary politics

Antonio Negri, main theorist of Italian autonomism

social movements and theories close to the socialist

movement. As an identiable theoretical system it rst
emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerist (operaismo)
communism. Through translations made available by
Danilo Montaldi and others, the Italian autonomists drew
upon previous activist research in the United States by
the JohnsonForest Tendency and in France by the group
Socialisme ou Barbarie. Later, post-Marxist and anarchist tendencies became signicant after inuence from
the Situationists, the failure of Italian far-left movements
in the 1970s, and the emergence of a number of important theorists including Antonio Negri, who had contributed to the 1969 founding of Potere Operaio as well
as Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno, Franco Berardi Bifo etc.
Unlike other forms of Marxism, autonomist Marxism
emphasises the ability of the working class to force
changes to the organization of the capitalist system independent of the state, trade unions or political parties. Autonomists are less concerned with party politi-

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon ran for the french constituent

assembly in April 1848, but was not elected, although
his name appeared on the ballots in Paris, Lyon, Besanon, and Lille, France. He was successful, in the
complementary elections of June 4. The catalan politician Francesc Pi i Margall became the principal translator of Proudhons works into Spanish[141] and later
briey became president of Spain in 1873 while being
the leader of the Democratic Republican Federal Party.
For prominent anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker: The
rst movement of the Spanish workers was strongly inuenced by the ideas of Pi y Margall, leader of the Spanish Federalists and disciple of Proudhon. Pi y Margall
was one of the outstanding theorists of his time and had
a powerful inuence on the development of libertarian
ideas in Spain. His political ideas had much in common
with those of Richard Price, Joseph Priestly, Thomas
Paine, Jeerson, and other representatives of the AngloAmerican liberalism of the rst period. He wanted to
limit the power of the state to a minimum and gradually replace it by a Socialist economic order.[194] Pi i
Margall was a dedicated theorist in his own right, especially through book-length works such as La reaccin y

18

CHAPTER 1. LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM

cial democrats at the reformist end.[196] Another recent
mainstream Labour politician who has been described
as a libertarian socialist is Robin Cook.[197] In 1974 the
journal Libertarian Communism was started in the United
Kingdom by a group inside the Socialist Party of Great
Britain.[198]
Dened in this way, libertarian socialism in the contemporary political mainstream is distinguished from modern
social democracy and democratic socialism principally by
its political decentralism rather than by its economics.
The multi-tendency Socialist Party USA also has a strong
libertarian socialist current.
Katja Kipping and Julia Bonk in Germany, Femke
Halsema[199] in the Netherlands and Ufuk Uras and
the Freedom and Solidarity Party in Turkey, are examples of a contemporary libertarian socialist politicians and parties operating within a mainstream government. In Chile the autonomist organization Izquierda Autonoma (Autonomous Left) in the Chilean general election, 2013 gained a seat in the Chilean Parliament through
Gabriel Boric, ex leader of the 201113 Chilean student
protests.[200]

Francesc Pi i Margall, catalan follower and translator of

Proudhon and libertarian socialist theorist who briey became
President of Spain

la revolucin (en:"Reaction and revolution from 1855),

Las nacionalidades (en:"Nationalities from 1877), and
La Federacin from 1880.
There was a strong left-libertarian current in the British
labour movement and the term libertarian socialist has
been applied to a number of democratic socialists, including some prominent members of the British Labour
Party. The Socialist League was formed in 1885 by
William Morris and others critical of the authoritarian
socialism of the Social Democratic Federation. It was involved in the New Unionism, the rank and le union militancy of the 1880s90s, which anticipated syndicalism in
some key ways (Tom Mann, a New Unionist leader, was
one of the rst British syndicalists). The Socialist League
was dominated by anarchists by the 1890s.[195]
The Independent Labour Party, formed at that time, drew
more on the Non-Conformist religious traditions in the
British working class than on Marxist theory, and had
a libertarian socialist strain. Others in the tradition of
the ILP, and described as libertarian socialists Michael
Foot and most importantly, G. D. H. Cole. Labour Party
minister Peter Hain has written in support of libertarian socialism, identifying an axis involving a bottom-up
vision of socialism, with anarchists at the revolutionary
end and democratic socialists [such as himself] at its
reformist end, as opposed to the axis of state socialism
with Marxist-Leninists at the revolutionary end and so-

Georgism
Main articles: Georgism and Henry George
Georgism (also called Geoism or Geonomics) is an
economic philosophy and ideology which holds that people own what they create, but that things found in nature, most importantly land, belong equally to all.[201]
The Georgist philosophy is based on the writings of the
economist Henry George (18391897), and is usually associated with the idea of a single tax on the value of land.
His most famous work, Progress and Poverty (1879), is a
treatise on inequality, the cyclic nature of industrialized
economies, and the use of the land value tax as a remedy.
Georgists argue that a tax on land value is economically
ecient, fair, and equitable; and that it can generate sufcient revenue so that other taxes (e.g. taxes on profits, sales or income), which are less fair and ecient,
can be reduced or eliminated. A tax on land value has
been described by many as a progressive tax, since it
would be paid primarily by the wealthy, and would reduce economic inequality.[202]
Georgist ideas heavily inuenced the politics of the early
20th century. Political parties that were formed based on
Georgist ideas include the Commonwealth Land Party,
the Justice Party of Denmark, the Henry George Justice Party, and the Single Tax League. Several communities were also initiated with Georgist principles during the height of the philosophys popularity. Two such
communities that still exist are Arden, Delaware, which
was founded in 1900 by Frank Stephens and Will Price,
and Fairhope, Alabama, which was founded in 1894 by
the auspices of the Fairhope Single Tax Corporation.[203]

1.3. NOTABLE LIBERTARIAN SOCIALIST TENDENCIES

19

Christian anarchist Leo Tolstoy was enthused by the economic thinking of Henry George, incorporating it approvingly into later works such as Resurrection, the book
that played a major factor in his excommunication.[204]

nized internally on democratic lines. About the state itself they diered, some believing it would remain more
or less in its existing form and others that it would be
transformed into a federal body representing the workers guilds, consumers organizations, local government
bodies, and other social structures.[140] In 1914, S. G.
Guild socialism
Hobson, a leading contributor to The New Age, published
National Guilds: An Inquiry into the Wage System and the
Main article: Guild socialism
Way Out. In this work, guilds were presented as an alterGuild socialism is a political movement advocating native to state-control of industry or conventional trade
union activity. Guilds, unlike the existing trade unions,
would not conne their demands to matters of wages and
conditions but would seek to obtain control of industry
for the workers whom they represented. Ultimately, industrial guilds would serve as the organs through which
industry would be organised in a future socialist society.
The theory of guild socialism was developed and popularised by G. D. H. Cole who formed the National Guilds
League in 1915 and published several books on guild
socialism, including Self-Government in Industry (1917)
and Guild Socialism Restated (1920).

Revolutionary syndicalism
Main article: Revolutionary syndicalism

G. D. H. Cole, theorist of guild socialism

workers control of industry through the medium of traderelated guilds in an implied contractual relationship with
the public.[140] It originated in the United Kingdom and
was at its most inuential in the rst quarter of the 20th
century.[140] It was strongly associated with G. D. H. Cole
and inuenced by the ideas of William Morris.
Guild socialism was partly inspired by the guilds of
craftsmen and other skilled workers which had existed in
England during the Middle Ages. In 1906, Arthur Penty
published Restoration of the Gild System in which he opposed factory production and advocated a return to an
earlier period of artisanal production organised through
guilds. The following year, the journal The New Age became an advocate of guild socialism, although in the context of modern industry rather than the medieval setting
favoured by Penty. The Guild Socialists stood for state
ownership of industry, combined with workers control
through delegation of authority to national guilds orga-

Revolutionary syndicalism is a type of economic system

proposed as a replacement for capitalism and an alternative to state socialism, which uses federations of collectivised trade unions or industrial unions. It is a form of
socialist economic corporatism that advocates interest aggregation of multiple non-competitive categorised units
to negotiate and manage an economy.[205] For adherents,
labour unions are the potential means of both overcoming economic aristocracy and running society fairly in the
interest of the majority, through union democracy. Industry in a syndicalist system would be run through cooperative confederations and mutual aid. Local syndicates would communicate with other syndicates through
the Bourse du Travail (labor exchange) which would
manage and transfer commodities. Syndicalism is also
used to refer to the tactic of bringing about this social arrangement, typically expounded by anarcho-syndicalism
and De Leonism, in which a general strike begins and
workers seize their means of production and organise in
a federation of trade unionism, such as the CNT.[206]
Throughout its history, the reformist section of syndicalism has been overshadowed by its revolutionary section, typied by the Confdration Gnrale du Travail (CGT) in France, IWW, the Federacin Anarquista
Ibrica section of the CNT.,[207] the Unione Sindacale
Italiana and the Central Organisation of the Workers of
Sweden (SAC).

20

CHAPTER 1. LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM

Christian anarchism

vout Catholic convert; she advocated the Catholic economic theory of distributism. Day believed all states
Main article: Christian anarchism
were inherently totalitarian,[214] and was a self-labeled
Christian anarchism is a movement in political theology anarchist.[215][216][217][218] In the 1930s, Day worked
closely with fellow activist Peter Maurin to establish the
Catholic Worker movement, a nonviolent, pacist movement that continues to combine direct aid for the poor and
homeless with nonviolent direct action on their behalf.
The importance of Day within catholicism goes to the extent that the cause for Days canonization is open in the
Catholic Church, and she is thus formally referred to as a
Servant of God.[219] Ammon Hennacy was an Irish American pacist, Christian, anarchist, social activist, member
of the Catholic Worker Movement and a Wobbly. He established the "Joe Hill House of Hospitality" in Salt Lake
City, Utah.[220]
Gandhism
Main articles: Gandhism and Gandhian economics

Leo Tolstoy, important theorist of Christian anarchism and

anarcho-pacism

that combines anarchism and Christianity.[208] It is the

belief that there is only one source of authority to which
Christians are ultimately answerable, the authority of God
as embodied in the teachings of Jesus. More than any
other Bible source, the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus
call to not resist evil but turn the other cheek, are used as
the basis for Christian anarchism.[209]
Christian anarchists are pacists and oppose the use of
violence, such as war.[210] The foundation of Christian
anarchism is a rejection of violence, with Leo Tolstoy's
The Kingdom of God Is Within You regarded as a key
text.[210][211] Christian anarchists denounce the state as
they claim it is violent, deceitful and, when gloried, a
form of idolatry.[210][212]
The Tolstoyans were a small Christian anarchist group
formed by Tolstoys companion, Vladimir Chertkov
(18541936), to spread Tolstoys religious teachings.
Prince Peter Kropotkin wrote of Tolstoy in the article on anarchism in the 1911 Encyclopdia Britannica
while in hundreds of essays over the last twenty years
of his life, Tolstoy reiterated the anarchist critique of
the state and recommended books by Kropotkin and
Proudhon to his readers, whilst rejecting anarchisms
espousal of violent revolutionary means.[213] Dorothy
Day was an American journalist, social activist, de-

Gandhism is the collection of inspirations, principles,

beliefs and philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi (Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi), who was a major political and
spiritual leader of India and the Indian Independence
Movement. It is a body of ideas and principles that describes the inspiration, vision and the life work of Gandhi.
It is particularly associated with his contributions to the
idea and practice of nonviolent resistance, sometimes
also called civil resistance. Gandhian economics are
the socio-economic principles expounded by Mohandas
Gandhi. It is largely characterised by its anity to the
principles and objectives of nonviolent humanistic socialism, but with a rejection of violent class war and promotion of socio-economic harmony. Gandhis economic
ideas also aim to promote spiritual development and harmony with a rejection of materialism. The term Gandhian economics was coined by J. C. Kumarappa, a close
supporter of Gandhi.[221] Gandhian economics places importance to means of achieving the aim of development
and this means must be non-violent, ethical and truthful in all economic spheres. In order to achieve this
means he advocated trusteeship, decentralization of economic activities, labour intensive technology and priority
to weaker sections. Gandhi also had letter communication with Christian anarchist Leo Tolstoy and saw himself
as his disciple.[222]
Gandhi challenged future Indian Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru and the modernizers in the late 1930s
who called for rapid industrialization on the Soviet
model; Gandhi denounced that as dehumanizing and
contrary to the needs of the villages where the great
majority of the people lived.[223] After Gandhis death
Nehru led India to large-scale planning that emphasized
modernization and heavy industry, while modernizing
agriculture through irrigation.
Historian Kuruvilla
Pandikattu says it was Nehrus vision, not Gandhis,

1.3. NOTABLE LIBERTARIAN SOCIALIST TENDENCIES

21
ten by dutch anarcho-pacist Bart de Ligt which deals
with non-violent resistance in part inspired by the ideas
of Gandhi.[229] Anarchist historian George Woodcock reports that The Conquest of Violence was read widely by
British and American pacists during the 1930s and led
many of them to adopt an anarchistic point of view.[230]
Platformism
Main article: Platformism

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

that was eventually preferred by the Indian State.[224]

Gandhi was a self-described philosophical anarchist,[225]
and his vision of India meant an India without an underlying government.[226] He once said that the ideally
nonviolent state would be an ordered anarchy.[227]
While political systems are largely hierarchical, with
each layer of authority from the individual to the central
government have increasing levels of authority over the
layer below, Gandhi believed that society should be
the exact opposite, where nothing is done without the
consent of anyone, down to the individual. His idea
was that true self-rule in a country means that every
person rules his or herself and that there is no state which
enforces laws upon the people.[228]
Gandhian activists such as Vinoba Bhave and Jayaprakash
Narayan were involved in the Sarvodaya movement,
which sought to promote self-suciency amidst Indias rural population by encouraging land redistribution,
socio-economic reforms and promoting cottage industries. The movement sought to combat the problems of
class conict, unemployment and poverty while attempting to preserve the lifestyle and values of rural Indians,
which were eroding with industrialisation and modernisation. Sarvodaya also included Bhoodan, or the gifting of land and agricultural resources by the landlords
(called zamindars) to their tenant farmers in a bid to end
the medieval system of zamindari. The Conquest of Violence : an Essay on War and Revolution is a book writ-

Platformism is a tendency within the wider anarchist

movement based on the organisational theories in the
tradition of Dielo Truda's Organizational Platform of
the General Union of Anarchists (Draft).[231] The document was based on the experiences of Russian anarchists in the 1917 October Revolution, which led eventually to the victory of the Bolsheviks over the anarchists and other groups. The Platform attempted to address and explain the anarchist movements failures during the Russian Revolution. Today there are platformist
groups in many countries including the Workers Solidarity Movement in Ireland, North Eastern Federation of
Anarchist Communists (NEFAC, or Fdration des Communistes Libertaires du Nord-Est) in the northeastern US,
the Union Communiste Libertaire in Quebec, Common
Cause in Ontario, the Organizacin Comunista Libertaria
(OCL) in Chile, the Federation of Anarchists of Greece
(OAE) in Greece, Anarchist Communist Initiative (AKI)
in Turkey, Organizacion Socialista Libertaria (OSL)
in Argentina, the Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici
(FdCA) in Italy, the Coletivo pr Organizao Anarquista
em Gois in Brazil, Grupo Qhispikay Llaqta in Peru,
the Libertarian Communist Organization (France) in
France, the Alianza de los Comunistas Libertarios (ACL)
in Mexico, Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group
(MACG) and Sydney Anarchist Communist Trajectory
(SACT) in Australia, the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF) in South Africa, and Revolutionary
Confederation of Anarcho-syndicalists (RKAS) by the
name of N.I. Makhno (
- . . . ) an international anarcho-syndicalist, platformist confederation
(sections and individual members of RKAS exist in
Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Germany, Latvia, Bulgaria and
Israel).
Platfomist organizations also founded the now defunct International Libertarian Solidarity. The website
Anarkismo.net is run collaboratively by Platformist organisations from all over the world.
Within the New Left
Main article: New Left
The emergence of the New Left in the 1950s and 1960s
led to a revival of interest in libertarian socialism.[233]

22

CHAPTER 1. LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM

the social status quo.[241] They have been described as
a highly theatrical, anti-authoritarian and anarchist[242]
youth movement of symbolic politics.[243] Since they
were well known for street theater and politically themed
pranks, many of the old school political left either ignored or denounced them. According to ABC News,
The group was known for street theater pranks and was
once referred to as the 'Groucho Marxists'.[244]
Social ecology and Communalism
Main articles: Social ecology and Communalism (Political Philosophy)
Social ecology is closely related to the work and ideas

Herbert Marcuse, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical

theory, was an inuential libertarian socialist philosopher of the
New Left.[232]

The New Lefts critique of the Old Left's authoritarianism was associated with a strong interest in personal
liberty, autonomy (see the thinking of Cornelius Castoriadis) and led to a rediscovery of older socialist traditions, such as left communism, council communism,
and the Industrial Workers of the World. In the United
States this was caused by a renewal of anarchism from the
1950s forward through writers such as Paul Goodman and
anarcho-pacism which became inuential in the Antinuclear movement and anti war movements of the time
and which incorporated both the inuences of gandhism
and toltoyan Christian anarchism.[234]
In Australia the Sydney Push was a predominantly leftwing intellectual subculture in Sydney from the late 1940s
to the early 1970s which became associated with the label Sydney libertarianism.[235] The New Left also led
to a revival of anarchism in the 1960s in the United
States. Journals like Radical America and Black Mask
in America, Solidarity, Big Flame and Democracy & Nature, succeeded by The International Journal of Inclusive
Democracy,[236] in the UK, introduced a range of leftlibertarian ideas to a new generation. Social ecology,
autonomism and, more recently, participatory economics
(parecon), and Inclusive Democracy emerged from this.
The New Left in the United States also included anarchist, countercultural and hippie-related radical groups
such as the Yippies who were led by Abbie Homan, The
Diggers,[237] Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers and the
White Panther Party. By late 1966, the Diggers opened
free stores which simply gave away their stock, provided
free food, distributed free drugs, gave away money, organized free music concerts, and performed works of
political art.[238] The Diggers took their name from the
original English Diggers led by Gerrard Winstanley[239]
and sought to create a mini-society free of money and
capitalism.[240] On the other hand the Yippies employed
theatrical gestures, such as advancing a pig ("Pigasus the
Immortal) as a candidate for President in 1968, to mock

Murray Bookchin

of Murray Bookchin and inuenced by anarchist Peter

Kropotkin. Social ecologists assert that the present
ecological crisis has its roots in human social problems,
and that the domination of human-over-nature stems
from the domination of human-over-human.[245]
Bookchin later developed a political philosophy to complement social ecology which he called Communalism
(spelled with a capital C to dierentiate it from other
forms of communalism). While originally conceived as a
form of social anarchism, he later developed Communalism into a separate ideology which incorporates what he
saw as the most benecial elements of anarchism, Marxism, syndicalism, and radical ecology.
Politically, Communalists advocate a network of directly
democratic citizens assemblies in individual communities or cities organized in a confederated fashion. The
method used to achieve this is called libertarian munic-

1.3. NOTABLE LIBERTARIAN SOCIALIST TENDENCIES

ipalism and involves the establishment of face-to-face
democratic institutions which grow and expand confederally with the goal of eventually replacing the nation-state.
Unlike anarchists, Communalists are not opposed to taking part in parliamentary politicsespecially municipal
electionsas long as candidates are libertarian socialist
and anti-statist in outlook.

23
be replaced with a system of non-transferable credit
which would cease to exist upon purchase of a commodity.

Parpolity is a theoretical political system proposed by

Stephen R. Shalom. It was developed as a political vision to accompany Parecon. Participism as a whole is
critical of aspects of modern representative democracies
and capitalism arguing that the level of political control
by the people isnt sucient. To address this problem
Participism
Parpolity suggests a system of Nested Councils, which
would include every adult member of a given society.
Main article: Participism
Under Participism, the state as such would dissolve into
Participism is a twenty-rst century form of libertarian
a mere coordinating body made up of delegates which
would be recallable at any time by the nested council below them.

Inclusive Democracy
Main article: Inclusive Democracy
Inclusive Democracy is a political theory and political
project that aim for direct democracy, economic democracy in a stateless, moneyless and marketless economy,
self-management (democracy in the social realm) and
ecological democracy. The theoretical project of Inclusive Democracy (ID)), as distinguished from the political project which is part of the democratic and autonomy
traditions, emerged from the work of political philosopher, former academic and activist Takis Fotopoulos in
Towards An Inclusive Democracy and was further developed by him and other writers in the journal Democracy
& Nature and its successor The International Journal of
Inclusive Democracy, an electronic journal freely availMichael Albert
able and published by the International Network for Insocialism. It comprises two related economic and politi- clusive Democracy.
cal systems called Participatory economics or Parecon According to Arran Gare, Towards an Inclusive Democand Participatory politics or Parpolity.
racy oers a powerful new interpretation of the hisParecon is an economic system proposed primarily by tory and destructive dynamics of the market and provides
of both
activist and political theorist Michael Albert and radical an inspiring new vision of the future in place[246]
neo-liberalism
and
existing
forms
of
socialism.
Also,
economist Robin Hahnel, among others. It uses particas
David
Freeman
points
out,
although
Fotopoulos
apipatory decision making as an economic mechanism to
proach
is
not
openly
anarchism,
yet
anarchism
seems
the
guide the production, consumption and allocation of reformal
category
within
which
he
works,
given
his
comsources in a given society. Proposed as an alternative
and abolition
to contemporary capitalist market economies and also mitment to direct democracy, municipalism
[247]
of
state,
money
and
market
economy.
an alternative to centrally planned socialism or coordinatorism, it is described as an anarchistic economic vision, and it could be considered a form of socialism as
under Parecon, the means of production are owned by the
workers. It proposes to attain these ends mainly through
the following principles and institutions: Workers and
consumers councils utilizing self-managerial methods for
decision making, balanced job complexes, remuneration
according to eort and sacrice, and Participatory Planning. Under Parecon, the current monetary system would

An articial market is proposed by this tendency as a solution to the problem of maintaining freedom of choice for
the consumer within a marketless and moneyless economy, an articial market operates in much the same way
as traditional markets, but uses labour vouchers or personal credit in place of traditional money. According to
Takis Fotopoulos, an articial market secures real freedom of choice, without incurring the adverse eects associated with real markets.[248]

24

CHAPTER 1. LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM

Insurrectionary anarchism
Main article: Insurrectionary anarchism
Insurrectionary anarchism is a revolutionary theory, practice and tendency within the anarchist movement which
emphasizes the theme of insurrection within anarchist
practice. It is critical of formal organizations such as
labor unions and federations that are based on a political programme and periodic congresses. Instead, insurrectionary anarchists advocate informal organization and
small anity groupbased organization. Insurrectionary
anarchists put value in attack, permanent class conict,
and a refusal to negotiate or compromise with class enemies.
Contemporary insurrectionary anarchism inherits
the views and tactics of anti-organizational anarchocommunism[249] and illegalism. So, between 1880
and 1890,[154] with the perspective of an immanent
revolution",[154] who was opposed to the ocial
workers movement, which was then in the process of
formation (general Social Democratisation). They were
opposed not only to political (statist) struggles but also to
strikes which put forward wage or other claims, or which
were organised by trade unions.[154] But While they
were not opposed to strikes as such, they were opposed
to trade unions and the struggle for the eight-hour
day. This anti-reformist tendency was accompanied
by an anti-organisational tendency, and its partisans
declared themselves in favour of agitation amongst the
unemployed for the expropriation of foodstus and other
articles, for the expropriatory strike and, in some cases,
for 'individual recuperation' or acts of terrorism.[154]
A resurgence of such ideas happened in the peculiar
conditions of post war Italy and Greece.[250]
Zapatismo and Magonism
Main articles: Zapatista Army of National Liberation,
Emiliano Zapata and Magonism
The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejrcito Zapatista de Liberacin Nacional, EZLN) often referred to
as the Zapatistas is a revolutionary leftist group based in
Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico. Since 1994,
the group has been in a declared war against the Mexican
state, though this war has been primarily nonviolent and
defensive against military, paramilitary, and corporate incursions into Chiapas. Their social base is mostly rural
indigenous people but they have some supporters in urban areas and internationally. Their main spokesperson is
Subcomandante Marcos (currently a.k.a. Delegate Zero
in relation to "the Other Campaign"). Unlike other Zapatista spokespeople, Marcos is not an indigenous Maya.
Since December 1994, the Zapatistas had been gradually forming several autonomous municipalities, called
Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (MAREZ).
In these municipalities, an assembly of local representa-

Subcomandante Marcos in 1996

tives forms the Juntas de Buen Gobierno or Councils of

Good Government (JBGs). These are not recognized by
the federal or state governments; they oversee local community programs on food, health and education, as well
as taxation. The EZLN political formations have happened in two phases generally called Aquascalientes and
Caracoles.
The group takes its name from Emiliano Zapata, the
agrarian reformer[251] and commander of the Liberation
Army of the South during the Mexican Revolution, and
sees itself as his ideological heir. Zapatista originally referred to a member of the revolutionary guerrilla movement founded about 1910 by Zapata. His Liberation
Army of the South (Ejrcito Libertador del Sur) fought
during the Mexican Revolution for the redistribution of
agricultural land. Zapata and his army and allies, including Pancho Villa, fought for agrarian reform in Mexico. Specically, they wanted to establish communal
land rights for Mexicos indigenous population, which had
mostly lost its land to the wealthy elite of European descent. Zapata was partly inuenced by an anarchist from
Oaxaca named Ricardo Flores Magn. The inuence of
Flores Magn on Zapata can be seen in the Zapatistas
Plan de Ayala, but even more noticeably in their slogan
(this slogan was never used by Zapata) "Tierra y libertad" or land and liberty, the title and maxim of Flores
Magns most famous work. Zapatas introduction to anarchism came via a local schoolteacher, Otilio Montao
Snchez later a general in Zapatas army, executed on
May 17, 1917 who exposed Zapata to the works of Peter
Kropotkin and Flores Magn at the same time as Zapata
was observing and beginning to participate in the strug-

1.3. NOTABLE LIBERTARIAN SOCIALIST TENDENCIES

gles of the peasants for the land.

25
left-wing libertarianism)[280] which names several related
but distinct approaches to politics, society, culture, and
political and social theory, which stress both individual
freedom and social justice. Unlike right-libertarians, they
believe that neither claiming nor mixing ones labor with
natural resources is enough to generate full private property rights,[281][282] and maintain that natural resources
(land, oil, gold, trees) ought to be held in some egalitarian
manner, either unowned or owned collectively.[282] Those
left-libertarians who support private property do so under
the condition that recompense is oered to the local community.

In reference to inspirational gures, in nearly all EZLN

villages exist murals accompanying images of Zapata,
Che Guevara, and Subcomandante Marcos.[252] The ideology of the Zapatista movement, Zapatismo, synthesizes traditional Mayan practices with elements of libertarian socialism, anarchism,[253][254] and Marxism.[255]
The historical inuence of Mexican Anarchists and various Latin-American Socialists is apparent on Zapatismo;
with the positions of Subcomandante Marcos also adding
a distinct Marxist (according to the New York Times)
[256]
element to the movement. A Zapatista slogan is in
harmony with the concept of mutual aid: For everyone,
everything. For us, nothing (Para todos, todo. Para
Communization
nosotros, nada).

Main article: Communization

Left wing market anarchism
Communization mainly refers to a contemporary communist theory in which we nd is a mixing-up of
insurrectionist anarchism, the communist ultra-left, postLeft wing market anarchism, a form of left- autonomists, anti-political currents, groups like the Invislibertarianism, individualist anarchism[257] and lib- ible Committee, as well as more explicitly communizing
ertarian socialism[258][259] is associated with scholars currents, such as Thorie Communiste and Endnotes. Obsuch as Kevin Carson,[260][261] Roderick T. Long,[262][263] viously at the heart of the word is communism and, as the
communism as a particCharles Johnson,[264] Brad Spangler,[265] Samuel Ed- shift to communization suggests,
[283]
ular
activity
and
process....
[266]
[267][268][269]
ward Konkin III,
Sheldon Richman,
Chris Matthew Sciabarra,[270] and Gary Chartier,[271] The association of the term communization with a selfwho stress the value of radically free markets, termed identied "ultra-left" was cemented in France in the
freed markets to distinguish them from the common 1970s, where it came to describe not a transition to a
conception which these libertarians believe to be riddled higher phase of communism but a vision of commuwith statist and capitalist privileges.[272] Referred to as nist revolution itself. Thus the 1975 Pamphlet A World
left-wing market anarchists[273] or market-oriented left- Without Money states: insurrection and communisation
libertarians,[269] proponents of this approach strongly are intimately linked. There would not be rst a pearm the classical liberal ideas of self-ownership riod of insurrection and then later, thanks to this insurand free markets, while maintaining that, taken to rection, the transformation of social reality. The insurtheir logical conclusions, these ideas support anti- rectional process derives its force from communisation
capitalist,[274][275][276] anti-corporatist, anti-hierarchical, itself.[284] The term is still used in this sense in France
pro-labor positions in economics; anti-imperialism in today and has spread into English usage as a result of the
foreign policy; and thoroughly liberal or radical views translation of texts by Gilles Dauv and Thorie Comuregarding such cultural issues as gender, sexuality, and niste, two key gures in this tendency. In collaboration
race.
with other left communists such as Franois Martin and
The genealogy of contemporary market-oriented left- Karl Nesic, Dauv has attempted to fuse, critique, and
libertarianismsometimes labeled left-wing market develop dierent left communist currents, most notably
anarchism[277] overlaps to a signicant degree with the Italian movement associated with Amadeo Bordiga
that of SteinerVallentyne left-libertarianism as the roots (and its heretical journal Invariance), German-Dutch
of that tradition are sketched in the book The Ori- council communism, and the French perspectives assoou Barbarie and the Situationist
gins of Left-Libertarianism.[278] CarsonLong-style left- ciated with Socialisme
[285]
International.
libertarianism is rooted in 19th-century mutualism and
Main article: Left-wing market anarchism

in the work of gures such as Thomas Hodgskin and the

individualist anarchists Benjamin Tucker and Lysander
Spooner. While, with notable exceptions, marketoriented libertarians after Tucker tended to ally with the
political right, relationships between such libertarians and
the New Left thrived in the 1960s, laying the groundwork
for modern left-wing market anarchism.[279] Left wing
market anarchism identies with Left-libertarianism (or

In the late 1990s a close but not identical sense of

communization was developed by the French postsituationist group Tiqqun. In keeping with their ultra-left
predecessors, Tiqquns predilection for the term seems to
be its emphasis on communism as an immediate process
rather than a far-o goal, but for Tiqqun it is no longer
synonymous with the revolution considered as an historical event, but rather becomes identiable with all sorts

26
of activities from squatting and setting up communes
to simply sharing that would typically be understood
as pre-revolutionary.[286] From an ultra-left perspective
such a politics of dropping-out or, as Tiqqun put it, desertion setting up spaces and practices that are held to
partially autonomous from capitalism is typically dismissed as either naive or reactionary.[287] Due to the popularity of the Tiqqun-related works Call and The Coming Insurrection in US anarchist circles it tended to be
this latter sense of communization that was employed
in US anarchist and "insurrectionist" communiques, notably within the Californian student movement of 2009
2010.[288]

1.4 Contemporary libertarian socialism

The global Occupy movement is noted to have distinct libertarian

socialist principles.

See also: Contemporary anarchism

A surge of popular interest in libertarian socialism occurred in western nations during the 1960s and 1970s.[289]
Anarchism was inuential in the Counterculture of the
1960s[290][291][292] and anarchists actively participated in
the late sixties students and workers revolts.[293] In 1968
in Carrara, Italy the International of Anarchist Federations was founded during an international anarchist conference held there in 1968 by the three existing European
federations of France, the Italian and the Iberian Anarchist Federation as well as the Bulgarian federation in
French exile.[294][295] The uprisings of May 1968 also led
to a small resurgence of interest in left communist ideas.
Various small left communist groups emerged around
the world, predominantly in the leading capitalist coun-

CHAPTER 1. LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM

tries. A series of conferences of the communist left began in 1976, with the aim of promoting international and
cross-tendency discussion, but these petered out in the
1980s without having increased the prole of the movement or its unity of ideas.[296] Prominent left communist groups existing today include the International Communist Party, International Communist Current and the
Internationalist Communist Tendency.
The housing and employment crisis in most of Western
Europe led to the formation of communes and squatter
movements like that of Barcelona, Spain. In Denmark,
squatters occupied a disused military base and declared
the Freetown Christiania, an autonomous haven in central
Copenhagen.
Around the turn of the 21st century, libertarian socialism grew in popularity and inuence as part of
the anti-war, anti-capitalist, and anti-globalisation movements.[297] Anarchists became known for their involvement in protests against the meetings of the World Trade
Organization (WTO), Group of Eight, and the World
Economic Forum. Some anarchist factions at these
protests engaged in rioting, property destruction, and violent confrontations with police. These actions were
precipitated by ad hoc, leaderless, anonymous cadres
known as black blocs; other organisational tactics pioneered in this time include security culture, anity
groups and the use of decentralised technologies such
as the internet.[297] A signicant event of this period
was the confrontations at WTO conference in Seattle in
1999.[297] For english anarchist scholar Simon Critchley contemporary anarchism can be seen as a powerful critique of the pseudo-libertarianism of contemporary
neo-liberalism...One might say that contemporary anarchism is about responsibility, whether sexual, ecological
or socio-economic; it ows from an experience of conscience about the manifold ways in which the West ravages the rest; it is an ethical outrage at the yawning inequality, impoverishment and disenfranchisment that is
so palpable locally and globally.[298]
International anarchist federations in existence include the International of Anarchist Federations, the
International Workers Association, and International
Libertarian Solidarity. The largest organised anarchist movement today is in Spain, in the form of
the Confederacin General del Trabajo (CGT) and the
Confederacin Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). CGT membership was estimated to be around 100,000 for 2003.[299]
Other active syndicalist movements include in Sweden
the Central Organisation of the Workers of Sweden and
the Swedish Anarcho-syndicalist Youth Federation; the
CNT-AIT in France;[300] the Union Sindicale Italiana
in Italy; in the US Workers Solidarity Alliance and the
UK Solidarity Federation. The revolutionary industrial
unionist Industrial Workers of the World, claiming 2,000
paying members, and the International Workers Association, an anarcho-syndicalist successor to the First International, also remain active.

1.5. REFERENCES

27

Libertarian socialists in the early 21st century have been

involved in the alter-globalization movement, squatter
movement; social centers; infoshops; anti-poverty groups
such as Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and Food Not
Bombs; tenants unions; housing cooperatives; intentional
communities generally and egalitarian communities; anti- [9]
sexist organizing; grassroots media initiatives; digital media and computer activism; experiments in participatory
economics; anti-racist and anti-fascist groups like AntiRacist Action and Anti-Fascist Action; activist groups
protecting the rights of immigrants and promoting the
free movement of people, such as the No Border network;
worker co-operatives, countercultural and artist groups;
and the peace movement etc.
[10]
Libertarian socialism has also more recently played a
large part in the global Occupy movement,[301][302] in particular its focus on direct participatory democracy.

1.5 References
[1] Ostergaard, Georey. Anarchism. A Dictionary of
Marxist Thought. Blackwell Publishing, 1991. p. 21.
[2] Chomsky, Noam (2004). Language and Politics.
Otero, Carlos Peregrn. AK Press. p. 739

In

[3] Bookchin, Murray and Janet Biehl. The Murray Bookchin

Reader. Cassell, 1997. p. 170 ISBN 0-304-33873-7
[4] Hicks, Steven V. and Daniel E. Shannon. The American journal of economics and sociolology. Blackwell Pub,
2003. p. 612
[5] Miller, Wilbur R. (2012). The social history of crime and
punishment in America. An encyclopedia. 5 vols. London: Sage Publications. p. 1007. ISBN 1412988764.
There exist three major camps in libertarian thought:
right-libertarianism, socialist libertarianism, and ...
[6] unlike other socialists, they tend to see (to various dierent degrees, depending on the thinker) to be skeptical of
centralized state intervention as the solution to capitalist
exploitation... Roderick T. Long. Toward a libertarian
theory of class. Social Philosophy and Policy. Volume
15. Issue 02. Summer 1998. Pg. 305
[7] So, libertarian socialism rejects the idea of state ownership and control of the economy, along with the state as
such. I1. Isnt libertarian socialism an oxymoron in An
Anarchist FAQ
[8] We do not equate socialism with planning, state control,
or nationalization of industry, although we understand that
in a socialist society (not under socialism) economic activity will be collectively controlled, managed, planned,
and owned. Similarly, we believe that socialism will involve equality, but we do not think that socialism is equality, for it is possible to conceive of a society where everyone is equally oppressed. We think that socialism is incompatible with one-party states, with constraints on freedom of speech, with an elite exercising power 'on behalf

of' the people, with leader cults, with any of the other devices by which the dying society seeks to portray itself as
the new society. What is Libertarian Socialism?" by Ulli
Diemer. Volume 2, Number 1 (Summer 1997 issue) of
The Red Menace.
Therefore, rather than being an oxymoron, libertarian
socialism indicates that true socialism must be libertarian
and that a libertarian who is not a socialist is a phoney. As
true socialists oppose wage labour, they must also oppose
the state for the same reasons. Similarly, libertarians must
oppose wage labour for the same reasons they must oppose
the state. I1. Isnt libertarian socialism an oxymoron in
An Anarchist FAQ
So, libertarian socialism rejects the idea of state ownership and control of the economy, along with the state
as such. Through workers self-management it proposes
to bring an end to authority, exploitation, and hierarchy in
production. I1. Isnt libertarian socialism an oxymoron
in An Anarchist FAQ

[11] " ...preferringa system of popular self governance via networks of decentralized, local voluntary, participatory, cooperative associations. Roderick T. Long. Toward a
libertarian theory of class. Social Philosophy and Policy.
Volume 15. Issue 02. Summer 1998. Pg. 305
[12] Mendes, Silva. Socialismo Libertrio ou Anarchismo Vol.
1 (1896): Society should be free through mankinds
spontaneous federative aliation to life, based on the
community of land and tools of the trade; meaning: Anarchy will be equality by abolition of private property (while
retaining respect for personal property) and liberty by abolition of authority".
[13] We therefore foresee a Society in which all activities will
be coordinated, a structure that has, at the same time, sufcient exibility to permit the greatest possible autonomy
for social life, or for the life of each enterprise, and enough
cohesiveness to prevent all disorder...In a well-organized
society, all of these things must be systematically accomplished by means of parallel federations, vertically united
at the highest levels, constituting one vast organism in
which all economic functions will be performed in solidarity with all others and that will permanently preserve
the necessary cohesion. Gaston Leval. Libertarian socialism: a practical outline.
[14] "...preferring a system of popular self governance via networks of decentralized, local, voluntary, participatory, cooperative associations-sometimes as a complement to and
check on state power...
[15] Rocker, Rudolf (2004). Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory
and Practice. AK Press. p. 65. ISBN 978-1-90259392-0.
[16] LibSoc share with LibCap an aversion to any interference
to freedom of thought, expression or choicce of lifestyle.
Roderick T. Long. Toward a libertarian theory of class.
Social Philosophy and Policy. Volume 15. Issue 02. Summer 1998. pp 305
[17] What is implied by the term 'libertarian socialism'?: The
idea that socialism is rst and foremost about freedom and

28

CHAPTER 1. LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM

therefore about overcoming the domination, repression,

and alienation that block the free ow of human creativity, thought, and action...An approach to socialism that incorporates cultural revolution, womens and childrens liberation, and the critique and transformation of daily life,
as well as the more traditional concerns of socialist politics. A politics that is completely revolutionary because
it seeks to transform all of reality. We do not think that
capturing the economy and the state lead automatically
to the transformation of the rest of social being, nor do
we equate liberation with changing our life-styles and our
heads. Capitalism is a total system that invades all areas of
life: socialism must be the overcoming of capitalist reality
in its entirety, or it is nothing. What is Libertarian Socialism?" by Ulli Diemer. Volume 2, Number 1 (Summer
1997 issue) of The Red Menace.
[18] Authority is dened in terms of the right to exercise social control (as explored in the sociology of power) and
the correlative duty to obey (as explred in the philosophy
of practical reason). Anarchism is distinguished, philosophically, by its scepticism towards such moral relations
by its questioning of the claims made for such normative power and, practically, by its challenge to those authoritative powers which cannot justify their claims and
which are therefore deemed illegitimate or without moral
foundation.Anarchism and Authority: A Philosophical Introduction to Classical Anarchism by Paul McLaughlin.
AshGate. 2007. p. 1
[19] The IAF - IFA ghts for : the abolition of all forms of
authority whether economical, political, social, religious,
cultural or sexual.Principles of The International of Anarchist Federations"
[20] Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the
human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation
of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social
wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being
free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations. Emma Goldman. What it Really Stands for
Anarchy in Anarchism and Other Essays.
[21] Individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker dened anarchism as opposition to authority as follows They found
that they must turn either to the right or to the left,
follow either the path of Authority or the path of
Liberty. Marx went one way; Warren and Proudhon
the other. Thus were born State Socialism and Anarchism...Authority, takes many shapes, but, broadly speaking, her enemies divide themselves into three classes: rst,
those who abhor her both as a means and as an end of
progress, opposing her openly, avowedly, sincerely, consistently, universally; second, those who profess to believe
in her as a means of progress, but who accept her only so
far as they think she will subserve their own selsh interests, denying her and her blessings to the rest of the
world; third, those who distrust her as a means of progress,
believing in her only as an end to be obtained by rst
trampling upon, violating, and outraging her. These three
phases of opposition to Liberty are met in almost every

sphere of thought and human activity. Good representatives of the rst are seen in the Catholic Church and the
Russian autocracy; of the second, in the Protestant Church
and the Manchester school of politics and political economy; of the third, in the atheism of Gambetta and the socialism of Karl Marx. Benjamin Tucker. Individual Liberty.
[22] Ward, Colin (1966). Anarchism as a Theory of Organization. Archived from the original on 25 March 2010.
Retrieved 1 March 2010.
[23] Anarchist historian George Woodcock report of Mikhail
Bakunin's anti-authoritarianism and shows opposition to
both state and non-state forms of authority as follows:
All anarchists deny authority; many of them ght against
it. (p. 9)...Bakunin did not convert the Leagues central committee to his full program, but he did persuade
them to accept a remarkably radical recommendation to
the Berne Congress of September 1868, demanding economic equality and implicitly attacking authority in both
Church and State.
[24] Brown, L. Susan (2002). Anarchism as a Political Philosophy of Existential Individualism: Implications for
Feminism. The Politics of Individualism: Liberalism,
Liberal Feminism and Anarchism. Black Rose Books Ltd.
Publishing. p. 106.
[25] Sims, Franwa (2006). The Anacostia Diaries As It Is. Lulu
Press. p. 160.
[26] A Mutualist FAQ: A.4. Are Mutualists Socialists?
[27] Murray Bookchin, Ghost of Anarcho-Syndicalism; Robert
Graham, The General Idea of Proudhons Revolution
[28] Kent Bromley, in his preface to Peter Kropotkin's book
The Conquest of Bread, considered early French utopian
socialist Charles Fourier to be the founder of the libertarian branch of socialist thought, as opposed to the
authoritarian socialist ideas of Babeuf and Buonarroti.
Kropotkin, Peter. The Conquest of Bread, preface by Kent
Bromley, New York and London, G. P. Putnams Sons,
1906.
[29] "(Benjamin) Tucker referred to himself many times as a
socialist and considered his philosophy to be Anarchistic
socialism. An Anarchist FAQ by Various Authors
[30] French individualist anarchist mile Armand shows
clearly opposition to capitalism and centralized economies
when he said that the individualist anarchist inwardly he
remains refractory fatally refractory morally, intellectually, economically (The capitalist economy and the
directed economy, the speculators and the fabricators of
single are equally repugnant to him.)"Anarchist Individualism as a Life and Activity by Emile Armand
[31] Anarchist Peter Sabatini reports that In the United States
of early to mid-19th century, there appeared an array of communal and utopian counterculture groups
(including the so-called free love movement). William
Godwin's anarchism exerted an ideological inuence on
some of this, but more so the socialism of Robert Owen
and Charles Fourier. After success of his British venture, Owen himself established a cooperative community

1.5. REFERENCES

within the United States at New Harmony, Indiana during

1825. One member of this commune was Josiah Warren
(17981874), considered to be the rst individualist anarchist"Peter Sabatini. Libertarianism: Bogus Anarchy
[32] It introduces an eye-opening approach to radical social thought, rooted equally in libertarian socialism and
market anarchism. Chartier, Gary; Johnson, Charles
W. (2011). Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power,
and Structural Poverty. Brooklyn, NY:Minor Compositions/Autonomedia. Pg. Back cover
[33] Brooks, Frank H. The Individualist Anarchists: An Anthology of Liberty Transaction Publishers (1994) p. 75
[34] Spiegel, Henry. The Growth of Economic Thought Duke
University Press (1991) p. 446
[35] Paul, Ellen Frankel et al. Problems of Market Liberalism
Cambridge University Press (1998) p. 305
[36] However, libertarian socialism retains respect for personal
property.
[37] The Anarchist FAQ Editorial Collective. 150 years of
Libertarian"]
[38] Wikiquote. Retrieved June 4, 2006.
[39] Perlin, Terry M. (1979). Contemporary Anarchism.
Transaction Publishers. p. 40. ISBN 978-0-87855-0975.
[40] Bookchin, Murray. The Modern Crisis Black Rose Books
(1987) pp. 15455 ISBN 0-920057-61-6
[41] Chomsky (2003) p. 26
[42] Hahnel, Robin. Economic Justice and Democracy, Routledge Press, 2005, p. 138 ISBN 0-415-93344-7
[43] Cleaver, Harry. Kropotkin, Self-valorization And The
Crisis Of Marxism. written for and presented to the Conference on Pyotr Alexeevich Kropotkin organized by the
Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, St. Petersburg
and Dimitrov on December 8 14, 1992.
[44] Chomsky (2003) pp. 3031
[45] Ellerman 1992.
[46] wage slave. merriam-webster.com. Retrieved 4 March
2013.
[47] wage slave. dictionary.com. Retrieved 4 March 2013.
[48] Sandel 1996, p. 184
[49] Conversation with Noam Chomsky.
Globetrotter.berkeley.edu. p. 2. Retrieved 2010-06-28.
[50] Hallgrimsdottir & Benoit 2007.
[51] The Bolsheviks and Workers Control, 19171921: The
State and Counter-revolution. Spunk Library. Retrieved
4 March 2013.
[52] Harrington, Austin, et al. 'Encyclopedia of Social Theory'
Routledge (2006) p. 50

29

[53] Proudhon 1890.

[54] Marx 1969, Chapter VII
[55] Goldman 2003, p. 283
[56] Lindemann, Albert S. 'A History of European Socialism'
Yale University Press (1983) p. 160
[57] Ely, Richard et al. 'Property and Contract in Their Relations to the Distribution of Wealth' The Macmillan Company (1914)
[58] Chomsky (2004) p. 775
[59] Ed, Andrew. 'Closing the Iron Cage: The Scientic Management of Work and Leisure' Black Rose Books (1999)
p. 116
[60] Bookchin, Murray Social Anarchism Or Lifestyle Anarchism AK Press (1995) pp. 7172 ISBN 1-873176-83-X
[61] Purkis, Jon. Bowen, James. 'Changing Anarchism'
Manchester University Press (2004) pp. 165, 179
[62] Graeber, David. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology Prickly Paradigm Press (2004) pp. 2223, 2629
[63] The London Years, 1956
[64] Hain, Peter Rediscovering our Libertarian Roots
Chartist (August 2000)
[65] Bookchin, Murray. 'The Spanish Anarchists: the heroic
years, 18681936' AK Press (1998) p. 112 ISBN 1873176-04-X.
[66] Polenberg, Richard Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case,
the Supreme Court, and Free Speech. Cornell University
Press (1999) pp. 127130 ISBN 0-8014-8618-1
[67] ""An Anarchist Defense of Pornography by Boston Anarchist Drinking Brigade. Theanarchistlibrary.org. Retrieved 2013-10-11.
[68] Interview with an anarchist dominatrix by Organise
[69] The Free Love Movement and Radical Individualism By
Wendy McElroy. Ncc-1776.org. 1996-12-01. Archived
from the original on 31 December 2010. Retrieved 201009-20.
[70] The Free Love Movement and Radical Individualism By
Wendy McElroy. Ncc-1776.org. 1996-12-01. Retrieved
2013-10-11.
[71] Nicolas Walter. Anarchism and Religion"". Theanarchistlibrary.org. Retrieved 2013-10-11.
[72] Free thought | Dene Free thought at Dictionary.com.
Dictionary.reference.com. Retrieved 2013-07-12.
[73] Wendy McElroy. The culture of individualist anarchist
in Late-nineteenth century America
[74] "Free Society was the principal English-language forum for
anarchist ideas in the United States at the beginning of the
twentieth century. Emma Goldman: Making Speech Free,
19021909, p. 551.

30

CHAPTER 1. LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM

[75] Georey C. Fidler (SpringSummer 1985). The Escuela Moderna Movement of Francisco Ferrer: Por
la Verdad y la Justicia"". History of Education Quarterly (History of Education Society) 25 (1/2): 103132.
doi:10.2307/368893. JSTOR 368893.

[85] EL NATURISMO LIBERTARIO EN LA PENNSULA IBRICA (18901939) by Jose Maria Rosello.

Retrieved 2013-10-11.

[76] Francisco Ferrers Modern School. Flag.blackened.net.

Archived from the original on 7 August 2010. Retrieved
2010-09-20.

[87] An Anarchist FAQ by Various authors

[77] Sex-Pol stood for the German Society of Proletarian Sexual Politics. Danto writes that Reich oered a mixture
of psychoanalytic counseling, Marxist advice and contraceptives, and argued for a sexual permissiveness, including for young people and the unmarried, that unsettled other psychoanalysts and the political left. The clinics
were immediately overcrowded by people seeking help.
Danto, Elizabeth Ann (2007). Freuds Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis & Social Justice, 19181938, Columbia University Press, rst published 2005., pp. 118120, 137,
198, 208.
[78] The Sexual Revolution, 1945 (Die Sexualitt im Kulturkampf, translated by Theodore P. Wolfe)
[79] Umanit Nova, n. 125, September 6, 1921. (A translation
can be found at The revolutionary haste by Errico Malatesta. Retrieved June 17, 2006.
[80] Goldman, Emma. 'Anarchism and Other Essays Mother
Earth (1910) p. 113.
[81] Woodcock
[82] Resisting the Nation State, the pacist and anarchist tradition by Georey Ostergaard. Ppu.org.uk (1945-0806). Retrieved on 2011-12-28.
[83] Woodcock, p. 21: Finally, somewhat aside from the
curve that runs from anarchist individualism to anarchosyndicalism, we come to Tolstoyanism and to pacist anarchism that appeared, mostly in Holland (sic), Britain,
and the United states, before and after the Second World
War and which has continued since then in the deep in
the anarchist involvement in the protests against nuclear
armament.
[84] Diez, Xavier (2002). La insumisin voluntaria. El anarquismo individualista espaol durante la Dictadura y la
Segunda Repblica (19231938)" (in Spanish). Acracia. Retrieved 23 May 2014. Su obra ms representativa es Walden, aparecida en 1854, aunque redactada entre 1845 y 1847, cuando Thoreau decide instalarse en el
aislamiento de una cabaa en el bosque, y vivir en ntimo
contacto con la naturaleza, en una vida de soledad y sobriedad. De esta experiencia, su losofa trata de transmitirnos la idea que resulta necesario un retorno respetuoso
a la naturaleza, y que la felicidad es sobre todo fruto de
la riqueza interior y de la armona de los individuos con
el entorno natural. Muchos han visto en Thoreau a uno
de los precursores del ecologismo y del anarquismo primitivista representado en la actualidad por John Zerzan.
Para George Woodcock, esta actitud puede estar tambin
motivada por una cierta idea de resistencia al progreso y
de rechazo al materialismo creciente que caracteriza la sociedad norteamericana de mediados de siglo XIX.

[86] The pioneers. Natustar.com. Retrieved 2013-10-11.

[88] Introduction to ''Anarchism and countercultural politics

in early twentieth-century Cuba'' by Kirwin R. Shaer.
Raforum.info. Retrieved 2013-10-11.
[89] While almost all forms of modern anarchism consider
themselves to have an ecological dimension, the specically eco-anarchist thread within anarchism has two main
focal points, Social Ecology and primitivist."An Anarchist FAQ by Various authors
[90] Noam Chomsky, Nationalism and the New World Order: An Interview by Takis Fotopoulos at Democracy
and Nature Vol. 2, No. 2 (Issue 5), 1994 pp. 17
[91] It was with sadness and a certain frustration that I read in
Democracy and Nature (Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 198202) that
Murray Bookchin and Janet Biehl have resigned from the
D&N International Advisory Board, Murray complaining,
among other things, that the journal has become too Castoriadian in its orientation. The sadness stems from the
fact that I found inherently appealing D&Ns eort to examine what it considered the best of Bookchin and Castoriadis so as to encourage the emergence of a new liberatory project. On the Bookchin/Biehl Resignations and
the Creation of a New Liberatory Project by David Ames
Curtis at Agora International website
[92] Roderick T. Long. Toward a libertarian theory of class.
Social Philosophy and Policy. Volume 15. Issue 02. Summer 1998. Pg. 310
[93] It was in these conditions of class struggle that, among a
whole cluster of radical groups such as the Fifth Monarchy Men, the Levellers and the Ranters, there emerged
perhaps the rst real proto-anarchists, the Diggers, who
like the classical 19th-century anarchists identied political and economic power and who believed that a social,
rather than political revolution was necessary for the establishment of justice. Gerrard Winstanley, the Diggers
leader, made an identication with the word of God and
the principle of reason, an equivalent philosophy to that
found in Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You. In
fact, it seems likely Tolstoy took much of his own inspiration from Winstanley "Marlow. Anarchism and Christianity
[94] While the ideal commonwealth conceived by James Harrington tried to combine the existence of a powerful state
with respect for the political rights of the citizens, Thomas
Hobbes and Gerrard Winstanley, for opposite reasons, denied the possibility of power being shared between the
state and the people...Before dening the government of
a true Commonwealth Winstanley denounces the kingly
government based on property and like Proudhon he believes that property is theft. Marie Louise Berneri
"Utopias of the English Revolution
[95] George Woodcock Anarchism. The Encyclopedia of
Philosophy

1.5. REFERENCES

31

[96] Lewis Herber. (Murray Bookchin) Ecology and Revolu- [106] Herbert Marcuse. Eros and Civilization. Beacon Press,
tionary Thought. Theanarchistlibrary.org (2009-04-27).
Boston, MA, 1955. p. 218
Retrieved on 2011-12-28.
[107] Peter Sabatini. Libertarianism: Bogus Anarchy. Theanarchistlibrary.org (2009-12-03). Retrieved on 2011-12[97] It was the great service of liberal thinkers like Jeer28.
son and Paine that they recognized the natural limitations of every form of government. That is why they
[108] General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century
did not want to see the state become a terrestrial Provi(1851), Sixth Study, 3 5.
dence which in its infallibility would make on its own every decision, thereby not only blocking the road to higher [109] De l'tre-humain mle et femelleLettre P.J. Proudhon
forms of social development, but also crippling the natural
par Joseph Djacque (in French)
sense of responsibility of the people which is the essential
condition for every prosperous society. Rudolf Rocker. [110] An Anarchism FAQ A.1 What is anarchism?".
Pioneers of American Freedom: Origin of Liberal and radWeb.archive.org. 2009-01-26. Archived from the origical thought in America. J. J. LITTLE & IVES COMinal on 2009-01-26. Retrieved 2013-10-11.
PANY, NEW YORK. 1949. pg. 13
[111] Swartz, Clarence Lee. What is Mutualism?
[98] The Anarchists are simply. unterried Jeersonian
Democrats. They believe that the best government is that [112] "Ricardian socialism". The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of
Political Thought. 1987. p. 441
which governs least, and that that which governs least is
no government at all. Benjamin Tucker. Individual Lib- [113] Ojeili, Chamsy (November 2001). The Advance Witherty. New York. Vanguard Press. MCMXXVI. pg. 13
out Authority": Post-modernism, Libertarian Socialism,
[99] At one end of an institutional continuum one can place
the total institutions that routinely destroy the autonomy
and initiative of their subj ects. At the other end of this
continuum lies, perhaps, some ideal version of Jeersonian democrac y composed of independent, self-reliant,
selfrespecting, landowning farm ers, managers of their
own small enterprises, answerable to themselves, free of
debt, and more generally with no institutional reason for
servility or deference. Such free-standing farmers, Jeerson thought, were the basis of a vigorous and independent
public sphere where citizens could speak their mind without fear or favor. Somewhere in between these two poles
lies the contemporary situation of most citizens of Western democracies : a relatively open public sphere but a
quotidian institutional experience that is largely at cross
purposes with the implicit assumptions behind this public
sphere and encouraging and often rewarding caution, deference, servility, and conformity. James C. Scott. Two
Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play. Princeton University
Press, 2012, pg. 79-80

and Intellectuals. Democracy & Nature (Taylor & Francis) 7 (3): 391413. doi:10.1080/10855660120092294.
Retrieved 22 May 2014.
[114] Beer, A History of British Socialism, vol. 2, p. 256.
[115] Marx-Engels Collected Works: Volume 48. New York: International Publishers, 2001; p. 538, fn. 95.
[116] Carr, E.H. The Bolshevik Revolution 19171923. W.
W. Norton & Company 1985.
[117] Avrich, Paul. Russian Anarchists and the Civil War,
Russian Review, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Jul., 1968), pp. 296
306. Blackwell Publishing
[118] Chomsky, Noam (1970). Notes on Anarchism. In
Gurin, Daniel. Anarchism: From Theory to Practice.
New York: Monthly Review Press. ISBN 0-85345-1281. Retrieved 22 May 2014.
[119] Castoriadis, Cornelius (1975). An Interview. Telos
(23)., p. 133

[100] Kenneth C. Wenzer Godwins Place in the Anarchist Tra- [120] Castoriadis, Cornelius (1975). An Interview. Telos
(23)., p. 134
dition a Bicentennial Tribute. The anarchist library
(2011-02-12). Retrieved on 2011-12-28.
[121] Brinton, Maurice (Goodway, David ed). For Workers
Power: the selected writings of Maurice Brinton. AK Press.
[101] Graham, Robert. Anarchism - A Documentary History of
2004. ISBN 1-904859-07-0
Libertarian Ideas Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE to 1939), Black Rose Books, 2005
[122] Peasant ( )" was the ocial term for workers on
[102] Anarchism. In Our Time. BBC Radio 4. 7 Dec 2006.
Retrieved April 30, 2012.

peoples communes. According to the Ultra-Left, both

peasants and (urban) workers together composed a
proletarian class divorced from any meaningful control
over production or distribution.

[103] Sheehan, Sean. Anarchism, London: Reaktion Books,

2004. p. 85.
[123] See, for instance, Whither China?" by Yang Xiguang.

[104] Kropotkin, Peter. The Conquest of Bread, preface by Kent [124] The 70s Collective, ed. 1996. China: The Revolution is
Bromley, New York and London, G. P. Putnams Sons,
Dead, Long Live the Revolution. Montreal: Black Rose
1906.
Books.
[105] Hakim Bey (1991) The Lemonade Ocean & Modern [125] Libertarian Marxism? by Daniel Guerin. TheanarTimes
chistlibrary.org. 2011-04-23. Retrieved 2013-10-11.

32

[126] Root & Branch at libcom.org

[127] Root & Branch # 7 at libcom.org

CHAPTER 1. LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM

[149] Anarchism for Know-It-Alls. Filiquarian Publishing.

2008. ISBN 978-1-59986-218-7. Retrieved 20 September 2010.

[128] A libertarian Marxist tendency map. Libcom.org. Re[150] Fabbri, Luigi.

Anarchism and Communism.
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Northeastern Anarchist #4.
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2002. http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/
[129] Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. The General Idea of the revoluworldwidemovements/fabbrianarandcom.html
tion Freedom Press (1923)
[130] Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. 'Oeuvres Compltes (Lacroix [151] Makhno, Mett, Arshinov, Valevski, Linski (Dielo
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Trouda). The Organizational Platform of the Libertarian Communists.
1926.
Constructive Sec[131] Tandy, Francis D., 1896, Voluntary Socialism, chapter 6,
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[132] Carson, Kevin, 2004, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, chapter 2 (after Meek & Oppenheimer) ISBN 1- [152] ""Chapter 41: The Anarchists"" in ''The Great French
Revolution 17891793'' by Peter Kropotkin. Theanar4196-5869-7.
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[133] Beecher, Jonathan F. (2001). Victor Considerant and the
Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism. University of [153] Nunzio Pernicone, Italian Anarchism 18641892, pp.
California Press. p. 155. ISBN 978-0-520-22297-7.
111113, AK Press 2009.
[134] Swartz, Clarence Lee. What is Mutualism? VI. Land and
[154] Pengam, Alain. Anarchist-Communism. The Anarchist
Rent
Library. Retrieved 23 May 2014. While they were not opposed to strikes as such, they were opposed to trade unions
[135] Carson, Kevin, 2004, Studies in Mutualist Political Econand the struggle for the eight-hour day. This anti-reformist
omy, chapter 2 (after Ricardo, Dobb & Oppenheimer)
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dency, and its partisans declared themselves in favour of
[136] Hymans, E., Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, pp. 1901
agitation amongst the unemployed for the expropriation of
foodstus and other articles, for the expropriatory strike
[137] Woodcock, pp. 110, 112
and, in some cases, for 'individual recuperation' or acts of
terrorism.
[138] Free Market Anti-Capitalism. Mutualist.Org. Retrieved
on 2011-12-28.
[155] Christopher Gray, Leaving the Twentieth Century, p. 88.
[139] Woodcock, p. 20
[156] ""Towards the creative Nothing by Renzo Novatore.
[140] Anarchism at the Encyclopedia Britannica online.
Theanarchistlibrary.org. Retrieved 2013-10-11.
[141] George Woodcock. Anarchism: a history of libertarian
[157] Post-left anarcho-communist Bob Black after analysing
movements. p. 357
insurrectionary anarcho-communist Luigi Galleani's view
[142] George Woodcock. Anarchism: a history of libertarian
on anarcho-communism went as far as saying that commovements. p. 357
munism is the nal fulllment of individualism.... The apparent contradiction between individualism and commu[143] Kevin Carson. Studies in Mutualist Political Economy.
nism rests on a misunderstanding of both.... Subjectivity
is also objective: the individual really is subjective. It is
[144] Patsouras, Louis. 2005. Marx in Context. iUniverse. p.
nonsense to speak of emphatically prioritizing the social
54
over the individual,... You may as well speak of priori[145] Bakunin Mikail. Bakunin on Anarchism. Black Rose
tizing the chicken over the egg. Anarchy is a method of
Books. 1980. p. 369
individualization. It aims to combine the greatest individual development with the greatest communal unity.Bob
[146] Morriss, Brian. Bakukunin: The Philosophy of Freedom.
Black. Nightmares of Reason.
Black Rose Books Ltd., 1993. p. 115
[147] The revolution abolishes private ownership of the means [158] Modern Communists are more individualistic than
Stirner. To them, not merely religion, morality, family
of production and distribution, and with it goes capitalistic
and State are spooks, but property also is no more than
business. Personal possession remains only in the things
a spook, in whose name the individual is enslaved and
you use. Thus, your watch is your own, but the watch fachow enslaved!...Communism thus creates a basis for the
tory belongs to the people.Alexander Berkman. "What
liberty and Eigenheit of the individual. I am a Communist
Is Communist Anarchism?"
because I am an Individualist. Fully as heartily the Com[148] From Politics Past to Politics Future: An Integrated Analysis
munists concur with Stirner when he puts the word take
of Current and Emergent Paradigms Alan James Mayne
in place of demand that leads to the dissolution of propPublished 1999 Greenwood Publishing Group 316 pages
erty, to expropriation. Individualism and Communism go
ISBN 0-275-96151-6. Books.google.com. 1999. ISBN
hand in hand.Max Baginski. Stirner: The Ego and His
978-0-275-96151-0. Retrieved 2010-09-20.
Own on Mother Earth. Vol. 2. No. 3 MAY, 1907

1.5. REFERENCES

[159] Communism is the one which guarantees the greatest

amount of individual liberty provided that the idea that
begets the community be Liberty, Anarchy...Communism
guarantees economic freedom better than any other form
of association, because it can guarantee wellbeing, even
luxury, in return for a few hours of work instead of a days
work. Communism and Anarchy by Peter Kropotkin
[160] This other society will be libertarian communism, in
which social solidarity and free individuality nd their full
expression, and in which these two ideas develop in perfect harmony.Organisational Platform of the Libertarian
Communists by Dielo Truda (Workers Cause)

33

it, and in following it to its logical conclusions, made it the

basis of a new economic philosophy...This seems to have
been done independently by three dierent men, of three
dierent nationalities, in three dierent languages: Josiah
Warren, an American; Pierre J. Proudhon, a Frenchman;
Karl Marx, a German Jew...That the work of this interesting trio should have been done so nearly simultaneously would seem to indicate that Socialism was in the
air, and that the time was ripe and the conditions favorable for the appearance of this new school of thought...So
far as priority of time is concerned, the credit seems to belong to Warren, the American, a fact which should be
noted by the stump orators who are so fond of declaiming against Socialism as an imported article. Benjamin
Tucker. Individual Liberty

[161] I see the dichotomies made between individualism and

communism, individual revolt and class struggle, the
struggle against human exploitation and the exploitation
[171] ""Anarchist Individualism as a Life and Activity by Emile
of nature as false dichotomies and feel that those who
Armand. Spaz.org. 2002-03-01. Retrieved 2013-10-11.
accept them are impoverishing their own critique and
struggle.MY PERSPECTIVES by Willful Disobedi[172] el capitalismo es slo el efecto del gobierno; desapareence Vol. 2, No. 12
cido el gobierno, el capitalismo cae de su pedestal vertiginosamente.... Lo que llamamos capitalismo no es otra
[162] This process of education and class organization, more
cosa que el producto del Estado, dentro del cual lo nico
than any single factor in Spain, produced the collectives.
que se cultiva es la ganancia, bien o mal habida. Luchar,
And to the degree that the CNT-FAI (for the two organipues, contra el capitalismo es tarea intil, porque sea Capzations became fatally coupled after July 1936) exercised
italismo de Estado o Capitalismo de Empresa, mientras el
the major inuence in an area, the collectives proved to be
Gobierno exista, existir el capital que explota. La lucha,
generally more durable, communist and resistant to Stalpero de conciencias, es contra el Estado.Anarquismo by
inist counterrevolution than other republican-held areas of
Miguel Gimenez Igualada
Spain. Murray Bookchin. To Remember Spain: The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936
[163] Murray Bookchin. To Remember Spain: The Anarchist
and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936
[164] What do I mean by individualism? I mean by individualism the moral doctrine which, relying on no dogma, no
tradition, no external determination, appeals only to the
individual conscience.Mini-Manual of Individualism by
Han Ryner
[165] I do not admit anything except the existence of the individual, as a condition of his sovereignty. To say that the
sovereignty of the individual is conditioned by Liberty is
simply another way of saying that it is conditioned by itself.""Anarchism and the State in Individual Liberty
[166] Palmer, Brian (2010-12-29) What do anarchists want
from us?, Slate.com

[173] "La propiedad? Bah! No es problema. Porque cuando

nadie trabaje para nadie, el acaparador de la riqueza desaparece, como ha de desaparecer el gobierno cuando
nadie haga caso a los que aprendieron cuatro cosas en
las universidades y por ese slo hecho pretenden gobernar a los hombres. Porque si en la tierra de los ciegos el tuerto es rey, en donde todos ven y juzgan y disciernen, el rey estorba. Y de lo que se trata es de que
no haya reyes porque todos sean hombres. Las grandes
empresas industriales las transformarn los hombres en
grandes asociaciones donde todos trabajen y disfruten del
producto de su trabajo. Y de esos tan sencillos como hermosos problemas trata el anarquismo y al que lo cumple
y vive es al que se le llama anarquista...El hincapi que
sin cansancio debe hacer el anarquista es el de que nadie
debe explotar a nadie, ningn hombre a ningn hombre,
porque esa no-explotacin llevara consigo la limitacin de
la propiedad a las necesidades individuales.Anarquismo
by Miguel Gimenez Igualada

[167] William Bailie, Josiah Warren: The First American Anarchist A Sociological Study, Boston: Small, Maynard
& Co., 1906, p. 20
[174] The most ambitious contribution to literary anarchism
during the 1890s was undoubtedly Oscar Wilde The Soul
[168] "''Native American Anarchism: A Study of Left-Wing
of Man under Socialism. Wilde, as we have seen, declared
American Individualism'' by Eunice Minette Schuster.
himself an anarchist on at least one occasion during the
Againstallauthority.org. Retrieved 2013-10-11.
1890s, and he greatly admired Kropotkin, whom he had
met.
Later, in De Profundis, he described Kropotkins life
[169] Benjamin Tucker: Capitalist or Anarchist in An Anaras
one
of the most perfect lives I have come across in my
chist FAQ by Various Authors
own experience and talked of him as a man with a soul
[170] The economic principles of Modern Socialism are a logof that beautiful white Christ that seems coming out of
ical deduction from the principle laid down by Adam
Russia. But in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, which
Smith in the early chapters of his Wealth of Nations,
appeared in 1890, it is Godwin rather than Kropotkin
whose inuence seems dominant. George Woodcock.
namely, that labor is the true measure of price...Half
Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movea century or more after Smith enunciated the principle
ments. 1962. (p. 447)
above stated, Socialism picked it up where he had dropped

34

CHAPTER 1. LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM

[175] The soul of man under Socialism by Oscar Wilde. [197] Chris Smith said in 2005 that in recent years Cook had
Flag.blackened.net. Retrieved 2013-10-11.
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Ideas and Movements. 1962. (p. 447)
Smith: The House of Commons was Robin Cooks true
home Commentators, Opinion Independent.co.uk.
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[178] Sorel, Georges. 'Political Theorists in Context' Routledge [198] papers relating to Libertarian Communism (a splinter
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Great Britain at Archives Hub at the Great Research Cen[179] Rocker, Rudolf. 'Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and
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[180] Pierce, Wayne.Libertarian Marxisms Relation to Anar- [199] Following Isaiah Berlin, Halsema distinguishes between
positive and negative freedom. Negative freedom is acchism The Utopian 7380.
cording to Halsema the freedom citizens from government
inuence; she applies this concept especially to the mul[181] Herman Gorter, Anton Pannekoek, Sylvia Pankhurst,
ticultural society and the rechtsstaat, where the governOtto Ruhl Non-Leninist Marxism: Writings on the Workers
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them. Positive freedom is the emancipation of citizens
from poverty and discrimination. Halsema wants to ap[182] Marot, Eric. Trotsky, the Left Opposition and the Rise
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where government should take more action. According
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[195] John Quail, The Slow-Burning Fuse Paladin, 1978 ISBN [208] Christoyannopoulos, pp. 24: Locating Christian anar0-586-08225-5
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[196] Hain, Peter (1995). Ayes to the Left: A Future for Social- [209] Christoyannopoulos, pp. 4380: The Sermon on the
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Mount: A manifesto for Christian anarchism

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[210] Christoyannopoulos, Alexandre (12 March 2010). A [219] US bishops endorse sainthood cause of Catholic
Christian Anarchist Critique of Violence: From Turning
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and the State. Salzburg. Retrieved 23 May 2014.
[220] Day, Dorothy (February 1970). Ammon Hennacy:
[211] Christoyannopoulos, pp. 19 and 208: Leo Tolstoy
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[221] Kumarappa, Joseph Cornelius (1951). Gandhian economic thought. Library of Indian economics (1st ed.).
In the 1900 essay, On Anarchy, he wrote; The AnarBombay, India: Vora. OCLC 3529600. Retrieved 7 Auchists are right in everything; in the negation of the exgust 2009.
isting order, and in the assertion that, without Authority,
there could not be worse violence than that of Author- [222] In 1908 Leo Tolstoy wrote A Letter to a Hindu, which said
ity under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in
that only by using love as a weapon through passive resisthinking that Anarchy can be instituted by a revolution.
tance could the Indian people overthrow colonial rule. In
But it will be instituted only by there being more and more
1909, Gandhi wrote to Tolstoy seeking advice and permispeople who do not require the protection of governmental
sion to republish A Letter to a Hindu in Gujarati. Tolstoy
power ... There can be only one permanent revolutiona
responded and the two continued a correspondence until
moral one: the regeneration of the inner man. Despite his
Tolstoys death in 1910. The letters concern practical and
misgivings about anarchist violence, Tolstoy took risks to
theological applications of non-violence.Murthy, B. Srinicirculate the prohibited publications of anarchist thinkers
vasa, ed. (1987). Mahatma Gandhi and Leo Tolstoy: Letin Russia, and corrected the proofs of Kropotkins Words
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of a Rebel, illegally published in St Petersburg in 1906.
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Peter Kropotkin: from prince to rebel. G Woodcock, I
[223] Bidyut Chakrabarty, Jawaharlal Nehru and Planning,
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19381941: India at the Crossroads, Modern Asian StudOtterman, Sharon (2012-11-26) In Hero of the Catholic
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Left, a Conservative Cardinal Sees a Saint, New York
[224] Kuruvila Pandikattu (2001). Gandhi: the meaning of MaTimes
hatma for the millennium. CRVP. p. 237. ISBN 978-1Day, Dorothy. On Pilgrimage - May 1974, There was
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no time to answer the one great disagreement which was
in their minds--how can you reconcile your Faith in the [225] Snow, Edgar. The Message of Gandhi. 27 September
March 1948. Like Marx, Gandhi hated the state and
monolithic, authoritarian Church which seems so far from
wished to eliminate it, and he told me he considered himJesus who had no place to lay his head, and who said
self 'a philosophical anarchist.'"
sell what you have and give to the poor,"--with your anarchism? Because I have been behind bars in police stations, houses of detention, jails and prison farms, whatso- [226] Jesudasan, Ignatius. A Gandhian theology of liberation.
Gujarat Sahitya Prakash: Ananda India, 1987, pp. 236
ever they are called, eleven times, and have refused to pay
237
Federal income taxes and have never voted, they accept
me as an anarchist. And I in turn, can see Christ in them [227] Bidyut Chakrabarty (2006). Social and political thought
even though they deny Him, because they are giving themof Mahatma Gandhi. Routledge. p. 138. ISBN 978-0selves to working for a better social order for the wretched
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[228] Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand; Tolstoy, Leo (SeptemAnarchist FAQ - A.3.7 Are there religious anarchists?,
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Tolstoys ideas had a strong inuence on Gandhi, who
and Leo Tolstoy letters. Long Beach Publications.
inspired his fellow country people to use non-violent resistance to kick Britain out of India. Moreover, Gandhis [229] Gandhis ideas were popularised in the West in books
vision of a free India as a federation of peasant communes
such as Richard Greggs The Power of Nonviolence
is similar to Tolstoys anarchist vision of a free society
(1935), (34) and Bart de Ligts The Conquest of Violence
(although we must stress that Gandhi was not an anar(1937).Georey Ostergaard. Resisting the Nation State.
chist). The Catholic Worker Group in the United States
The pacist and anarchist tradition
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was Dorothy Day a staunch Christian pacist and anar- [230] Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements
by George Woodcock
chist who founded it in 1933.

[217] Reid, Stuart (2008-09-08) Day by the Pool, The American [231] Dielo Trouda group (2006) [1926]. Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft). Italy:
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[218] Day, Dorothy.On Pilgrimage - February 1974, The blurb
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spokesmen for the ideas expressed, including Alex ComDuring the 1960s, Marcuse achieved world renown as the
fort, Paul Goodman and Murray Bookchin. It is the traguru of the New Left, publishing many articles and giving
dition we might call anarchism. We ourselves have never
lectures and advice to student radicals all over the world.
hesitated to use the word.

36

CHAPTER 1. LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM

He travelled widely and his work was often discussed in [244] 1969: Height of the Hippies - ABC News. Abcthe mass media, becoming one of the few American innews.go.com. Retrieved 2013-10-11.
tellectuals to gain such attention. Never surrendering his
revolutionary vision and commitments, Marcuse contin- [245] Bookchin, Murray (1994). The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism. Black Rose Books.
ued to his death to defend the Marxian theory and liberpp. 119120. ISBN 978-1-55164-018-1.
tarian socialism.
[233] Robin Hahnel, Economic Justice and Democracy: From [246] Arran Gare, Beyond Social Democracy? Takis Fotopoulos Vision of an Inclusive Democracy as a New Liberatory
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Project Democracy & Nature, Vol. 9, No. 3 (November
[234] . As such In the forties and fties, anarchism, in fact
2003), pp. 345358(14)
if not in name, began to reappear, often in alliance with
pacism, as the basis for a critique of militarism on both [247] David Freeman, Inclusive democracy and its prospects
review of book Towards An Inclusive Democracy: The
sides of the Cold War. The anarchist/pacist wing of
Crisis of the Growth Economy and the Need For a New
the peace movement was small in comparison with the
Liberatory Project, published in Thesis Eleven, Sage Pubwing of the movement that emphasized electoral work,
lications, no. 69 (May 2002), pp. 103106.
but made an important contribution to the movement
as a whole. Where the more conventional wing of the
peace movement rejected militarism and war under all but
the most dire circumstances, the anarchist/pacist wing
rejected these on principle.Anarchism and the AntiGlobalization Movement by Barbara Epstein In the
1950s and 1960s anarcho-pacism began to gel, toughminded anarchists adding to the mixture their critique of
the state, and tender-minded pacists their critique of violence. Its rst practical manifestation was at the level
of method: nonviolent direct action, principled and pragmatic, was used widely in both the Civil Rights movement
in the USA and the campaign against nuclear weapons in
Britain and elsewhere.Georey Ostergaard. Resisting the
Nation State. The pacist and anarchist tradition as can
be seen in the activism and writings of the English anarchist member of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Alex Comfort or the similar activism of the American
catholic anarcho-pacists Ammon Hennacy and Dorothy
Day. Anarcho-pacism became a basis for a critique of
militarism on both sides of the Cold War.Anarchism
and the Anti-Globalization Movement by Barbara Epstein
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crisis of the growth economy and the need for a new liberatory project, (London & NY: Cassell, 1997), p. 255.
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menter at Reason magazines Hit&Run blog, remarking

1.5. REFERENCES

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on Jesse Walkers link to the Kelly article, put it: ev- [275] Writing before the rise of the CarsonLong school of leftery trade is a cooperative act. In fact, its a fairly comlibertarianism, historian of American anarchism David
mon observation among market anarchists that genuinely
DeLeon was disinclined to treat any market-oriented varifree markets have the most legitimate claim to the label
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bilitated by Kevin Carson at website of Center for a StateRadicalism. Baltimore, MD:Johns Hopkins University
less Society
Press. p. 123.
[260] Carson, Kevin A. (2008). Organization Theory: A Liber- [276] Gary Chartier has joined Kevin Carson, Charles Johnson, and others (echoing the language of Benjamin Tucker
tarian Perspective. Charleston, SC:BookSurge.
and Thomas Hodgskin) in maintaining that, because of its
[261] Carson, Kevin A. (2010). The Homebrew Industrial Revheritage and its emancipatory goals and potential, radiolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto. Charleston, SC:
cal market anarchism should be seenby its proponents
BookSurge.
and by othersas part of the socialist tradition, and that
market anarchists can and should call themselves so[262] Long, Roderick T. (2000). Reason and Value: Aristotle
cialists. See Gary Chartier, Advocates of Freed Marversus Rand. Washington, DC:Objectivist Center
kets Should Oppose Capitalism, Free-Market AntiCapitalism?" session, annual conference, Association of
[263] Long, Roderick T. (2008). "An Interview With Roderick
Private Enterprise Education (Csars Palace, Las VeLong"
gas, NV, April 13, 2010); Gary Chartier, Advocates of
Freed Markets Should Embrace 'Anti-Capitalism'"; Gary
[264] Johnson, Charles W. (2008).
"Liberty, Equality,
Chartier, Socialist Ends, Market Means: Five Essays. Cp.
Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism. AnarTucker, Socialism.
chism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country? In Long, Roderick T. and Machan, Tibor Aldershot: [277] Chris Sciabarra is the only scholar associated with this
Ashgate pp. 15588.
school of left-libertarianism who is skeptical about anarchism; see Sciabarras Total Freedom
[265] Spangler, Brad (15 September 2006). "Market Anarchism as Stigmergic Socialism.
[278] Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner. The origins of Left
Libertarianism. Palgrave. 2000
[266] Konkin III, Samuel Edward. The New Libertarian Mani[279] Long, Roderick T. (2006). "Rothbards 'Left and Right':
festo.
Forty Years Later. Rothbard Memorial Lecture, Austrian
[267] Richman, Sheldon (23 June 2010).
"Why LeftScholars Conference.
Libertarian?" The Freeman. Foundation for Economic
[280] Related, arguably synonymous, terms include libertariEducation.
anism, left-wing libertarianism, egalitarian-libertarianism,
and libertarian socialism.
[268] Richman, Sheldon (18 December 2009). "Workers of the
World Unite for a Free Market. Foundation for Economic
Sundstrom, William A. "An Egalitarian-Libertarian
Education.
Manifesto.
[269] Sheldon Richman (3 February 2011). "Libertarian Left:
Free-market anti-capitalism, the unknown ideal. The
American Conservative. Retrieved 5 March 2012.
[270] Sciabarra, Chris Matthew (2000). Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism. University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press.
[271] Chartier, Gary (2009). Economic Justice and Natural
Law. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Bookchin, Murray and Biehl, Janet (1997). The

Murray Bookchin Reader. New York:Cassell. p.
170.
Sullivan, Mark A. (July 2003). Why the Georgist Movement Has Not Succeeded: A Personal
Response to the Question Raised by Warren J.
Samuels. American Journal of Economics and Sociology. 62:3. p. 612.

[281] Vallentyne, Peter; Steiner, Hillel; Otsuka, Michael (2005).

Why Left-Libertarianism Is Not Incoherent, Indetermi[272] Gillis, William (2011). The Freed Market. In Chartier,
nate, or Irrelevant: A Reply to Fried. Philosophy and
Gary and Johnson, Charles. Markets Not Capitalism.
Public Aairs (Blackwell Publishing, Inc.) 33 (2). ReBrooklyn, NY:Minor Compositions/Autonomedia. pp.
trieved 2013-07-23.
1920.
[282] Hamowy, Ronald. Left Libertarianism. The Encyclo[273] Chartier, Gary; Johnson, Charles W. (2011). Markets Not
pedia of Libertarianism. p. 288
Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty. Brook- [283] Benjamin Noys (ed). Communization and its Discontents:
lyn, NY:Minor Compositions/Autonomedia. pp. 116.
Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles. Minor Compositions, Autonomedia. 2011. 1st ed.
[274] Gary Chartier and Charles W. Johnson (eds). Markets
Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, [284] A World Without Money by Les amis de 4 millions de
Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty. Mijeunes travailleurs. (quoted passage not included in this
nor Compositions; 1st edition (November 5, 2011
English extract)

38

[285] The text surveys the Italian and German lefts, Socialisme Ou Barbarie and the Situationist International and
describes the theoretical development of the French ultraleft.Re-collecting our past - La Banquise

CHAPTER 1. LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM

radicalism based on a critique of all authority and all hierarchies of power. Anarchism circulated within the movement along with other radical ideologies. The inuence of
anarchism was strongest among radical feminists, in the
commune movement, and probably in the Weather Underground and elsewhere in the violent fringe of the antiwar movement. Anarchism and the Anti-Globalization
Movement by Barbara Epstein

[286] As we apprehend it, the process of instituting communism can only take the form of a collection of acts of
communisation, of making common such-and-such space,
such-and-such machine, such-and-such knowledge. That
is to say, the elaboration of the mode of sharing that at- [294] London Federation of Anarchists involvement in Carrara
taches to them. Insurrection itself is just an accelerator, a
conference, 1968 International Institute of Social History,
decisive moment in this process. Anonymous, Call
Accessed 19 January 2010

[287] For a critique of Tiqqun from an ultra-left perspective, as [295] Short history of the IAF-IFA A-infos news project, Acwell as a description of the opposition between the two
cessed 19 January 2010
sense of communization see "Reexions Around Call"
Letters Journal #3. See also Dauv and Nesic, Un Appel [296] The International Conferences of the Communist
Left (197680) | International Communist Current.
et une Invite.
En.internationalism.org. Retrieved 2013-07-12.
[288] See e.g. After the Fall: Communiqus from Occupied
[297] Rupert, Mark (2006). Globalization and International PoCalifornia
litical Economy. Lanham: Rowman & Littleeld Publish[289] Thomas 1985, p. 4
ers. p. 66. ISBN 0-7425-2943-6.
[290] John Patten (1968-10-28). ""These groups had their roots
in the anarchist resurgence of the nineteen sixties. Young
militants nding their way to anarchism, often from the
anti-bomb and anti-Vietnam war movements, linked up
with an earlier generation of activists, largely outside the
ossied structures of ocial anarchism. Anarchist tactics embraced demonstrations, direct action such as industrial militancy and squatting, protest bombings like
those of the First of May Group and Angry Brigade
and a spree of publishing activity. Islands of Anarchy: Simian, Cienfuegos, Refract and their support network by John Patten. Katesharpleylibrary.net. Retrieved 2013-10-11.
[291] Farrell provides a detailed history of the Catholic Workers and their founders Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. He
explains that their pacism, anarchism, and commitment
to the downtrodden were one of the important models
and inspirations for the 60s. As Farrell puts it, Catholic
Workers identied the issues of the sixties before the Sixties began, and they oered models of protest long before
the protest decade.The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar Radicalism by James J. Farrell
[292] While not always formally recognized, much of the
protest of the sixties was anarchist. Within the nascent
womens movement, anarchist principles became so
widespread that a political science professor denounced
what she saw as The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Several groups have called themselves Amazon Anarchists.
After the Stonewall Rebellion, the New York Gay Liberation Front based their organization in part on a reading of
Murray Bookchin's anarchist writings. Anarchism by
Charley Shively in Encyclopedia of Homosexuality. p. 52
[293] Within the movements of the sixties there was much
more receptivity to anarchism-in-fact than had existed in
the movements of the thirties...But the movements of the
sixties were driven by concerns that were more compatible with an expressive style of politics, with hostility to
authority in general and state power in particular...By the
late sixties, political protest was intertwined with cultural

[298] Innitely Demanding by Simon Critchley. Verso. 2007. p.

125
[299] Carley, Mark Trade union membership 19932003
(International:SPIRE Associates 2004).
[300] http://www.cnt-ait-fr.org/CNT-AIT/ACCUEIL.html
Website of the Confdration Nationale du Travail
Association Internationale des Travailleurs
[301] If any radical left tendency has been responsible for inspiring action, the palm should go to Marxisms historic
antagonist on the Leftanarchism. Wherever movements
have been provoked against neoliberalism, black ags
have tended to outnumber red. Autonomista and other
kinds of left-libertarian thought were major currents running through movements in Greece and Spain. The cornerstone for the occupation of Zuccotti Park was laid by
anarchists, who also developed the consensus procedures
by which the movement participants made (or occasionally failed to make) decisions. Cheerleaders for Anarchism by Nikil Saval in Dissent magazine
[302] In November 2011, Rolling Stone magazine credited
American anarchist David Graeber with giving the
Occupy Wall Street movement its theme: "We are the 99
percent". Rolling Stone says Graeber helped create the rst
New York City General Assembly, with only 60 participants, on August 2. Sharlet, Je (10 November 2011).
Inside Occupy Wall Street: How a bunch of anarchists
and radicals with nothing but sleeping bags launched a
nationwide movement. Rolling Stone. Retrieved 4 December 2011.

1.6 Libertarian socialist periodicals

Against the Grain: a libertarian socialist newspaper
(US, 19761978)[1]

1.7. SEE ALSO

39

Anarcho-Syndicalist Review (US, 1986-)

Tegen de Stroom (1990s, Netherlands)[13]

Big Flame (UK, 1960s70s)

The Commune (UK, 2008) [14]

Comment: New Perspectives in Libertarian Thought

(US, 1960s, edited by Murray Bookchin)[2]

The Libertarian Communist (UK, 2008)

Democracy & Nature (US/UK) succeeded by The

International Journal of Inclusive Democracy (belongs to the direct democratic, libertarian socialist
and autonomy traditions)[3]
Contemporary Issues-Dinge der Zeit (English and
German language "magazine for a democracy of
content, 19471997 published by Joseph Weber,
Murray Bookchins mentor)[4]
Flash Point: a libertarian socialist newsjournal
(Saskatoon, Canada, 1970s)[1]

Workers Solidarity (Publication of the Workers Solidarity Movement, Ireland)

Zenit Sweden,
19581970
Syndikalistiska Grupprrelsen)

(Magazine

by

Turnusol (Turkey, 2008)[15]

Z Magazine

1.7 See also

Freedom newspaper (UK)

Geolibertarianism

Heatwave (UK, 1960s)[5]

Veganarchism

Leeds Other Paper (UK, 19741991)[6]

Libertarian Communism (UK, 19741976)
Liberty (US, 18811908)
Mother Earth (US, 19071915)
New Internationalist (UK)
Organized Thoughts (US, 1990s)[7]
Our Generation (originally Our Generation Against
Nuclear War), 19611994; a historical and theoretical journal
Rebelles (Quebec, 1990s)[8]
Red and Black Notes (Toronto, 1997 2006-, features Cajo Brendel, Cornelius Castoriadis, Martin
Glaberman, CLR James, Larry Gambone and
others)[9]
Red & Black Revolution (Publication of The
Workers Solidarity Movement, Ireland)
ROAR Magazine (2010present)
Root and Branch (Cambridge, Massachusetts, US,
1970, featured work of Paul Mattick and others)[10]
Social Anarchism (journal), a Baltimore-based journal founded in 1981 and currently publishing.
Socialisme ou Barbarie (France)
Socialist Standard (UK, 1904present)
Solidarity (UK, 1960s70s)[11]
Der Sozialist, (Germany, 1900s, co-edited by Gustav
Landauer and Margarethe Hardegger)[12]

1.8 References
[1] Priodiques en anglais CIRA Lausanne. Anarcabolo.ch (2011-09-02). Retrieved on 2011-12-28.
[2] Murray Bookchin What is Social Ecology? at the
Wayback Machine (archived June 1, 2008) communalism.org
[3] The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy. Inclusivedemocracy.org. Retrieved on 2011-12-28.
[4] Murray Bookchin obituary. Times Online (2011-12-21).
Retrieved on 2011-12-28.
[5] Heatwave Magazine UK, 1960s. libcom.org. Retrieved
on 2011-12-28.
[6] Leeds other paper Leeds libertarian socialist newspaper. [WorldCat.org]. Worldcatlibraries.org. Retrieved on
2011-12-28.
[7] Index
of
/Politics/Organized.Thoughts.
Web.archive.org.
Archived from the original on
2009-01-01. Retrieved 2013-10-11.
[8] Lessons from the Summit Protest movement. Struggle.ws.
Retrieved on 2011-12-28.
[9] Red & Black Notes Index at the Wayback Machine
(archived October 27, 2009). geocities.com
[10] Root And Branch. Webcitation.org. Retrieved on 201112-28.
[11] Anderson, Paul.
(2004-07-27) GAUCHE. Libsoc.blogspot.com. Retrieved on 2011-12-28.
[12] Gallin, Dan; Horn, Pat (2005). Organizing Informal
Women Workers. Global Labor Institute. Retrieved 23
May 2014.

40

CHAPTER 1. LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM

[13] Obituary for the Dutch anarchist Karl Kreuger.

Web.archive.org. 2008-12-09. Archived from the original on 2008-12-09. Retrieved 2013-10-11.
[14] The Commune for workers self-management and communism
[15] Baka Bir Sol Mmkn!. Turnusol.biz. Retrieved on
2011-12-28.

1.9 Bibliography
Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian
Ideas. Robert Graham, editor.
Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism
(300CE to 1939) Black Rose Books, Montral
and London 2005. ISBN 1-55164-250-6.
Volume Two: The Anarchist Current (1939
2006) Black Rose Books, Montral 2007.
ISBN 978-1-55164-311-3.
Woodcock, George (22 November 2004).
Anarchism: a history of libertarian ideas and
movements. University of Toronto Press. ISBN
978-1-55111-629-7. Retrieved 28 December 2011.
An Anarchist FAQ by Iain McKay (ed.), Volume 1
(2008), see esp. section: A.1.3 Why is anarchism
also called libertarian socialism?
Anarchy: A Graphic Guide, Cliord Harper (Camden Press, 1987): An overview, updating Woodcocks classic, and illustrated throughout by Harpers
woodcut-style artwork.
The Anarchist Reader, George Woodcock (ed.)
(Fontana/Collins 1977; ISBN 0-00-634011-3): An
anthology of writings from anarchist thinkers and
activists including Proudhon, Kropotkin, Bakunin,
Malatesta, Bookchin, Goldman, and many others.
Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian
Thought and British Writers from William Morris to
Colin Ward. David Goodway. Liverpool University
Press. 2006 ISBN 1-84631-025-3
The Anarchist Turn. Edited by Jacob Blumenfeld,
Chiara Bottici and Simon Critchley. Pluto Press.
March 19, 2013. ISBN 9780745333427
Anarchism: From Theory to Practice by Daniel
Guerin. Monthly Review Press. 1970. ISBN 085345-175-3

(French) LAutonomie. Le mouvement autonome en

France et en Italie, ditions Spartacus 1978
Critical Theory and Libertarian Socialism: Realizing the Political Potential of Critical Social Theory.
Charles Masquelier. Bloomsbury Academic. 2014
Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism
by Peter Marshall. PM Press. 2010. ISBN 160486-064-2
People Without Government: An Anthropology of
Anarchy (2nd ed.) by Harold Barclay, Left Bank
Books, 1990 ISBN 1-871082-16-1
Pioneers of Anti-Parliamentarism by Guy Aldred.
Glasgow: Bakunin Press.
The Political Theory of Anarchism by April Carter.
Harper & Row. 1971. ISBN 978-0-06-136050-3
Sartwell, Crispin (2008). Against the state: an introduction to anarchist political theory. SUNY Press.
ISBN 978-0-7914-7447-1.
Libertarian Socialism: Politics in Black and Red
Edited By Alex Prichard, Ruth Kinna, Saku Pinta
and Dave Berry. Palgrave Macmillan, December
2012 ISBN 978-0-230-28037-3
Libertarianism without Inequality by Otsuka,
Michael. (Oxford University Press 2003)
Non-Leninist Marxism: Writings on the Workers
Councils (a collection of writings by Gorter, Pannekoek, Pankhurst, and Ruhle). Red and Black Publishers, St Petersburg, Florida, 2007. ISBN 978-09791813-6-8
The International Communist Current, itself a Left
Communist grouping, has produced a series of studies of what it views as its own antecedents. The book
on the German-Dutch current, which is by Philippe
Bourrinet (who later left the ICC), in particular contains an exhaustive bibliography.
The Italian Communist Left 19261945 (ISBN
1897980132)
The Dutch-German Communist Left (ISBN
1899438378)
The Russian Communist Left, 19181930
(ISBN 1897980108)

Anarchy through the times by Max Nettlau. Gordon

Press. 1979. ISBN 0-8490-1397-6

The British Communist Left, 19141945

(ISBN 1897980116)

Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, ed. Sylvere

Lotringer & Christian Marazzi. New York: Semiotext(e), 1980, 2007. ISBN 1-58435-053-9, ISBN
978-1-58435-053-8.

Benjamin Noys (ed). Communization and its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles. Minor Compositions, Autonomedia.
2011. 1st ed.

1.10. EXTERNAL LINKS

1.10 External links

1.10.1

Libertarian socialist general resources

Le Monde Libertaire Transcription of the rst

known publication to declare itself 'Libertarian' and
socialist, in 1858 edited by Joseph Djacque.
libcom.org the home of Libertarian Communism in
Britain

41
Kropotkin, Self-valorization And The Crisis Of
Marxism. by Harry Cleaver. Written for and
presented to the Conference on Pyotr Alexeevich
Kropotkin organized by the Russian Academy of
Science in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Dimitrov
on December 8 14, 1992
How a Libertarian Capitalist Became a Libertarian
Socialist by Chris Wilson
The Crisis of Dialectical Materialism and Libertarian Socialism by Mario Cutajar

A libertarian Marxist tendency map

Libertarian Socialist Alliance International Global
Network of Libertarian Socialist Organizations
A Peoples Libertarian Index
Libertarian socialism
Collective Action Notes is a libertarian socialist publication whose website hosts an extensive collection of online anti-authoritarian texts. (link dead)
Archived version at the Wayback Machine.

1.10.3 Libertarian socialist websites

The Red Menace Archive of The Red Menace, published by the Libertarian Socialist Collective
Workers Solidarity Movement
Industrial Workers of the World
Professor Roger McCains libertarian socialist economics page

Anarchism and the left

Social Ecology London, English libertarian socialist

study/action group

Infoshops libertarian Marxism and libertarian socialism portal

TURNUSOL, A Libertarian Socialist Internet Periodical, Turkey

Left Communism collection on the Marxists Internet Archive

Liberty & Solidarity

The Anarchist Library large online library with texts

from anarchist authors
For Communism John Gray WebSite: large online
library of libertarian communist texts

1.10.2

Introductory articles

Libertarian Socialism by spunk.org

Libertarian socialism: a practical outline (1959)
by Gaston Leval
What is Libertarian Socialism?" by Ulli Diemer
Libertarian Marxisms Relation to Anarchism by
Wayne Price

An Anarchist FAQ Webpage An Anarchist FAQ

Anarchism on In Our Time at the BBC. (listen now)

Anarchism: A Bibliography
Anarchy Archives information relating to famous
anarchists including their writings (see Anarchy
Archives).
Daily Bleeds Anarchist Encyclopedia 700+ entries, with short biographies, links and dedicated
pages
KateSharpleyLibrary.net website of the Kate
Sharpley Library, containing many historical documents pertaining to anarchism

Libertarian Socialism: A Better Reconciliation Be- 1.10.4 Libertarian socialist history

tween Self-Ownership and Equality by Nicholas
Vrousalis
Socialism from below by George Woodcock
Libertarian Socialism by Tom McLaughlin

Anarchism and the Russian revolution

"The End of Traditional Antisystemic Movements

and the Need for a New Type of Antisystemic Movements Today by Takis Fotopoulos,
Democracy & Nature, Vol. 7, no. 3, 2001.

The Bolshevik Counter-Revolution against the

workers and popular soviet/council power was done
with party dictatorship and massacre on the Kronstadt soviet in March 1921.

42

CHAPTER 1. LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM

Anarchist timeline includes libertarian socialists

Anarchist Encyclopedia (from the Daily Bleed) includes libertarian socialists

1.10.5

Film

See List of lms dealing with Anarchism for a list of nonction and ction lms dealing with anarchist movements
both historical and contemporary.
Noam Chomsky Discussion with Libertarian Socialists, Ireland 2006

Chapter 2

Anti-capitalism
This article lists ideologies opposed to capitalism and describes them briey. For arguments against capitalism,
see criticism of capitalism.
Anti-capitalism comprises a wide variety of move-

A man marching against capitalism with Democratic Socialists

of America members at the Occupy Wall Street protest event,
September 24, 2011

or advocates the ownership and control of the means of

production, capital, land, property, etc., by the commuments, ideas and attitudes that oppose capitalism, includ- nity as a whole, and their administration or distribution
ing anarchism. Anti-capitalists, in the strict sense of the in the interests of all.
word, are those who wish to replace capitalism with an2. Socialists argue for cooperative/community or state
other type of economic system.
control of the economy, or the commanding heights of
the economy,[3] with democratic control by the people
over the state, although there have been some undemo2.1 Socialism
cratic philosophies. State or worker cooperative ownership is in fundamental opposition to private ownerMain article: Socialism
ship of means of production, which is a dening feature of
Socialism advocates public or direct worker ownership capitalism. Most socialists argue that capitalism unfairly
and administration of the means of production and allo- concentrates power, wealth and prot, among a small segcation of resources, and a society characterized by equal ment of society that controls capital and derives its wealth
access to resources for all individuals, with an egalitarian through exploitation.
method of compensation.[1][2]
Socialists argue that the accumulation of capital generates
An Industrial Workers of the World poster (1911)

1. A theory or policy of social organisation which aims at waste through externalities that require costly corrective
43

44

CHAPTER 2. ANTI-CAPITALISM

regulatory measures. They also point out that this process generates wasteful industries and practices that exist
only to generate sucient demand for products to be sold
at a prot (such as high-pressure advertisement); thereby
creating rather than satisfying economic demand.[4][5]
Socialists argue that capitalism consists of irrational activity, such as the purchasing of commodities only to sell
at a later time when their price appreciates, rather than
for consumption, even if the commodity cannot be sold
at a prot to individuals in need; they argue that making
money, or accumulation of capital, does not correspond
to the satisfaction of demand.[6]
Private ownership imposes constraints on planning,
leading to inaccessible economic decisions that result
in immoral production, unemployment and a tremendous waste of material resources during crisis of
overproduction. According to socialists, private property
in the means of production becomes obsolete when it concentrates into centralized, socialized institutions based on
private appropriation of revenue (but based on cooperative work and internal planning in allocation of inputs)
until the role of the capitalist becomes redundant.[7] With
no need for capital accumulation and a class of owners,
private property in the means of production is perceived
as being an outdated form of economic organization that
should be replaced by a free association of individuals
based on public or common ownership of these socialized
assets.[8] Socialists view private property relations as limiting the potential of productive forces in the economy.[9]

Emma Goldman famously denounced wage slavery by saying:

The only dierence is that you are hired slaves instead of block
slaves.[11]

privilege that protects capitalist, banking and land interests, and the accumulation or acquisition of property (and
any form of coercion that led to it) which he believed
hampers competition and keeps wealth in the hands of the
few. The Spanish individualist anarchist Miguel Gimenez
Igualada sees capitalism is an eect of government; the
disappearance of government means capitalism falls from
its pedestal vertiginously...That which we call capitalism
2.1.1 Anarchist and libertarian socialist is not something else but a product of the State, within
which the only thing that is being pushed forward is prot,
criticisms
good or badly acquired. And so to ght against capitalism
Main articles: Anarchist economics and Libertarian so- is a pointless task, since be it State capitalism or Enterprise capitalism, as long as Government exists, exploitcialism
The ght, but of consciousness, is
For the inuential German individualist anarchist ing capital will exist.
[13]
against
the
State..
philosopher Max Stirner "private property is a spook
which lives by the grace of law and it becomes 'mine' Within anarchism there emerged a critique of wage
only by eect of the law. In other words, private prop- slavery which refers to a situation perceived as quasierty exists purely through the protection of the State, voluntary slavery,[14] where a persons livelihood depends
through the States grace. Recognising its need for state on wages, especially when the dependence is total and
protection, Stirner is also aware that "[i]t need not make immediate.[15][16] It is a negatively connoted term used to
any dierence to the 'good citizens who protects them draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor by foand their principles, whether an absolute King or a con- cusing on similarities between owning and renting a perstitutional one, a republic, if only they are protected. son. The term wage slavery has been used to criticize
And what is their principle, whose protector they always economic exploitation and social stratication, with the
'love'? Not that of labour, rather it is interest-bearing former seen primarily as unequal bargaining power bepossession . . . labouring capital, therefore . . . labour tween labor and capital (particularly when workers are
certainly, yet little or none at all of ones own, but labour paid comparatively low wages, e.g. in sweatshops),[17]
of capital and of the -- subject labourers."[12] French and the latter as a lack of workers self-management, fulanarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon opposed government lling job choices and leisure in an economy.[18][19][20]
Early socialists (Utopian socialists and Ricardian socialists) criticized capitalism for concentrating power and
wealth within a small segment of society.[10] and does not
utilise available technology and resources to their maximum potential in the interests of the public.[9]

2.1. SOCIALISM
Libertarian socialists believe if freedom is valued, then
society must work towards a system in which individuals have the power to decide economic issues along
with political issues. Libertarian socialists seek to replace unjustied authority with direct democracy, voluntary federation, and popular autonomy in all aspects
of life,[21] including physical communities and economic
enterprises. With the advent of the industrial revolution, thinkers such as Proudhon and Marx elaborated
the comparison between wage labor and slavery in the
context of a critique of societal property not intended
for active personal use,[22][23] Luddites emphasized the
dehumanization brought about by machines while later
Emma Goldman famously denounced wage slavery by
saying: The only dierence is that you are hired slaves
instead of block slaves.".[24] American anarchist Emma
Goldman believed that the economic system of capitalism
was incompatible with human liberty. The only demand
that property recognizes, she wrote in Anarchism and
Other Essays, is its own gluttonous appetite for greater
wealth, because wealth means power; the power to subdue, to crush, to exploit, the power to enslave, to outrage,
to degrade.[25] She also argued that capitalism dehumanized workers, turning the producer into a mere particle
of a machine, with less will and decision than his master
of steel and iron.[26]

45
robbery as massive as the earlier feudal conquest of the
land. It has been sustained to the present by continual
state intervention to protect its system of privilege without which its survival is unimaginable.[33] Carson coined
the pejorative term vulgar libertarianism, a phrase that
describes the use of a free market rhetoric in defense of
corporate capitalism and economic inequality. According to Carson, the term is derived from the phrase vulgar political economy, which Karl Marx described as an
economic order that deliberately becomes increasingly
apologetic and makes strenuous attempts to talk out of
existence the ideas which contain the contradictions [existing in economic life].[34]

2.1.2 Marxism

Noam Chomsky contends that there is little moral difference between chattel slavery and renting ones self
to an owner or "wage slavery". He feels that it is an
attack on personal integrity that undermines individual
freedom. He holds that workers should own and control
their workplace.[27] Many libertarian socialists argue that
large-scale voluntary associations should manage industrial manufacture, while workers retain rights to the individual products of their labor.[28] As such, they see a distinction between the concepts of private property and
"personal possession". Whereas private property grants
an individual exclusive control over a thing whether it is in
use or not, and regardless of its productive capacity, possession grants no rights to things that are not in use.[29]
In addition to individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker's
big four monopolies (land, money, taris, and patents),
Carson argues that the state has also transferred wealth
to the wealthy by subsidizing organizational centralization, in the form of transportation and communication
subsidies. He believes that Tucker overlooked this issue due to Tuckers focus on individual market transactions, whereas Carson also focuses on organizational issues. The theoretical sections of Studies in Mutualist Political Economy are presented as an attempt to integrate
marginalist critiques into the labor theory of value.[30]
Carson has also been highly critical of intellectual property.[31] The primary focus of his most recent work has
been decentralized manufacturing and the informal and
household economies.[32] Carson holds that Capitalism,
arising as a new class society directly from the old class
society of the Middle Ages, was founded on an act of

Capital: Critique of Political Economy, by Karl Marx, is a critical

analysis of political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws
of the capitalist mode of production

Main article: Marxism

We are, in Marxs terms, 'an ensemble

of social relations and we live our lives at
the core of the intersection of a number of

46

CHAPTER 2. ANTI-CAPITALISM
unequal social relations based on hierarchically interrelated structures which, together,
dene the historical specicity of the capitalist
modes of production and reproduction and
underlay their observable manifestations.
Martha E. Gimenez, Marxism and Class,
Gender and Race: Rethinking the Trilogy[35]

[8] The Political Economy of Socialism, by Horvat, Branko.

1982. Chapter 1: Capitalism, The General Pattern of
Capitalist Development (pp. 1520)
[9] Marx and Engels Selected Works, Lawrence and Wishart,
1968, p. 40. Capitalist property relations put a fetter on
the productive forces.
[10] in Encyclopdia Britannica (2009). Retrieved October 14, 2009, from Encyclopdia Britannica Online:
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/551569/
socialism, Main summary: Socialists complain that
capitalism necessarily leads to unfair and exploitative
concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of the
relative few who emerge victorious from free-market
competitionpeople who then use their wealth and
power to reinforce their dominance in society.

Marx believed that the capitalist bourgeois and their

economists were promoting what he saw as the lie that
The interests of the capitalist and those of the worker
are... one and the same"; he believed that they did this by
purporting the concept that the fastest possible growth
of productive capital" was best not only for the wealthy
capitalists but also for the workers because it provided
them with employment.[36]
[11] Goldman 2003, p. 283.

2.2 See also

Anti-corporate activism
The Black Book of Capitalism
Capitalism: A Love Story
Corporatocracy
Criticism of capitalism
List of communist and anti-capitalist parties with
parliamentary representation
Occupy Wall Street
Post-capitalism

2.3 References

[12] Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin. G.6 What are the ideas of

Max Stirner? in An Anarchist FAQ. Infoshop.org. Retrieved 2010-09-20.
[13] el capitalismo es slo el efecto del gobierno; desaparecido el gobierno, el capitalismo cae de su pedestal vertiginosamente...Lo que llamamos capitalismo no es otra cosa
que el producto del Estado, dentro del cual lo nico que
se cultiva es la ganancia, bien o mal habida. Luchar, pues,
contra el capitalismo es tarea intil, porque sea Capitalismo de Estado o Capitalismo de Empresa, mientras el
Gobierno exista, existir el capital que explota. La lucha,
pero de conciencias, es contra el Estado.Anarquismo by
Miguel Gimenez Igualada
[14] Ellerman 1992.
[15] wage slave. merriam-webster.com. Retrieved 4 March
2013.
[16] wage slave. dictionary.com. Retrieved 4 March 2013.
[17] Sandel 1996, p. 184

[1] Newman, Michael. (2005) Socialism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-280431-6

[18] Conversation with Noam Chomsky.

Globetrotter.berkeley.edu. p. 2. Retrieved 2010-06-28.

[2] Socialism. Oxford English Dictionary.

[19] Hallgrimsdottir & Benoit 2007.

[3] Socialism Encyclopdia Britannica. 2006. Encyclopdia Britannica Online.

[4]
[5] Fred Magdo and Michael D. Yates. What Needs To
Be Done: A Socialist View. Monthly Review. Retrieved
2014-02-23.
[6] Lets produce for use, not prot. Retrieved August 7, 2010,
from worldsocialism.org: http://www.worldsocialism.
org/spgb/may10/page23.html
[7] Engels, Fredrich.
Socialism: Utopian and Scientic.
Retrieved October 30, 2010, from Marxists.org: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/
1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm, The bourgeoisie demonstrated
to be a superuous class. All its social functions are now
performed by salaried employees.

[20] The Bolsheviks and Workers Control, 19171921: The

State and Counter-revolution. Spunk Library. Retrieved
4 March 2013.
[21] Harrington, Austin, et al. 'Encyclopedia of Social Theory'
Routledge (2006) p.50
[22] Proudhon 1890.
[23] Marx 1969, Chapter VII
[24] Goldman 2003, p. 283
[25] Goldman, Emma. Anarchism and Other Essays. 3rd ed.
1917. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1969., p. 54.
[26] Goldman, Emma. Anarchism and Other Essays. 3rd ed.
1917. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1969.pg. 54

2.5. EXTERNAL LINKS

47

[27] Conversation with Noam Chomsky, p. 2 of 5. Globetrotter.berkeley.edu. Retrieved August 16, 2011.

Sam Ashman The anti-capitalist movement and the

war International Socialist Journal 2003

[28] Lindemann, Albert S. 'A History of European Socialism'

Yale University Press (1983) p.160

Marxists Internet Archive

[29] Ely, Richard et al. 'Property and Contract in Their Relations to the Distribution of Wealth' The Macmillan Company (1914)
[30] Kevin A. Carson, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
chs. 1-3
[31] Carson, Kevin. Intellectual Property A Libertarian
Critique. c4ss.org. Retrieved May 23, 2009.
[32] Carson, Kevin. Industrial Policy: New Wine in Old Bottles. c4ss.org. Retrieved May 26, 2009.
[33] Richman, Sheldon, Libertarian Left, The American Conservative (March 2011)
[34] Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, III, p. 501.
[35] Gimenez, Martha E. Marxism, and Class, Gender, and
Race: Rethinking the Trilogy. Race, Gender & Class 8
(2): 2233. JSTOR 41674970. Retrieved 2014-05-18.
[36] Marx 1849.

2.4 Further reading

Alex Callinicos.
Polity. 2003

An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto.

David McNally. Another World Is Possible: Globalization and Anti-Capitalism. Arbeiter Ring Publishing. 2006
Ezequiel Adamovsky. Anti-capitalism. Seven Stories Press. 2011
David E Lowes. The Anti-Capitalist Dictionary
2006, London: Zed Books
Simon Tormey. Anti-Capitalism: A Beginners
Guide. Oneworld Publications. 2013
Anti-Capitalism : A Guide To The Movement

2.5 External links

Rough Guide to the Anti-Capitalist Movement,
League for the Fifth International
Jeremy Rifkin. "The Rise of Anti-Capitalism". at
the New York Times. MARCH 15, 2014
Infoshop.org Anarchists Opposed to Capitalism, Infoshop.org
How The Miners Were Robbed 1907 anti-capitalist
pamphlet hosted at EconomicDemocracy

Dr. Wladyslaw Jan Kowalski Anti-Capitalism: Modern Theory and Historical Origins
Anti-Capitalism as an ideology... and as a movement, Libcom.org
Studies in Anti-Capitalism
Capitalism/Anticapitalism: a survey and a view

Chapter 3

Anti-statism

Anti-statism is a term describing opposition to state

intervention into personal, social, and economic
aairs.[1]:260 Some anti-statist views reject the state
completely and in some cases rulership in general (e.g.,
anarchism).

3.1 General categories

Anti-statists dier greatly according to the beliefs they
hold in addition to anti-statism.
A signicant diculty in determining whether a thinker
or philosophy is anti-statist is the problem of dening
the state itself. Terminology has changed over time, and
past writers often used the word, state in a dierent
sense than we use it today. Thus, the anarchist Mikhail
Bakunin used the term simply to mean a governing organization. Other writers used the term state to mean
any law-making or law enforcement agency. Karl Marx
dened the state as the institution used by the ruling class
of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule. According to Max Weber, the state is an organization with
an eective legal monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force in a particular geographic area.

Henry David Thoreau expressed this evolutionary antistatist view in his essay Civil Disobedience:
I heartily accept the motto,"That government is best which governs least"; and I should
like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it nally amounts to
this, which also I believe,"That government
is best which governs not at all"; and when men
and women are prepared for it, that will be the
kind of government which they will have.[2]

Anarchist communism
Anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-naturism
Anarcho-pacism
Anarcho-primitivism
Anarcho-syndicalism
Buddhist anarchism
Christian anarchism
Collectivist anarchism
Egoist anarchism and the philosophy of Max
Stirner
Existentialist anarchism
Green anarchism
Individualist anarchism
Insurrectionary anarchism
Jewish anarchism
Libertarian socialism
Mutualism
National anarchism
Social anarchism
Synthesis anarchism
Veganarchism
Voluntaryism

Nihilist movement

3.3 See also

Anti-nationalism

3.4 References
[1] Gallaher, Carolyn; Dahlman, Carl T.; Gilmartin, Mary;
Mountz, Alison; Shirlow, Peter (2009). Key Concepts in
Political Geography. London: SAGE. p. 392. ISBN 9781-4129-4672-8. Retrieved July 31, 2014.

3.2 Anti-statist philosophies

Anarchism and its inner schools of thought:

[2] Civil Disobedience. Annotated works of Henry David

Thoreau. Thoreau Society.

Agorism
Anarcha-feminism
48

Chapter 4

Anti-authoritarianism
Anti-authoritarianism
is
opposition
to
authoritarianism, which is dened as a a form of
social organisation characterised by submission to
authority",[1] favoring complete obedience or subjection to authority as opposed to individual freedom"[2]
and to authoritarian government.[3] Anti-authoritarians
usually believe in full equality before the law and strong
civil liberties. Sometimes the term is used interchangeably with anarchism, an ideology which entails opposing
authority or hierarchical organization in the conduct of
human relations, including, but not limited to, the state
system.[4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]

4.1 Views and practice

Freethought is a philosophical viewpoint that holds opinions should be formed on the basis of logic, reason,
and empiricism, rather than authority, tradition, or
other dogmas.[12][13][14] The cognitive application of
freethought is known as freethinking, and practitioners
of freethought are known as freethinkers.[12][15]
Argument from authority (Latin: argumentum ab auctoritate) is a common form of argument which leads to
a logical fallacy when misused.[16] In informal reasoning,
the appeal to authority is a form of argument attempting
to establish a statistical syllogism.[17] The appeal to authority relies on an argument of the form:

thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of

the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads,
I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such
or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect
nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to
them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I
do not content myself with consulting a single authority
in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their
opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special
questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for
the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual,
I have no absolute faith in any person.[22] He saw that
Therefore there is no xed and constant authority, but a
continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all,
voluntary authority and subbordination. This same reason forbids me, then, to recognise a xed, constant and
universal authority, because there is no universal man, no
man capable of grasping in all that wealth of detail, without which the application of science to life is impossible,
all the sciences, all the branches of social life.[22]

A is an authority on a particular topic

A says something about that topic
A is probably correct
Fallacious examples of using the appeal include any appeal to authority used in the context of logical reasoning,
and appealing to the position of an authority or authorities to dismiss evidence,[17][18][19][20] as, while authorities
can be correct in judgments related to their area of expertise more often than laypersons, they can still come to
the wrong judgments through error, bias, dishonesty, or
falling prey to groupthink. Thus, the appeal to authority is
not a generally reliable argument for establishing facts.[21]
Inuential anarchist Mikhail Bakunin thought that Does
it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a

English punk rock band Crass in 1984. Founders of the anarcho

punk movement with a banner of their anarchist slogan Theres
no authority but yourself

After World War II there was a strong sense of

anti-authoritarianism based on anti-fascism in Europe.
This was attributed to the active resistance from
occupation and to fears arising from the development of

49

50
superpowers.[23] Anti-authoritarianism has also been associated with countercultural and bohemian movements.
In the 1950s the Beat Generation were politically radical, and to some degree their anti-authoritarian attitudes
were taken up by activists in the 1960s..[24] The hippie
and larger counterculture movements of the 1960s carried
out a way of life and activism which was ideally carried
through anti-authoritarian and non-violent means; thus it
was observed that The way of the hippie is antithetical to
all repressive hierarchical power structures since they are
adverse to the hippie goals of peace, love and freedom...
Hippies don't impose their beliefs on others. Instead, hippies seek to change the world through reason and by living
what they believe.[25] In the 1970s anti-authoritarianism
became associated with the punk subculture.[26]
Critical psychologist and book author Bruce E. Levine
argues that many natural anti-authoritarians are now
psychopathologized and medicated before they achieve
political consciousness of societys most oppressive
authorities.[27] He adds that There are anti-authoritarians
who use psychiatric drugs to help them function, but
they often reject psychiatric authorities explanations for
why they have diculty functioning. So, for example,
they may take Adderall (an amphetamine prescribed for
ADHD), but they know that their attentional problem is
not a result of a biochemical brain imbalance but rather
caused by a boring job.[27]

4.2 See also

Libertarianism
Question authority

4.3 References
[1] Rogets
II:
The
New
Thesaurus
(1995).
authoritarianism.
Houghton Miin Company.
Archived from the original on 24 June 2008. Retrieved
2008-06-25.

CHAPTER 4. ANTI-AUTHORITARIANISM

[6] Authority is dened in terms of the right to exercise social control (as explored in the sociology of power) and
the correlative duty to obey (as explored in the philosophy of practical reason). Anarchism is distinguished,
philosophically, by its scepticism towards such moral
relations-by its questioning of the claims made for such
normative power- and, practically, by its challenge to
those authoritative powers which cannot justify their
claims and which are therefore deemed illegitimate or
without moral foundation.Anarchism and Authority: A
Philosophical Introduction to Classical Anarchism by Paul
McLaughlin. AshGate. 2007. pg. 1
[7] Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the
human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation
of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social
wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being
free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations. Emma Goldman. What it Really Stands for
Anarchy in Anarchism and Other Essays.
[8] Individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker dened anarchism as opposition to authority as follows They found
that they must turn either to the right or to the left,
follow either the path of Authority or the path of Liberty. Marx went one way; Warren and Proudhon the other.
Thus were born State Socialism and Anarchism ... Authority, takes many shapes, but, broadly speaking, her enemies divide themselves into three classes: rst, those who
abhor her both as a means and as an end of progress, opposing her openly, avowedly, sincerely, consistently, universally; second, those who profess to believe in her as a
means of progress, but who accept her only so far as they
think she will subserve their own selsh interests, denying
her and her blessings to the rest of the world; third, those
who distrust her as a means of progress, believing in her
only as an end to be obtained by rst trampling upon, violating, and outraging her. These three phases of opposition to Liberty are met in almost every sphere of thought
and human activity. Good representatives of the rst are
seen in the Catholic Church and the Russian autocracy; of
the second, in the Protestant Church and the Manchester
school of politics and political economy; of the third, in
the atheism of Gambetta and the socialism of Karl Marx.
Benjamin Tucker. Individual Liberty.

[2] anti-authoritarian at dictionary.com

[3] antiauthoritarian at The Free Dictionary
[4] Anarchists do reject the state, as we will see. But to claim
that this central aspect of anarchism is denitive is to sell
anarchism short.Anarchism and Authority: A Philosophical Introduction to Classical Anarchism by Paul McLaughlin. AshGate. 2007. pg. 28
[5] IAF principles. International of Anarchist Federations.
Archived from the original on 5 January 2012. The IAF
- IFA ghts for : the abolition of all forms of authority
whether economical, political, social, religious, cultural or
sexual.

[9] Ward, Colin (1966). Anarchism as a Theory of Organization. Archived from the original on 25 March 2010.
Retrieved 1 March 2010.
[10] Anarchist historian George Woodcock report of Mikhail
Bakunin's anti-authoritarianism and shows opposition to
both state and non-state forms of authority as follows: All
anarchists deny authority; many of them ght against it.
(pg. 9) ... Bakunin did not convert the Leagues central committee to his full program, but he did persuade
them to accept a remarkably radical recommendation to
the Berne Congress of September 1868, demanding economic equality and implicitly attacking authority in both
Church and State.

4.3. REFERENCES

[11] Brown, L. Susan (2002). Anarchism as a Political Philosophy of Existential Individualism: Implications for
Feminism. The Politics of Individualism: Liberalism,
Liberal Feminism and Anarchism. Black Rose Books Ltd.
Publishing. p. 106.
[12] Freethinker - Denition and More from the Free
Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Merriam-webster.com.
2012-08-31. Retrieved 2014-01-12.
[13] Free thought | Dene Free thought at Dictionary.com.
Dictionary.reference.com. Retrieved 2014-01-12.
[14]
[15] Nontracts - FFRF Publications. Archive.is. Retrieved
2014-01-12.
[16] Logical Fallacies. Stanford.edu. Fall 2008. Retrieved
2014-01-25.
[17] Salmon, M. H. (2006). Introduction to Critical Reasoning.
Mason, OH: Thomson Wadsworth. pp. 1189.
[18] Gensler, Harry J. (2003). Introduction to Logic. New
York, NY: Routedge. pp. 3334.
[19] Baronett, Stan (2008). Logic. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Pearson Prentice Hall. p. 304.
[20] Walton, Douglas (2008). Informal Logic. London: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-71380-3.p=89
[21] Walton, Douglas (2008). Informal Logic. London: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-71380-3.p=84
[22] What is Authority?" by Mikhail Bakunin
[23] Cox, David (2005). Sign Wars: The Culture Jammers
Strike Back!. LedaTape Organisation. p. 108. ISBN 9780-9807701-5-5. Retrieved 22 October 2011.
[24] The American Novel at PBS website
[25] Stone 1994, The Way of the Hippy
[26] McLaughlin, Paul (2007). Anarchism and Authority.
Aldershot: Ashgate. p. 10. ISBN 0-7546-6196-2.
[27] Would We Have Drugged Up Einstein? How AntiAuthoritarianism Is Deemed a Mental Health Problem
by Bruce E. Levine

51

Chapter 5

Anarchism and issues related to love and

sex
Anarchism has been important in the advocacy of free
love since its birth. Later, a strong tendency of free love
appeared alongside anarcha-feminism and advocacy of
LGBT rights and sex education. In recent times, anarchists have also voiced opinions and taken action around
certain sex-related subjects such as pornography, BDSM,
and the sex industry.

5.1 Beginnings

skin, the three men immediately ew to the hotel for

hot brandy and water. But there was a problem. The law
stood in the way: As it was past ten oclock on a Sunday night the proprietor could not sell us any brandy or
spirits of any kind! So he had to give it to us. The result
was not displeasing, but what laws!...Wilde nishes the
story: Both Alphonso and Stephen are now anarchists, I
need hardly say."[3]

5.2 Free love and anarchism

The major male anarchist thinkers, with the exception

of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, strongly supported womens Main article: Free love
equality. Mikhail Bakunin, for example, opposed
patriarchy and the way the law subjects [women] to the
absolute domination of the man. He argued that "[e]qual
rights must belong to men and women so that women 5.2.1 The United States
can become independent and be free to forge their own
way of life. Bakunin foresaw the full sexual freedom
of women and the end of the authoritarian juridical
family". [Bakunin on Anarchism, p. 396 and p. 397].[1]
Proudhon, on the other hand, viewed the family as the
most basic unit of society and of his morality and thought
women had the responsibility of fullling a traditional
role within the family.[2]
In Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man Under Socialism, he
passionately advocates for an egalitarian society where
wealth is shared by all, while warning of the dangers of
authoritarian socialism that would crush individuality.[3]
He later commented, I think I am rather more than a
Socialist. I am something of an Anarchist, I believe.
Wildes left libertarian politics were shared by other gures who actively campaigned for homosexual emancipation in the late 19th century, John Henry Mackay and
Edward Carpenter.[4] In August 1894, Wilde wrote to
his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, to tell of a dangerous
adventure. He had gone out sailing with two lovely boys,
Stephen and Alphonso, and they were caught in a storm.
We took ve hours in an awful gale to come back! [And
we] did not reach pier till eleven oclock at night, pitch
dark all the way, and a fearful sea. . . . All the shermen were waiting for us....Tired, cold, and wet to the

Lucifer the Lightbearer, an inuential American anarchist free

love journal

An important current within American individualist anarchism was free love.[5] Free love advocates sometimes
traced their roots back to Josiah Warren and to experimental communities, viewed sexual freedom as a clear,
direct expression of an individuals self-ownership. Free
love particularly stressed womens rights since most sexual laws discriminated against women: for example, marriage laws and anti-birth control measures.[5] The most
important American free love journal was Lucifer the
Lightbearer (18831907) edited by Moses Harman and
Lois Waisbrooker[6] but also there existed Ezra Heywood
and Angela Heywoods The Word (18721890, 1892
1893).[5] Also M. E. Lazarus was an important American

52

5.2. FREE LOVE AND ANARCHISM

individualist anarchist who promoted free love.[5]
Free Society (1895-1897 as The Firebrand; 1897-1904
as Free Society) was a major anarchist newspaper in the
United States at the end of the nineteenth and beginning
of the twentieth centuries.[7] The publication staunchly
advocated free love and womens rights, and critiqued
"Comstockery" -- censorship of sexual information. Deliberately defying Comstockism in an act of civil disobedience, The Firebrand published Walt Whitman's A
Woman Waits for Me in 1897; A.J. Pope, Abe Isaak, and
Henry Addis were quickly arrested and charged with publishing obscene information for the Whitman poem and a
letter It Depends on the Women, signed by A.E.K. The
A.E.K. letter presented various hypotheticals of women
refusing or assenting to sex with their husbands or lovers,
and argued that true liberation required education of both
sexes and particularly women.[8]
In New Yorks Greenwich Village, "bohemian" feminists
and socialists advocated self-realisation and pleasure for
women (and also men) in the here and now, as well as
campaigning against the rst World War and for other
anarchist and socialist causes. They encouraged playing
with sexual roles and sexuality,[9] and the openly bisexual radical Edna St. Vincent Millay and the lesbian anarchist Margaret Anderson were prominent among them.
The Villagers took their inspiration from the (mostly anarchist) immigrant female workers from the period 19051915[10] and the "New Life Socialism" of Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis and Olive Schreiner. Discussion groups organised by the Villagers were frequented
by Emma Goldman, among others. Magnus Hirschfeld
noted in 1923 that Goldman has campaigned boldly and
steadfastly for individual rights, and especially for those
deprived of their rights. Thus it came about that she
was the rst and only woman, indeed the rst and only
American, to take up the defense of homosexual love before the general public.[11] In fact, prior to Goldman,
heterosexual anarchist Robert Reitzel (184998) spoke
positively of homosexuality from the beginning of the
1890s in his German-language journal Der arme Teufel
(Detroit).

53
ciated movements.[13] Indeed, with Marxs support, the
American branch of the organisation was purged of its
pacist, anti-racist and feminist elements, which were accused of putting too much emphasis on issues unrelated to
class struggle and were therefore seen to be incompatible
with the "scientic socialism" of Marx and Engels.[14]

5.2.2 Europe
French and Spanish individualist anarchist circles had a
strong sense of personal libertarianism and experimentation. Free love contents started to have a strong inuence in individualist anarchist circles and from there it expanded to the rest of anarchism also appearing in Spanish
individualist anarchist groups.[15]
In this sense, the theoretical positions and the vital experiences of French individualism are deeply iconoclastic and scandalous, even within libertarian circles. The
call of nudist naturism, the strong defence of birth control methods, the idea of "unions of egoists" with the
sole justication of sexual practices, that will try to put
in practice, not without diculties, will establish a way
of thought and action, and will result in sympathy within
some, and a strong rejection within others.[15] Periodicals involved in this movement include L'EnDehors in
France and Iniciales and La Revista Blanca in Spain.[15]
Emile Armand

The main propagandist of free love within European individualist anarchism was Emile Armand.[16] He advocated naturism (see anarcho-naturism) and polyamory
and he came up with the concept of la camaraderie
amoureuse.[17] He wrote many propagandist articles on
this subject such as De la libert sexuelle (1907) where
he advocated not only a vague free love but also multiple partners, which he called plural love.[17] In the individualist anarchist journal L'en dehors he and others
continued in this way. Armand seized this opportunity
to outline his theses supporting revolutionary sexualism
In Europe and North America, the free love movement and camaraderie amoureuse that diered from the tracombined ideas revived from utopian socialism with an- ditional views of the partisans of free love in several rearchism and feminism to attack the hypocritical sexual spects.
morality of the Victorian era, and the institutions of mar- Later Armand submitted that from an individualist perriage and the family that were seen to enslave women. spective nothing was reprehensible about making love,
Free lovers advocated voluntary sexual unions with no even if one did not have very strong feelings for ones
state interference[12] and armed the right to sexual partner.[17] The camaraderie amoureuse thesis, he expleasure for both women and men, sometimes explic- plained, entails a free contract of association (that may
itly supporting the rights of homosexuals and prostitutes. be annulled without notice, following prior agreement)
For a few decades, adherence to free love became reached between anarchist individualists of dierent genwidespread among European and American anarchists, ders, adhering to the necessary standards of sexual hybut these views were opposed at the time by the domi- giene, with a view toward protecting the other parties
nant actors of the Left: Marxists and social democrats. to the contract from certain risks of the amorous expeRadical feminist and socialist Victoria Woodhull was ex- rience, such as rejection, rupture, exclusivism, possespelled from the International Workingmens Association siveness, unicity, coquetry, whims, indierence, irtain 1871 for her involvement in the free love and asso- tiousness, disregard for others, and prostitution.[17] He

54

CHAPTER 5. ANARCHISM AND ISSUES RELATED TO LOVE AND SEX

sexual, or bisexual nature or of a combination thereof. He
also supported the right of individuals to change sex and
stated his willingness to rehabilitate forbidden pleasures,
non-conformist caresses (he was personally inclined toward voyeurism), as well as sodomy. This led him to allocate more and more space to what he called the sexual
non-conformists, while excluding physical violence.[17]
His militancy also included translating texts from people
such as Alexandra Kollontai and Wilhelm Reich and establishments of free love associations which tried to put
into practice la camaraderie amoureuse through actual
sexual experiences.
The prestige in the subject of free love of Armand within
anarchist circles was such as to motivate the young Argentinian anarchist Amrica Scarf to ask Armand in a
letter on advice as to how to deal with the relationship
she had with notorious Italian anarchist Severino Di Giovanni.[18] Di Giovanni was still married when they began the relationship.[18] The letter was published in Len
dehors" on 20 January 1929 under the title An Experience, together with the reply from E. Armand.[18] Armand replied to Scarf "Comrade: My opinion matters
little in this matter you send me about what you are doing. Are you or are you not intimately in accord with your
personal conception of the anarchist life? If you are, then
ignore the comments and insults of others and carry on
following your own path. No one has the right to judge
your way of conducting yourself, even if it were the case
that your friends wife be hostile to these relations. Every
woman united to an anarchist (or vice versa), knows very
well that she should not exercise on him, or accept from
him, domination of any kind."[18]
Errico Malatesta

mile Armand

The treatment of the issue of love by the inuential Italian

anarchist Errico Malatesta deserves attention. Malatesta
says in Love and Anarchy, Lets eliminate the exploitation of man by man, lets ght the brutal pretention of the
male who thinks he owns the female, lets ght religious,
social and sexual prejudice, lets expand education and
then we will be happy with reason if there are no more
evils than love. In any case, the ones with bad luck in
love will procur themselves other pleasures, since it will
not happen like today, when love and alcohol are the only
consolations of the majority of humanity.[19]

also published Le Combat contre la jalousie et le sexualisme rvolutionnaire (1926), followed over the years by
Ce que nous entendons par libert de l'amour (1928), La 5.3 Anarcha-feminism
Camaraderie amoureuse ou chiennerie sexuelle (1930),
and, nally, La Rvolution sexuelle et la camaraderie Main article: Anarcha-feminism
amoureuse (1934), a book of nearly 350 pages comprising most of his writings on sexuality.[17]
Anarcha-feminism was inspired by late 19th and early
In a text from 1937, he mentioned among the individu- 20th century authors and theorists such as anarchist
alist objectives the practice of forming voluntary associ- feminists Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre and
ations for purely sexual purposes of heterosexual, homo- Lucy Parsons.[20] In the Spanish Civil War, an anarcha-

5.3. ANARCHA-FEMINISM
feminist group, Mujeres Libres (Free Women) linked
to the Federacin Anarquista Ibrica, organized to defend both anarchist and feminist ideas,[21] while Stirnerist
Nietzschean feminist Federica Montseny held that the
emancipation of women would lead to a quicker realization of the social revolution and that the revolution
against sexism would have to come from intellectual and
militant 'future-women.' According to this Nietzschean
concept of Federica Montesenys, women could realize
through art and literature the need to revise their own
roles.[22]
Since the 1860s, anarchisms radical critique of
capitalism and the state has been combined with a
critique of patriarchy. Anarcha-feminists thus start
from the precept that modern society is dominated
by men. Authoritarian traits and valuesdomination,
exploitation, aggression, competition. etc.are integral
to hierarchical civilizations and are seen as masculine.
In contrast, non-authoritarian traits and values
cooperation, sharing, compassion, sensitivityare regarded as feminine, and devalued. Anarcha-feminists
have thus espoused creation of a non-authoritarian,
anarchist society. They refer to the creation of a society,
based on cooperation, sharing, mutual aid, etc. as the
"feminization of society.[1]

5.3.1

Emma Goldman

55
its suragist goals, Emma Goldman advocated passionately for the rights of women, and is today heralded
as a founder of anarcha-feminism, which challenges
patriarchy as a hierarchy to be resisted alongside state
power and class divisions.[23] In 1897 she wrote: I demand the independence of woman, her right to support
herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases,
or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both
sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in
motherhood.[24]
A nurse by training, Emma Goldman was an early advocate for educating women concerning contraception.
Like many contemporary feminists, she saw abortion as a
tragic consequence of social conditions, and birth control
as a positive alternative. Goldman was also an advocate
of free love, and a strong critic of marriage. She saw early
feminists as conned in their scope and bounded by social
forces of Puritanism and capitalism. She wrote: We are
in need of unhampered growth out of old traditions and
habits. The movement for womens emancipation has so
far made but the rst step in that direction.[25][26]
Sex education
Goldman in her essay on the Modern School also dealt
with the issue of Sex Education. She denounced that
educators also know the evil and sinister results of ignorance in sex matters. Yet, they have neither understanding
nor humanity enough to break down the wall which puritanism has built around sex...If in childhood both man
and woman were taught a beautiful comradeship, it would
neutralize the oversexed condition of both and would help
womans emancipation much more than all the laws upon
the statute books and her right to vote.[27]

5.3.2 Mujeres Libres

Main article: Mujeres Libres
Mujeres Libres (English: Free Women) was an anarchist
womens organization in Spain that aimed to empower
working class women. It was founded in 1936 by Luca
Snchez Saornil, Mercedes Comaposada and Amparo
Poch y Gascn and had approximately 30,000 members.
The organization was based on the idea of a double
struggle for womens liberation and social revolution and
argued that the two objectives were equally important and
should be pursued in parallel. In order to gain mutual support, they created networks of women anarchists. Flying
day-care centres were set up in eorts to involve more
women in union activities.[28]
In revolutionary Spain of the 1930s, many anarchist
women were angry with what they viewed as persistent
Emma Goldman
sexism amongst anarchist men and their marginalized status within a movement that ostensibly sought to abolish
Although she was hostile to rst-wave feminism and domination and hierarchy. They saw womens problems

56

CHAPTER 5. ANARCHISM AND ISSUES RELATED TO LOVE AND SEX

as inseparable from the social problems of the day; while to 30,000 members, organizing womens social spaces,
they shared their compaeros desire for social revolution schools, newspapers and daycare programs.
they also pushed for recognition of womens abilities and
organized in their communities to achieve that goal. Citing the anarchist assertion that the means of revolutionary 5.4 Queer anarchism
struggle must model the desired organization of revolutionary society, they rejected mainstream Spanish anarchisms assertion that womens equality would follow au- Main article: Anarcho-queer
tomatically from the social revolution. To prepare women Anarchism's foregrounding of individual freedoms made
for leadership roles in the anarchist movement, they organized schools, women-only social groups and a womenonly newspaper so that women could gain self-esteem and
condence in their abilities and network with one another
to develop their political consciousness.

Luca Snchez Saornil, prominent Spanish anarcha-feminist militant, leader of the collective Mujeres Libres and lesbian writer

Luca Snchez Saornil was a main founder of the Spanish anarcha-feminist federation Mujeres Libres who was
open about her lesbianism.[29] At a young age she began writing poetry and associated herself with the emerging Ultraist literary movement. By 1919, she had been
published in a variety of journals, including Los Quijotes, Tableros, Plural, Manantial and La Gaceta Literaria. Working under a male pen name, she was able to
explore lesbian themes[30] at a time when homosexuality
was criminalized and subject to censorship and punishment. Dissatised with the chauvinistic prejudices of fellow republicans, Luca Snchez Saornil joined with two
compaeras, Mercedes Comaposada and Amparo Poch y
Gascn, to form Mujeres Libres in 1936. Mujeres Libres
was an autonomous anarchist organization for women
committed to a double struggle of womens liberation
and social revolution. Luca and other Free Women
rejected the dominant view that gender equality would
emerge naturally from a classless society. As the Spanish Civil War exploded, Mujeres Libres quickly grew

John Henry Mackay, individualist anarchist advocate of LGBT

rights

for a natural marriage with homosexuality in the eyes of

many, both inside and outside of the Anarchist movement. Emil Szittya, in Das Kuriositten-Kabinett (1923),
wrote about homosexuality that very many anarchists
have this tendency. Thus I found in Paris a Hungarian
anarchist, Alexander Sommi, who founded a homosexual anarchist group on the basis of this idea. His view
is conrmed by Magnus Hirschfeld in his 1914 book Die
Homosexualitt des Mannes und des Weibes: In the ranks
of a relatively small party, the anarchist, it seemed to me
as if proportionately more homosexuals and eeminates
are found than in others. Italian anarchist Luigi Bertoni
(who Szittya also believed to be homosexual) observed
that Anarchists demand freedom in everything, thus also
in sexuality. Homosexuality leads to a healthy sense of
egoism, for which every anarchist should strive.[31]
Anarcho-syndicalist writer Ulrich Linse wrote about a
sharply outlined gure of the Berlin individualist an-

5.5. LATER 20TH CENTURY AND CONTEMPORARY TIMES

archist cultural scene around 1900, the precocious
Johannes Holzmann" (known as Senna Hoy): an adherent of free love, [Hoy] celebrated homosexuality as a
champion of culture and engaged in the struggle against
Paragraph 175.[32] The young Hoy (born 1882) published these views in his weekly magazine, (Kampf)
from 1904 which reached a circulation of 10,000 the
following year. German anarchist psychotherapist Otto
Gross also wrote extensively about same-sex sexuality in both men and women and argued against its
discrimination.[33] In the 1920s and 1930s, French individualist anarchist publisher Emile Armand campaigned
for acceptance of free love, including homosexuality, in
his journal L'EnDehors.

57

Der Eigene was the rst Gay Journal in the world,

published from 1896 to 1932 by Adolf Brand in
Berlin. Brand contributed many poems and articles himself. Other contributors included Benedict Friedlaender,
Hanns Heinz Ewers, Erich Mhsam, Kurt Hiller, Ernst
Burchard, John Henry Mackay, Theodor Lessing, Klaus
Mann, and Thomas Mann, as well as artists Wilhelm von
Gloeden, Fidus, and Sascha Schneider. The journal may
have had an average of around 1500 subscribers per issue
during its run, but the exact numbers are uncertain. After
the rise to power by the Nazis, Brand became a victim of
persecution and had his journal closed.

5.4.1 Anarchist homophobia

Despite these supportive stances, the anarchist movement
of the time certainly wasn't free of homophobia: an editorial in an inuential Spanish anarchist journal from 1935
argued that an Anarchist shouldn't even associate with homosexuals, let alone be one: If you are an anarchist, that
means that you are more morally upright and physically
strong than the average man. And he who likes inverts is
no real man, and is therefore no real anarchist.[35]

5.5 Later 20th century and contemporary times

Adolf Brand, egoist gay anarchist activist

From 1906, the writings and theories of John Henry

Mackay had a signicant inuence on Adolf Brand's organisation Gemeinschaft der Eigenen. The individualist
anarchist Adolf Brand was originally a member of
Hirschfelds Scientic-Humanitarian committee, but
formed a break-away group. Brand and his colleagues,
known as the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, were heavily inuenced by homosexual anarchist John Henry Mackay.
They were opposed to Hirschfelds medical characterisation of homosexuality as the domain of an intermediate sex.[34] and disdained the Jewish Hirschfeld.
Ewald Tschek, another homosexual anarchist writer of
the era, regularly contributed to Adolf Brands journal
Der Eigene, and wrote in 1925 that Hirschfelds Scientic Humanitarian Committee was a danger to the German people, caricaturing Hirschfeld as Dr. Feldhirsch.

Young anarcha-feminists at an anti-globalization protest quote

Emma Goldman

The writings of the French bisexual anarchist Daniel

Gurin oer an insight into the tension sexual minorities among the Left have often felt. He was a leading
gure in the French Left from the 1930s until his death
in 1988. After coming out in 1965, he spoke about the
extreme hostility toward homosexuality that permeated
the Left throughout much of the 20th century.[36] Not so
many years ago, to declare oneself a revolutionary and to
confess to being homosexual were incompatible, Gurin
wrote in 1975.[37] In 1954, Gurin was widely attacked
for his study of the Kinsey Reports in which he also detailed the oppression of homosexuals in France. The
harshest [criticisms] came from Marxists, who tend seriously to underestimate the form of oppression which is

58

CHAPTER 5. ANARCHISM AND ISSUES RELATED TO LOVE AND SEX

antisexual terrorism. I expected it, of course, and I knew

that in publishing my book I was running the risk of being attacked by those to whom I feel closest on a political
level.[38] After coming out publicly in 1965, Gurin was
abandoned by the Left, and his papers on sexual liberation were censored or refused publication in left-wing
journals.[39] From the 1950s, Gurin moved away from
Marxism-Leninism and toward a synthesis of anarchism
and communism which allowed for individualism while
rejecting capitalism. Gurin was involved in the uprising
of May 1968, and was a part of the French Gay Liberation
movement that emerged after the events. Decades later,
Frdric Martel described Gurin as the grandfather of
the French homosexual movement.[40]

a naughty school-kid or dressing up as a nurse!"[42]

The British anarcho-pacist Alex Comfort gained notoriety for writing the bestseller sex manual The Joy of Sex
(1972) in the context of the sexual revolution. Queer
Fist appeared in New York City and identies itself as
an anti-assimilationist, anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian
street action group, came together to provide direct action and a radical queer and trans-identied voice at
the Republican National Convention (RNC) protests.[41]
Anarcha -feminism continues in new forms such as
the Bolivian collective Mujeres Creando or the Spanish
anarcha-feminist squat Eskalera Karakola. Contemporary anarcha-feminist writers/theorists include Germaine
Greer, L. Susan Brown and the eco-feminist Starhawk.

More objectionable to anarchists, however, are the anti-porn activists who are frankly
censorious; While sharing the views of antiporners who seek to protect others from porn,
these people go a step further and use coercive
force to achieve their ends. This is totally incompatible with the kind of voluntary society
sought by most anarchists, and should be denounced by all freedom-lovers...Pornography,
like any other form of entertainment can be
good or bad, based on the individual merits of
any particular work. However, as a genre of literature or lm, it is no better or worse or good
or evil than any other. If porn is bad or sexist,
the best strategy is to criticize it and discuss
it with others, and/or make good, non-sexist
porn, not suppress it. Sex and its depiction are
a source of pleasure for many and our freedom
to indulge in both should be defended, or at
least tolerated, by anarchists. Censors, including those who claim to be anarchists, are the
enemies of freedom, and anarchists who support them call into question their commitment
to a free society.[45]

The issue of free love has a dedicated treatment in the

work of French anarcho-hedonist philosopher Michel
Onfray in such works as Thorie du corps amoureux :
pour une rotique solaire (2000) and L'invention du plaisir
: fragments cyraniques (2002).

5.5.1

BDSM

Main article: BDSM

In Issue 59 of Organise, the journal of the Anarchist Federation in Britain and Ireland, there appeared an Interview with an Anarchist Dominatrix".[42] The interviewer
asks Mistress Venus, an anarcho-communist,[42] You
say your clients worshipped you when you were in your
dominatrix role, and you also talk about having power and
control over them. How does that role t in with you being an anarchist?"[42] to which she replies Domination is
a game, the adults version of what children call playing.
Its not real and, for me personally, it does not reect elements of my personality. I enjoy the sessions as a performer, as an experimenter and as an exhibitionist... Its
the attention I crave. The thrill of power and control is
a novelty in a game, not something that I desire to be
present in my real life. I think it is very important, in a
society based on freedom, that people should be able to
express themselves and their fetishes and fantasies freely
and in a safe environment (providing all parties are consenting), whether those fetishes involve being whipped as

The group Anarkink has also been in existence.[43] Their

goal was to challenge the view within the anarchist movement that BDSM is something weird and to give a safe
space for kinky anarchists.[44]

5.5.2 Pornography
The Boston Anarchist Drinking Brigade published in
Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #35 - Winter '93 an
article titled An Anarchist Defense of Pornography.[45]
In it they manifest,

Chuck Munson, the person behind Infoshop.org and several other anarchist projects, has also defended the right
to distribute and receive pornography based on the principle of freedom of speech.[46]
Nevertheless the issue has caused some tensions within
the anarchist movement. During A-Kongress, a large anarchist event in Germany, at the workshop titled Anarchy and Sex some members of Fuck For Forest took
o their clothes to demonstrate the freedom of being naked,[47] two thirds of people at that event have
shown their support for FFF members expression.[48]
Some women have become uncomfortable at seeing nude
people at the event[48] and that resulted in a verbal altercation during which one FFF member may have said
something sexist[48] (although the evidence points to the
contrary[47] ). On the following day Fuck For Forest members were refused entry to the congress and when they
voiced their opposition to that decision the congress organisers chose to shut the whole project down.[47]

5.7. REFERENCES

5.5.3

Anarchists in high heels

59

5.7 References
[1] An Anarchist FAQ. What is Anarcha-Feminism?
[2] Broude, N. and M. Garrard (1992). The Expanding Discourse: Feminism And Art History. p. 303. Westview
Press. ISBN 978-0-06-430207-4
[3] Kristian Williams. The Soul of Man Under... Anarchism?"
[4] According to his biographer Neil McKenna, Wilde was
part of a secret organisation that aimed to legalise homosexuality, and was known among the group as a leader of
the Cause. (McKenna, Neil. 2003. The Secret Life of
Oscar Wilde.)
[5] The Free Love Movement and Radical Individualism By
Wendy McElroy
[6] Joanne E. Passet, Power through Print: Lois Waisbrooker
and Grassroots Feminism, in: Women in Print: Essays on
the Print Culture of American Women from the Nineteenth
and Twentieth Centuries, James Philip Danky and Wayne
A. Wiegand, eds., Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin
Press, 2006; pp. 229-50.

Wendy McElroy the author of XXX: A Womans Right to

Pornography

Anarchists in high heels are anarchists (or sometimes

radicals or libertarians) who work in the sex industry.
The term can be found being used in XXX: A Womans
Right to Pornography by Wendy McElroy where porn actress, Veronica Hart, makes this comment upon hearing
the word feminist:
I dont need Andrea Dworkin to tell me
what to think or how to behave. [...] And
I dont appreciate being called psychologically
damaged! I have friends in the business who
call themselves Anarchists in High Heels.
Theyd love to have a word with her.[49]
This term, due to the connection with sex workers, has
become linked to sex-positive feminism.

5.6 Further reading

[7] "Free Society was the principal English-language forum for

anarchist ideas in the United States at the beginning of the
twentieth century. Emma Goldman: Making Speech Free,
1902-1909, p.551.
[8] Moran, 2004.
[9] Sochen, June. 1972. The New Woman: Feminism in
Greenwich Village 1910-1920. New York: Quadrangle.
[10] Cott, Nancy. 1987. The Grounding of Modern Feminism,
New Haven/London.
[11] Katz, Jonathan Ned. Gay American History: Lesbians and
Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell,
1976)
[12] See, for example, Heywood, Ezra, 1876. Cupids Yokes:
or, The Binding Forces of Conjugal Life: An Essay to Consider Some Moral and Physiological Phases of Love and
Marriage, Wherein Is Asserted the Natural Rights and Necessity of Sexual Self Government. Princeton, MA: Cooperative Publishing.
[13] Messer-Kruse, Timothy. 1998. The Yankee International:
1848-1876. (University of North Carolina)

Greenway, Judy (1997). Twenty-rst Century

Sex. Twenty-rst Century Anarchism: Unorthodox
Ideas for a New Millennium. Ed. J. Purkis and J.
Bowen. London: Cassell. 170-180. Online version.

[14] Ibid.

Heckert, J. and Cleminson, R.(eds.)

(2011)
Anarchism & Sexuality: Ethics, Relationships and
Power. New York/London: Routledge.

[16] E. Armand and la camaraderie amoureuse. Revolutionary sexualism and the struggle against jealousy

[15] La insumisin voluntaria. El anarquismo individualista

espaol durante la dictadura y la Segunda Repblica by
Xavier Dez

[17] Emile Armand and la camaraderie amourouse Revolutionary sexualism and the struggle against jealousy. by
Francis Rousin 2000. Retrieved 2010-06-10.

Kissack, Terence. (2008). Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States. Edin[18] Letter of Amrica Scarf to mile Armand
burgh/Oakland, Ca: AK Press.

60

CHAPTER 5. ANARCHISM AND ISSUES RELATED TO LOVE AND SEX

[19] Amor y anarqua by Errico Malatesta

1 (20 January 1975), pp.10-14.)

* Together, Gurin argued, such groups bore a great
deal of responsibility for fostering homophobic attitudes among the working class as late as the 1970s.
Their attitude was the most blinkered, the most reactionary, the most antiscientic. (Etre homosexuel et rvolutionnaire, La Quinzaine littraire, no.
215, no. spcial : Les homosexualits (August
1975), pp. 9-10. Quote p. 10)

[20] Dunbar-Ortiz, p.9.

[21] Ackelsberg.
[22] Spencer Sunshine, Nietzsche and the Anarchists
[23] Marshall, p. 409.
[24] Quoted in Wexler, Intimate, p. 94.
[25] Goldman, Anarchism, p. 224.
[26] See generally Haaland; Goldman, The Trac in
Women"; Goldman, On Love.
[27] Emma Goldman. The Social Importance of the Modern
School
[28] Mujeres Libres - Women anarchists in the Spanish Revolution
[29] basta pensar en el lesbianismo de Luca Snchez Saornil
[30] R. Fue una poca transgresora, emergi el feminismo y
la libertad sexual estuvo en el candelero. Hay rastreos
de muchas lesbianas escritoras: Carmen Conde[primera
acadmica de nmero], Victorina Durn, Margarita
Xirgu, Ana Mara Sagi, la periodista Irene Polo, Luca
Snchez Saornil, fundadora de Mujeres Libres[seccin
feminista de CNT]... Incluso exista un crculo sco
en Madrid como lugar de encuentro y tertulia.P. Se
declaraban lesbianas?R. Haba quien no se esconda mucho, como Polo o Durn, pero lesbiana era un insulto,
algo innombrable. Excepto los poemas homosexuales de
Snchez Saornil, sus textos no eran explcitos para poder
publicarlos, as que hay que reinterpretarlos.Tener referentes serios de lesbianas elimina estereotipos by Juan
Fernandez at El Pais
[31] Hirschfeld, Magnus, 1914. Die Homosexualitt des
Mannes und des Weibes (Berlin: Louis Marcus)
[32] Linse, Ulrich, Individualanarchisten, Syndikalisten, Bohmiens, in Berlin um 1900, ed. Gelsine Asmus (Berlin:
Berlinische Galerie, 1984)

[37] Gurin, Daniel. 1975. Etre homosexuel et rvolutionnaire,

La Quinzaine littraire, no. 215, no. spcial : Les homosexualits (August 1975), pp. 9-10.
[38] Letter of 27 May 1955, Fonds Gurin, BDIC, F
721/carton 12/4, quoted in Chaperon, Le fonds Daniel
Gurin et lhistoire de la sexualit in Journal de la BDIC,
no.5 (June 2002), p.10
[39] Berry, David. 2003. For a dialectic of homosexuality and
revolution. Paper for Conference on Socialism and Sexuality. Past and present of radical sexual politics, Amsterdam, 34 October 2003.
[40] Frdric Martel, Le rose et le noir. Les homosexuels en
France depuis 1968 (Paris : Seuil, 2000), pp.46.
[41] Queer Fist blog
[42] Interview with an anarchist dominatrix by Organise
[43] http://anarchistbdsm.wordpress.com/
[44] http://anarchistbdsm.wordpress.com/about
[45] An Anarchist Defense of Pornography by Boston Anarchist Drinking Brigade
[46] https://www.myspace.com/video/vid/19104947
[47] Fuck For Forest at A-Kongress
[48] http://www.alpineanarchist.org/r_akongress_english.
html
[49] Wendy McElroy (1995), XXX: A Womans Right to
Pornography, One: Pornography As an Industry, Prelude
Pr, USA, ISBN 0-312-13626-9

[33] Otto Gross

[34] New York: Howard Fertig, 1985.

5.8 External links

[35] Quoted in Cleminson, Richard. 1995. Male inverts

and homosexuals: Sex discourse in the Anarchist Revista
Blanca, Published in Gert Hekma et al. (eds.)"Gay men
and the sexual history of the political left by Harrington
Park Press 1995, ISBN 1-56023-067-3.

Sexuality and sex related articles at the anarchist library

The Parti Communiste Franais was hysterically

intransigent as far as moral behaviour was concerned (Aragon, victime et proteur du tabou, in
Gai Pied Hebdo, 4 June 1983, reproduced in Homosexualit et Rvolution, pp. 62-3, quote p. 63.);
* The trotskyist Pierre Lambert's OCI was completely hysterical with regard to homosexuality";
Lutte ouvri re was theoretically opposed to homosexuality; as was the Ligue communiste, despite
their belatedly paying lip service to gay lib. ( confesse, Interview with Grard Ponthieu in Sexpol no.

East Van Porn Collective.com, home of Made in Secret a pornographic documentary.

[36]

Anarchist Studies Network reading list on Sexuality,

an extensive bibliography

Essays
"Porn Again Anarchists", a satirical essay published
in Slingshot! magazine.
RadicalX, a British project bringing together art, sex
and radical politics.

Chapter 6

Anarchism and religion

Anarchists have traditionally been skeptical of or vehemently opposed to organized religion.[1] Nevertheless
some anarchists have provided religious interpretations
and approaches to anarchism, including the idea that glorication of the state is a form of sinful idolatry.[2][3]

6.1 Anarchist clashes with religion

Proudhon, the rst person to call himself an anarchist,

who was well known for saying, `Property is theft, also
said, `God is evil and `God is the eternal X".[1]
Published posthumously in French in 1882, Mikhail
Bakunin's God and the State[4] was one of the rst Anarchist treatises on religion. Bakunin expounds his philosophy of religions place in history and its relationship to the modern political state. It was later published in English by Mother Earth Publications in 1916.
Anarcho-communisms main theorist Peter Kropotkin,
was a child of the Enlightenment and the Scientic Revolution, and assumed that religion would be replaced by
science and that the Church as well as the State would
be abolished; he was particularly concerned with the development of a secular system of ethics which replaced
supernatural theology with natural biology.[1]

Errico Malatesta and Carlo Caero, the main founders

of the Italian anarchist movement, both came from
freethinking families (and Caero was involved with the
National Secular Society when he visited London during
the 1870s)".[1] In the french anarchist movement Elise
Reclus was a son of a Calvinist minister, and began by
rejecting religion before they moving on to anarchism.[1]
and writer in
Members of the Italian Anarchist Federation marching on an Sebastien Faure, the most active speaker
[1]
the
French
movement
for
half
a
century
wrote an esanticlerical manifestation. The banner reads Free from dogsay titled Twelve Proofs of Gods Inexistence.[5] German
mas, always heretics"
insurrectionary anarchist Johann Most wrote an article
Anarchists are generally non-religious and are frequently called The God Pestilence.[6]
anti-religious, and the standard anarchist slogan is the In the United States freethought was a basically antiphrase coined by the (non-anarchist) socialist Auguste christian, anti-clerical movement, whose purpose was to
Blanqui in 1880: `Ni Dieu ni matre! (Neither God make the individual politically and spiritually free to denor master!)...The argument for a negative connection is cide for himself on religious matters. A number of
that religion supports politics, the Church supports the contributors to Liberty were prominent gures in both
State, opponents of political authority also oppose reli- freethought and anarchism. The individualist anarchist
gious authority.[1]
George MacDonald was a co-editor of Freethought and,
William Godwin, the author of the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), the rst systematic text of
libertarian politics, was a Calvinist minister who began
by rejecting Christianity, and passed through deism to
atheism and then what was later called agnosticism.[1]
The pioneering German individualist anarchist Max
Stirner, began as a left-Hegelian, post-Feuerbachian
atheist, rejecting the `spooks of religion as well as of politics including the spook of `humanity".[1] Pierre-Joseph

for a time, The Truth Seeker. E.C. Walker was co-editor

of the excellent free-thought / free love journal Lucifer,
the Light-Bearer".[7] Many of the anarchists were ardent freethinkers; reprints from freethought papers such
as Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, Freethought and The Truth
Seeker appeared in Liberty...The church was viewed as a
common ally of the state and as a repressive force in and
of itself.[7] Late 19th century/early 20th Century anarchists such as Voltairine de Cleyre were often associated

61

62
with the freethinkers movement, advocating atheism.[8]
In Europe a similar development occurred in French and
Spanish individualist anarchist circles. Anticlericalism,
just as in the rest of the libertarian movement, in another
of the frequent elements which will gain relevance related to the measure in which the (French) Republic begins to have conicts with the church...Anti-clerical discourse, frequently called for by the french individualist
Andr Lorulot, will have its impacts in Estudios (a Spanish individualist anarchist publication). There will be an
attack on institutionalized religion for the responsibility
that it had in the past on negative developments, for its
irrationality which makes it a counterpoint of philosophical and scientic progress. There will be a criticism of
proselitism and ideological manipulation which happens
on both believers and agnostics..[9] This tendencies will
continue in French individualist anarchism in the work
and activism of Charles-Auguste Bontemps and others.
In the Spanish individualist anarchist magazine tica and
Iniciales there is a strong interest in publishing scientic
news, usually linked to a certain atheist and anti-theist obsession, philosophy which will also work for pointing out
the incompatibility between science and religion, faith
and reason. In this way there will be a lot of talk on
Darwins theories or on the negation of the existence of
the soul..[10] Spanish anarchists in the early 20th century
were responsible for burning several churches, though
many of the church burnings were actually carried out
by members of the Radical Party while anarchists were
blamed. The implicit and/or explicit support by church
leaders for the National Faction during the Spanish Civil
War greatly contributed to anti-religious sentiment.

CHAPTER 6. ANARCHISM AND RELIGION

6.2 Religious anarchism and anarchist themes in religions

Religious anarchists view organised religion mostly as
authoritarian and hierarchical that has strayed from its
humble origins, as Peter Marshall explains:
The original message of the great religious
teachers to live a simple life, to share the
wealth of the earth, to treat each other with
love and respect, to tolerate others and to live
in peace invariably gets lost as worldly institutions take over. Religious leaders, like their
political counterparts, accrue power to themselves, draw up dogmas, and wage war on
dissenters in their own ranks and the followers of other religions. They seek protection
from temporal rulers, bestowing on them in
return a supernatural legitimacy and magical
aura. They weave webs of mystery and mystication around naked power; they join the
sword with the cross and the crescent. As a result, in nearly all cases organised religions have
lost the peaceful and tolerant message of their
founding fathers, whether it be Buddha, Jesus
or Mohammed.[13]

6.2.1 Buddhism
Main article: Buddhist anarchism

Emma Goldman wrote in Anarchism: What It Really

Many Westerners who call themselves Buddhists regard
Stands For:
the Buddhist tradition, in contrast to most other world
faiths, as nontheistic, humanistic and experientiallybased. Most Buddhist schools, they point out, see the
Buddha as the embodied proof that transcendence and
Anarchism has declared war on the perniultimate happiness is possible for all, without exception.
cious inuences which have so far prevented
They note that Buddhist scriptures such as the Kalama
the harmonious blending of individual and soSutta have an inherently libertarian emphasis, placing a
cial instincts, the individual and society. Relipriority on the questioning of all authority and dogma,
gion, the dominion of the human mind; Propwith properly informed personal choice as nal arbiter.
erty, the dominion of human needs; and GovThe Indian revolutionary and self-declared atheist Har
ernment, the dominion of human conduct, repDayal, much inuenced by Marx and Bakunin, who
resent the stronghold of mans enslavement and
sought to expel British rule from the subcontinent, was
all the horrors it entails.[11]
a striking instance of someone who in the early 20th
century tried to synthesize anarchist and Buddhist ideas.
Having moved to the United States, in 1912 he went so
Chinese anarchists led the opposition to Christianity in far as to establish in Oakland the Bakunin Institute of
the early 20th century, but the most prominent of them, California, which he described as the rst monastery of
Li Shizeng, made it clear that he opposed not only Chris- anarchism.[14][15]
tianity but all religion as such. When he became president
of the Anti-Christian Movement of 1922 he told the Beijing Atheists League: Religion is intrinsically old and 6.2.2 Christianity
corrupt: history has passed it by and asked Why are we
of the twentieth century... even debating this nonsense Main article: Christian anarchism
According to some, Christianity began primarily as a
from primitive ages?"[12]

6.2. RELIGIOUS ANARCHISM AND ANARCHIST THEMES IN RELIGIONS

63

is organized along anarchist lines. All decisions are made

locally in a community of equals where every members voice has equal weight. While there are no formal
linkages between Quakerism and anarchism and Quakers as a whole hold a wide variety of political opinions, the long tradition of Quaker involvement in socialjustice work and similar outlooks on how power should
be structured and decisions should be reached has led
to signicant crossover in membership and inuence between Christian anarchists and Quakers. The Quaker inuence was particularly pronounced in the anti-nuclear
movement of the 1980s and in the North American antiglobalization movement, both of which included many
thousands of anarchists and self-consciously adopted secular, consensus-based aspects of Quaker decision making.

6.2.3 Gnosticism

Political cartoon by socialist cartoonist, Art Young, The Masses,

1917.

pacist and anarchist movement. Jesus is said, in this

view, to have come to empower individuals and free people from an oppressive religious standard in the Mosaic
law; he taught that the only rightful authority was God,
not Man, evolving the law into the Golden Rule (see also
liberal Christianity).
According to Christian anarchists, there is only one
source of authority to which Christians are ultimately answerable, the authority of God as embodied in the teachings of Jesus. Christian anarchists believe that freedom
from government or Church is justied spiritually and
will only be guided by the grace of God if Man shows
compassion to others and turns the other cheek when confronted with violence.
As per Christian communism, anarchism is not necessarily opposed by the Catholic Church. Indeed,
Distributism in Catholic social teaching such as Pope
Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum and Pope Pius
XI's Quadragesimo Anno [16] resembles a Mutualist society based on Cooperatives, while Pope John Paul
II's Catechism of the Catholic Church states She (the
Church) has...refused to accept, in the practice of capitalism, individualism and the absolute primacy of the
law of the marketplace over human labor. Regulating the
economy solely by centralized planning perverts the basis
of social bonds; regulating it solely by the law of the marketplace fails social justice. Notable Catholic anarchists
include Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin who founded the
Catholic Worker Movement.

The discovery of the ancient Gnostic texts at Nag Hammadi coupled with the writings of the science ction
writer Philip K. Dick, especially with regard to his concept of the Black Iron Prison, has led to the development
of Anarcho-Gnosticism.[17]
Some ancient forms of Gnosticism had many things in
common with modern ideas of anarchism: their members lived on communes with little to no private property and they practiced ceremonies led by people chosen
each time by lots rather than hierarchical authority. Some
Gnostic groups also practiced equality among the sexes
and people of various sexual orientation; some were even
vegetarians. Central to all Gnostic philosophy was an individual attainment of spiritual understanding and experience rather than one based on dogma. They often had
decentralized church structure and, given that Gnostics
believed we are all divine and one within the fullness,
they placed a strong emphasis on equality. Gnostics saw
themselves in opposition to spiritual entities called archons, a word which means ruler"; the word anarchy
comes from, anarkhos, meaning, without rulers, and
so in many ways the goal of Gnosticism is literally anarchy.

6.2.4 Islam
Main article: Islam and anarchism

There have been anti-authoritarian traits throughout the

history of Islam, often related to Susm. The end of
the 20th century brought the syncretism of Islam and anarchism into a non-violent, anti-authoritarian philosophy
The Quaker church, or the Religious Society of Friends, espoused by people like Hakim Bey and Islam Hadari.

64

6.2.5

CHAPTER 6. ANARCHISM AND RELIGION

Judaism

the Confucians generally preferred moderation using rites

instead of laws. The Taoists, on the other hand, rejected
Main articles: Anarchism and Orthodox Judaism and such ideas. At the center of Taoism lies the notion of
Wu wei (often translated; action through inaction). It
Jewish anarchism
can be summed up by the following quote from the Tao
Te Ching; 'The world is ruled by letting things take their
While many Jewish anarchists were irreligious or somecourse. It cannot be ruled by interfering.'
times vehemently anti-religious, there were also a few religious anarchists and pro-anarchist thinkers, who com- These Taoist ideas resonate with modern concepts of anbined contemporary radical ideas with traditional Ju- archism. However, simply resonating with modern anardaism. Some secular anarchists, such as Abba Gordin chists is not the same as an actual connection.[19]
and Erich Fromm, also noticed remarkable similarity between anarchism and many Kabbalistic ideas, especially
in their Hasidic interpretation. Some Jewish mystical 6.3 Footnotes
groups were based on anti-authoritarian principles, somewhat similar to the Christian Quakers and Dukhobors.
Martin Buber, a deeply religious philosopher, had fre- [1] Nicolas Walter. Anarchism and Religion
quently referred to the Hasidic tradition.
[2] Christoyannopoulos, Alexandre (March 2010). A ChrisThe Orthodox Kabbalist rabbi Yehuda Ashlag believed
in a religious version of libertarian communism, based
on principles of Kabbalah, which he called altruist
communism. Ashlag supported the Kibbutz movement and preached to establish a network of self-ruled
internationalist communes, who would eventually annul
the brute-force regime completely, for every man did that
which was right in his own eyes., because there is nothing
more humiliating and degrading for a person than being
under the brute-force government.[18]

tian Anarchist Critique of Violence: From Turning the

Other Cheek to a Rejection of the State. Political Studies Association.
[3] Christoyannopoulos, Alexandre (2010). Christian Anarchism: A Political Commentary on the Gospel. Exeter:
Imprint Academic. p. 254. The state as idolatry
[4] Michael Bakunin (1916). God and the State. Dwardmac.pitzer.edu. Archived from the original on 30 April
2010. Retrieved 2010-05-15.

A British Orthodox rabbi, Yankev-Meyer Zalkind, was an

anarcho-communist and very active anti-militarist. Rabbi
Zalkind was a close friend of Rudolf Rocker, a prolic
Yiddish writer and a prominent Torah scholar. He argued, that the ethics of the Talmud, if properly understood, is closely related to anarchism.

[5] Sebastien Faure. Twelve Proofs of Gods Inexistence.

One contemporary movement in Judaism with anarchist tendencies is Jewish Renewal. The movement is trans-denominational, including Orthodox, nonOrthodox, Judeo-Buddhists and Judeo-Pagans, and focusing on feminism, environmentalism and pacism.

[8] Sharon Presley. Exquisite Rebel: Voltairine de Cleyre.

Voltairine.org. Retrieved 2010-05-15.

6.2.6

Neopaganism

[6] Johann Most. The God Pestilence

[7] Wendy McElroy. The culture of individualist anarchist
in Late-nineteenth century America

[9] Xavier Diez. El anarquismo individualista en Espaa

(1923-1939) Virus Editorial. 2007. pg. 143
[10] Xavier Diez. El anarquismo individualista en Espaa
(1923-1939) Virus Editorial. 2007. pg. 152
[11] Anarchism: What It Really Stands For entry at the

Anarchy Archives
Neopaganism, with its focus on the sanctity of nature and
equality, along with its often decentralized nature, has led
[12] Zarrow (1990), p. 156-157.
to a number of Neopagan inspired anarchists. One of the
most prominent is Starhawk, who writes extensively about [13] Peter Marshall (2011). Alexandre Christoyannopoulos,
both Neopaganism and activism.
ed. Religious Anarchism: New Perspectives. p. xx. Introduction

6.2.7

Taoism

[14] Anarchist Portraits by Paul Avrich, Princeton University

Press, 1988, p30

The central text of Taoism and Taoist philosophy, the

[15] Ghadar Movement: Ideology, Organisation and Strategy by
Tao Te Ching, is considered by some as one of the great
Karish K. Puri, Guru Nanak Dev University Press, 1983
anarchist classics. At the time it was written in ancient
China, there was a struggle between Taoists, Legalists and [16] Allitt, Patrick (2000). Catholic Converts: British and
Confucians, where the Legalists were in favor of codiAmerican Intellectuals Turn to Rome. Cornell University
cation of law and a centralization of governance, while
Press. p. 206. ISBN 978-0-8014-8663-0

6.6. EXTERNAL LINKS

[17] The Radical Tradition: Philosophy, Metapolitics &

the Conservative Revolution, edited by Troy Southgate, Primordial Traditions, 2011, pages 123-125
http://www.primordialtraditions.net/prime/Publications/
TheRadicalTradition.aspx
[18] Baal HaSulam. Building the Future Society. World
Wide Kabbalah Academy. Retrieved 2010-05-15.
[19] Zarrow (1990), p. 6-13.

6.4 References and further reading

Christoyannopoulos, Alexandre J. M. E., ed.
(2011), Religious Anarchism: New Perspectives (Paperback) (1st ed.), Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
ISBN 1-4438-3189-1
Zarrow, Peter Gue (1990). Anarchism and Chinese
Political Culture. New York: Columbia University
Press. ISBN 0231071388..

6.5 See also

Christian libertarianism
Freedom of religion
Freethought
Religion and politics

6.6 External links

Buddhist Anarchism, by Gary Snyder
Anarchism and Unitarian Universalism, by Clayton
Dewey
Taoism and Anarchy, essay by Mark Gillespie
Academics and Students Interested in Religious Anarchism (ASIRA)

65

Chapter 7

Anarcha-feminism
law subjects [women] to the absolute domination of the
man. He argued that "[e]qual rights must belong to men
and women so that women can become independent
and be free to forge their own way of life. Bakunin foresaw the end of the authoritarian juridical family" and
the full sexual freedom of women.[2] (Bakunin on Anarchism, p. 396 and p. 397). Proudhon, on the other
hand, viewed the family as the most basic unit of society
A purple and black ag is often used to represent and of his morality and thought women had the responsiAnarcha-feminism.
bility of fullling a traditional role within the family.[3][4]
Since the 1860s, anarchisms radical critique of
capitalism and the state has been combined with a
critique of patriarchy. Anarcha-feminists thus start
from the precept that modern society is dominated
by men. Authoritarian traits and valuesdomination,
exploitation, aggression, competition, etc.are integral
to hierarchical civilizations and are seen as masculine.
In contrast, non-authoritarian traits and values
cooperation, sharing, compassion, sensitivityare regarded as feminine, and devalued. Anarcha-feminists
have thus espoused creation of a non-authoritarian,
anarchist society. They refer to the creation of a society,
based on cooperation, sharing, mutual aid, etc. as the
"feminization of society.[2]

The symbol of Anarcha-feminism: in the center of the

Anarcha-feminism began with late 19th and early 20th
Venus symbol is a raised st.
century authors and theorists such as anarchist feminists
Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre and Lucy ParAnarcha-feminism (also called anarchist feminism sons.[5] In the Spanish Civil War, an anarcha-feminist
and anarcho-feminism) combines anarchism with group, Mujeres Libres (Free Women) linked to the
feminism. It generally views patriarchy as a manifes- Federacin Anarquista Ibrica, organized to defend
tation of involuntary coercive hierarchy that should be both anarchist and feminist ideas,[6] while Stirnerist
replaced by decentralized free association. Anarcha- Nietzschean feminist Federica Montseny held that the
feminists believe that the struggle against patriarchy emancipation of women would lead to a quicker realis an essential part of class struggle, and the anarchist ization of the social revolution and that the revolustruggle against the state. In essence, the philosophy sees tion against sexism would have to come from intellecanarchist struggle as a necessary component of feminist tual and militant 'future-women.' According to this Nistruggle and vice-versa. L. Susan Brown claims that etzschean concept of Federica Montsenys, women could
as anarchism is a political philosophy that opposes all realize through art and literature the need to revise their
relationships of power, it is inherently feminist.[1]
own roles.[7] In China, the anarcho-feminist He Zhen argued that without womens liberation, society could not
be liberated.[8]

7.1 Origins
Mikhail Bakunin opposed patriarchy and the way the
66

7.2. ANARCHA-FEMINISM, INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM AND THE FREE LOVE MOVEMENT

7.1.1

67

Virginia Bolten and La Voz de la Mujer

Lucifer the Lightbearer, an inuential American free love journal

Cover of La Voz de la Mujer, pioneering Argentinian anarchafeminist publication

In Argentina Virginia Bolten is responsible for the publication of a newspaper called La Voz de la Mujer (English: The Womans Voice), which was published nine
times in Rosario between 8 January 1896 and 1 January
1897, and was revived, briey, in 1901. A similar paper with the same name was reportedly published later
in Montevideo, which suggests that Bolten may also have
founded and edited it after her deportation.[9] La Voz de
la Mujer described itself as dedicated to the advancement of Communist Anarchism. Its central theme was
that of the multiple nature of womens oppression. An
editorial asserted, We believe that in present-day society nothing and nobody has a more wretched situation
than unfortunate women. Women, they said, were doubly oppressed - by bourgeois society and by men. Its
feminism can be seen from its attack on marriage and
upon male power over women. Its contributors, like anarchist feminists elsewhere, developed a concept of oppression that focused on gender oppression. Marriage was a
bourgeois institution which restricted womens freedom,
including their sexual freedom. Marriages entered into
without love, delity maintained through fear rather than
desire, oppression of women by men they hated - all were
seen as symptomatic of the coercion implied by the marriage contract. It was this alienation of the individuals
will that the anarchist feminists deplored and sought to
remedy, initially through free love and then, and more
thoroughly, through social revolution.[10]

7.2 Anarcha-feminism, individualist anarchism and the free love

movement
Main articles: Individualist anarchism and Free love
An important current within individualist anarchism is
free love.[11] Free love advocates sometimes traced their
roots back to Josiah Warren and to experimental communities, which viewed sexual freedom as a clear, direct expression of an individuals self-ownership. Free love particularly stressed womens rights since most sexual laws
discriminated against women: for example, marriage
laws and anti-birth control measures.[11] The most important American free love journal was Lucifer the Light-

bearer (18831907) edited by Moses Harman and Lois

Waisbrooker[12] but Ezra and Angela Heywoods The
Word was also published from 18721890 and in 1892
1893.[11] Also M. E. Lazarus was an important American individualist anarchist who promoted free love.[11] In
Europe the main propagandist of free love within individualist anarchism was Emile Armand[13] He proposed
the concept of la camaraderie amoureuse to speak of free
love as the possibility of voluntary sexual encounter between consenting adults. He was also a consistent proponent of polyamory.[13] In France there was also feminist activity inside French individualist anarchism as
promoted by individualist feminists Marie Kge, Anna
Mah, Rirette Maitrejean, and Sophia Zakovska.[14]

Maria Lacerda de Moura, Brazilian individualist anarchist

anarcha-feminist

Brazilian individualist anarchist Maria Lacerda de Moura

lectured on topics such as education, womens rights, free
love, and antimilitarism. Her writings and essays landed
her attention not only in Brazil, but also in Argentina
and Uruguay. In February 1923 she launched Renascena, a periodical linked with the anarchist, progressive,
and freethinking circles of the period. Her thought was
mainly inuenced by individualist anarchists such as Han
Ryner and Emile Armand.[15]

68

7.2.1

CHAPTER 7. ANARCHA-FEMINISM

Voltairine de Cleyre

Main article: Voltairine de Cleyre

Voltairine de Cleyre (November 17, 1866 June 20,
1912) was an American anarchist writer and feminist.
She was a prolic writer and speaker, opposing the state,
marriage, and the domination of religion in sexuality
and womens lives. She began her activist career in the
freethought movement. De Cleyre was initially drawn to
individualist anarchism but evolved through mutualism to
an "anarchism without adjectives. She was a colleague of
Emma Goldman, with whom she maintained a relationship of respectful disagreement on many issues. Many
of her essays were in the Collected Works of Voltairine
de Cleyre, published posthumously by Mother Earth in
1914. In her 1895 lecture entitled Sex Slavery, de Cleyre
condemns ideals of beauty that encourage women to distort their bodies and child socialization practices that create unnatural gender roles. The title of the essay refers
not to trac in women for purposes of prostitution, although that is also mentioned, but rather to marriage laws
that allow men to rape their wives without consequences.
Such laws make every married woman what she is, a
bonded slave, who takes her masters name, her masters
bread, her masters commands, and serves her masters Emma Goldman
passions.[16]

7.2.2

Emma Goldman

Main article: Emma Goldman

Although she was hostile to rst-wave feminism and
its suragist goals, Emma Goldman advocated passionately for the rights of women, and is today heralded
as a founder of anarcha-feminism, which challenges
patriarchy as a hierarchy to be resisted alongside state
power and class divisions.[17] In 1897 she wrote: I demand the independence of woman, her right to support
herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases,
or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both
sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in
motherhood.[18]
A nurse by training, Goldman was an early advocate for
educating women concerning contraception. Like many
contemporary feminists, she saw abortion as a tragic consequence of social conditions, and birth control as a positive alternative. Goldman was also an advocate of free
love, and a strong critic of marriage. She saw early feminists as conned in their scope and bounded by social
forces of Puritanism and capitalism. She wrote: We are
in need of unhampered growth out of old traditions and
habits. The movement for womens emancipation has so
far made but the rst step in that direction.[19][20] When
Margaret Sanger, an advocate of access to contraception,
coined the term birth control and disseminated information about various methods in the June 1914 issue of
her magazine The Woman Rebel, she received aggres-

sive support from Goldman. Sanger was arrested in August under the Comstock Law, which prohibited the dissemination of obscene, lewd, or lascivious articles[21]
including information relating to birth control. Although
they later split from Sanger over charges of insucient
support, Goldman and Reitman distributed copies of
Sangers pamphlet Family Limitation (along with a similar essay of Reitmans). In 1915 Goldman conducted a
nationwide speaking tour in part to raise awareness about
contraception options. Although the nations attitude toward the topic seemed to be liberalizing, Goldman was
arrested in February 1916 and charged with violation of
the Comstock Law. Refusing to pay a $100 ne, she
spent two weeks in a prison workhouse, which she saw
as an opportunity to reconnect with those rejected by
society.[22]
Goldman was also an outspoken critic of prejudice against
homosexuals. Her belief that social liberation should
extend to gay men and lesbians was virtually unheard
of at the time, even among anarchists.[23] As Magnus
Hirschfeld wrote, she was the rst and only woman, indeed the rst and only American, to take up the defense
of homosexual love before the general public.[24] In numerous speeches and letters, she defended the right of gay
men and lesbians to love as they pleased and condemned
the fear and stigma associated with homosexuality. As
Goldman wrote in a letter to Hirschfeld, It is a tragedy, I
feel, that people of a dierent sexual type are caught in a
world which shows so little understanding for homosexuals and is so crassly indierent to the various gradations

7.2. ANARCHA-FEMINISM, INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM AND THE FREE LOVE MOVEMENT

69

and variations of gender and their great signicance in

life.[24]

7.2.3

Milly Witkop

Main article: Milly Witkop

Milly Witkop was a Ukrainian-born Jewish anarchosyndicalist and feminist writer and activist. She was
the common-law wife of Rudolf Rocker. In November 1918, Witkop and Rocker moved to Berlin; Rocker
had been invited by Free Association of German Trade
Unions (FVdG) chairman Fritz Kater to join him in
building up what would become the Free Workers
Union of Germany (FAUD), an anarcho-syndicalist trade
union.[25] Both Rocker and Witkop became members of
the FAUD.[26] After its founding in early 1919, a discussion about the role of girls and women in the union
started. The male-dominated organization had at rst ignored gender issues, but soon women started founding
their own unions, which were organized parallel to the
regular unions, but still formed part of the FAUD. Witkop
was one of the leading founders of the Womens Union
in Berlin in 1920. On October 15, 1921, the womens
unions held a national congress in Dsseldorf and the
Syndicalist Womens Union (SFB) was founded on a national level. Shortly thereafter, Witkop drafted Was will
der Syndikalistische Frauenbund? (What Does the Syndicalist Womens Union Want?) as a platform for the SFB.
From 1921, the Frauenbund was published as a supplement to the FAUD organ Der Syndikalist, Witkop was one
of its primary writers.[26]
Witkop reasoned that proletarian women were exploited
not only by capitalism like male workers, but also by
their male counterparts. She contended therefore that
women must actively ght for their rights, much like
workers must ght capitalism for theirs. She also insisted
on the necessity of women taking part in class struggle.
Housewives could use boycotts to support this struggle.
From this, she concluded the necessity of an autonomous
womens organization in the FAUD. Witkop also held
that domestic work should be deemed equally valuable
to wage labor.[27]

7.2.4

Mujeres Libres

Luca Snchez Saornil, leader of Mujeres Libres in 1933

port, they created networks of women anarchists. Flying

day-care centres were set up in eorts to involve more
women in union activities.[28]
The organization also produced propaganda through radio, travelling libraries and propaganda tours, in order
to promote their cause. Organizers and activist travelled
through rural parts of Spain to set up rural collectives and
support for women in the country.[29] To prepare women
for leadership roles in the anarchist movement, they organized schools, women-only social groups and a womenonly newspaper so that women could gain self-esteem
and condence in their abilities and network with one another to develop their political consciousness. Many of
the female workers in Spain were illiterate and the Mujeres Libres sought to educate them through literacy programs, technically oriented classes and classes in social
studies. Schools were also created for train nurses to help
injured in emergency medical clinics.[29] Medical classes
also provided women with information on sexual health
and pre and post-natal care.[29] The Mujeres Libres also
created a woman run Magazine to keep all of its members
informed. The rst monthly issue of Mujeres Libres was
published on May 20, 1936 (ack 100). However the magazine only had 14 issues, and the last one was still being
printed when the civil war battlefront reached Barcelona,
and no copies survived. The magazine addressed working class women and focused on awakening the female
conscience toward libertarian ideas.[30]

Main article: Mujeres Libres

Mujeres Libres (English: Free Women) was an anarchist
womens organization in Spain that aimed to empower
working class women. It was founded in 1936 by Luca
Snchez Saornil, Mercedes Comaposada and Amparo
Poch y Gascn and had approximately 30,000 members.
The organization was based on the idea of a double Luca Snchez Saornil
struggle for womens liberation and social revolution and
argued that the two objectives were equally important and Main article: Luca Snchez Saornil
should be pursued in parallel. In order to gain mutual sup- Luca Snchez Saornil (December 13, 1895 June

70

CHAPTER 7. ANARCHA-FEMINISM
feminist concerns, who are overtly antifeminist, or who
behave in ways regarded as patriarchal and misogynistic.
The term was used in the 2001 article Stick it To The
Manarchy[38] and later in a 2001 questionnaire, Are
You a Manarchist?".[39]
Contemporary anarcha-feminism has been noted for its
heavy inuence on ecofeminism. Ecofeminists rightly
note that except for anarcha-feminist, no feminist perspective has recognized the importance of healing the nature/culture division.[40]

Luca Snchez Saornil (left) and Emma Goldman in Spain during

the 1930s

2, 1970), was a Spanish poet, militant anarchist and

feminist. She is best known as one of the founders of
Mujeres Libres and served in the Confederacin Nacional
del Trabajo (CNT) and Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista (SIA). By 1919, she had been published in a
variety of journals, including Los Quijotes, Tableros, Plural, Manantial and La Gaceta Literaria. Working under a male pen name, she was able to explore lesbian
themes[31] at a time when homosexuality was criminalized and subject to censorship and punishment. Writing in anarchist publications such as Earth and Freedom,
the White Magazine and Workers Solidarity, Luca outlined her perspective as a feminist. Although quiet on
the subject of birth control, she attacked the essentialism
of gender roles in Spanish society. In this way, Luca
established herself as one of the most radical of voices
among anarchist women, rejecting the ideal of female domesticity which remained largely unquestioned. In a series of articles for Workers Solidarity, she boldly refuted
Gregorio Maran's identication of motherhood as the
nucleus of female identity.[32]

7.3 Contemporary developments

An important aspect of anarcha-feminism is its opposition to traditional concepts of family, education and
gender roles;[33] the institution of marriage is one of the
most widely opposed.[34] De Cleyre argued that marriage
stied individual growth,[35] and Goldman argued that
it is primarily an economic arrangement... [woman]
pays for it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect,
her very life.[36] Anarcha-feminists have also argued for
non-hierarchical family and educational structures, and
had a prominent role in the creation of the Modern School
in New York City, based on the ideas of Francesc Ferrer
i Gurdia.[37]
In English-speaking anarcha-feminist circles in the
United States, the term "manarchist" emerged as a pejorative label for male anarchists who are dismissive of

Current Anarcha-feminist groups include Bolivia's

Mujeres Creando, Radical Cheerleaders, the Spanish
anarcha-feminist squat La Eskalera Karakola, and the
annual La Rivolta! conference in Boston.

Young anarcha-feminists at an anti-globalization protest quote

Emma Goldman

Contemporary anarcha-feminist writers/theorists include

Peggy Kornegger, L. Susan Brown, the eco-feminist
Starhawk and the post-left anarchist and anarchoprimitivist Lilith.[41]
In the past decades two lms have been produced about
anarcha-feminism. Libertarias is a historical drama made
in 1996 about the Spanish anarcha-feminist organization
Mujeres Libres. In 2010 the argentinian lm Ni dios,
ni patrn, ni marido was released which is centered
on the story of anarcha-feminist Virginia Bolten and
her publishing of the newspaper La Voz de la Mujer
(English: The Womans Voice).[42][43]

7.4 See also

Anarchism and sex/love
Ecofeminism
Individualist feminism
Libertarias, a lm about the Spanish anarchofeminist organization Mujeres Libres
Queer anarchism
Radical feminism

7.5. NOTES
The Firebrand (later Free Society), BlueStockings
Journal, and Lucifer the Lightbearer, turn-of-thecentury feminist anarchist publications

7.5 Notes
[1] Brown, p. 208.
[2] An Anarchist FAQ. What is Anarcha-Feminism?
[3] Broude, N. and M. Garrard (1992). The Expanding Discourse: Feminism And Art History. p. 303. Westview
Press. ISBN 978-0-06-430207-4
[4] An Anarchist FAQ (14/17): Section 3 The Anarchist
Library
[5] Dunbar-Ortiz, p.9.
[6] Ackelsberg.
[7] Spencer Sunshine: Nietzsche and the Anarchists
(2005)". Fifth Estate (radicalarchives.org) 367: 3637.
Winter 20042005. Retrieved 2012-09-29.
[8] Liu (2013), p. 53.
[9] Molyneux, Maxine (2001). Womens movements in international perspective: Latin America and beyond. Palgrave
MacMillan. p. 24. ISBN 978-0-333-78677-2.
[10] No God, No Boss, No Husband: The worlds rst
Anarcha-Feminist group. Libcom.org. January 3, 2012.
Retrieved 2012-09-29.
[11] McElroy, Wendy (December 1, 1996). The Free Love
Movement and Radical Individualism. The Libertarian
Enterprise. Retrieved 2012-09-29.
[12] Passet, Joanne E. Power through Print: Lois Waisbrooker
and Grassroots Feminism, in: Women in Print: Essays on
the Print Culture of American Women from the Nineteenth
and Twentieth Centuries, James Philip Danky and Wayne
A. Wiegand, eds., Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin
Press, 2006; pp. 229-50.
[13] E. Armand and la camaraderie amoureuse": Revolutionary sexualism and the struggle against jealousy
(PDF). Retrieved 2012-09-29.
[14] ""Individualisme anarchiste et fminisme la " Belle
Epoque """. Endehors.org. Retrieved 2012-09-29.
[15] ""Maria Lacerda de Moura - Uma Anarquista Individualista Brasileira by. Nodo50.org. Retrieved 2012-09-29.
[16] De Cleyre 2005, p. 228
[17] Marshall, p. 409.
[18] Quoted in Wexler, Intimate, p. 94.
[19] Goldman, Anarchism, p. 224.
[20] See generally Haaland; Goldman, The Trac in
Women"; Goldman, On Love.

71

[21] Quoted in Wexler, Intimate, p. 210.

[22] Wexler, Intimate, pp. 211215.
[23] Katz, Jonathan Ned (1992). Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. New York City: Penguin
Books. pp. 376380.
[24] Goldman, Emma (1923). Oener Brief an den Herausgeber der Jahrbcher ber Louise Michel with a preface
by Magnus Hirschfeld. Jahrbuch fr sexuelle Zwischenstufen 23: 70. Translated from German by James Steakley. Goldmans original letter in English is not known to
be extant.
[25] Vallance, Margaret (July 1973). Rudolf Rockera biographical sketch. Journal of Contemporary History
(London/Beverly Hills: Sage Publications) 8 (3): 7595.
doi:10.1177/002200947300800304. ISSN 0022-0094.
OCLC 49976309. Pg. 77-78.
[26] (German)Wolf, Siegbert: Witkop, Milly in Datenbank
des deutschsprachigen Anarchismus. Retrieved October
8, 2007.
[27] Rbner, Hartmut (1994). Freiheit und Brot: Die Freie
Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands: Eine Studie zur Geschichte
des Anarchosyndikalismus (in German). Berlin/Cologne:
Libertad Verlag. ISBN 3-922226-21-3.Pg. 185-189.
[28] O'Carroll, Aileen (June 1998). Mujeres Libres: Women
anarchists in the Spanish Revolution (54). Workers Solidarity. Retrieved 2012-09-29.
[29] O'Carroll, Aileen. Mujeres Libres: Women anarchists in
the Spanish Revolution. Workers Solidarity No 54. Retrieved September 27, 2005.
[30] Porter, David (1938). Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on
the Spanish Revolution. New Paltz, NY: Common Ground
Press. p. 254.
[31] R. Fue una poca transgresora, emergi el feminismo y
la libertad sexual estuvo en el candelero. Hay rastreos
de muchas lesbianas escritoras: Carmen Conde[primera
acadmica de nmero], Victorina Durn, Margarita
Xirgu, Ana Mara Sagi, la periodista Irene Polo, Luca
Snchez Saornil, fundadora de Mujeres Libres[seccin
feminista de CNT]... Incluso exista un crculo sco
en Madrid como lugar de encuentro y tertulia.P. Se
declaraban lesbianas?R. Haba quien no se esconda mucho, como Polo o Durn, pero lesbiana era un insulto,
algo innombrable. Excepto los poemas homosexuales de
Snchez Saornil, sus textos no eran explcitos para poder
publicarlos, as que hay que reinterpretarlos.Tener referentes serios de lesbianas elimina estereotipos by Juan
Fernandez at El Pais
[32] Enders and Radcli. Constructing Spanish womanhood:
female identity in modern Spain. SUNY Press, 1999.
[33] Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love, in Alix Kates
Shulman (ed.), Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman
Reader, Schocken Books, N.Y., 1982, pp. 204-13.
[34] Goldman, Marriage and Love.
[35] Voltairine de Cleyre, They Who Marry Do Ill (1907)

72

[36] Goldman, Marriage and Love, Red Emma Speaks, p.

205
[37] Avrich, Paul, The Modern School Movement: Anarchism
and Education in the United States.
[38] The Rock Bloc Collective (Spring 2001). Stick it to the
Manarchy. Onward Newspaper. Retrieved 2012-09-29.
[39] Are You A Manarchist?". Anarcha.org. Retrieved 201209-29.
[40] Tuana, Nancy (1994). Tong, Rosemarie, ed. Feminism
And Philosophy: Essential Readings In Theory, Reinterpretation, And Application. Boulder (Colo.): Westview Press.
p. 328. ISBN 978-0-8133-2213-1.
[41] Lilith texts at The Anarchist Library. The Anarchist Library. Retrieved 2012-09-29.
[42] ""Ni Dios, Ni Patrn, Ni Marido (2009) by Laura Ma".
Cinenacional.com. Retrieved 2012-09-29.
[43] Ni Dios, Ni Patron, Ni Marido - Trailer. Youtube.com.
Retrieved 2012-09-29.

7.6 References

CHAPTER 7. ANARCHA-FEMINISM
Marshall, Peter. Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. London: HarperCollins, 1992.
ISBN 978-0-00-217855-6.
Wexler, Alice. Emma Goldman: An Intimate Life.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. ISBN 978-0394-52975-2.

7.7 Further reading

Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian
Ideas - Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism
(300CE-1939) (ed. Robert Graham) includes material by Louise Michel, Charlotte Wilson, Voltairine
de Cleyre, Emma Goldman, Lucia Sanchez Soarnil
(Mujeres Libres), and Latin American (Carmen
Lareva), Chinese (He Zhen) and Japanese (Ito Noe
and Takamure Itsue) anarcha-feminists.

7.8 External links

Anarcha-feminism at DMOZ
Anarcha- Communist Gender news

Ackelsberg, Martha A. Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of
Women, AK Press, 2005. ISBN 978-1-902593-968.

anarcha-feminist articles at The anarchist library

Bakunin, Mikhail (ed. Sam Dolgo), Bakunin on

Anarchy, Vintage Books, 1971: Statism and Anarchy (1873), p. 346: "[The family patriarch] is
simultaneously a slave and a despot: a despot exerting his tyranny over all those under his roof and
dependent on his will.

Modern anarchist writings by women

Brown, L. Susan (1995). Beyond Feminism: Anarchism and Human Freedom. Reinventing Anarchy,
Again. San Francisco: AK Press. pp. 149154.
ISBN 978-1-873176-88-7.
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne (ed.). Quiet Rumours: An
Anarcha-Feminist Reader, Dark Star: 2002. ISBN
978-1-902593-40-1.
Goldman, Emma. Anarchism and Other Essays. 3rd
ed. 1917. New York: Dover Publications Inc.,
1969. ISBN 978-0-486-22484-8.
*Liu, Lydia, Rebecca E. Karl and Dorothy Ko,
ed. (2013). The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory. New York:
Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231162906.
Marsh, Margaret S. Anarchist Women, 18701920,
Temple University Press, 1981. ISBN 978-087722-202-6.

Anarcha-Feminism at Infoshop.org
Anarcha

Libertarian Communist Library Archive

Chapter 8

Anarchism and education

Anarchism has had a special interest on the issue of
education from the works of William Godwin[1] and
Max Stirner[2] onwards.
A wide diversity of issues related to education have
gained the attention of anarchist theorists and activists.
They have included the role of education in social control and socialization, the rights and liberties of youth and
children within educational contexts, the inequalities encouraged by current educational systems, the inuence of
state and religious ideologies in the education of people,
the division between social and manual work and its relationship with education, sex education and art education.
Various alternatives to contemporary mainstream educational systems and their problems have been proposed
by anarchists which have gone from alternative education
systems and environments, self-education, advocacy of
youth and children rights, and freethought activism.

8.1 Early anarchist views on education

8.1.1

William Godwin

William Godwin

For English enlightenment anarchist William Godwin education was the main means by which change would be
achieved..[1] Godwin saw that the main goal of education should be the promotion of happiness.[1] For Godwin, education had to have A respect for the childs autonomy which precluded any form of coercion, A pedagogy that respected this and sought to build on the childs
own motivation and initiatives and A concern about the
childs capacity to resist an ideology transmitted through
the school.[1]
In his Political Justice he criticizes state sponsored schooling on account of its obvious alliance with national
government.[3] For him the State will not fail to
employ it to strengthen its hands, and perpetuate its
institutions..[3] He thought It is not true that our youth
ought to be instructed to venerate the constitution, however excellent; they should be instructed to venerate truth;
and the constitution only so far as it corresponded with
their independent deductions of truth..[3] A long work

on the subject of education to consider is The Enquirer.

Reections On Education, Manners, And Literature. In A
Series Of Essays.[4]

8.1.2 Max Stirner

Max Stirner was a German philosopher linked mainly
with the anarchist school of thought known as
individualist anarchism who worked as a schoolteacher in
a gymnasium for young girls.[5] He examines the subject
of education directly in his long essay The False Principle
of our Education. In it we discern his persistent pursuit
of the goal of individual self-awareness and his insistence
on the centering of everything around the individual
personality.[2] As such Stirner in education, all of the
given material has value only in so far as children learn
to do something with it, to use it.[2] In that essay he
deals with the debates between realist and humanistic
educational commentators and sees that both are
concerned with the learner as an object, someone to be

73

74

CHAPTER 8. ANARCHISM AND EDUCATION

Max Stirner

acted upon rather than one encouraged to move toward

subjective self-realization and liberation and sees that
a knowledge which only burdens me as a belonging
and a possession, instead of having gone along with me
completely so that the free-moving ego, not encumbered
by any dragging possessions, passes through the world
with a fresh spirit, such a knowledge then, which has
not become personal, furnishes a poor preparation for
life..[2]
He concludes this essay by saying that the necessary
decline of non-voluntary learning and rise of the selfassured will which perfects itself in the glorious sunlight
of the free person may be expressed somewhat as follows:
knowledge must die and rise again as will and create itself anew each day as a free person..[6] Stirner thus saw
education is to be life and there, as outside of it, the selfrevelation of the individual is to be the task.[6] For him
pedagogy should not proceed any further towards civilizing, but toward the development of free men, sovereign
characters.[6]

Josiah Warren

example, possibly under the inuence of the...Swiss educational theorist Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (via Robert
Owen), emphasized - as we would expect - the nurturing of the independence and the conscience of individual
children, not the inculcation of pre-conceived values.[8] "

8.2 The classics and the late 19th

century
8.2.1 Mikhail Bakunin

On Equal Opportunity in Education[9] Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin denounced what he saw as the social inequalities caused by the current educational systems. He put this issue in this way will it be feasible
for the working masses to know complete emancipation
as long as the education available to those masses continues to be inferior to that bestowed upon the bourgeois, or,
in more general terms, as long as there exists any class,
8.1.3 Josiah Warren
be it numerous or otherwise, which, by virtue of birth,
Josiah Warren is widely regarded as the rst Ameri- is entitled to a superior education and a more complete
[9]
can anarchist.[7] Where utopian projectors starting with instruction? Does not the question answer itself?...
Plato entertained the idea of creating an ideal species He also denounced that Consequently while some study
through eugenics and education and a set of universally others must labour so that they can produce what we need
valid institutions inculcating shared identities, Warren to live not just producing for their own needs, but also
wanted to dissolve such identities in a solution of indi- for those men who devote themselves exclusively to invidual self-sovereignty. His educational experiments, for tellectual pursuits.[9] As a solution to this Bakunin pro-

8.2. THE CLASSICS AND THE LATE 19TH CENTURY

posed that Our answer to that is a simple one: everyone must work and everyone must receive education...for
works sake as much as for the sake of science, there must
no longer be this division into workers and scholars and
henceforth there must be only men. "[9]

75
the mother, and the children will learn to love each other
and to respect their mutual rights; at the same time their
love will be enriched as it transcends the narrow limits
of family aection, thereby achieving a wider and nobler
love: the love of the great human family...Today, parents not only support their children [i.e. providing food,
clothes, etc.] but also supervise their education. This is a
custom based on a false principle, a principle that regards
the child as the personal property of the parents. The
child belongs to no one, he belongs only to himself; and
during the period when he is unable to protect himself
and is thereby exposed to exploitation, it is society that
must protect him and guarantee his free development. It
is society that must support him and supervise his education. In supporting him and paying for his education
society is only making an advance loan which the child
will repay when he becomes an adult proper.[10]

8.2.2 Peter Kropotkin

Mikhail Bakunin

Bakunin views on the relationships between children and

parents pointed to the educational aspects of them and so
he argued that: We do not claim that the child should
be treated as an adult, that all his caprices should be respected, that when his childish will stubbornly outs the
elementary rules of science and common sense we should
avoid making him feel that he is wrong. We say, on the
contrary, that the child must be trained and guided, but
that the direction of his rst years must not be exclusively
exercised by his parents, who are all too often incompetent and who generally abuse their authority. The aim of
education is to develop the latent capacities of the child
to the fullest possible extent and enable him to take care
of himself as quickly as possible...It is painfully evident
that authoritarianism is incompatible with an enlightened
system of education. If the relations of father to son are
no longer those of master to slave but those of teacher
to student, of an older to a much younger friend, do you
think that the reciprocal aection of parents and children
would thereby be impaired? On the contrary, when intimate relations of these sorts cease, do not the discords so
characteristic of modern families begin? Is not the family
disintegrating into bitter frictions largely because of the
tyranny exercised by parents over their children?...No one
can therefore justly claim that a free and regenerated society will destroy the family. In such a society the father,

Peter Kropotkin

Russian anarcho-communist theorist Peter Kropotkin

suggested in Brain Work and Manual Work that The
masses of the workmen do not receive more scientic education than their grandfathers did; but they have been deprived of the education of even the small workshop, while
their boys and girls are driven into a mine, or a factory,
from the age of thirteen, and there they soon forget the
little they may have learned at school. As to the scientists,

76

CHAPTER 8. ANARCHISM AND EDUCATION

they despise manual labour.[11][12] So for Kropotkin We

fully recognise the necessity of specialisation of knowledge, but we maintain that specialisation must follow general education, and that general education must be given
in science and handicraft alike. To the division of society into brainworkers and manual workers we oppose
the combination of both kinds of activities; and instead
of `technical education,' which means the maintenance
of the present division between brain work and manual
work, we advocate the ducation intgrale, or complete
education, which means the disappearance of that pernicious distinction.[12]

Tolstoy dierentiated between education and culture.[13]

He wrote that Education is the tendency of one man
to make another just like himself... Education is culture under restraint, culture is free. [Education is] when
the teaching is forced upon the pupil, and when then instruction is exclusive, that is when only those subjects
are taught which the educator regards as necessary.[13]
For him without compulsion, education was transformed
into culture.[13]

8.3 The Early 20th century

Main article: Escuela Moderna

In 1901, Catalan anarchist and free-thinker Francesc

8.3.1

8.3.2 Francesc Ferrer i Gurdia and the

Modern schools

Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy, inuential christian anarchist and anarcho pacist

theorist

Francesc Ferrer i Gurdia, Catalan anarchist pedagogue

The Russian christian anarchist and famous novelist Leo

Tolstoy established a school for peasant children on
his estate.[13] Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana and
founded thirteen schools for his serfs children, based
on the principles Tolstoy described in his 1862 essay
The School at Yasnaya Polyana.[14] Tolstoys educational experiments were short-lived due to harassment by
the Tsarist secret police, but as a direct forerunner to
A. S. Neill's Summerhill School, the school at Yasnaya
Polyana[15] can justiably be claimed to be the rst example of a coherent theory of democratic education.

Ferrer i Gurdia established modern or progressive

schools in Barcelona in deance of an educational system controlled by the Catholic Church.[16] The schools
stated goal was to "educate the working class in a rational, secular and non-coercive setting. Fiercely anticlerical, Ferrer believed in freedom in education, education free from the authority of church and state.[17]
Murray Bookchin wrote: This period [1890s] was the
heyday of libertarian schools and pedagogical projects in
all areas of the country where Anarchists exercised some
degree of inuence. Perhaps the best-known eort in

8.3. THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY

77

this eld was Francisco Ferrers Modern School (Escuela

Moderna), a project which exercised a considerable inuence on Catalan education and on experimental techniques of teaching generally.[18] La Escuela Moderna,
and Ferrers ideas generally, formed the inspiration for a
series of Modern Schools in the United States,[16] Cuba,
South America and London. The rst of these was started
in New York City in 1911. It also inspired the Italian
newspaper Universit popolare, founded in 1901.

was founded in New York City, in 1911, two years after Francesc Ferrer i Gurdias execution for sedition
in monarchist Spain on 18 October 1909. Commonly
called the Ferrer Center, it was founded by notable anarchists including Leonard Abbott, Alexander Berkman, Voltairine de Cleyre, and Emma Goldman rst
meeting on St. Marks Place, in Manhattans Lower
East Side, but twice moved elsewhere, rst within lower
Manhattan, then to Harlem. The Ferrer Center opened
with
only nine students, one being the son of Margaret
Ferrer wrote an extensive work on education and on his
Sanger, the contraceptives-rights activist. Starting in
educational experiments called The Origin and Ideals of
1912, the schools principal was the philosopher Will
the Modern School.[19]
Durant, who also taught there. Besides Berkman and
Goldman, the Ferrer Center faculty included the Ashcan
School painters Robert Henri and George Bellows, and
The Modern School movement in the United States
its guest lecturers included writers and political activists
Main article: Modern School (United States)
such as Margaret Sanger, Jack London, and Upton SinThe Modern Schools, also called Ferrer Schools, were clair.[20] Student Magda Schoenwetter, recalled that the
school used Montessori methods and equipment, and emphasised academic freedom rather than xed subjects,
such as spelling and arithmetic.[21] The Modern School
magazine originally began as a newsletter for parents,
when the school was in New York City, printed with the
manual printing press used in teaching printing as a profession. After moving to the Stelton Colony, New Jersey, the magazines content expanded to poetry, prose,
art, and libertarian education articles; the cover emblem
and interior graphics were designed by Rockwell Kent.
Artists and writers, among them Hart Crane and Wallace
Stevens, praised The Modern School as the most beautifully printed magazine in existence.

The NYC Modern School, ca. 19111912, Principal Will Durant

and pupils. This photograph was the cover of the rst issue of
The Modern School magazine.

United States schools, established in the early twentieth

century, that were modeled after the Escuela Moderna
of Francesc Ferrer i Gurdia, the Catalan educator and
anarchist. They were an important part of the anarchist,
free schooling, socialist, and labor movements in the U.S.,
intended to educate the working-classes from a secular,
class-conscious perspective. The Modern Schools imparted day-time academic classes for children, and nighttime continuing-education lectures for adults.

After the 4 July 1914 Lexington Avenue bombing, the police investigated and several times raided the Ferrer Center and other labor and anarchist organisations in New
York City.[22] Acknowledging the urban danger to their
school, the organizers bought 68 acres (275,000 m) in
Piscataway Township, New Jersey, and moved there in
1914, becoming the center of the Stelton Colony. Moreover, beyond New York City, the Ferrer Colony and Modern School was founded (ca. 19101915) as a Modern School-based community, that endured some forty
years. In 1933, James and Nellie Dick, who earlier had
been principals of the Stelton Modern School, founded
the Modern School in Lakewood, New Jersey,[22] which
survived the original Modern School, the Ferrer Center,
becoming the nal surviving such school, lasting until
1958.[23]

8.3.3 Emma Goldman

In an essay entitled The child and its enemies

Lithuanian-American anarcha-feminist Emma Goldman
manifested that The child shows its individual tendencies in its plays, in its questions, in its association with
people and things. But it has to struggle with everlasting external interference in its world of thought and emoThe rst, and most notable, of the Modern Schools tion. It must not express itself in harmony with its nature,

78

CHAPTER 8. ANARCHISM AND EDUCATION

womans emancipation much more than all the laws upon
the statute books and her right to vote.[27]

8.4 Later 20th century and contemporary times

Main articles: Anarchistic free school, Deschooling
Society and Unschooling

Emma Goldman

with its growing personality. It must become a thing, an

object. Its questions are met with narrow, conventional,
ridiculous replies, mostly based on falsehoods; and, when,
with large, wondering, innocent eyes, it wishes to behold
the wonders of the world, those about it quickly lock the
windows and doors, and keep the delicate human plant
in a hothouse atmosphere, where it can neither breathe
nor grow freely.[24] Goldman in the essay entitled The
Social Importance of the Modern School saw that the
school of today, no matter whether public, private, or
parochial...is for the child what the prison is for the convict and the barracks for the soldier a place where everything is being used to break the will of the child, and
then to pound, knead, and shape it into a being utterly
foreign to itself.[25]
In this way it will be necessary to realize that education
of children is not synonymous with herdlike drilling and
training. If education should really mean anything at all,
it must insist upon the free growth and development of
the innate forces and tendencies of the child. In this way
alone can we hope for the free individual and eventually
also for a free community, which shall make interference
and coercion of human growth impossible.[26]

Experiments in Germany led to A. S. Neill founding what

became Summerhill School in 1921.[28] Summerhill is
often cited as an example of anarchism in practice.[29]
British anarchists Stuart Christie and Albert Meltzer
manifested that A.S. Neill is the modern pioneer of libertarian education and of hearts not heads in the school.
Though he has denied being an anarchist, it would be hard
to know how else to describe his philosophy, though he
is correct in recognising the dierence between revolution in philosophy and pedagogy, and the revolutionary
change of society. They are associated but not the same
thing.[30] However, although Summerhill and other free
schools are radically libertarian, they dier in principle
from those of Ferrer by not advocating an overtly political class struggle-approach.[31]

8.4.1 Herbert Read

The English anarchist philosopher, art critic and poet,
Herbert Read developed a strong interest in the subject
of education and particularly in art education. Reads
anarchism was inuenced by William Godwin, Peter
Kropotkin and Max Stirner. Read became deeply interested in childrens drawings and paintings after having
been invited to collect works for an exhibition of British
art that would tour allied and neutral countries during
the Second World War. As it was considered too risky
to transport across the Atlantic works of established importance to the national heritage, it was proposed that
childrens drawings and paintings should be sent instead.
Read, in making his collection, was unexpectedly moved
by the expressive power and emotional content of some of
the younger artists works. The experience prompted his
special attention to their cultural value, and his engagement of the theory of childrens creativity with seriousness matching his devotion to the avant-garde. This work
both changed fundamentally his own lifes work throughout his remaining twenty-ve years and provided art education with a rationale of unprecedented lucidity and persuasiveness. Key books and pamphlets resulted: Education through Art (Read, 1943); The Education of Free Men
(Read, 1944); Culture and Education in a World Order
(Read, 1948); The Grass Read, (1955); and Redemption
of the Robot (1970)".[32]

Goldman in her essay on the Modern School also dealt

with the issue of Sex education. She denounced that educators also know the evil and sinister results of ignorance in sex matters. Yet, they have neither understanding
nor humanity enough to break down the wall which puritanism has built around sex...If in childhood both man
and woman were taught a beautiful comradeship, it would Read elaborated a socio-cultural dimension of creative
neutralize the oversexed condition of both and would help education, oering the notion of greater international un-

8.4. LATER 20TH CENTURY AND CONTEMPORARY TIMES

derstanding and cohesiveness rooted in principles of developing the fully balanced personality through art education. Read argued in Education through Art that every
child, is said to be a potential neurotic capable of being
saved from this prospect, if early, largely inborn, creative
abilities were not repressed by conventional Education.
Everyone is an artist of some kind whose special abilities,
even if almost insignicant, must be encouraged as contributing to an innite richness of collective life. Reads
newly expressed view of an essential continuity of child
and adult creativity in everyone represented a synthesis
the two opposed models of twentieth-century art education that had predominated until this point...Read did not
oer a curriculum but a theoretical defence of the genuine and true. His claims for genuineness and truth were
based on the overwhelming evidence of characteristics revealed in his study of child art...From 1946 until his death
in 1968 he was president of the Society for Education in
Art (SEA), the renamed ATG, in which capacity he had a
platform for addressing UNESCO...On the basis of such
representation Read, with others, succeeded in establishing the International Society for Education through Art
(INSEA) as an executive arm of UNESCO in 1954.[32] "

8.4.2

79

Paul Goodman, american anarchist writer of Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society

Paul Goodman

Paul Goodman was an important anarchist critic of

contemporary educational systems as can be seen in
his books Growing Up Absurd and Compulsory Miseducation. Goodman believed that in contemporary societies It is in the schools and from the mass media, rather
than at home or from their friends, that the mass of our
citizens in all classes learn that life is inevitably routine,
depersonalized, venally graded; that it is best to toe the
mark and shut up; that there is no place for spontaneity, open sexuality and free spirit. Trained in the schools
they go on to the same quality of jobs, culture and politics. This is education, miseducation socializing to the
national norms and regimenting to the nations needs
"[33]
Goodman thought that a persons most valuable educational experiences occur outside the school. Participation in the activities of society should be the chief means
of learning. Instead of requiring students to succumb
to the theoretical drudgery of textbook learning, Goodman recommends that education be transferred into factories, museums, parks, department stores, etc, where the
students can actively participate in their education...The
ideal schools would take the form of small discussion
groups of no more than twenty individuals. As has
been indicated, these groups would utilize any eective
environment that would be relevant to the interest of
the group. Such education would be necessarily noncompulsory, for any compulsion to attend places authority in an external body disassociated from the needs and
aspirations of the students. Moreover, compulsion retards and impedes the students ability to learn.[33] As far

as the current educational system Goodman thought that

The basic intention behind the compulsory attendance
laws is not only to insure the socialization process but
also to control the labour supply quantitatively within an
industrialized economy characterized by unemployment
and ination. The public schools and universities have
become large holding tanks of potential workers.[33]

8.4.3 Ivan Illich

The term deschooling was popularized by Ivan Illich, who
argued that the school as an institution is dysfunctional for
self-determined learning and serves the creation of a consumer society instead.[34] Illich thought that the dismantling of the public education system would coincide with
a pervasive abolition of all the suppressive institutions of
society.[33] Illich charges public schooling with institutionalizing acceptable moral and behavioral standards
and with constitutionally violating the rights of young
adults...IIlich subscribes to Goodmans belief that most of
the useful education that people acquire is a by-product
of work or leisure and not of the school. Illich refers to
this process as informal education. Only through this
unrestricted and unregulated form of learning can the individual gain a sense of self-awareness and develop his
creative capacity to its fullest extent..[33] Illich thought
that the main goals of an alternative education systems
should be to provide access to available resources to all
who want to learn: to empower all who want to share what
they know; to nd those who want to learn it from them;
to furnish all who want to present an issue to the public

80

CHAPTER 8. ANARCHISM AND EDUCATION

with the opportunity to make their challenges known. The

system of learning webs is aimed at individual freedom
and expression in education by using society as the classroom. There would be reference services to index items
available for study in laboratories, theatres, airports, libraries, etc.; skill exchanges which would permit people
to list their skills so that potential students could contact
them; peer-matching, which would communicate an individuals interest so that he or she could nd educational
associates; reference services to educators at large, which
would be a central directory of professionals, para professionals and freelancers..[33]

8.4.4

children can counter adult-based intentions and interpretations of the built environment. His later text, The Child
in the Country, inspired a number of social scientists,
notably geographer Chris Philo (1992), to call for more
attention to be paid to young people as a hidden and
marginalised group in society.[35]

8.5 Bibliography

Colin Ward

Colin Ward in his workroom, October 2003

English anarchist Colin Ward in his main theoretical publication Anarchy in Action (1973) in a chapter called
Schools No Longer discusses the genealogy of education and schooling, in particular examining the writings of Everett Reimer and Ivan Illich, and the beliefs
of anarchist educator Paul Goodman. Many of Colins
writings in the 1970s, in particular Streetwork: The ExThe Modern School magazine, Spring, 1920
ploding School (1973, with Anthony Fyson), focused on
learning practices and spaces outside of the school building. In introducing Streetwork, Ward writes, [this] is a
Archer, William. The Life, Trial, and Death of
book about ideas: ideas of the environment as the educaFrancisco Ferrer. London: Chapman and Paul.
tional resource, ideas of the enquiring school, the school
1911
without walls. In the same year, Ward contributed
to Education Without Schools (edited by Peter Buckman)
Avrich, Paul. The Modern School Movement: Andiscussing the role of the state. He argued that one sigarchism And Education In The United States. AK
nicant role of the state in the national education sysPress, Jan 30, 2006
tems of the world is to perpetuate social and economic
injustice".[35]
Boyd, Carol. P. The Anarchists and education in
In The Child in the City (1978), and later The Child in the
Spain. (1868-1909). The Journal of Modern HisCountry (1988), Ward examined the everyday spaces of
tory. Vol. 48. No. 4. (Dec. 1976)
young peoples lives and how they can negotiate and rearticulate the various environments they inhabit. In his
Ferm, Elizabeth Byrne. Freedom in Education. New
earlier text, the more famous of the two, Colin Ward exYork: Lear Publishers. 1949
plores the creativity and uniqueness of children and how
Goodman, Paul. Compulsory Mis-Education. New
they cultivate the art of making the city work. He arYork: Horizon. 1964
gued that through play, appropriation and imagination,

8.7. REFERENCES

81

Graubard, Allen. Free the Children: Radical Reform [10] Bakunin on Anarchy, translated and edited by Sam Dolgo, 1971.
and the Free School Movement. New York: Pantheon. 1973
[11] Brain Work and Manual Work by Peter Kropotkin

Hemmings, Ray. Childrens Freedom: A. S. Neill [12] Fields, Factories and Workshops: or Industry Combined
and the Evolutions of the Summerhill Idea. London:
with Agriculture and Brain Work with Manual Work by
Allen & Unwin. 1972
Peter Kropotkin
Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. 1971. ISBN 0-06012139-4.

[13] The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and Anarchist

Resistance by Matt Hern

Jandric, Petar. Wikipedia and education: anarchist

perspectives and virtual practices. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, vol.8. no.2

[14] Tolstoy, Lev N.; Leo Wiener; translator and editor (1904).
The School at Yasnaya Polyana - The Complete Works of
Count Tolstoy: Pedagogical Articles. Linen-Measurer, Volume IV. Dana Estes & Company. p. 227.

Jensen, Derrick. Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution, Chelsea Green, 2005, ISBN
978-1-931498-78-4

[15] Wilson, A.N. (2001). Tolstoy. Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc. p. xxi. ISBN 0-393-32122-3.

Stirner, Max. "The False Principle of Our Education - or Humanism and Realism." . Rheinische
Zeitung. April 1842

[16] Georey C. Fidler (SpringSummer 1985). The Escuela

Moderna Movement of Francisco Ferrer: Por la Verdad
y la Justicia"". History of Education Quarterly 25 (1/2):
103132. doi:10.2307/368893.

Suissa, Judith. Anarchism and Education: a Philosophical Perspective. Routledge. New York. 2006
Suissa, Judith. Anarchy in the classroom. New
Humanist. Volume 120. Issue 5 September/October
2005

[17] Francisco Ferrers Modern School

[18] Chapter 7, Anarchosyndicalism, The New Ferment. In
Murray Bookchin, The Spanish anarchists: the heroic
years, 1868-1936. AK Press, 1998, p.115. ISBN 1873176-04-X
[19] Francisco Ferrer. The Origin and Ideals of the Modern
School

8.6 See also

Anarchistic free school
Alternative education
Democratic education

8.7 References
[1] william godwin and informal education by infed
[2] Introduction to The False Principle of our Education' by
Max Stirner by James J. Martin

[20] Avrich, Paul, The Modern School Movement, AK Press

(2005), p.212: At the Ferrer Center, Berkman was called
The Pope, Goldman was called The Red Queen.
[21] Avrich, Paul, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America, Interview with Magda Schoenwetter,
AK Press (2005), ISBN 1-904859-27-5, ISBN 978-1904859-27-7, p.230: What everybody is yowling about
now freedom in education we had then, though I
still cant spell or do multiplication.
[22] Avrich, Paul, The Modern School Movement. Princeton: Princeton University Press (1980); Avrich, Paul, Anarchist Portraits, Princeton: Princeton University Press,
ISBN 0-691-00609-1 (1988)

[3] Political Justice by William Godwin

[23] AERO-GRAMME #11: The Alternative Education Resource Organization Newsletter

[4] The Enquirer. Reections On Education, Manners, And

Literature. In A Series Of Essays. by William Godwin

[24] Emma Goldman. The Child and its enemies.

[5] The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, volume 8, The Macmillan Company and The Free Press, New York 1967

[25] Emma Goldman. The Social Importance of the Modern

School
[26] Emma Goldman. The Child and its enemies.

[6] The False Principle of our Education' by Max Stirner

[7] Palmer, Brian (2010-12-29) What do anarchists want
from us?, Slate.com
[8] Introduction of The Practical Anarchist: Writings of
Josiah Warren by Crispin Sartwell
[9] Equal Opportunity in Education by Mikhail Bakunin

[27] Emma Goldman. The Social Importance of the Modern

School
[28] Purkis, Jon (2004). Changing Anarchism. Manchester:
Manchester University Press. ISBN 0-7190-6694-8.
[29] Andrew Vincent (2010) Modern Political Ideologies, 3rd
edition, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell p.129

82

[30] Stuart Christie and Albert Meltzer. The Floodgates of Anarchy

[31] Suissa, Judith (SeptemberOctober 2005). Anarchy in
the classroom. The New Humanist 120 (5).
[32] David Thistlewood. HERBERT READ (18931968)" in
PROSPECTS: the quarterly review of comparative education. Paris, UNESCO: International Bureau of Education,
vol. 24, no.1/2, 1994, p. 37590
[33] ROBERT H. CHAPPELL. ANARCHY REVISITED:
AN INQUIRY INTO THE PUBLIC EDUCATION
DILEMMA. Journal of Libertarian Studies Vol. 2, No.4,
pp 357-372 Pergamon Press. 1978.
[34] Illich, Ivan (1971). Deschooling Society. New York:
Harper and Row. ISBN 0-06-012139-4.
[35] Mills, S. (2010) 'Colin Ward: The Gentle Anarchist and
Informal Education at the encyclopaedia of informal education.

8.8 External links

Anarchist texts on education at the Anarchist Library

CHAPTER 8. ANARCHISM AND EDUCATION

Chapter 9

Queer anarchism

Anarcho-queer ag.

Queer anarchism (or Anarcha-queer) is an anarchist

school of thought which advocates anarchism and
social revolution as a means of gay liberation and
abolition of homophobia, lesbophobia, transmisogyny,
biphobia, transphobia, heteronormativity, heterosexism,
patriarchy, and the gender binary. LGBT anarchists
who campaigned for LGBT rights both outside and inside the anarchist and LGBT movements include John
Henry Mackay,[1] Adolf Brand, and Daniel Guerin.[2]
Individualist anarchist Adolf Brand published Der Eigene
which was the rst publication dedicated to gay issues in
the world, published from 1896 to 1932 in Berlin.[3][4]
John Henry Mackay, German individualist anarchist advocate of
LGBT rights

9.1 History
Anarchisms foregrounding of individual freedoms made
for a natural defense of homosexuality in the eyes of
many, both inside and outside of the Anarchist movement. Emil Szittya, in Das Kuriositten-Kabinett (1923),
wrote about homosexuality that very many anarchists
have this tendency. Thus I found in Paris a Hungarian
anarchist, Alexander Sommi, who founded a homosexual anarchist group on the basis of this idea. His view
is conrmed by Magnus Hirschfeld in his 1914 book Die
Homosexualitt des Mannes und des Weibes: In the ranks
of a relatively small party, the anarchist, it seemed to
me as if proportionately more homosexuals and eeminates are found than in others.[5] Italian anarchist Luigi
Bertoni (who Szittya also believed to be homosexual) observed that Anarchists demand freedom in everything,

thus also in sexuality. Homosexuality leads to a healthy

sense of egoism, for which every anarchist should strive.
In Oscar Wildes The Soul of Man Under Socialism, he
passionately advocates for an egalitarian society where
wealth is shared by all, while warning of the dangers of
authoritarian socialism that would crush individuality.[6]
He later commented, I think I am rather more than a
Socialist. I am something of an Anarchist, I believe..[7]
In August 1894, Wilde wrote to his lover, Lord Alfred
Douglas, to tell of a dangerous adventure. He had gone
out sailing with two lovely boys, Stephen and Alphonso,
and they were caught in a storm. We took ve hours in
an awful gale to come back! [And we] did not reach pier

83

84
till eleven oclock at night, pitch dark all the way, and
a fearful sea. . . . All the shermen were waiting for
us....Tired, cold, and wet to the skin, the three men
immediately ew to the hotel for hot brandy and water.
But there was a problem. The law stood in the way: As
it was past ten oclock on a Sunday night the proprietor
could not sell us any brandy or spirits of any kind! So he
had to give it to us. The result was not displeasing, but
what laws!...Wilde nishes the story: Both Alphonso
and Stephen are now anarchists, I need hardly say."[6]

CHAPTER 9. QUEER ANARCHISM

Alongside this Mackay was also an early signer of (Magnus) Hirschfelds Petition to the Legislative Bodies
of the German Empire for a revision of the antihomosexual paragraph 175 (his name appeared in the rst
list published in 1899)".[11] He also kept a special interest
about Oscar Wilde and was outraged at his imprisonment
for homosexual activity.[11] Nevertheless Mackay entered
into conict with Hirschfeld and his organization the Scientic Humanitarian Committee.[12]
The individualist anarchist Adolf Brand was originally
a member of Hirschfelds Scientic-Humanitarian committee, but formed a break-away group. Brand and
his colleagues, known as the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen
(Community of Self-owners"), were also heavily inuenced by the writings of Max Stirner.[4]

Adolf Brand, early German anarchist activist for the rights of

male homosexuals

Anarcho-syndicalist writer Ulrich Linse wrote about a

sharply outlined gure of the Berlin individualist anarchist cultural scene around 1900, the precocious
Johannes Holzmann" (known as Senna Hoy): an adherent of free love, [Hoy] celebrated homosexuality as a
'champion of culture' and engaged in the struggle against
Paragraph 175.[8] The young Hoy (born 1882) published these views in his weekly magazine, ("Kampf",
in English Struggle) from 1904 which reached a circulation of 10,000 the following year. German anarchist psychotherapist Otto Gross also wrote extensively
about same-sex sexuality in both men and women and argued against its discrimination.[9] Heterosexual anarchist
Robert Reitzel (184998) spoke positively of homosexuality from the beginning of the 1890s in his Germanlanguage journal "Der arme Teufel" (Detroit).

Der Eigene stirnerist pioneer Gay activist publication

They were opposed to Hirschfelds medical characterisation of homosexuality as the domain of an intermediate sex.[13] Ewald Tschek, another homosexual anarchist writer of the era, regularly contributed to Adolf
Brands journal Der Eigene, and wrote in 1925 that
Hirschfelds Scientic Humanitarian Committee was a
danger to the German people, caricaturing Hirschfeld as
Dr. Feldhirsch. Although Mackay was closer in views
to Adolf Brand and his Community of Self-owners
in some respects as compared to Hirschfelds ScienticHumanitarian committee, nevertheless he did not agree
with Brands antifeminism and almost misogynistic views
believing his anarchist principle of equal freedom to all
[14]
John Henry Mackay was an individualist anarchist known certainly applied to women as well as men.
in the anarchist movement as an important early follower Der Eigene was the rst gay Journal in the world,
and propagandizer of the philosophy of Max Stirner.[10] published from 1896 to 1932 by Adolf Brand in

9.1. HISTORY

85

Berlin. Brand contributed many poems and articles himself. Other contributors included Benedict Friedlaender,
Hanns Heinz Ewers, Erich Mhsam, Kurt Hiller, Ernst
Burchard, John Henry Mackay, Theodor Lessing, Klaus
Mann, and Thomas Mann, as well as artists Wilhelm von
Gloeden, Fidus, and Sascha Schneider. The journal may
have had an average of around 1500 subscribers per issue
during its run, but the exact numbers are uncertain. After
the rise to power by the Nazis, Brand became a victim of
persecution and had his journal closed.
The prominent American anarchist Emma Goldman was
also an outspoken critic of prejudice against homosexuals. Her belief that social liberation should extend to gay
men and lesbians was virtually unheard of at the time,
even among anarchists.[15] As Magnus Hirschfeld wrote,
she was the rst and only woman, indeed the rst and
only American, to take up the defense of homosexual love
before the general public.[16] In numerous speeches and
letters, she defended the right of gay men and lesbians to
love as they pleased and condemned the fear and stigma
associated with homosexuality. As Goldman wrote in a
Luca Snchez Saornil, prominent Spanish anarcha-feminist milletter to Hirschfeld, It is a tragedy, I feel, that people of a
itant, leader of the collective Mujeres Libres and lesbian writer
dierent sexual type are caught in a world which shows so
little understanding for homosexuals and is so crassly indierent to the various gradations and variations of genThe writings of the French bisexual anarchist Daniel
der and their great signicance in life.[16]
Gurin oer an insight into the tension sexual minoriDespite these supportive stances, the anarchist movement ties among the Left have often felt. He was a leading
of the time certainly wasn't free of homophobia: an edito- gure in the French Left from the 1930s until his death
rial in an inuential Spanish anarchist journal from 1935 in 1988. After coming out in 1965, he spoke about the
argued that an Anarchist shouldn't even associate with ho- extreme hostility toward homosexuality that permeated
mosexuals, let alone be one: If you are an anarchist, that the left throughout much of the 20th century.[20] Not so
means that you are more morally upright and physically many years ago, to declare oneself a revolutionary and to
strong than the average man. And he who likes inverts is confess to being homosexual were incompatible, Gurin
no real man, and is therefore no real anarchist.[17]
wrote in 1975.[21] In 1954, Gurin was widely attacked
Luca Snchez Saornil was a main founder of the Span- for his study of the Kinsey Reports in which he also deish anarcha-feminist federation Mujeres Libres who was tailed the oppression of homosexuals in France. The
open about her lesbianism.[18] At a young age she be- harshest [criticisms] came from marxists, who tend segan writing poetry and associated herself with the emerg- riously to underestimate the form of oppression which is
ing Ultraist literary movement. By 1919, she had been antisexual terrorism. I expected it, of course, and I knew
published in a variety of journals, including Los Qui- that in publishing my book I was running the risk of bejotes, Tableros, Plural, Manantial and La Gaceta Liter- ing attacked by those to whom I feel closest on a political
[22]
aria. Working under a male pen name, she was able to level. After coming out publicly in 1965, Gurin was
[19]
explore lesbian themes at a time when homosexuality abandoned by the Left, and his papers on sexual liberwas criminalized and subject to censorship and punish- ation were censored or refused publication in left-wing
[23]
From the 1950s, Gurin moved away from
ment. Dissatised with the chauvinistic prejudices of fel- journals.
low republicans, Luca Snchez Saornil joined with two Marxism-Leninism and toward a synthesis of anarchism
compaeras, Mercedes Comaposada and Amparo Poch y and marxism close to platformism which allowed for inGascn, to form Mujeres Libres in 1936. Mujeres Libres dividualism while rejecting capitalism. Gurin was inwas an autonomous anarchist organization for women volved in the uprising of May 1968, and was a part of
committed to a double struggle of womens liberation the French Gay Liberation movement that emerged afand social revolution. Luca and other Free Women ter the events. Decades later, Frdric Martel described
rejected the dominant view that gender equality would Gurin as the grandfather of the French homosexual
[24]
emerge naturally from a classless society. As the Span- movement.
ish Civil War exploded, Mujeres Libres quickly grew Meanwhile in the United States late in his career the into 30,000 members, organizing womens social spaces, uential anarchist thinker Paul Goodman came out as bischools, newspapers and daycare programs.
sexual. The freedom with which he revealed, in print
and in public, his romantic and sexual relations with men

86

CHAPTER 9. QUEER ANARCHISM

(notably in a late essay, Being Queer"[25] ), proved to be

one of the many important cultural springboards for the
emerging gay liberation movement of the early 1970s.

9.1.1

Contemporary Queer Anarchism

Queeruption - a Queercore festival where anarchists

are prominent
Socialism and LGBT rights

9.3 Further reading

C. B. Daring; J. Rogue; Deric Shannon and Abbey
Volcano (Eds). Queering Anarchism: Addressing
and Undressing Power and Desire. AK Press. 2012
Lena Eckert. "Post-Anarchism as a Tool for Queer
and Transgender Politics and/or Vice Versa?"
Terence Kissack. Free Comrades: Anarchism and
Homosexuality in the United States. AK Press. ISBN
978-1-904859-11-6

Anarcha-queers protesting against the National Socialist Movement in Milwaukee, 2008

Anarcha-queer originated during the second half 20th

century among Anarchists involved in the Gay Liberation
movement, who viewed Anarchism as the road to harmony between heterosexual and LGBT people. Anarchaqueer has its roots deep in Queercore, a form of Punk
rock which portrays homosexuality in a positive manner. Like most forms of Punk rock, Queercore attracts
a large Anarchist crowd. Anarchists are prominent in
Queercore Zines. There are two main Anarcha-queer
groups, Queer Mutiny, a British group with branches in
most major cities and Bash Back! An American network
of queer anarchists. Queer Fist appeared in New York
City and identies itself as an anti-assimilationist, anticapitalist, anti-authoritarian street action group, came together to provide direct action and a radical queer and
trans-identied voice at the Republican National Convention (RNC) protests.[26]
Anarcha-feminist collectives such as the Spanish squat
Eskalera Karakola and the Bolivian Mujeres Creando
give high importance to lesbian and bisexual female issues.
The Fag Army is a left-wing queer anarchist group in
Sweden, which launched its rst action on August 18
2014, when it pied the Minister for Health and Social Affairs, Christian Democrat leader Gran Hgglund.[27]

9.2 See also

Anarchism and issues related to love and sex
Dumba - a New York collective living space with
Anarcha-queer tendencies
Gay Shame - a movement self-described as a radical
alternative to gay mainstreaming

9.4 References
[1] The story of one persons struggle against intolerance
and repression during the early 20th century homosexual emancipation movement in Germany. Mackay is a
very interesting gure in both anarchist and homosexual
circles.Hubert Kennedy. Anarchist Of Love: The Secret
Life Of John Henry Mackay.
[2] Although by 1968 he could be seen as the grandfather
of the French homosexual movement , Daniel Gurin has
always been better know outside gay circles for his rle
in the revolutionary movement. On the revolutionary left
of the Socialist Party in the 1930s, he was later heavily
inuenced by Trotsky, before becoming attracted to the
libertarian communist wing of the anarchist movement.
David Berry. For a dialectic of homosexuality and revolution
[3] Karl Heinrich Ulrichs had begun a journal called
Prometheus in 1870, but only one issue was published.
(Kennedy, Hubert, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs: First Theorist
of Homosexuality, In: 'Science and Homosexualities, ed.
Vernon Rosario (pp. 2645). New York: Routledge,
1997.
[4] Hubert Kennedy. Anarchist Of Love: The Secret Life Of
John Henry Mackay.pg. 7
[5] Hirschfeld, Magnus, 1914. Die Homosexualitt des
Mannes und des Weibes (Berlin: Louis Marcus)
[6] Kristian Williams. The Soul of Man Under... Anarchism?"
[7] According to his biographer Neil McKenna, Wilde was
part of a secret organisation that aimed to legalise homosexuality, and was known among the group as a leader of
the Cause. (McKenna, Neil. 2003. The Secret Life of
Oscar Wilde.)
[8] Linse, Ulrich, Individualanarchisten, Syndikalisten, Bohmiens, in Berlin um 1900, ed. Gelsine Asmus (Berlin:
Berlinische Galerie, 1984)

9.5. EXTERNAL LINKS

[9] Otto Gross

[10] IDEAS OF MAX STIRNER.; First English Translation
of His Book, The Ego and His Own -- His Attack on Socialism -- The Most Revolutionary Book Ever Published.
by JAMES HUNEKER
[11] Hubert Kennedy. Anarchist Of Love: The Secret Life Of
John Henry Mackay.pg. 12
[12] Hubert Kennedy. Anarchist Of Love: The Secret Life Of
John Henry Mackay.pg. 8
[13] New York: Howard Fertig, 1985.
[14] Hubert Kennedy. Anarchist Of Love: The Secret Life Of
John Henry Mackay.pg. 35
[15] Katz, Jonathan Ned (1992). Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. New York City: Penguin
Books. pp. 376380.

87

deal of responsibility for fostering homophobic attitudes among the working class as late as the 1970s.
Their attitude was the most blinkered, the most reactionary, the most antiscientic. (Etre homosexuel et rvolutionnaire, La Quinzaine littraire, no.
215, no. spcial : Les homosexualits (August
1975), pp. 9-10. Quote p. 10)
[21] Gurin, Daniel. 1975. Etre homosexuel et rvolutionnaire,
La Quinzaine littraire, no. 215, no. spcial : Les homosexualits (August 1975), pp. 9-10.
[22] Letter of 27 May 1955, Fonds Gurin, BDIC, F
721/carton 12/4, quoted in Chaperon, Le fonds Daniel
Gurin et lhistoire de la sexualit in Journal de la BDIC,
no.5 (June 2002), p.10
[23] Berry, David. 2003. For a dialectic of homosexuality and
revolution. Paper for Conference on Socialism and Sexuality. Past and present of radical sexual politics, Amsterdam, 34 October 2003.

[16] Goldman, Emma (1923). Oener Brief an den Herausgeber der Jahrbcher ber Louise Michel with a preface
by Magnus Hirschfeld. Jahrbuch fr sexuelle Zwischenstufen 23: 70. Translated from German by James Steakley. Goldmans original letter in English is not known to
be extant.

[24] Frdric Martel, Le rose et le noir. Les homosexuels en

France depuis 1968 (Paris : Seuil, 2000), pp.46.

[17] Quoted in Cleminson, Richard. 1995. Male inverts

and homosexuals: Sex discourse in the Anarchist Revista
Blanca, Published in Gert Hekma et al. (eds.)"Gay men
and the sexual history of the political left by Harrington
Park Press 1995, ISBN 978-1-56023-067-0.

[26] Queer Fist blog

[18] basta pensar en el lesbianismo de Luca Snchez Saornil

9.5 External links

[19] R. Fue una poca transgresora, emergi el feminismo y

la libertad sexual estuvo en el candelero. Hay rastreos
de muchas lesbianas escritoras: Carmen Conde[primera
acadmica de nmero], Victorina Durn, Margarita
Xirgu, Ana Mara Sagi, la periodista Irene Polo, Luca
Snchez Saornil, fundadora de Mujeres Libres[seccin
feminista de CNT]... Incluso exista un crculo sco
en Madrid como lugar de encuentro y tertulia.P. Se
declaraban lesbianas?R. Haba quien no se esconda mucho, como Polo o Durn, pero lesbiana era un insulto,
algo innombrable. Excepto los poemas homosexuales de
Snchez Saornil, sus textos no eran explcitos para poder
publicarlos, as que hay que reinterpretarlos.Tener referentes serios de lesbianas elimina estereotipos by Juan
Fernandez at El Pais
[20]

The Parti Communiste Franais was hysterically

intransigent as far as moral behaviour was concerned (Aragon, victime et proteur du tabou, in
Gai Pied Hebdo, 4 June 1983, reproduced in Homosexualit et Rvolution, pp. 62-3, quote p. 63.);
* The trotskyist Pierre Lambert's OCI was completely hysterical with regard to homosexuality";
Lutte ouvri re was theoretically opposed to homosexuality; as was the Ligue communiste, despite
their belatedly paying lip service to gay lib. ( confesse, Interview with Grard Ponthieu in Sexpol no.
1 (20 January 1975), pp.10-14.)
* Together, Gurin argued, such groups bore a great

[25] Goodman, Paul (1994), Being Queer, in Stoehr, Taylor,

Crazy Hope and Finite Experience: Final Essays of Paul
Goodman, Routledge, p. 103, ISBN 0-88163-266-X

[27] Christian Democrat leader attacked with cake. The Local. 18 August 2014. Retrieved 20 August 2014.

Archive of anarcha-queer publication Pink and

Black attack at the zine library

Chapter 10

Individualist anarchism
Individualist anarchism refers to several traditions of
thought within the anarchist movement that emphasize
the individual and his or her will over external determinants such as groups, society, traditions, and ideological
systems.[1][2] Individualist anarchism is not a single philosophy but refers to a group of individualistic philosophies that sometimes are in conict. Thereafter, it expanded through Europe and the United States. Benjamin
R. Tucker, a famous 19th-century individualist anarchist,
held that if the individual has the right to govern himself,
all external government is tyranny.[3]

others.[9][10]
2. The rejection of or reservations about the idea of
revolution, seeing it as a time of mass uprising which
could bring about new hierarchies. Instead they favor
more evolutionary methods of bringing about anarchy
through alternative experiences and experiments and education which could be brought about today.[11][12] This
is also because it is not seen as desirable for individuals to wait for revolution to start experiencing alternative
experiences outside what is oered in the current social
system.[13]
3. The view that relationships with other persons or things
can be in ones own interest only and can be as transitory
and without compromises as desired since in individualist anarchism sacrice is usually rejected. In this way,
Max Stirner recommended associations of egoists.[14][15]
Individual experience and exploration therefore is emphasized.

10.1 Overview

The egoist form of individualist anarchism, derived from

the philosophy of Max Stirner, supports the individual
doing exactly what he pleases taking no notice of
God, state, or moral rules.[16] To Stirner, rights were
spooks in the mind, and he held that society does not exist but the individuals are its reality he supported
property by force of might rather than moral right.[17]
Stirner advocated self-assertion and foresaw associations of egoists drawn together by respect for each
others ruthlessness.[18]
Liberty (18811908), US individualist anarchist publication
edited by Benjamin Tucker

Among the early inuences on individualist anarchism were William Godwin,[4] Henry David Thoreau
(transcendentalism),[5] Josiah Warren ("sovereignty of
the individual"), Lysander Spooner ("natural law"),
Pierre Joseph Proudhon (mutualism), Anselme Bellegarrigue,[6] Herbert Spencer ("law of equal liberty"),[7] and
Max Stirner (egoism).[8]
Individualist anarchism of dierent kinds have a few
things in common. These are:
1. The concentration on the individual and his/her will in
preference to any construction such as morality, ideology,
social custom, religion, metaphysics, ideas or the will of

For American anarchist historian Eunice Minette Schuster, American individualist anarchism stresses the isolation of the individual his right to his own tools, his
mind, his body, and to the products of his labor. To the
artist who embraces this philosophy it is "aesthetic" anarchism, to the reformer, ethical anarchism, to the independent mechanic, economic anarchism. The former
is concerned with philosophy, the latter with practical
demonstration. The economic anarchist is concerned
with constructing a society on the basis of anarchism.
Economically he sees no harm whatever in the private
possession of what the individual produces by his own
labor, but only so much and no more. The aesthetic and
ethical type found expression in the transcendentalism,
humanitarianism, and romanticism of the rst part of the

88

10.1. OVERVIEW
nineteenth century, the economic type in the pioneer life
of the West during the same period, but more favorably
after the Civil War.[19] It is for this reason that it has
been suggested that in order to understand American individualist anarchism one must take into account the social context of their ideas, namely the transformation of
America from a pre-capitalist to a capitalist society ... the
non-capitalist nature of the early U.S. can be seen from
the early dominance of self-employment (artisan and
peasant production). At the beginning of the 19th century, around 80% of the working (non-slave) male population were self-employed. The great majority of Americans during this time were farmers working their own
land, primarily for their own needs. and so Individualist
anarchism is clearly a form of artisanal socialism ... while
communist anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism are forms
of industrial (or proletarian) socialism.[20] Contemporary individualist anarchist Kevin Carson characterizes
American individualist anarchism saying that Unlike the
rest of the socialist movement, the individualist anarchists
believed that the natural wage of labor in a free market was its product, and that economic exploitation could
only take place when capitalists and landlords harnessed
the power of the state in their interests. Thus, individualist anarchism was an alternative both to the increasing
statism of the mainstream socialist movement, and to a
classical liberal movement that was moving toward a mere
apologetic for the power of big business. [21]

89
cial context helped the rise of European individualist
illegalism and as such The illegalists were proletarians
who had nothing to sell but their labour power, and nothing to discard but their dignity; if they disdained wagedwork, it was because of its compulsive nature. If they
turned to illegality it was due to the fact that honest toil
only beneted the employers and often entailed a complete loss of dignity, while any complaints resulted in
the sack; to avoid starvation through lack of work it
was necessary to beg or steal, and to avoid conscription
into the army many of them had to go on the run.[22]
And so a European tendency of individualist anarchism
advocated violent individual acts of individual reclamation, propaganda by the deed and criticism of organization. Such individualist anarchist tendencies include
French illegalism[23][24] and Italian anti-organizational
insurrectionarism.[25] Bookchin reports that at the end
of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th it
was in times of severe social repression and deadening social quiescence that individualist anarchists came
to the foreground of libertarian activityand then primarily as terrorists. In France, Spain, and the United
States, individualistic anarchists committed acts of terrorism that gave anarchism its reputation as a violently
sinister conspiracy..[26]
Another important tendency within individualist anarchist currents emphasizes individual subjective exploration and deance of social conventions. Individualist anarchist philosophy attracted amongst artists, intellectuals and the well-read, urban middle classes in
general.[22] As such Murray Bookchin describes a lot of
individualist anarchism as people who expressed their
opposition in uniquely personal forms, especially in ery
tracts, outrageous behavior, and aberrant lifestyles in the
cultural ghettos of n de siecle New York, Paris, and
London. As a credo, individualist anarchism remained
largely a bohemian lifestyle, most conspicuous in its demands for sexual freedom ('free love') and enamored of
innovations in art, behavior, and clothing..[27] In this way
free love[28][29] currents and other radical lifestyles such
as naturism[29][30] had popularity among individualist anarchists.
For Catalan historian Xavier Diez, individualist anarchism under its iconoclastic, antiintelectual, antitheist
run, which goes against all sacralized ideas or values
it entailed, a philosophy of life which could be considered a reaction against the sacred gods of capitalist society. Against the idea of nation, it opposed
its internationalism. Against the exaltation of authority embodied in the military institution, it opposed its
antimilitarism. Against the concept of industrial civilization, it opposed its naturist vision.[31]

L'Anarchie, French individualist anarchist journal established in

April 1905 by Albert Libertad.

In European individualist anarchism a dierent so-

In regards to economic questions, there are diverse positions. There are adherents to mutualism (Proudhon,
mile Armand, early Benjamin Tucker), egoistic disrespect for ghosts such as private property and markets (Stirner, John Henry Mackay, Lev Chernyi, later

90

CHAPTER 10. INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM

Tucker), and adherents to anarcho-communism (Albert

Libertad, illegalism, Renzo Novatore).[32] Anarchist historian George Woodcock nds a tendency in individualist
anarchism of a distrust (of) all co-operation beyond the
barest minimum for an ascetic life".[33]

are not of equal value, with some of us of more worth

and importance' than others depending on our utility in
bringing about social good. Therefore he does not believe
in equal rights, but the persons life that should be favored
that is most conducive to the general good.[41] Godwin
opposed government because it infringes on the individuals right to private judgement to determine which actions most maximize utility, but also makes a critique of
all authority over the individuals judgement. This aspect
of Godwins philosophy, minus the utilitarianism, was developed into a more extreme form later by Stirner.[42]

On the issue of violence opinions have gone from a violentist point of view mainly exemplied by illegalism
and insurrectionary anarchism to one that can be called
anarcho-pacist. In the particular case of Spanish individualist anarchist Miguel Gimenez Igualada, he went
from illegalist practice in his youth[34] towards a pacist
position later in his life.[35]
Godwin took individualism to the radical extent of opposing individuals performing together in orchestras, writing in Political Justice that everything understood by
the
term co-operation is in some sense an evil.[40] The
10.2 Early inuences
only apparent exception to this opposition to cooperation is the spontaneous association that may arise when
10.2.1 William Godwin
a society is threatened by violent force. One reason he
opposed cooperation is he believed it to interfere with
Main article: William Godwin
an individuals ability to be benevolent for the greater
William Godwin can be considered an individualist good. Godwin opposes the idea of government, but wrote
that a minimal state as a present necessary evil[43] that
would become increasingly irrelevant and powerless by
the gradual spread of knowledge.[4] He expressly opposed democracy, fearing oppression of the individual
by the majority, though he believed it to be preferable
to dictatorship.
Godwin supported individual ownership of property,
dening it as the empire to which every man is entitled over the produce of his own industry.[43] However, he also advocated that individuals give to each other
their surplus property on the occasion that others have a
need for it, without involving trade (e.g. gift economy).
Thus, while people have the right to private property,
they should give it away as enlightened altruists. This
was to be based on utilitarian principles; he said: Every man has a right to that, the exclusive possession of
which being awarded to him, a greater sum of benet or
pleasure will result than could have arisen from its being
otherwise appropriated.[43] However, benevolence was
not to be enforced, being a matter of free individual private judgement. He did not advocate a community of
goods or assert collective ownership as is embraced in
James Northcote, William Godwin, oil on canvas, 1802, the communism, but his belief that individuals ought to share
National Portrait Gallery, William Godwin, a radical liberal and with those in need was inuential on the later developutilitarian was one of the rst to espouse what became known as ment of anarchist communism.
individualist anarchism.
[36]

anarchist
and philosophical anarchist who was inuenced by the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment,[37] and
developed what many consider the rst expression of
modern anarchist thought.[4] Godwin was, according to
Peter Kropotkin, the rst to formulate the political and
economical conceptions of anarchism, even though he
did not give that name to the ideas developed in his
work.[38][39] Godwin advocated extreme individualism,
proposing that all cooperation in labor be eliminated.[40]
Godwin was a utilitarian who believed that all individuals

Godwins political views were diverse and do not perfectly agree with any of the ideologies that claim his inuence; writers of the Socialist Standard, organ of the
Socialist Party of Great Britain, consider Godwin both
an individualist and a communist;[44] anarcho-capitalist
Murray Rothbard did not regard Godwin as being in the
individualist camp at all, referring to him as the founder
of communist anarchism";[45] and historian Albert Weisbord considers him an individualist anarchist without
reservation.[46] Some writers see a conict between Godwins advocacy of private judgement and utilitarianism,

10.2. EARLY INFLUENCES

91

Title page from the third edition of Political Justice

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the rst self-identied anarchist.

as he says that ethics requires that individuals give their

surplus property to each other resulting in an egalitarian
society, but, at the same time, he insists that all things sider Proudhon to be an individualist anarchist,[49][50][51]
be left to individual choice.[4] Many of Godwins views while others regard him to be a social anarchist.[52][53]
changed over time, as noted by Kropotkin.
Some commentators do not identify Proudhon as an inWilliam Godwin's inuenced the socialism of Robert dividualist anarchist due to his preference for association
Owen and Charles Fourier. After success of his British in large industries, rather than individual control.[54] Nevventure, Owen himself established a cooperative com- ertheless, he was inuential among some of the Amermunity within the United States at New Harmony, In- ican individualists; in the 1840s and 1850s, Charles A.
diana during 1825. One member of this commune was Dana,[55] and William B. Greene introduced Proudhons
Josiah Warren (17981874), considered to be the rst in- works to the United States. Greene adapted Proudhons
dividualist anarchist. After New Harmony failed Warren mutualism to American conditions and introduced it to
shifted his ideological loyalties from socialism to anar- Benjamin R. Tucker.[56]
chism (which was no great leap, given that Owens social- Proudhon opposed government privilege that protects
ism had been predicated on Godwins anarchism).[47]
capitalist, banking and land interests, and the accumulation or acquisition of property (and any form of coercion
that led to it) which he believed hampers competition and
10.2.2 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
keeps wealth in the hands of the few. Proudhon favoured
a right of individuals to retain the product of their labour
Main article: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
as their own property, but believed that any property beyond that which an individual produced and could posPierre-Joseph Proudhon (18091865) was the rst sess was illegitimate. Thus, he saw private property as
philosopher to label himself an anarchist.[48] Some con- both essential to liberty and a road to tyranny, the former

92
when it resulted from labour and was required for labour
and the latter when it resulted in exploitation (prot, interest, rent, tax). He generally called the former possession and the latter property. For large-scale industry,
he supported workers associations to replace wage labour
and opposed the ownership of land.
Proudhon maintained that those who labour should retain
the entirety of what they produce, and that monopolies on
credit and land are the forces that prohibit such. He advocated an economic system that included private property
as possession and exchange market but without prot,
which he called mutualism. It is Proudhons philosophy
that was explicitly rejected by Joseph Dejacque in the inception of anarchist-communism, with the latter asserting
directly to Proudhon in a letter that it is not the product
of his or her labour that the worker has a right to, but
to the satisfaction of his or her needs, whatever may be
their nature. An individualist rather than anarchist communist,[49][50][51] Proudhon said that communism ... is
the very denial of society in its foundation ...[57] and famously declared that "property is theft!" in reference to
his rejection of ownership rights to land being granted to
a person who is not using that land.

CHAPTER 10. INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM

Mutualists oppose the idea of individuals receiving an income through loans, investments, and rent, as they believe these individuals are not labouring. Some of them
argue that if state intervention ceased, these types of incomes would disappear due to increased competition in
capital.[62] Though Proudhon opposed this type of income, he expressed: "... I never meant to ... forbid or
suppress, by sovereign decree, ground rent and interest
on capital. I believe that all these forms of human activity should remain free and optional for all.[63]

After Dejacque and others split from Proudhon due to

the latters support of individual property and an exchange economy, the relationship between the individualists, who continued in relative alignment with the philosophy of Proudhon, and the anarcho-communists was
characterised by various degrees of antagonism and harmony. For example, individualists like Tucker on the one
hand translated and reprinted the works of collectivists
like Mikhail Bakunin, while on the other hand rejected
the economic aspects of collectivism and communism as
incompatible with anarchist ideals.

Mutualism
Main article: Mutualism (economic theory)
Mutualism is an anarchist school of thought which can
be traced to the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who
envisioned a society where each person might possess a
means of production, either individually or collectively,
with trade representing equivalent amounts of labor in
the free market.[58] Integral to the scheme was the establishment of a mutual-credit bank which would lend to
producers at a minimal interest rate only high enough to
cover the costs of administration.[59] Mutualism is based
on a labor theory of value which holds that when labour or
its product is sold, in exchange, it ought to receive goods
or services embodying the amount of labor necessary to
produce an article of exactly similar and equal utility.[60]
Some mutualists believe that if the state did not intervene, as a result of increased competition in the marketplace, individuals would receive no more income than
that in proportion to the amount of labor they exert.[61]

What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right

and of Government by Pierre Joseph Proudhon by Pierre Joseph
Proudhon

Insofar as they ensure the workers right to the full product of their labor, mutualists support markets and private
property in the product of labor. However, they argue
for conditional titles to land, whose private ownership
is legitimate only so long as it remains in use or occupation (which Proudhon called possession.)[64] Proudhons Mutualism supports labor-owned cooperative rms
and associations[65] for we need not hesitate, for we have
no choice. . . it is necessary to form an ASSOCIATION
among workers . . . because without that, they would
remain related as subordinates and superiors, and there
would ensue two . . . castes of masters and wage-workers,
which is repugnant to a free and democratic society and
so it becomes necessary for the workers to form themselves into democratic societies, with equal conditions for

10.2. EARLY INFLUENCES

all members, on pain of a relapse into feudalism.[66]
As for capital goods (man-made, non-land, "means of
production"), mutualist opinion diers on whether these
should be commonly managed public assets or private
property.
Mutualists, following Proudhon, originally considered
themselves to be libertarian socialists. However, some
mutualists have abandoned the labor theory of value, and
prefer to avoid the term socialist. But they still retain
some cultural attitudes, for the most part, that set them
o from the libertarian right.[67] Mutualists have distinguished themselves from state socialism, and don't advocate social control over the means of production. Benjamin Tucker said of Proudhon, that though opposed
to socializing the ownership of capital, Proudhon aimed
nevertheless to socialize its eects by making its use benecial to all instead of a means of impoverishing the many
to enrich the few ... by subjecting capital to the natural
law of competition, thus bringing the price of its own use
down to cost.[68]

93
also known as The Ego and His Own (Der Einzige und
sein Eigentum in German, which translates literally as The
Only One and his Property). This work was rst published
in 1844 in Leipzig, and has since appeared in numerous
editions and translations.
Egoism
Main articles: Egoist anarchism and Philosophy of Max
Stirner
See also: Ethical egoism and Moral nihilism

Max Stirner's philosophy, sometimes called egoism, is

a form of individualist anarchism.[69] Max Stirner was
a Hegelian philosopher whose name appears with familiar regularity in historically oriented surveys of anarchist thought as one of the earliest and best-known
exponents of individualist anarchism.[8] In 1844, his
The Ego and Its Own (Der Einzige and sein Eigentum
which may literally be translated as The Unique Individual and His Property)[70] was published, which is considered to be a founding text in the tradition of individualist
10.2.3 Max Stirner
anarchism.[8] Stirner does not recommend that the individual try to eliminate the state but simply that they disMain article: Max Stirner
regard the state when it conicts with ones autonomous
Johann Kaspar Schmidt (October 25, 1806 June 26,
choices and go along with it when doing so is conducive to
ones interests.[71] He says that the egoist rejects pursuit
of devotion to a great idea, a good cause, a doctirine,
a system, a lofty calling, saying that the egoist has no
political calling but rather lives themselves out without
regard to how well or ill humanity may fare thereby.[72]
Stirner held that the only limitation on the rights of the
individual is that individuals power to obtain what he
desires.[73] He proposes that most commonly accepted social institutionsincluding the notion of State, property
as a right, natural rights in general, and the very notion of
societywere mere spooks in the mind. Stirner wants to
abolish not only the state but also society as an institution
responsible for its members.[74] Stirner advocated selfassertion and foresaw Unions of Egoists, non-systematic
associations, which Stirner proposed in as a form of organization in place of the state.[75] A Union is understood
as a relation between egoists which is continually renewed
by all parties support through an act of will.[36][76] Even
murder is permissible if it is right for me,[77] though
it is claimed by egoist anarchists that egoism will foster
genuine and spontaneous union between individuals.[78]
Max Stirner. Portrait by Friedrich Engels.

1856), better known as Max Stirner (the nom de plume

he adopted from a schoolyard nickname he had acquired as a child because of his high brow, in German
'Stirn'), was a German philosopher, who ranks as one
of the literary fathers of nihilism, existentialism, postmodernism and anarchism, especially of individualist anarchism. Stirners main work is The Ego and Its Own,

For Stirner, property simply comes about through might:

Whoever knows how to take, to defend, the thing, to
him belongs property. And, What I have in my power,
that is my own. So long as I assert myself as holder, I
am the proprietor of the thing. He says, I do not step
shyly back from your property, but look upon it always
as my property, in which I respect nothing. Pray do the
like with what you call my property!".[79] His concept of
egoistic property not only a lack of moral restraint on
how one obtains and uses things, but includes other people

94

CHAPTER 10. INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM

as well.[80] His embrace of egoism is in stark contrast to communist egoism, which is said to be a synthesis
Godwins altruism. Stirner was opposed to communism, of individualism and collectivism, and says that greed
seeing it as a form of authority over the individual.
in its fullest sense is the only possible basis of commu[85]
Forms of libertarian communism such
This position on property is much dierent from the na- nist society.
as
Situationism
are
inuenced by Stirner.[86] Anarchotive American, natural law, form of individualist anarchism, which defends the inviolability of the private prop- communist Emma Goldman was inuenced by both
erty that has been earned through labor[81] and trade. Stirner and Peter Kropotkin and blended their philosoin books of hers such
However, in 1886 Benjamin Tucker rejected the natu- phies together in her own, as shown
as Anarchism And Other Essays.[87]
ral rights philosophy and adopted Stirners egoism, with
several others joining with him. This split the American
individualists into erce debate, with the natural rights
10.2.4 Early American individualist anarproponents accusing the egoists of destroying libertarichism
[82]
anism itself. Other egoists include James L. Walker,
Sidney Parker, Dora Marsden and John Beverly RobinJosiah Warren
son.
Main article: Josiah Warren
Josiah Warren is widely regarded as the rst American

The Ego and Its Own by Max Stirner

In Russia, individualist anarchism inspired by Stirner

combined with an appreciation for Friedrich Nietzsche
attracted a small following of bohemian artists and intellectuals such as Lev Chernyi, as well as a few lone wolves
who found self-expression in crime and violence.[83] They
rejected organizing, believing that only unorganized individuals were safe from coercion and domination, believing this kept them true to the ideals of anarchism.[84] This
type of individualist anarchism inspired anarcha-feminist
Emma Goldman[83]
Though Stirners philosophy is individualist, it has inuenced some libertarian communists and anarchocommunists. For Ourselves Council for Generalized
Self-Management discusses Stirner and speaks of a

Josiah Warren

anarchist,[88] and the four-page weekly paper he edited

during 1833, The Peaceful Revolutionist, was the rst anarchist periodical published,[89] an enterprise for which
he built his own printing press, cast his own type, and
made his own printing plates.[89]
Warren was a follower of Robert Owen and joined
Owens community at New Harmony, Indiana. Josiah
Warren termed the phrase "Cost the limit of price, with
cost here referring not to monetary price paid but the
labor one exerted to produce an item.[90] Therefore, "[h]e
proposed a system to pay people with certicates indicat-

10.3. DEVELOPMENTS AND EXPANSION

ing how many hours of work they did. They could exchange the notes at local time stores for goods that took
the same amount of time to produce..[88] He put his theories to the test by establishing an experimental labor
for labor store called the Cincinnati Time Store where
trade was facilitated by notes backed by a promise to perform labor. The store proved successful and operated for
three years after which it was closed so that Warren could
pursue establishing colonies based on mutualism. These
included "Utopia" and "Modern Times. Warren said that
Stephen Pearl Andrews' The Science of Society, published
in 1852, was the most lucid and complete exposition of
Warrens own theories.[91] Catalan historian Xavier Diez
report that the intentional communal experiments pioneered by Warren were inuential in European individualist anarchists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries
such as mile Armand and the intentional communities
started by them.[31]

95
green anarchism but with an emphasis on the individual
experience of the natural world inuencing later naturist
currents,[5] simple living as a rejection of a materialist
lifestyle[5] and self-suciency were Thoreaus goals, and
the whole project was inspired by transcendentalist philosophy. Many have seen in Thoreau one of the precursors of ecologism and anarcho-primitivism represented
today in John Zerzan. For George Woodcock this attitude can be also motivated by certain idea of resistance
to progress and of rejection of the growing materialism
which is the nature of American society in the mid 19th
century.[30]

The essay Civil Disobedience (Resistance to Civil Government) was rst published in 1849. It argues that people should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that people have a duty to
avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. Thoreau
was motivated in part by his disgust with slavery and
the Mexican-American War. The essay later inuenced
Henry David Thoreau
Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Martin Buber and Leo Tolstoy through its advocacy of nonviolent
Main article: Henry David Thoreau
resistance.[92] It is also the main precedent for anarchoHenry David Thoreau (18171862) was an important
pacism.[92] The American version of individualist anarchism has a strong emphasis on the non-aggression principle and individual sovereignty.[93] Some individualist
anarchists, such as Thoreau,[94][95] do not speak of economics but simply the right of disunion from the state,
and foresee the gradual elimination of the state through
social evolution.

10.3 Developments and expansion

10.3.1 Free Love, anarcha-feminism and
LGBT issues
Main articles: Anarchism and issues related to love and
sex, Anarcha-feminism and Queer anarchism
An important current within individualist anarchism is

Henry David Thoreau

early inuence in individualist anarchist thought in the

United States and Europe. Thoreau was an American author, poet, naturalist, tax resister, development
critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher, and leading
transcendentalist. He is best known for his book Walden,
a reection upon simple living in natural surroundings,
and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition
to an unjust state. His thought is an early inuence on

Lucifer the Lightbearer, an inuential American free love journal

free love.[28] Free love advocates sometimes traced their

roots back to Josiah Warren and to experimental communities, and viewed sexual freedom as a clear, direct expression of an individuals self-ownership. Free love particularly stressed womens rights since most sexual laws,

96
such as those governing marriage and use of birth control, discriminated against women.[28] The most important American free love journal was Lucifer the Lightbearer (18831907) edited by Moses Harman and Lois
Waisbrooker[96] but also there existed Ezra Heywood
and Angela Heywoods The Word (18721890, 1892
1893).[28] Also M. E. Lazarus was an important American individualist anarchist who promoted free love.[28]
Later John William Lloyd, a collaborator of Benjamin
Tuckers periodical Liberty, published in 1931 a sex manual that he called The Karezza Method: Or Magnetation,
the Art of Connubial Love.[97]
In Europe, the main propagandist of free love within individualist anarchism was mile Armand.[98] He proposed
the concept of la camaraderie amoureuse to speak of free
love as the possibility of voluntary sexual encounter between consenting adults. He was also a consistent proponent of polyamory.[98] In France, there was also feminist
activity inside individualist anarchism as promoted by
individualist feminists Marie Kge, Anna Mah, Rirette
Maitrejean, and Sophia Zakovska.[99]

CHAPTER 10. INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM

Spanish individualist anarchist circles. Anticlericalism,
just as in the rest of the libertarian movement, is another
of the frequent elements which will gain relevance related to the measure in which the (French) Republic begins to have conicts with the church ... Anti-clerical discourse, frequently called for by the french individualist
Andr Lorulot, will have its impacts in Estudios (a Spanish individualist anarchist publication). There will be an
attack on institutionalized religion for the responsibility
that it had in the past on negative developments, for its irrationality which makes it a counterpoint of philosophical
and scientic progress. There will be a criticism of proselitism and ideological manipulation which happens on
both believers and agnostics..[103] This tendencies will
continue in French individualist anarchism in the work
and activism of Charles-Auguste Bontemps and others.
In the Spanish individualist anarchist magazine tica and
Iniciales there is a strong interest in publishing scientic
news, usually linked to a certain atheist and anti-theist obsession, philosophy which will also work for pointing out
the incompatibility between science and religion, faith
and reason. In this way there will be a lot of talk on Darwins theories or on the negation of the existence of the
soul..[104]

The Brazilian individualist anarchist Maria Lacerda de

Moura lectured on topics such as education, womens
rights, free love, and antimilitarism. Her writings and essays garnered her attention not only in Brazil, but also in
Argentina and Uruguay.[100] She also wrote for the Span- 10.3.3 Anarcho-naturism
ish individualist anarchist magazine Al Margen alongside
Miguel Gimenez Igualada[101]
Main articles: Naturism and anarcho-naturism
In Germany, the Stirnerists Adolf Brand and John Henry Another important current, especially within French
[30][105]
individualist anarchist groups was
Mackay were pioneering campaigners for the acceptance and Spanish
[106]
naturism.
Naturism promoted an ecological worldof male bisexuality and homosexuality.
view, small ecovillages, and most prominently nudism as
a way to avoid the articiality of the industrial mass society of modernity. Naturist individualist anarchists saw
10.3.2 Freethought
the individual in his biological, physical and psychological aspects and avoided, and tried to eliminate, social
Main article: Freethought
determinations.[30] An early inuence in this vein was
Henry David Thoreau and his famous book Walden[107]
Freethought as a philosophical position and as activism
Important promoters of this were Henri Zisly and Emile
was important in both North American and European in- Gravelle who collaborated in La Nouvelle Humanit foldividualist anarchism.
lowed by Le Naturien, Le Sauvage, L'Ordre Naturel, & La
In the United States, freethought was a basically anti- Vie Naturelle.[108][109]
Christian, anti-clerical movement, whose purpose was This relationship between anarchism and naturism was
to make the individual politically and spiritually free to quite important at the end of the 1920s in Spain.[110] The
decide for himself on religious matters. A number of linking role played by the Sol y Vida group was very imcontributors to Liberty were prominent gures in both portant. The goal of this group was to take trips and enfreethought and anarchism. The individualist anarchist joy the open air. The Naturist athenaeum, Eclctico, in
George MacDonald was a co-editor of Freethought and, Barcelona, was the base from which the activities of the
for a time, The Truth Seeker. E.C. Walker was co-editor group were launched. First Etica and then Iniciales, which
of the excellent free-thought / free love journal Lucifer, began in 1929, were the publications of the group, which
the Light-Bearer".[102] Many of the anarchists were ar- lasted until the Spanish Civil War. We must be aware
dent freethinkers; reprints from freethought papers such that the naturist ideas expressed in them matched the deas Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, Freethought and The Truth sires that the libertarian youth had of breaking up with the
Seeker appeared in Liberty ... The church was viewed as conventions of the bourgeoisie of the time. That is what a
a common ally of the state and as a repressive force in and young worker explained in a letter to Iniciales He writes
of itself.[102]
it under the odd pseudonym of silvestre del campo, (wild
In Europe a similar development occurred in French and man in the country). I nd great pleasure in being naked

10.3. DEVELOPMENTS AND EXPANSION

97

10.3.4 Individualist
anarchism
Friedrich Nietzsche

and

See also: Anarchism and Friedrich Nietzsche Individualist anarchism

The thought of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
has been inuential in individualist anarchism, specically in thinkers such as Frances mile Armand,[111] the
Italian Renzo Novatore,[112] and the Colombian Biolo
Panclasta. Robert C. Holub, author of Nietzsche: Socialist, Anarchist, Feminist posits that translations of Nietzsches writings in the United States very likely appeared
rst in Liberty, the anarchist journal edited by Benjamin
Tucker[113] ".

10.3.5 Anglo American individualist anarchism

See also: Anarchism in the United States and
Individualist anarchism in the United States

American mutualism and individualist utopianism

Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Inuential early eco-anarchist

work

in the woods, bathed in light and air, two natural elements

we cannot do without. By shunning the humble garment
of an exploited person, (garments which, in my opinion,
are the result of all the laws devised to make our lives bitter), we feel there no others left but just the natural laws.
Clothes mean slavery for some and tyranny for others.
Only the naked man who rebels against all norms, stands
for anarchism, devoid of the prejudices of outt imposed
by our money-oriented society..[110] The relation between Anarchism and Naturism gives way to the Naturist
Federation, in July 1928, and to the lV Spanish Naturist Congress, in September 1929, both supported by the
Libertarian Movement. However, in the short term, the
Naturist and Libertarian movements grew apart in their
conceptions of everyday life. The Naturist movement felt
closer to the Libertarian individualism of some French
theoreticians such as Henri Ner (real name of Han Ryner)
than to the revolutionary goals proposed by some Anarchist organisations such as the FAI, (Federacin Anarquista Ibrica)".[110]

Stephen Pearl Andrews

For American anarchist historian Eunice Minette Schuster It is apparent ... that Proudhonian Anarchism was
to be found in the United States at least as early as
1848 and that it was not conscious of its anity to the
Individualist Anarchism of Josiah Warren and Stephen

98

CHAPTER 10. INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM

Pearl Andrews ... William B. Greene presented this

Proudhonian Mutualism in its purest and most systematic
form..[114] William Batchelder Greene (18191878) is
best known for the works Mutual Banking(1850), which
proposed an interest-free banking system, and Transcendentalism, a critique of the New England philosophical
school. He saw mutualism as the synthesis of liberty
and order.[114] His associationism ... is checked by individualism ... Mind your own business, Judge not
that ye be not judged. Over matters which are purely
personal, as for example, moral conduct, the individual is sovereign, as well as over that which he himself
produces. For this reason he demands mutuality in
marriagethe equal right of a woman to her own personal freedom and property[114] and feminist and spiritualist tendencies.[115]
Contemporary American anarchist Hakim Bey reports
that "Steven Pearl Andrews ... was not a fourierist (see
Charles Fourier), but he lived through the brief craze for
phalansteries in America & adopted a lot of fourierist
principles & practices ... a maker of worlds out of words.
He syncretized Abolitionism, Free Love, spiritual universalism, (Josiah) Warren, & (Charles) Fourier into a grand
utopian scheme he called the Universal Pantarchy ... He
was instrumental in founding several intentional communities, including the Brownstone Utopia on 14th St.
in New York, & Modern Times in Brentwood, Long
Island. The latter became as famous as the best-known
fourierist communes (Brook Farm in Massachusetts &
the North American Phalanx in New Jersey) in fact,
Modern Times became downright notorious (for Free
Love) & nally foundered under a wave of scandalous
publicity. Andrews (& Victoria Woodhull) were members of the infamous Section 12 of the 1st International,
expelled by Marx for its anarchist, feminist, & spiritualist
tendencies. "[115]
The Boston Anarchists
Another form of individualist anarchism was found
in the United States, as advocated by the Boston
anarchists.[83] By default, American individualists had
no diculty accepting the concepts that one man employ another or that he direct him, in his labor but
rather demanded that all natural opportunities requisite
to the production of wealth be accessible to all on equal
terms and that monopolies arising from special privileges
created by law be abolished.[116]
They believed state monopoly capitalism (dened as a
state-sponsored monopoly)[117] prevented labor from being fully rewarded. Voltairine de Cleyre, summed up
the philosophy by saying that the anarchist individualists
are rm in the idea that the system of employer and employed, buying and selling, banking, and all the other essential institutions of Commercialism, centred upon private property, are in themselves good, and are rendered
vicious merely by the interference of the State.[118]

Lysander Spooner

Even among the 19th-century American individualists, there was not a monolithic doctrine, as they disagreed amongst each other on various issues including
intellectual property rights and possession versus property
in land.[119][120][121] A major schism occurred later in the
19th century when Tucker and some others abandoned
their traditional support of natural rightsas espoused
by Lysander Spooner- and converted to an egoism modeled upon Stirners philosophy.[120] Lysander Spooner besides his individualist anarchist activism was also an important anti-slavery activist and became a member of the
First International.[122]
Some Boston anarchists, including Benjamin Tucker,
identied themselves as "socialists", which in the 19th
century was often used in the sense of a commitment to
improving conditions of the working class (i.e. "the labor
problem").[123] By around the start of the 20th century,
the heyday of individualist anarchism had passed,[124]

American individualist anarchism and the labor

movement
George Woodcock reports that the American individualist anarchists Lysander Spooner and William B. Greene
had been members of the socialist First International[125]
Two individualist anarchists who wrote in Benjamin
Tuckers Liberty were also important labor organizers of
the time. Joseph Labadie (April 18, 1850 October

10.3. DEVELOPMENTS AND EXPANSION

99
Lum strongly in his individualist tendency.[130] He developed a "mutualist" theory of unions and as such was
active within the Knights of Labor and later promoted
anti-political strategies in the American Federation of Labor.[130] Frustration with abolitionism, spiritualism, and
labor reform caused Lum to embrace anarchism and radicalize workers,[130] as he came to believe that revolution
would inevitably involve a violent struggle between the
working class and the employing class. Convinced of
the necessity of violence to enact social change he volunteered to ght in the American Civil War, hoping thereby
to bring about the end of slavery.[131] Kevin Carson has
praised Lums fusion of individualist laissez-faire economics with radical labor activism as creative and described him as more signicant than any in the Boston
group.[130]
American egoism

Dyer Lum

7, 1933) was an American labor organizer, individualist anarchist, social activist, printer, publisher, essayist,
and poet. In 1883 Labadie embraced a non-violent version of individualist anarchism. Without the oppression
of the state, Labadie believed, humans would choose to
harmonize with the great natural laws ... without robbing
[their] fellows through interest, prot, rent and taxes.
However, he supported community cooperation, as he
supported community control of water utilities, streets,
and railroads.[126] Although he did not support the militant anarchism of the Haymarket anarchists, he fought for
the clemency of the accused because he did not believe
they were the perpetrators. In 1888, Labadie organized
the Michigan Federation of Labor, became its rst president, and forged an alliance with Samuel Gompers.
A colleague of Labadies at Liberty, Dyer Lum was
another important individualist anarchist labor activist
and poet of the era.[127] A leading anarcho-syndicalist
and a prominent left-wing intellectual of the 1880s,[128]
he is remembered as the lover and mentor of early
anarcha-feminist Voltairine de Cleyre.[129] Lum was a
prolic writer who wrote a number of key anarchist
texts, and contributed to publications including Mother
Earth, Twentieth Century, and, The Alarm (the journal
of the International Working Peoples Association) and
The Open Court among others. Lums political philosophy was a fusion of individualist anarchist economics
"a radicalized form of laissez-faire economics inspired
by the Boston anarchistswith radical labor organization
similar to that of the Chicago anarchists of the time.[130]
Herbert Spencer and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon inuenced

Benjamin Tucker

Some of the American individualist anarchists later in

this era, such as Benjamin Tucker, abandoned natural
rights positions and converted to Max Stirner's Egoist anarchism. Rejecting the idea of moral rights, Tucker said
that there were only two rights, the right of might and
the right of contract. He also said, after converting to
Egoist individualism, In times past ... it was my habit
to talk glibly of the right of man to land. It was a bad
habit, and I long ago sloughed it o ... Mans only right to
land is his might over it.[132] In adopting Stirnerite egoism (1886), Tucker rejected natural rights which had long
been considered the foundation of libertarianism. This

100
rejection galvanized the movement into erce debates,
with the natural rights proponents accusing the egoists of
destroying libertarianism itself. So bitter was the conict
that a number of natural rights proponents withdrew from
the pages of Liberty in protest even though they had hitherto been among its frequent contributors. Thereafter,
Liberty championed egoism although its general content
did not change signicantly.[133]
Several periodicals were undoubtedly inuenced by Liberty's presentation of egoism. They included: I published
by C.L. Swartz, edited by W.E. Gordak and J.W. Lloyd
(all associates of Liberty); The Ego and The Egoist, both
of which were edited by Edward H. Fulton. Among the
egoist papers that Tucker followed were the German Der
Eigene, edited by Adolf Brand, and The Eagle and The
Serpent, issued from London. The latter, the most prominent English-language egoist journal, was published from
1898 to 1900 with the subtitle 'A Journal of Egoistic Philosophy and Sociology'".[134]
American anarchists who adhered to egoism include
Benjamin Tucker, John Beverley Robinson, Steven T.
Byington, Hutchins Hapgood, James L. Walker and
Victor Yarros and E.H. Fulton.[134] John Beverley Robinson wrote an essay called Egoism in which he states
that Modern egoism, as propounded by Stirner and
Nietzsche, and expounded by Ibsen, Shaw and others, is
all these; but it is more. It is the realization by the individual that they are an individual; that, as far as they
are concerned, they are the only individual.[135] James
L. Walker published the work The Philosophy of Egoism in which he argued that egosim implies a rethinking
of the self-other relationship, nothing less than a complete revolution in the relations of mankind that avoids
both the archist principle that legitimates domination
and the moralist notion that elevates self-renunciation
to a virtue. Walker describes himself a s an egoistic anarchist who believed in both contract and cooperation as
practical principles to guide everyday interactions.[136]
For Walker what really denes egoism is not mere selfinterest, pleasure, or greed; it is the sovereignty of the
individual, the full expression of the subjectivity of the
individual ego.[137]
Italian anti-organizationalist individualist anarchism was
brought to the United States[138] by Italian born individualists such as Giuseppe Ciancabilla and others who advocated for violent propaganda by the deed there. Anarchist historian George Woodcock reports the incident in
which the important Italian social anarchist Errico Malatesta became involved in a dispute with the individualist
anarchists of Paterson, who insisted that anarchism implied no organization at all, and that every man must act
solely on his impulses. At last, in one noisy debate, the individual impulse of a certain Ciancabilla directed him to
shoot Malatesta, who was badly wounded but obstinately
refused to name his assailant.[139]
Enrico Arrigoni (pseudonym: Frank Brand) was an

CHAPTER 10. INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM

Italian American individualist anarchist Lathe operator,
house painter, bricklayer, dramatist and political activist
inuenced by the work of Max Stirner.[140][141] He took
the pseudonym Brand from a ctional character in
one of Henrik Ibsens plays.[141] In the 1910s he started
becoming involved in anarchist and anti-war activism
around Milan.[141] From the 1910s until the 1920s he participated in anarchist activities and popular uprisings in
various countries including Switzerland, Germany, Hungary, Argentina and Cuba.[141] He lived from the 1920s
onwards in New York City and there he edited the individualist anarchist eclectic journal Eresia in 1928. He
also wrote for other American anarchist publications such
as L' Adunata dei refrattari, Cultura Obrera, Controcorrente and Intessa Libertaria.[141] During the Spanish
Civil War, he went to ght with the anarchists but was
imprisoned and was helped on his release by Emma
Goldman.[140][141] Afterwards Arrigoni became a longtime member of the Libertarian Book Club in New York
City.[141] His written works include The totalitarian nightmare (1975), The lunacy of the Superman (1977), Adventures in the country of the monoliths (1981) and Freedom:
my dream (1986).[141]
Anarcho-capitalism
Main article: Anarcho-capitalism
19th century individualist anarchists espoused the labor
theory of value. Some believe that the modern movement
of anarcho-capitalism is the result of simply removing
the labor theory of value from ideas of the 19th-century
American individualist anarchists: Their successors today, such as Murray Rothbard, having abandoned the
labor theory of value, describe themselves as anarchocapitalists.[142] As economic theory changed, the popularity of the labor theory of classical economics was superseded by the subjective theory of value of neo-classical
economics. Murray Rothbard, a student of Ludwig von
Mises, combined the Austrian school economics of his
teacher with the absolutist views of human rights and rejection of the state he had absorbed from studying the individualist American anarchists of the 19th century such
as Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker.[143] In the
mid-1950s Rothbard wrote an article under a pseudonym,
saying that we are not anarchists ... but not archists either ... Perhaps, then, we could call ourselves by a new
name: nonarchist, concerned with dierentiating himself from communist and socialistic economic views of
other anarchists (including the individualist anarchists of
the 19th century).[144]
There is a strong current within anarchism which does
not consider that anarcho-capitalism can be considered a
part of the anarchist movement due to the fact that anarchism has historically been an anti-capitalist movement
and for denitional reasons which see anarchism incompatible with capitalist forms.[145][146][147][148][149][150]

10.3. DEVELOPMENTS AND EXPANSION

Agorism

Main article: Agorism

Agorism was developed from anarcho-capitalism in the

late 20th-century by Samuel Edward Konkin III (a.k.a.
SEK3). The goal of agorists is a society in which all
"relations between people are voluntary exchangesa
free market.[151] Agorists are market anarchists. Most
Agorists consider that property rights are natural rights
deriving from the primary right of self-ownership. Because of this they are not opposed in principle to collectively held property if individual owners of the property
consent to collective ownership by contract or other voluntary mutual agreement. However, Agorists are divided
on the question of intellectual property rights.[]
Though anarcho-capitalism has been regarded as a form
of individualist anarchism,[152][153] some writers deny
that it is a form of anarchism,[154] or that capitalism itself is compatible with anarchism.[155]
Left-wing market anarchism
Main article: Left-wing market anarchism
Left-wing market anarchism, a form of leftlibertarianism and individualist anarchism[156] is
associated with scholars such as Kevin Carson,[157][158]
Roderick T. Long,[159][160] Charles Johnson,[161] Brad
Spangler,[162] Samuel Edward Konkin III,[163] Sheldon
Richman,[164][165][166] Chris Matthew Sciabarra,[167] and
Gary Chartier,[168] who stress the value of radically free
markets, termed freed markets to distinguish them from
the common conception which these libertarians believe
to be riddled with statist and capitalist privileges.[169]
Referred to as left-wing market anarchists[170] or
market-oriented left-libertarians,[166] proponents of this
approach strongly arm the classical liberal ideas of
self-ownership and free markets, while maintaining
that, taken to their logical conclusions, these ideas
support anti-capitalist,[171][172][173] anti-corporatist,
anti-hierarchical, pro-labor positions in economics;
anti-imperialism in foreign policy; and thoroughly liberal
or radical views regarding such cultural issues as gender,
sexuality, and race.

101
ory, which stress both individual freedom and social justice. Unlike right-libertarians, they believe that neither
claiming nor mixing ones labor with natural resources
is enough to generate full private property rights,[177][178]
and maintain that natural resources (land, oil, gold, trees)
ought to be held in some egalitarian manner, either unowned or owned collectively.[178] Those left-libertarians
who support private property do so under the condition
that recompense is oered to the local community. Gary
Chartier has joined Kevin Carson, Charles Johnson, and
others (echoing the language of Benjamin Tucker and
Thomas Hodgskin) in maintaining that, because of its
heritage and its emancipatory goals and potential, radical market anarchism should be seenby its proponents and by othersas part of the socialist tradition,
and that market anarchists can and should call themselves
socialists.[179]
Post-left anarchy and insurrectionary anarchism
Main articles: Lifestyle anarchism, Post-left anarchy and
Insurrectionary anarchism
Murray Bookchin has identied post-left anarchy as

Hakim Bey

a form of individualist anarchism in Social Anarchism

or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm where
he identies a shift among Euro-American anarchists
away from social anarchism and toward individualist or
lifestyle anarchism. Indeed, lifestyle anarchism today is
nding its principal expression in spray-can grati, postmodernist nihilism, antirationalism, neo-primitivism,
anti-technologism, neo-Situationist 'cultural terrorism',
mysticism, and a 'practice' of staging Foucauldian 'personal insurrections.[180] Post-left anarchist Bob Black in
his long critique of Bookchins philosophy called Anarchy after leftism said about post-left anarchy that It is,
unlike Bookchinism, individualistic in the sense that if
the freedom and happiness of the individuali.e., each
and every really existing person, every Tom, Dick and
Murrayis not the measure of the good society, what
is?".[181]

The genealogy of contemporary market-oriented leftlibertarianismsometimes labeled left-wing market

anarchism[174] 'overlaps to a signicant degree with
that of SteinerVallentyne left-libertarianism as the roots
of that tradition are sketched in the book The Origins of Left-Libertarianism.[175] CarsonLong-style leftlibertarianism is rooted in nineteenth-century mutualism
and in the work of gures such as Thomas Hodgskin
and the individualist anarchists Benjamin Tucker and
Lysander Spooner. Left wing market anarchism identies
with Left-libertarianism (or left-wing libertarianism)[176]
which names several related but distinct approaches to A strong relationship does exist between post-left anpolitics, society, culture, and political and social the- archism and the work of individualist anarchist Max

102

CHAPTER 10. INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM

Stirner. Jason McQuinn says that when I (and other anti- 10.3.6 European individualist anarchism
ideological anarchists) criticize ideology, it is always from
a specically critical, anarchist perspective rooted in both Main article: European individualist anarchism
the skeptical, individualist-anarchist philosophy of Max European individualist anarchism proceeded from the
Stirner.[182] Also Bob Black and Feral Faun/Wol Landstreicher strongly adhere to stirnerist egoist anarchism.
Bob Black has humorously suggested the idea of marxist
stirnerism.[183]
Hakim Bey has said From Stirners "Union of SelfOwning Ones" we proceed to Nietzsche's circle of Free
Spirits and thence to Charles Fourier's Passional Series, doubling and redoubling ourselves even as the Other
multiplies itself in the eros of the group.[184] Bey also
wrote that The Mackay Society, of which Mark & I
are active members, is devoted to the anarchism of Max
Stirner, Benj. Tucker & John Henry Mackay ... The
Mackay Society, incidentally, represents a little-known
current of individualist thought which never cut its ties
with revolutionary labor. Dyer Lum, Ezra & Angela Haywood represent this school of thought; Jo Labadie, who
wrote for Tuckers Liberty, made himself a link between
the American plumb-line anarchists, the philosophical individualists, & the syndicalist or communist branch
of the movement; his inuence reached the Mackay Society through his son, Laurance. Like the Italian Stirnerites (who inuenced us through our late friend Enrico Arrigoni) we support all anti-authoritarian currents, despite
their apparent contradictions.[185]
As far as posterior individualist anarchists, Jason McQuinn for some time used the pseudonym Lev Chernyi in
honor of the Russian individualist anarchist of the same
name while Feral Faun has quoted Italian individualist
anarchist Renzo Novatore[186] and has translated both
Novatore.[187] and the young Italian individualist anarchist Bruno Filippi[188]
Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist economist and
author of Studies in Mutualist Political Economy.[189] Another important current mutualist is Joe Peacott. Contemporary mutualists are among those involved in the
Alliance of the Libertarian Left and in the Voluntary Cooperation Movement. A recent mutualist collective was
the Boston Anarchist Drinking Brigade.[190]
Egoism has had a strong inuence on insurrectionary anarchism, as can be seen in the work of Wol Landstreicher. Feral Faun wrote in 1995 that:
In the game of insurgencea lived guerilla
war gameit is strategically necessary to use
identities and roles. Unfortunately, the context of social relationships gives these roles
and identities the power to dene the individual who attempts to use them. So I, Feral
Faun, became ... an anarchist ... a writer
... a Stirner-inuenced, post-situationist, anticivilization theorist ... if not in my own eyes,
at least in the eyes of most people who've read
my writings.[191]

mile Armand

roots laid by William Godwin,[36] Pierre Joseph Proudhon and Max Stirner. Proudhon was an early pioneer of
anarchism as well as of the important individualist anarchist current of mutualism.[49][50] Stirner became a central gure of individualist anarchism through the publication of his seminal work The Ego and Its Own which is
considered to be a founding text in the tradition of indi-

10.3. DEVELOPMENTS AND EXPANSION

vidualist anarchism.[8] Another early gure was Anselme
Bellegarrigue.[192] IA expanded and diversied through
Europe, incorporating inuences from North American
individualist anarchism.
European individualist anarchists include Albert Libertad, Bellegarrigue, Oscar Wilde, mile Armand,
Lev Chernyi, John Henry Mackay, Han Ryner, Adolf
Brand, Miguel Gimenez Igualada, Renzo Novatore,
and currently Michel Onfray.[193] Important currents
within it include free love,[194] anarcho-naturism,[194] and
illegalism.[195]

103
Deherme.[197]
Later, this tradition continued with such intellectuals as
Albert Libertad, Andr Lorulot, mile Armand, Victor
Serge, Zo d'Axa and Rirette Maitrejean, who developed theory in the main individualist anarchist journal
in France, L'Anarchie[198] in 1905. Outside this journal, Han Ryner wrote Petit Manuel individualiste (1903).
Later appeared the journal L'EnDehors created by Zo
d'Axa in 1891.

France
Main article: Individualist anarchism in France
From the legacy of Proudhon and Stirner there emerged

Zo d'Axa

Han Ryner

a strong tradition of French individualist anarchism. An

early important individualist anarchist was Anselme Bellegarrigue. He participated in the French Revolution of
1848, was author and editor of 'Anarchie, Journal de
l'Ordre and Au fait ! Au fait ! Interprtation de l'ide
dmocratique' and wrote the important early Anarchist
Manifesto in 1850. Catalan historian of individualist anarchism Xavier Diez reports that during his travels in the United States he at least contacted (Henry
David) Thoreau and, probably (Josiah) Warren.[196] Autonomie Individuelle was an individualist anarchist publication that ran from 1887 to 1888. It was edited by
Jean-Baptiste Louiche, Charles Scher and Georges

French individualist anarchists exposed a diversity of positions (per example, about violence and non-violence).
For example, mile Armand rejected violence and embraced mutualism while becoming an important propagandist for free love, while Albert Libertad and Zo
d'Axa were inuential in violentists circles and championed violent propaganda by the deed while adhering
to communitarianism or anarcho-communism [199] and
rejecting work. Han Ryner on the other side conciled anarchism with stoicism. Nevertheless French individualist circles had a strong sense of personal libertarianism
and experimentation. Naturism and free love contents
started to have a strong inuence in individualist anarchist circles and from there it expanded to the rest of anarchism also appearing in Spanish individualist anarchist
groups.[29] Along with feverish activity against the social order, (Albert) Libertad was usually also organizing
feasts, dances and country excursions, in consequence of
his vision of anarchism as the joy of living and not as
militant sacrice and death instinct, seeking to reconcile
the requirements of the individual (in his need for autonomy) with the need to destroy authoritarian society.[200]

104
Anarchist naturism was promoted by Henri Zisly, Emile
Gravelle [108] and Georges Butaud. Butaud was an individualist partisan of the milieux libres, publisher of
Flambeau (an enemy of authority) in 1901 in Vienna.
Most of his energies were devoted to creating anarchist
colonies (communauts exprimentales) in which he participated in several.[201]
In this sense, the theoretical positions and the vital experiences of french individualism are deeply iconoclastic and scandalous, even within libertarian circles. The
call of nudist naturism, the strong defence of bith control methods, the idea of "unions of egoists" with the
sole justication of sexual practices, that will try to put
in practice, not without diculties, will establish a way
of thought and action, and will result in sympathy within
some, and a strong rejection within others.[29]

CHAPTER 10. INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM

he founded L'Action d'Art, an anarchist literary journal, in 1913.[206] After World War II he contributed to
the journal L'Unique.[207] Within the synthesist anarchist
organization, the Fdration Anarchiste, there existed
an individualist anarchist tendency alongside anarchocommunist and anarchosyndicalist currents.[208] Individualist anarchists participating inside the Fdration Anarchiste included Charles-Auguste Bontemps, Georges
Vincey and Andr Arru.[208] The new base principles
of the francophone Anarchist Federation were written
by the individualist anarchist Charles-Auguste Bontemps
and the anarcho-communist Maurice Joyeux which established an organization with a plurality of tendencies and autonomy of federated groups organized around
synthesist principles.[209] Charles-Auguste Bontemps was
a prolic author mainly in the anarchist, freethinking,
pacist and naturist press of the time.[209] His view on anarchism was based around his concept of Social Individualism on which he wrote extensively.[209] He defended
an anarchist perspective which consisted on a collectivism of things and an individualism of persons.[210]
In 2002, an anarchist, Libertad organized a new version of the L'EnDehors, collaborating with Green Anarchy and including several contributors, such as Lawrence
Jarach, Patrick Mignard, Thierry Lod, Ron Sakolsky,
and Thomas Slut. Numerous articles about capitalism,
human rights, free love and social ghts were published.
The EnDehors continues now as a website, EnDehors.org.
The prolic contemporary French philosopher Michel
Onfray has been writing from an individualist
anarchist[193][211] perspective inuenced by Nietzsche, French post-structuralists thinkers such as Michel
Foucault and Gilles Deleuze; and Greek classical schools
of philosophy such as the Cynics and Cyrenaics. Among
the books which best expose Onfrays individualist
anarchist perspective include La sculpture de soi : la
morale esthtique (The sculpture of oneself: aesthetic
morality), La philosophie froce : exercices anarchistes,
La puissance d'exister and Physiologie de Georges
Palante, portrait d'un nietzchen de gauche which focuses
on French individualist philosopher Georges Palante.

Albert Libertad

French individualist anarchists grouped behind mile

Armand, published L'Unique after World War II.
L'Unique went from 1945 to 1956 with a total of
110 numbers.[202][203] Grard de Lacaze-Duthiers was a
French writer, art critic, pacist and anarchist. LacazeDuthiers, an art critic for the Symbolist review journal
La Plume, was inuenced by Oscar Wilde, Nietzsche and
Max Stirner. His (1906) L'Ideal Humain de l'Art helped
found the 'Artistocracy' movementa movement advocating life in the service of art.[204] His ideal was an
anti-elitist aestheticism: All men should be artists.[205]
Together with Andr Colomer and Manuel Devaldes,

Illegalism
Main article: Illegalism
Illegalism[23] is an anarchist philosophy that developed
primarily in France, Italy, Belgium, and Switzerland during the early 1900s as an outgrowth of Stirners individualist anarchism.[195] Illegalists usually did not seek
moral basis for their actions, recognizing only the reality
of might rather than right"; for the most part, illegal
acts were done simply to satisfy personal desires, not for
some greater ideal,[24] although some committed crimes
as a form of propaganda of the deed.[23] The illegalists
embraced direct action and propaganda of the deed.[212]
Inuenced by theorist Max Stirners egoism as well as

10.3. DEVELOPMENTS AND EXPANSION

105

Caricature of the Bonnot gang

Proudhon (his view that Property is theft!), Clment Duval and Marius Jacob proposed the theory of la reprise
individuelle (Eng: individual reclamation) which justied
robbery on the rich and personal direct action against exploiters and the system.,[24]
Illegalism rst rose to prominence among a generation
of Europeans inspired by the unrest of the 1890s, during which Ravachol, mile Henry, Auguste Vaillant,
and Caserio committed daring crimes in the name of Renzo Novatore
anarchism,[213] in what is known as propaganda of the
deed. Frances Bonnot Gang was the most famous group
portance; he was inuenced by Stirner, Friedrich Nito embrace illegalism.
etzsche, Georges Palante, Oscar Wilde, Henrik Ibsen,
Arthur Schopenhauer and Charles Baudelaire. He collaborated in numerous anarchist journals and participated in
Italy
futurism avant-garde currents. In his thought, he adhered
to Stirnerist disrespect for private property, only recogIn Italy individualist anarchism had a strong tendency to[112]
Novatore collabwards illegalism and violent propaganda by the deed sim- nizing property of ones own spirit.
orated in the individualist anarchist journal Iconoclasta!
ilar to French individualist anarchism but perhaps more
[188]
extreme[214][215] which emphazised criticism of organi- alongside the young stirnerist illegalist Bruno Filippi
zation be it anarchist or of other type.[216] In this respect
we can consider notorious magnicides carried out or attempted by individualists Giovanni Passannante, Sante
Caserio, Michele Angiolillo, Luigi Luccheni, Gaetano
Bresci who murdered king Umberto I. Caserio lived in
France and coexisted within French illegalism and later
assassinated French president Sadi Carnot. The theoretical seeds of current Insurrectionary anarchism were already laid out at the end of 19th century Italy in a combination of individualist anarchism criticism of permanent groups and organization with a socialist class struggle worldview.[217] During the rise of fascism this thought
also motivated Gino Lucetti, Michele Schirru and Angelo
Sbardellotto in attempting the assassination of Benito
Mussolini.

The individualist philosopher and poet Renzo Novatore belonged to the leftist section of the avant-garde
movement of Futurism[218] alongside other individualist anarcho-futurists such as Dante Carnesecchi, Leda
Rafanelli, Auro d'Arcola, and Giovanni Governato.
Also there was Pietro Bruzzi who published the journal L'Individualista in the 1920s alongside Ugo Fedeli
and Francesco Ghezzi but who fell to fascist forces
later.[219][220] Pietro Bruzzi also collaborated with the
Italian American individualist anarchist publication Eresia of New York City[220] edited by Enrico Arrigoni.

In Italy in 1945, during the Founding Congress of the

Italian Anarchist Federation, there was a group of individualist anarchists led by Cesare Zaccaria[221] who
was an important anarchist of the time.[222] Later, durDuring the early 20th century, the intellectual work ing the IX Congress of the Italian Anarchist Federation
of individualist anarchist Renzo Novatore came to im- in Carrara in 1965, a group decided to split o from this

106
organization and created the Gruppi di Iniziativa Anarchica. In the seventies, it was mostly composed of veteran individualist anarchists with an of pacism orientation, naturism, etc. ...[223]
In the famous Italian insurrectionary anarchist essay written by an anonymous writer, At Daggers Drawn with the
Existent, its Defenders and its False Critics, there reads
The workers who, during a wildcat strike, carried a banner saying, 'We are not asking for anything' understood
that the defeat is in the claim itself ('the claim against the
enemy is eternal'). There is no alternative but to take everything. As Stirner said: 'No matter how much you give
them, they will always ask for more, because what they
want is no less than the end of every concession'.[224]
The contemporary imprisoned Italian insurrectionary anarchist philosopher Michele Fabiani writes from an explicit individualist anarchist perspective in such essays
as Critica individualista anarchica alla modernit" (Individualist anarchist critique of modernity)[225] Horst Fantazzini (March 4, 1939 Altenkessel, Saarland, West GermanyDecember 24, 2001, Bologna, Italy),[226] was an
Italian-German individualist anarchist[227] who pursued
an illegalist lifestyle and practice until his death in 2001.
He gained media notoriety mainly due to his many bank
robberies through Italy and other countries.[226] In 1999
the lm Ormai fatta! appeared based on his life.[228]

CHAPTER 10. INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM

Spanish individualist anarchist Miguel Gimnez Igualada wrote the lengthy theory book called Anarchism espousing his individualist anarchism.[230] Between October 1937 and February 1938 he was editor of the individualist anarchist magazine Nosotros,[194] in which many
works of Han Ryner and mile Armand appeared. He
also participated in the publishing of another individualist anarchist maganize Al Margen: Publicacin quincenal individualista.[231] In his youth he engaged in illegalist
activities.[31] His thought was deeply inuenced by Max
Stirner, of which he was the main popularizer in Spain
through his own writings. He published and wrote the
preface[194] to the fourth edition in Spanish of The Ego
and Its Own from 1900. He proposed the creation of a
Union of Egoists, to be a Federation of Individualist Anarchists in Spain, but did not succeed.[231] In 1956 he published an extensive treatise on Stirner, dedicated to fellow
individualist anarchist mile Armand[232] Afterwards he
traveled and lived in Argentina, Uruguay and Mexico.[31]

Federico Urales was an important individualist anarchist who edited La Revista Blanca.[31] The individualist
anarchism[31] of Urales was inuenced by Auguste Comte
and Charles Darwin. He saw science and reason as a defense against blind servitude to authority. He was critical
of inuential individualist thinkers such as Nietzsche and
Stirner for promoting an asocial egoist individualism and
instead promoted an individualism with solidarity seen
as a way to guarantee social equality and harmony.[31]
He was highly critical of anarcho-syndicalism, which he
Spain
viewed as plagued by excessive bureaucracy, and thought
that it tended towards reformism.[31] Instead he favored
While Spain was inuenced by American individualist small groups based on ideological alignement.[31] He
anarchism, it was more closely related to the French cur- supported and participated in the establishment of the
rents. Around the start of the 20th century, individual- Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) in 1927.[31]
ism in Spain gathered force through the eorts of people such as Dorado Montero, Ricardo Mella, Federico In 1956, on exile escaping from Francos dictatorship
Urales, Miguel Gimenez Igualada, Mariano Gallardo, Miguel Gimnez Igualada published an extensive treato fellow individualist
and J. Elizalde who translated French and American tise on Stirner which he dedicated
[232]
[29]
anarchist
mile
Armand
On
the
subject of individuindividualists. Important in this respect were also magalist
anarchist
theory,
he
publisheds
Anarchism
in 1968,
azines such as La Idea Libre, La revista blanca, Etica,
during
his
exile
in
Mexico
from
Francos
dictatorship
in
Iniciales, Al margen, Estudios and Nosotros. The most in[233]
Spain.
He
was
present
in
the
First
Congress
of
the
uential thinkers there were Max Stirner, mile Armand
[234]
and Han Ryner. Just as in France, the spread of Esperanto Mexican Anarchist Federation in 1945.
and anationalism had importance just as naturism and In 2000, in Spain Ateneo Libertario Ricardo Mella, Atefree love currents.[29] Later, Armand and Ryner them- neo libertario Al Margen, Ateneu Enciclopdic Popular,
selves started writing in the Spanish invidualist press. Ar- Ateneo Libertario de Sant Boi, Ateneu Llibertari Poble
mands concept of amorous camaraderie had an impor- Sec y Fundaci D'Estudis Llibertaris i Anarcosindicaltant role in motivating polyamory as realization of the istes republished mile Armands writings on Free Love
individual.[29]
and individualist anarchism in a compilation titled Indi[235]
ReCatalan historian Xavier Diez reports that the Spanish vidualist anarchism and Amorous camaraderie.
cently
Catalan
historian
Xavier
Diez
has
dedicated
extenindividualist anarchist press was widely read by members of anarcho-communist groups and by members of sive research on Spanish individualist anarchism as can be
El anarquismo individualista en Espaa:
the anarcho-syndicalist trade union CNT. There were also seen in his books
[236]
and
Utopia sexual a la premsa anar19231938
the cases of prominent individualist anarchists such as
quista
de
Catalunya.
La revista tica-Iniciales(1927
Federico Urales and Miguel Gimenez Igualada who were
1937)
(which
deals
with
free love thought as present in the
members of the CNT and J. Elizalde who was a foundSpanish
individualist
anarchist
magazine Iniciales).[237]
ing member and rst secretary of the Iberian Anarchist
Federation.[229]

10.3. DEVELOPMENTS AND EXPANSION

107

Germany

Der Eigene stirnerist pioneer Gay activist publication

John Henry Mackay

In Germany, the Scottish-German John Henry McKay

became the most important propagandist for individualist
anarchist ideas. He fused Stirnerist egoism with the positions of Benjamin Tucker and actually translated Tucker
into German. Two semi-ctional writings of his own,
Die Anarchisten and Der Freiheitsucher, contributed to
individualist theory through an updating of egoist themes
within a consideration of the anarchist movement. English translations of these works arrived in the United
Kingdom and in individualist American circles led by
Tucker.[238] McKay is also known as an important European early activist for Gay rights.
Using the pseudonym Sagitta, Mackay wrote a series of
works for pederastic emancipation, titled Die Buecher der
namenlosen Liebe (Books of the Nameless Love). This series was conceived in 1905 and completed in 1913 and
included the Fenny Skaller, a story of a pederast.[239] Under the same pseudonym he also published ction, such
as Holland (1924) and a pederastic novel of the Berlin
boy-bars, Der Puppenjunge (The Hustler) (1926).
Adolf Brand (18741945) was a German writer, stirnerist
anarchist and pioneering campaigner for the acceptance
of male bisexuality and homosexuality. Brand published
a German homosexual periodical, Der Eigene in 1896.
This was the rst ongoing homosexual publication in the
world.[240] The name was taken from writings of ego-

ist philosopher Max Stirner, who had greatly inuenced

the young Brand, and refers to Stirners concept of "selfownership" of the individual. Der Eigene concentrated
on cultural and scholarly material, and may have had
an average of around 1500 subscribers per issue during its lifetime, although the exact numbers are uncertain. Contributors included Erich Mhsam, Kurt Hiller,
John Henry Mackay (under the pseudonym Sagitta) and
artists Wilhelm von Gloeden, Fidus and Sascha Schneider. Brand contributed many poems and articles himself.
Benjamin Tucker followed this journal from the United
States.[241]
Der Einzige was a German individualist anarchist magazine. It appeared in 1919, as a weekly, then sporadically until 1925 and was edited by cousins Anselm Ruest
(pseud. for Ernst Samuel) and Mynona (pseud. for
Salomo Friedlaender). Its title was adopted from the
book Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (engl. trans. The
Ego and Its Own) by Max Stirner. Another inuence
was the thought of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.[242] The publication was connected to the local
expressionist artistic current and the transition from it towards dada.[243]
United Kingdom and Ireland
The English enlightenment political theorist William
Godwin was an important inuence as mentioned
before.[36] The Irish anarchist writer of the Decadent
movement Oscar Wilde inuenced individualist anarchists such as Renzo Novatore[244] and gained the admira-

108

CHAPTER 10. INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM

the Advancement of Freedom in Sexual Relationships.[248]
"The Serpent, issued from London ... the most prominent English-language egoist journal, was published from
1898 to 1900 with the subtitle 'A Journal of Egoistic Philosophy and Sociology'".[134] Henry Meulen was another
British anarchist, he was notable for his support of free
banking.

Oscar Wilde, famous anarchist irish writer of the decadent movement and famous dandy

In the United Kingdom, Herbert Read was inuenced

highly by egoism as he later approached existentialism
(see existentialist anarchism).[249] Albert Camus devoted
a section of The Rebel to Stirner. Although throughout
his book Camus is concerned to present the rebel as
a preferred alternative to the revolutionary he nowhere
acknowledges that this distinction is taken from the one
that Stirner makes between the revolutionary and the
insurrectionist".[250] Sidney Parker is a British egoist individualist anarchist who wrote articles and edited anarchist journals from 1963 to 1993 such as Minus One,
Egoist, and Ego.[251] Donald Rooum is an English anarchist cartoonist and writer with a long association with
Freedom Press. Rooum stated that for his thought The
most inuential source is Max Stirner. I am happy to be
called a Stirnerite anarchist, provided 'Stirnerite' means
one who agrees with Stirners general drift, not one who
agrees with Stirners every word.[252] An Anarchist FAQ
reports that From meeting anarchists in Glasgow during the Second World War, long-time anarchist activist
and artist Donald Rooum likewise combined Stirner and
anarcho-communism. [253]

In the hybrid of post-structuralism and anarchism called

tion of Benjamin Tucker.
In his important essay The post-anarchism the British Saul Newman has written a lot
Soul of Man under Socialism from 1891 Wilde defended on Stirner and his similarities to post-structuralism. He
socialism as the way to guarantee individualism and so he writes:
saw that With the abolition of private property, then, we
shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody
Max Stirners impact on contemporary powill waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols
litical theory is often neglected. However in
for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the
Stirners political thinking there can be found
world. Most people exist, that is all.[246] For anarchist
a surprising convergence with poststructuralhistorian George Woodcock Wildes aim in The Soul of
ist theory, particularly with regard to the funcMan under Socialism is to seek the society most favorable
tion of power. Andrew Koch, for instance,
to the artist ... for Wilde art is the supreme end, containsees Stirner as a thinker who transcends the
ing within itself enlightenment and regeneration, to which
Hegelian tradition he is usually placed in, arguall else in society must be subordinated ... Wilde repreing that his work is a precursor poststructuralist
sents the anarchist as aesthete.[247] Woodcock nds that
ideas about the foundations of knowledge and
The most ambitious contribution to literary anarchism
truth.[254]
during the 1890s was undoubtedly Oscar Wilde The Soul
of Man under Socialism" and nds that it is inuenced Newman has published several essays on Stirner. War
mainly by the thought of William Godwin.[247]
on the State: Stirner and Deleuzes Anarchism[254]
[245]

In the late 19th century in the United Kingdom, there existed individualist anarchists such as Wordsworth Donisthorpe, Joseph Hiam Levy, Joseph Greevz Fisher, John
Badcock, Jr., Albert Tarn, and Henry Albert Seymour
[248]
who were close to the United States group around
Benjamin Tuckers magazine Liberty. In the mid-1880s
Seymour published a journal called The Anarchist.[248]
and also later took a special interest in free love as he
participated in the journal The Adult: A Journal for

and Empiricism, pluralism, and politics in Deleuze

and Stirner[255] discusses what he sees are similarities
between Stirners thought and that of Gilles Deleuze.
In Spectres of Stirner: a Contemporary Critique
of Ideology he discusses the conception of ideology
in Stirner.[256] In Stirner and Foucault: Toward a
Post-Kantian Freedom similarities between Stirner and
Michel Foucault.[257] Also he wrote Politics of the ego:
Stirners critique of liberalism.[258]

10.3. DEVELOPMENTS AND EXPANSION

Russia

109
of Benjamin Tucker. In 1907, he published a book entitled Associational Anarchism, in which he advocated
the free association of independent individuals..[260] On
his return from Siberia in 1917 he enjoyed great popularity among Moscow workers as a lecturer. Chernyi
was also Secretary of the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups, which was formed in March 1917.[260] He
was an advocate for the seizure of private homes,[260]
which was an activity seen by the anarchists after the
October revolution as direct expropriation on the bourgoise. He died after being accused of participation in an
episode in which this group bombed the headquarters of
the Moscow Committee of the Communist Party. Although most likely not being really involved in the bombing, he might have died of torture.[260]
Chernyi advocated a Nietzschean overthrow of the values of bourgeois Russian society, and rejected the voluntary communes of anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin
as a threat to the freedom of the individual.[261][262][263]
Scholars including Avrich and Allan Antli have interpreted this vision of society to have been greatly inuenced by the individualist anarchists Max Stirner, and
Benjamin Tucker.[264] Subsequent to the books publication, Chernyi was imprisoned in Siberia under the Russian Czarist regime for his revolutionary activities.[265]

Lev Chernyi

Individualist anarchism was one of the three categories

of anarchism in Russia, along with the more prominent
anarchist communism and anarcho-syndicalism.[259] The
ranks of the Russian individualist anarchists were predominantly drawn from the intelligentsia and the working
class.[259] For anarchist historian Paul Avrich The two
leading exponents of individualist anarchism, both based
in Moscow, were Aleksei Alekseevich Borovoi and
Lev Chernyi (Pavel Dmitrievich Turchaninov). From
Nietzsche, they inherited the desire for a complete overturn of all values accepted by bourgeois societypolitical,
moral, and cultural. Furthermore, strongly inuenced
by Max Stirner and Benjamin Tucker, the German and
American theorists of individualist anarchism, they demanded the total liberation of the human personality from
the fetters of organized society.[259]
Some Russian individualists anarchists found the ultimate expression of their social alienation in violence
and crime, others attached themselves to avant-garde
literary and artistic circles, but the majority remained
philosophical anarchists who conducted animated parlor discussions and elaborated their individualist theories
in ponderous journals and books.[259]

On the other hand Aleksei Borovoi (1876?1936),[266]

was a professor of philosophy at Moscow University, a
gifted orator and the author of numerous books, pamphlets, and articles which attempted to reconcile individualist anarchism with the doctrines of syndicallism.[260]
He wrote among other theoretical works, Anarkhizm in
1918 just after the October revolution[260] and Anarchism
and Law.[266] For him the chief importance is given not
to Anarchism as the aim but to Anarchy as the continuous quest for the aim.[267] He manifests there that No
social ideal, from the point of view of anarchism, could
be referred to as absolute in a sense that supposes its the
crown of human wisdom, the end of social and ethical
quest of man.[267]

10.3.7 Latin American individualist anarchism

Argentine anarchist historian Angel Cappelletti reports
that in Argentina Among the workers that came from
Europe in the 2 rst decades of the century, there was
curiously some stirnerian individualists inuenced by the
philosophy of Nietzsche, that saw syndicalism as a potential enemy of anarchist ideology. They established ...
anity groups that in 1912 came to, according to Max
Nettlau, to the number of 20. In 1911 there appeared,
in Coln, the periodical El nico, that dened itself as
Publicacin individualista".[268]

Lev Chernyi was an important individualist anarchist in- Vicente Rojas Lizcano, whose pseudonym was Bilo
volved in resistance against the rise to power of the Bol- Panclasta, was a Colombian individualist anarchist writer
shevik Party. He adhered mainly to Stirner and the ideas and activist. In 1904 he began using the name Biolo

110
Panclasta. Biolo in Spanish stands for lover of life
and Panclasta for enemy of all.[269] He visited more
than fty countries propagandizing for anarchism which
in his case was highly inuenced by the thought of Max
Stirner and Friedrich Nietszche. Among his written
works there are Siete aos enterrado vivo en una de las
mazmorras de Gomezuela: Horripilante relato de un resucitado(1932) and Mis prisiones, mis destierros y mi vida
(1929) which talk about his many adventures while living
his life as an adventurer, activist and vagabond, as well as
his thought and the many times he was imprisoned in different countries.

CHAPTER 10. INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM

a professor of philosophy in the 1980s. He argued that
since the individual gives form to the world, he is those
objects, the others and the whole universe.[270] One of
his main views was a theory of innite worlds which
for him was developed by pre-socratic philosophers.[270]
During the 1990s in Argentina, there appeared a stirnerist
publication called El nico: publicacion peridica de pensamiento individualista.[271][272][273]

10.4 Criticisms

Maria Lacerda de Moura individualist anarcha-feminist

Maria Lacerda de Moura was a Brazilian teacher,

journalist, anarcha-feminist, and individualist anarchist.
Her ideas regarding education were largely inuenced by
Francisco Ferrer. She later moved to So Paulo and became involved in journalism for the anarchist and labor
press. There she also lectured on topics including education, womens rights, free love, and antimilitarism.
Her writings and essays garnered her attention not only
in Brazil, but also in Argentina and Uruguay. In February 1923, she launched Renascena, a periodical linked
with the anarchist, progressive, and freethinking circles
of the period. Her thought was mainly inuenced by
individualist anarchists such as Han Ryner and mile Armand.[100] She maintained contact with Spanish individualist anarchist circles.[29]
Horst Matthai Quelle was a Spanish language German
anarchist philosopher inuenced by Max Stirner.[270] In
1938, at the beginning of the German economic crisis
and the rise of Nazism and fascism in Europe, Quelle
moved to Mexico. Quelle earned his undergraduate degree, masters and doctorate in philosophy at the National
Autonomous University of Mexico, where he returned as

George Bernard Shaw expressed doubts about the distribution of

wealth under individualist anarchism.

See also: Criticisms of anarchism

Philosopher Murray Bookchin criticized individualist anarchism for its opposition to democracy and its embrace of "lifestylism" at the expense of class struggle.[274]
Bookchin claimed that individualist anarchism supports
only negative liberty and rejects the idea of positive liberty.[275] Philosopher Albert Meltzer proposed that individualist anarchism diers radically from revolutionary anarchism, and that it is sometimes too readily conceded 'that this is, after all, anarchism'. He claimed that
Benjamin Tucker's acceptance of the use of a private police force (including to break up violent strikes to protect
the employers 'freedom'") is contradictory to the de-

10.7. FOOTNOTES

111
Skoble, Aeon (2008). Individualist Anarchism.
In Hamowy, Ronald. The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE; Cato Institute. pp. 2434. ISBN 978-1-4129-6580-4. LCCN
2008009151. OCLC 750831024.

nition of anarchism as no government.[276]

Philosopher George Bernard Shaw initially had irtations
with individualist anarchism before coming to the conclusion that it was the negation of socialism, and is, in fact,
unsocialism carried as near to its logical conclusion as any
sane man dare carry it. Shaws argument was that even
if wealth was initially distributed equally, the degree of
laissez-faire advocated by Tucker would result in the distribution of wealth becoming unequal because it would
permit private appropriation and accumulation.[277] According to academic Carlotta Anderson, American individualist anarchists accept that free competition results in
unequal wealth distribution, but they do not see that as
an injustice.[278] Tucker explained, If I go through life
free and rich, I shall not cry because my neighbor, equally
free, is richer. Liberty will ultimately make all men rich;
it will not make all men equally rich. Authority may (and
may not) make all men equally rich in purse; it certainly
will make them equally poor in all that makes life best
worth living.[279]

Sonn, Richard D. Sex, Violence, and the AvantGarde: Anarchism in Interwar France. Penn State
Press. 2010.
Steiner, Anne. Les en-dehors: Anarchistes individualistes et illgalistes la Belle poque .
LEchappe, 2008.
Various Authors. Enemies of Society: An Anthology of Individualist & Egoist Thought. Ardent Press.
2011

10.7 Footnotes
^

10.5 See also

Individualist anarchism in Europe
Individualist anarchism in France
Existentialist anarchism

10.6 Bibliography
Chartier, Gary; Johnson, Charles W. (2011). Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against
Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty. Brooklyn, NY:Minor Compositions/Autonomedia.
Diez, Xavier. El anarquismo individualista en Espaa (19231939). Virus Editorial. 2007.
Martin, James J. Men Against the State: the State the
Expositors of Individualist Anarchism. The Adrian
Allen Associates, Dekalb, Illinois, 1953.
Parry, Richard. The Bonnot Gang: The Story Of The
French Illegalists . Rebel Press, 1987.
Parvulescu, Constantin. The individualist anarchist
journal Der Einzige and the making of the radical
Left in the early post-World War I Germany. University of Minnesota, 2006
Perraudeau,
Michel.
Dictionnaire de
lindividualisme libertaire. ditions Libertaires.
2011. ISBN 978-2-919568-06-2
Rocker, Rudolf. Pioneers of American Freedom:
Origin of Liberal and Radical Thought in America.
Rocker Publishing Committee. 1949

The term individualist anarchism is often used as

a classicatory term, but in very dierent ways. Some
sources, such as An Anarchist FAQ use the classication
"social anarchism / individualist anarchism. Some see
individualist anarchism as distinctly non-socialist, and
use the classication socialist anarchism / individualist
anarchism accordingly.[280] Other classications include
mutualist/communal anarchism.[281]
^
Michael Freeden identies four broad types of
individualist anarchism. He says the rst is the type
associated with William Godwin that advocates selfgovernment with a progressive rationalism that included
benevolence to others. The second type is the amoral
self-serving rationality of Egoism, as most associated
with Max Stirner. The third type is found in Herbert
Spencer's early predictions, and in that of some of his
disciples such as Donisthorpe, foreseeing the redundancy
of the state in the source of social evolution. The fourth
type retains a moderated form of egoism and accounts
for social cooperation through the advocacy of market
relationships.[7]
^
See, for example, the Winter 2006 issue of the
Journal of Libertarian Studies, dedicated to reviews of
Kevin Carsons Studies in Mutualist Political Economy.
Mutualists compose one bloc, along with agorists and
geo-libertarians, in the recently formed Alliance of the
Libertarian Left.
^
Though this term is non-standard usageby left
agorists mean left in the general sense used by
left-libertarians, as dened by Roderick T. Long, as "...
an integration, or I'd argue, a reintegration of libertarianism with concerns that are traditionally thought of as
being concerns of the left. That includes concerns for
worker empowerment, worry about plutocracy, concerns
about feminism and various kinds of social equality. [282]
^
Konkin wrote the article Copywrongs in opposition
to the concept and Schulman countered SEK3s arguments in Informational Property: Logorights.

112
^

Individualist anarchism is also known by

the terms anarchist individualism, anarchoindividualism, individualistic anarchism, libanarchoertarian
anarchism,[283][284][285][286]
libertarianism,[287][288] anarchist libertarianism[287]
and anarchistic libertarianism.[289]

10.8 References
[1] What do I mean by individualism? I mean by individualism the moral doctrine which, relying on no dogma, no
tradition, no external determination, appeals only to the
individual conscience.Mini-Manual of Individualism by
Han Ryner
[2] I do not admit anything except the existence of the individual, as a condition of his sovereignty. To say that the
sovereignty of the individual is conditioned by Liberty is
simply another way of saying that it is conditioned by itself. Anarchism and the State in Individual Liberty
[3] Tucker, Benjamin R. (March 10, 1888, 1886). State Socialism and Anarchism: How far they agree and wherein
they dier. Liberty 5 (120): 23, 6. Check date values
in: |date= (help)
[4] William Godwin entry by Mark Philip in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2006-05-20
[5] Paralelamente, al otro lado del atlntico, en el diferente
contexto de una nacin a medio hacer, los Estados Unidos,
otros lsofos elaboraron un pensamiento individualista
similar, aunque con sus propias especicidades. Henry
David Thoreau (18171862), uno de los escritores prximos al movimiento de la losofa trascendentalista, es
uno de los ms conocidos. Su obra ms representativa
es Walden, aparecida en 1854, aunque redactada entre
1845 y 1847, cuando Thoreau decide instalarse en el aislamiento de una cabaa en el bosque, y vivir en ntimo
contacto con la naturaleza, en una vida de soledad y sobriedad. De esta experiencia, su losofa trata de transmitirnos la idea que resulta necesario un retorno respetuoso
a la naturaleza, y que la felicidad es sobre todo fruto de
la riqueza interior y de la armona de los individuos con
el entorno natural. Muchos han visto en Thoreau a uno
de los precursores del ecologismo y del anarquismo primitivista representado en la actualidad por Jonh Zerzan.
Para George Woodcock, esta actitud puede estar tambin motivada por una cierta idea de resistencia al progreso y de rechazo al materialismo creciente que caracteriza la sociedad norteamericana de mediados de siglo
XIX.Voluntary non-submission. Spanish individualist
anarchism during dictatorship and the second republic
(19231938)"
[6] George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian
Ideas and Movements. 1962
[7] Freeden, Michael. Ideologies and Political Theory: A
Conceptual Approach. Oxford University Press. ISBN
0-19-829414-X. pp. 313314
[8] Max Stirner entry by David Leopold in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2006-08-04

CHAPTER 10. INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM

[9] En la vida de todo nico, todo vnculo, independientemente de la forma en que ste se presente, supone una
cadena que condiciona, y por tanto elimina la condicin de persona libre. Ello supone dos consecuencias;
la libertad se mantendr al margen de toda categora
moral. Este ltimo concepto quedar al margen del
vocabulario estirneriano, puesto que tanto tica como
moral sern dos conceptos absolutos que, como tales, no
pueden situarse por encima de la voluntad individual. La
libertad se vive siempre al margen de cualquier condicionamiento material o espiritual, ms all del bien y del
mal como enunciar Nietzsche en una de sus principales
obras. Las creencias colectivas, los prejuicios compartidos, los convencionalismos sociales sern, pues, objeto
de destruccin.Voluntary non-submission. Spanish individualist anarchism during dictatorship and the second
republic (19231938)"
[10] Stirner himself, however, has no truck with higher beings. Indeed, with the aim of concerning himself purely
with his own interests, he attacks all higher beings, regarding them as a variety of what he calls spooks, or
ideas to which individuals sacrice themselves and by
which they are dominated. First amongst these is the abstraction Man, into which all unique individuals are submerged and lost. As he put it, liberalism is a religion because it separates my essence from me and sets it above
me, because it exalts 'Man' to the same extent as any other
religion does to God . . . it sets me beneath Man. Indeed,
he who is infatuated with Man leaves persons out of account so far as that infatuation extends, and oats in an
ideal, sacred interest. Man, you see, is not a person, but
an ideal, a spook. [p. 176 and p.79] Among the many
spooks Stirner attacks are such notable aspects of capitalist life as private property, the division of labour, the
state, religion, and (at times) society itself. We will discuss Stirners critique of capitalism before moving onto
his vision of an egoist society and how it relates to social
anarchism. G.6 What are the ideas of Max Stirner in
An Anarchist FAQ
[11] The rst is in regard to the means of action in the
here and now (and so the manner in which anarchy will
come about). Individualists generally prefer education
and the creation of alternative institutions, such as mutual banks, unions, communes, etc. Such activity, they
argue, will ensure that present society will gradually develop out of government into an anarchist one. They are
primarily evolutionists, not revolutionists, and dislike social anarchists use of direct action to create revolutionary
situations.A.3.1 What are the dierences between individualist and social anarchists?" in An Anarchist FAQ
[12] Toda revolucin, pues, hecha en nombre de principios abstractos como igualdad, fraternidad, libertad o humanidad, persigue el mismo n; anular la voluntad y
soberana del individuo, para as poderlo dominar.La insumisin voluntaria. El anarquismo individualista espaol
durante la dictadura y la segunda repblica (19231938)
[13] The wave of anarchist bombings and assassinations of
the 1890s ... and the practice of illegalism from the
mid-1880s to the start of the First World War ... were
twin aspects of the same proletarian oensive, but were

10.8. REFERENCES

expressed in an individualist practice, one that complemented the great collective struggles against capital. The
illegalist comrades were tired of waiting for the revolution.
The acts of the anarchist bombers and assassins (propaganda by the deed) and the anarchist burglars (individual reappropriation) expressed their desperation and
their personal, violent rejection of an intolerable society.
Moreover, they were clearly meant to be exemplary , invitations to revolt.THE ILLEGALISTS by Doug Imrie
[14] Finalmente, y este es un tema poco resuelto por el lsofo
bvaro, resulta evidente que, a pesar de todo culto a la
soberana individual, es necesario y deseable que los individuos cooperen. Pero el peligro de la asociacin conlleva
la reproduccin, an escala diferente, de una sociedad, y
es evidente que en este contexto, los individuos deban renunciar a buena parte de su soberana. Stirner propone
uniones de egostas, formadas por individuos libres que
pueden unirse episdicamente para colaborar, pero evitando la estabilidad o la permanencia.La insumisin voluntaria. El anarquismo individualista espaol durante la
dictadura y la segunda repblica (19231938)
[15] The unions Stirner desires would be based on free
agreement, being spontaneous and voluntary associations
drawn together out of the mutual interests of those involved, who would care best for their welfare if they unite
with others. [p. 309] The unions, unlike the state, exist to ensure what Stirner calls intercourse, or union
between individuals. To better understand the nature of
these associations, which will replace the state, Stirner
lists the relationships between friends, lovers, and children
at play as examples. [No Gods, No Masters, vol. 1, p. 25]
These illustrate the kinds of relationships that maximise
an individuals self-enjoyment, pleasure, freedom, and individuality, as well as ensuring that those involved sacrice nothing while belonging to them. Such associations
are based on mutuality and a free and spontaneous cooperation between equals. As Stirner puts it, intercourse
is mutuality, it is the action, the commercium, of individuals. [p. 218] Its aim is pleasure and self-enjoyment.
Thus Stirner sought a broad egoism, one which appreciated others and their uniqueness, and so criticised the narrow egoism of people who forgot the wealth others are:
But that would be a man who does not know
and cannot appreciate any of the delights
emanating from an interest taken in others,
from the consideration shown to others. That
would be a man bereft of innumerable pleasures, a wretched character ... would he not
be a wretched egoist, rather than a genuine
Egoist? ... The person who loves a human
being is, by virtue of that love, a wealthier
man that someone else who loves no one.
[No Gods, No Masters, vol. 1, p. 23]"What
are the dierences between individualist and
social anarchists?
[16] Miller, David (1987). The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of
Political Thought. Blackwell Publishing. p. 11. ISBN
0631227814.
[17] What my might reaches is my property; and let me claim
as property everything I feel myself strong enough to at-

113

tain, and let me extend my actual property as fas as I entitle, that is, empower myself to take" From The Ego and
Its Own, quoted in Ossar, Michael (1980). Anarchism in
the Dramas of Ernst Toller. State University of New York
Press. p. 27. ISBN 0873953932.
[18] Woodcock, George (2004). Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. Broadview Press. p. 20.
ISBN 0140206221.
[19] NATIVE AMERICAN ANARCHISM A Study of Left-Wing
American Individualism by Eunice Minette Schuster
[20] G.1.4 Why is the social context important in evaluating
Individualist Anarchism?" in An Anarchist FAQ
[21] Kevin Carson. Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective. BOOKSURGE. 2008. Pg. 1
[22] Richard Parry. The Bonnot Gang: The Story of the French
Illegalists
[23] The Illegalists, by Doug Imrie (published by Anarchy:
A Journal of Desire Armed)
[24] Parry, Richard. The Bonnot Gang. Rebel Press, 1987. p.
15
[25] Anarchist historian George Woodcock reports the incident in which the important Italian social anarchist Errico
Malatesta became involved in a dispute with the individualist anarchists of Paterson, who insisted that anarchism
implied no organization at all, and that every man must act
solely on his impulses. At last, in one noisy debate, the individual impulse of a certain Ciancabilla directed him to
shoot Malatesta, who was badly wounded but obstinately
refused to name his assailant. Woodcock, George. Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements.
1962
[26] Murray Bookchin. Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm
[27] 2. Individualist Anarchism and Reaction in Social
Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism An Unbridgeable
Chasm
[28] The Free Love Movement and Radical Individualism By
Wendy McElroy
[29] La insumisin voluntaria. El anarquismo individualista
espaol durante la dictadura y la Segunda Repblica by
Xavier Dez
[30] Proliferarn as diversos grupos que practicarn el excursionismo, el naturismo, el nudismo, la emancipacin
sexual o el esperantismo, alrededor de asociaciones informales vinculadas de una manera o de otra al anarquismo. Precisamente las limitaciones a las asociaciones
obreras impuestas desde la legislacin especial de la Dictadura potenciarn indirectamente esta especie de asociacionismo informal en que conuir el movimiento anarquista con esta heterogeneidad de prcticas y tendencias.
Uno de los grupos ms destacados, que ser el impulsor de la revista individualista tica ser el Ateneo Naturista Eclctico, con sede en Barcelona, con sus diferentes secciones la ms destacada de las cuales ser el

114

CHAPTER 10. INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM

grupo excursionista Sol y Vida."[http://www.nodo50.org/

ekintza/article.php3?id_article=310 http://www.acracia.
org/1-23a58lainsumision.pdf La insumisin voluntaria:
El anarquismo individualista espaol durante la Dictadura
y la Segunda Repblica (19231938)" by Xavier Dez
[31] Xavier Diez.
19231938

L'anarquisme Individualista a Espanya

[32] revolution is the re of our will and a need of our solitary

minds; it is an obligation of the libertarian aristocracy. To
create new ethical values. To create new aesthetic values. To communalize material wealth. To individualize
spiritual wealth. Towards the creative nothing by Renzo
Novatore
[33] George Woodcock. Anarchism: A History of Libertarian
Ideas and Movements. 1962
[34] Selon lhistorien Vladimir Muoz, son vritable nom aurait t Miguel Ramos Gimnez et il aurait particip au
dbut du 20 sicle aux groupes illgalistes.GIMNEZ
IGUALADA, Miguel at Diccionaire International des
Militants Anarchistes
[35] Igualada argued for an anarchism that was pacist, poetic, which creates goodness, harmony and beauty, which
cultivates a healthy sense of living in peace, sign of power
and fertility ... from there anyone which is un-harmonious
(violent-warrior), everyone that will pretend, in any form,
to dominate anyone of his similars, is not an anarchist,
since the anarchist respects in such a way personal integrity, so that he could not make anyone a slave of his
thoughts so as to turn him into an instrument of his, a
man-tool.Anarquismo by Miguel Gimenez Igualada
[36] Woodcock, George. 2004. Anarchism: A History Of Libertarian Ideas And Movements. Broadview Press. p. 20
[37] Anarchism, Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2006 (UK
version)

[43] Godwin, William (1796) [1793]. Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Inuence on Modern Morals and Manners. G.G. and J. Robinson. OCLC 2340417.
[44] William Godwin, Shelly and Communism by ALB, The
Socialist Standard
[45] Rothbard, Murray. "Edmund Burke, Anarchist.
[46] Weisbord, Albert (1937). Libertarianism. The Conquest of Power. New York: Covici-Friede. OCLC
1019295. Retrieved 2008-08-05.
[47] Peter Sabatini. Libertarianism: Bogus Anarchy
[48] Anarchism, BBC Radio 4 program, In Our Time,
Thursday December 7, 2006. Hosted by Melvyn Bragg
of the BBC, with John Keane, Professor of Politics at
University of Westminster, Ruth Kinna, Senior Lecturer
in Politics at Loughborough University, and Peter Marshall, philosopher and historian.
[49] George Edward Rines, ed. (1918). Encyclopedia Americana. New York: Encyclopedia Americana Corp. p. 624.
OCLC 7308909.
[50] Hamilton, Peter (1995). mile Durkheim. New York:
Routledge. p. 79. ISBN 0415110475.
[51] Faguet, mile (1970). Politicians & Moralists of the Nineteenth Century. Freeport: Books for Libraries Press. p.
147. ISBN 0836918282.
[52] Bowen, James & Purkis, Jon. 2004. Changing Anarchism: Anarchist Theory and Practice in a Global Age.
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[53] Knowles, Rob. Political Economy from below : Communitarian Anarchism as a Neglected Discourse in Histories of Economic Thought. History of Economics Review,
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[54] Woodcock, George. Anarchism: A History of Libertarian
Ideas and Movements, Broadview Press, 2004, p. 20

[38] Peter Kropotkin, Anarchism, Encyclopdia Britannica,

1910

[55] Dana, Charles A. Proudhon and his Bank of the People

(1848).

[39] Godwin himself attributed the rst anarchist writing to

Edmund Burke's A Vindication of Natural Society. Most
of the above arguments may be found much more at large
in Burkes Vindication of Natural Society; a treatise in
which the evils of the existing political institutions are
displayed with incomparable force of reasoning and lustre of eloquence" footnote, Ch. 2 Political Justice by
William Godwin.

[56] Tucker, Benjamin R., On Picket Duty, Liberty (Not the

Daughter but the Mother of Order) (18811908); 5 January 1889; 6, 10; APS Online p. 1

[40] "Godwin, William". (2006). In Britannica Concise

Encyclopaedia. Retrieved December 7, 2006, from
Encyclopdia Britannica Online.

[59] Miller, David. 1987. Mutualism. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought. Blackwell Publishing. p.
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[41] McLaughlin, Paul (2007). Anarchism and Authority: A

Philosophical Introduction to Classical Anarchism. Ashgate Publishing,. p. 119. ISBN 0754661962.

[60] Tandy, Francis D., 1896, Voluntary Socialism, chapter 6,

paragraph 15.

[42] McLaughlin, Paul (2007). Anarchism and Authority: A

Philosophical Introduction to Classical Anarchism. Ashgate Publishing,. p. 123. ISBN 0754661962.

[57] Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. The Philosophy of Misery:

The Evolution of Capitalism. BiblioBazaar, LLC (2006).
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[61] Tandy, Francis D., 1896, Voluntary Socialism, chapter 6,

paragraphs 9, 10 & 22.
Carson, Kevin, 2004, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, chapter 2 (after Meek & Oppenheimer).

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[62] Tandy, Francis D., 1896, Voluntary Socialism, chapter 6,

paragraph 19.
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[64] Swartz, Clarence Lee. What is Mutualism? VI. Land and
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[65] Hymans, E., Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, pp. 1901,
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[66] General Idea of the Revolution, Pluto Press, pp. 215216
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Socialism and Anarchism
[69] Goodway, David (2006). Anarchist Seeds Beneath the
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[90] A watch has a cost and a value. The COST consists of
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[78] Carlson, Andrew (1972). Philosophical Egoism: German Antecedents. Anarchism in Germany. Metuchen:
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[97] The Karezza Method

[79] Stirner, Max. The Ego and Its Own, p. 248

[99] Individualisme anarchiste et fminisme la Belle

Epoque "

[98] E. Armand and la camaraderie amoureuse. Revolutionary sexualism and the struggle against jealousy

[80] Moggach, Douglas. The New Hegelians. Cambridge Uni[100] http://www.nodo50.org/insurgentes/textos/mulher/

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[81] Weir, David. Anarchy & Culture. University of MasAnarquista Individualista Brasileira by
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[101] Entre los redactores y colaboradores de Al Margen,
[82] McElroy, Wendy. Benjamin Tucker, Individualism, &
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tumn 1981, VOL. IV, NO. 3
Maria Lacerda de Moura.

116

CHAPTER 10. INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM

[102] Wendy McElroy The culture of individualist anarchist in [113]

Late-nineteenth century America
[114]
[103] Xavier Diez. El anarquismo individualista en Espaa
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[115]
[104] Xavier Diez. El anarquismo individualista en Espaa
[116]
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Robert C. Holub, Nietzsche: Socialist, Anarchist, Feminist

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[105] Anarchism and the dierent Naturist views have always

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Vol. 1, No. 4, p. 308.
prximos al movimiento de la losofa trascendentalista,
es uno de los ms conocidos. Su obra ms representativa es Walden, aparecida en 1854, aunque redactada en- [121] Watner, Carl. "Spooner Vs. Liberty" PDF (1.20 MB) in
The Libertarian Forum. March 1975. Volume VII, No 3.
tre 1845 y 1847, cuando Thoreau decide instalarse en el
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[108]

[109]

[110]

[111]

[112]

contacto con la naturaleza, en una vida de soledad y so[122] George Woodcock. Anarchism: a history of anarchist
briedad. De esta experiencia, su losofa trata de transideas and movements (1962). p. 459.
mitirnos la idea de que resulta necesario un retorno respetuoso a la naturaleza, y que la felicidad es sobre todo [123] Brooks, Frank H. 1994. The Individualist Anarchists: An
fruto de la riqueza interior y de la armona de los individAnthology of Liberty (18811908). Transaction Publishuos con el entorno natural.La insumisin voluntaria: El
ers. p. 75.
anarquismo individualista espaol durante la Dictadura y
la Segunda Repblica (19231938)" by Xavier Dez
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La Nouvelle Humanit, followed by Le Naturien, Le
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[148] Section F Is anarcho"-capitalism a type of anarchism?

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[133] Wendy Mcelroy. Benjamin Tucker, Individualism, &
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[134] McElroy, Wendy. A Reconsideration of Trial by Jury, Fo- [149] "Libertarian and libertarianism are frequently employed
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largely as an attempt to distance themselves from the neg[135] Egoism by John Beverley Robinson
ative connotations of anarchy and its derivatives. The
situation has been vastly complicated in recent decades
[136] John F. Welsh. Max Stirners Dialectical Egoism: A New
with the rise of anarcho-capitalism, minimal statism and
Interpretation. Lexington Books. 2010. Pg. 163
an extreme right-wing laissez-faire philosophy advocated
by such theorists as Murray Rothbard and Robert Nozick
[137] John F. Welsh. Max Stirners Dialectical Egoism: A New
and their adoption of the words libertarian and libertarInterpretation. Lexington Books. 2010. Pg. 167
ianism. It has therefore now become necessary to distinguish between their right libertarianism and the left liber[138] it was in times of severe social repression and deadentarianism of the anarchist tradition. Anarchist seeds being social quiescence that individualist anarchists came to
neath the snow: left libertarian thought and british writers
the foreground of libertarian activityand then primarily
from William Morris to Colin Ward by David Goodway.
as terrorists. In France, Spain, and the United States, inLiverpool University Press. Liverpool. 2006. p. 4
dividualistic anarchists committed acts of terrorism that
gave anarchism its reputation as a violently sinister conspiracy. Murray Bookchin. Social Anarchism or Lifestyle [150] Within Libertarianism, Rothbard represents a minority
perspective that actually argues for the total elimination
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of the state. However Rothbards claim as an anarchist is
quickly voided when it is shown that he only wants an end
[139] Woodcock, George. Anarchism: A History of Libertarian
to the public state. In its place he allows countless private
Ideas and Movements. 1962
states, with each person supplying their own police force,
[140] Enrico Arrigoni at the Daily Bleeds Anarchist Encycloarmy, and law, or else purchasing these services from cappedia
italist venders...so what remains is shrill anti-statism conjoined to a vacuous freedom in hackneyed defense of capi[141] Paul Avrich. Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anartalism. In sum, the anarchy of Libertarianism reduces to
chism in America
a liberal fraud.Libertarianism: Bogus Anarchy by Peter
Sabatini in issue #41 (Fall/Winter 199495) of Anarchy:
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Marxist Thought. Oxford: Blackwell Reference. p. 21.
[144] Rothbard, Murray.
Are Libertarians 'Anarchists?.
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[153]
Alan and Trombley, Stephen (Eds.) Bullock, The
[145] The philosophy of anarcho-capitalism dreamed up
Norton Dictionary of Modern Thought, W. W. Norby the libertarian New Right, has nothing to do
ton & Co (1999), p. 30
with Anarchism as known by the Anarchist movement
Barry, Norman. Modern Political Theory, 2000,
proper.Meltzer, Albert. Anarchism: Arguments For and
Palgrave, p. 70
Against AK Press, (2000) p. 50
Adams, Ian. Political Ideology Today, Manchester
[146] In fact, few anarchists would accept the 'anarchoUniversity Press (2002) ISBN 0-7190-6020-6, p.
capitalists into the anarchist camp since they do not share
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a concern for economic equality and social justice, Their
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self-interested, calculating market men would be inca2003 ISBN 0-7487-7096-8, p. 91
pable of practising voluntary co-operation and mutual aid.
Heider, Ulrike. Anarchism: Left, Right, and Green,
Anarcho-capitalists, even if they do reject the State, might
City Lights, 1994. p. 3.
therefore best be called right-wing libertarians rather than
anarchists. Peter Marshall. Demanding the impossible:
Avrich, Paul. Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of
A history of anarchism. Harper Perennial. London. 2008.
Anarchism in America, Abridged Paperback Edition
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[147] It is important to distinguish between anarchism and certain strands of right-wing libertarianism which at times
go by the same name (for example, Murray Rothbards
anarcho-capitalism).Saul Newman, The Politics of Postanarchism, Edinburgh University Press, 2010, p. 43 ISBN
0748634959

Tormey, Simon. Anti-Capitalism, One World,

2004. pp. 11819
Raico, Ralph. Authentic German Liberalism of
the 19th Century, cole Polytechnique, Centre de
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Busky, Donald. Democratic Socialism: A Global [162] Spangler, Brad (15 September 2006). "Market AnarSurvey, Praeger/Greenwood (2000), p. 4
chism as Stigmergic Socialism.

[154]

[155]

Heywood, Andrew. Politics: Second Edition, Pal[163] Konkin III, Samuel Edward. The New Libertarian Manigrave (2002), p. 61
festo.
Oer, John. Herbert Spencer: Critical Assessments,
[164] Richman, Sheldon (23 June 2010).
"Why LeftRoutledge (UK) (2000), p. 243
Libertarian?" The Freeman. Foundation for Economic
K, David. What is Anarchism?" Bastard Press
Education.
(2005)
Marshall, Peter. Demanding the Impossible, Lon- [165] Richman, Sheldon (18 December 2009). "Workers of the
World Unite for a Free Market. Foundation for Economic
don: Fontana Press, 1992 (ISBN 0-00-686245-4)
Education.
Chapter 38
MacSaorsa, Iain. Is anarcho capitalism against [166] Sheldon Richman (3 February 2011). "Libertarian Left:
the state?" Spunk Press (archive)
Free-market anti-capitalism, the unknown ideal. The
American Conservative. Retrieved 5 March 2012.
Wells, Sam. Anarcho-Capitalism is Not Anarchism, and Political Competition is Not Economic
[167] Sciabarra, Chris Matthew (2000). Total Freedom: ToCompetition Frontlines 1 (January 1979)
ward a Dialectical Libertarianism. University Park, PA:
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Peiko, Leonard. 'Objectivism: The Philosophy of
Ayn Rand' Dutton Adult (1991) Chapter Govern[168] Chartier, Gary (2009). Economic Justice and Natural
ment
Law. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.
Doyle, Kevin. 'Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates,
and Pirate Utopias New York: Lexington Books, [169] Gillis, William (2011). The Freed Market. In Chartier,
(2002) pp. 4478
Gary and Johnson, Charles. Markets Not Capitalism.
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2003 p. 17

Kelsen, Hans. The Communist Theory of Law. [170] Chartier, Gary; Johnson, Charles W. (2011). Markets Not
Wm. S. Hein Publishing (1988) p. 110
Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, In Egbert. Tellegen, Maarten. Wolsink 'Society and
equality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty. BrookIts Environment: an introduction' Routledge (1998)
lyn, NY:Minor Compositions/Autonomedia. pp. 116.
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[171] Gary Chartier and Charles W. Johnson (eds). Markets
Jones, James 'The Merry Month of May' Akashic
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Books (2004) pp. 3738
Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty. Mi Sparks, Chris. Isaacs, Stuart 'Political Theorists in
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Context' Routledge (2004) p. 238
Bookchin, Murray. 'Post-Scarcity Anarchism' AK [172] Writing before the rise of the CarsonLong school of leftlibertarianism, historian of American anarchism David
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DeLeon was disinclined to treat any market-oriented vari Berkman, Alexander. 'Life of an Anarchist' Seven
ant of libertarianism as leftist; see DeLeon, David (1978).
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The American as Anarchist: Reections on Indigenous
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[157]
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equality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty. Brook[173] Gary Chartier has joined Kevin Carson, Charles Johnlyn, NY:Minor Compositions/Autonomedia
son, and others (echoing the language of Benjamin Tucker
and Thomas Hodgskin) in maintaining that, because of its
Carson, Kevin A. (2008). Organization Theory: A Liberheritage and its emancipatory goals and potential, raditarian Perspective. Charleston, SC:BookSurge.
cal market anarchism should be seenby its proponents
Carson, Kevin A. (2010). The Homebrew Industrial Revand by othersas part of the socialist tradition, and that
olution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto. Charleston, SC:
market anarchists can and should call themselves soBookSurge.
cialists. See Gary Chartier, Advocates of Freed Markets Should Oppose Capitalism, Free-Market AntiLong, Roderick T. (2000). Reason and Value: Aristotle
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Chartier, Socialist Ends, Market Means: Five Essays. Cp.
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Tucker, Socialism.
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try? In Long, Roderick T. and Machan, Tibor Aldershot:
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[175] Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner. The origins of Left [193] Onfray says in an interview Lindividualisme anarchiste
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[176] Related, arguably synonymous, terms include libertarije persiste donc plaider pour lindividu.Interview des
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was an individualist one whose partisans emphasized their
Sullivan, Mark A. (July 2003). Why the Georindividual freedom and advised other individuals to do
gist Movement Has Not Succeeded: A Personal
the same. Individualist anarchist activity spanned the full
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spectrum of alternatives to authoritarian society, subvertSamuels. American Journal of Economics and Soing it by undermining its way of life facet by facet. Thus
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of life for hundreds of individualists, as it was already for
[177] Vallentyne, Peter; Steiner, Hillel; Otsuka, Michael (2005).
countless thousands of proletarians. The wave of anarWhy Left-Libertarianism Is Not Incoherent, Indetermichist bombings and assassinations of the 1890s (Auguste
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Bonnot gang) were twin aspects of the same proletar[178] Hamowy, Ronald. Left Libertarianism. The Encycloian oensive, but were expressed in an individualist pracpedia of Libertarianism. p. 288
tice, one that complemented the great collective struggles
[179] See Gary Chartier, Advocates of Freed Markets Should
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Oppose Capitalism, Free-Market Anti-Capitalism?"
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[180] Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm by Murray Bookchin
[181] Anarchy after Leftism by Bob Black
[182] What is Ideology?" by Jason McQuinn

1900 and began to publish its own sectarian paper, 315

L'Anarchie ( 190514), there were groups and individuals
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[183] [http://sniggle.net/Manifesti/groucho.php Theses on [199] Libertad tait un rvolt, qui luttait non en dehors (tel
Groucho Marxism by Bob Black
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ducationnistes), mais en son sein. Il sera nonc comme
[184] Immediatism by Hakim Bey. AK Press. 1994. p. 4
une gure de l'anarchisme individualiste, nanmoins, il ne
se revendiquera jamais ainsi, mme si il ne rejetait pas
[185] Hakim Bey. An esoteric interpretation of the I.W.W.
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[186] Anti-politics.net, Whither now? Some thoughts on cred'illusions, nous savions bien que cette libration totale de
ating anarchy by Feral Faun
l'individu dans la socit capitaliste tait impossible et que
[187] Towards the creative nothing and other writings by Renzo
la ralisation de sa personnalit ne pourrait se faire que
Novatore
dans une socit raisonnable, dont le communisme libertaire nous semblait tre la meilleure expression.. Liber[188] The rebels dark laughter: the writings of Bruno Filippi.
tad sassociait la dynamique de rvolte individuelle radicale au projet d'mancipation collective. Il insistait sur
[189] Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. Kevin Carson
la ncessit de dvelopper le sentiment de camaraderie,
[190] Contemporary Individualist Anarchism: The Broadsides
an de remplacer la concurrence qui tait la morale de la
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Joe Peacott, Jim Baker, & Others
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[192] Biography of Anselme Bellegarrigue by Max Nettlau.
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[202] mile Armand in A las barricadas.com

[203] Unique, L' (19451956)
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CHAPTER 10. INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM

e quella profondamente socialista del movimento anarchico di lingua italiana. Questa commistione di elementi
individualisti e comunistiche caratterizza bene la corrente antiorganizzatricerappresenta lo sforzo di quanti
avvertirono in modo estremamente sensibile l'invadente
burocratismo che pervadeva il movimento operaio e
socialista.anarchismo insurrezionale in italian anarchopedia

[205] Lacaze-Duthiers, L'Ideal Humain de l'Art, pp. 578.

[218] Novatore: una biograa

[206] Richard David Sonn (2010). Sex, Violence, and the Avant[219] LIndivi-dualista
Garde: Anarchism in Interwar France. Penn State Press.
p. 199. ISBN 978-0-271-03663-2. Retrieved 27 January [220] Pietro Bruzzi at italian anarchopedia
2013.
[221] Storia del movimento libertario in Italia in anarchopedia
[207] L'Unique (1945-1956)
in Italian
[208] Pense et action des anarchistes en France : 19501970 [222] http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/73n6nh Cesare Zacby Cdric GURIN
caria (19 August 1897 October 1961) Pier Carlo Masini
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[209] Charles-Auguste Bontemps at Ephemeride Anarchiste
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[211] Au-del, lthique et la politique de Michel Onfray font signe vers lanarchisme individualiste de la
Belle Epoque qui est dailleurs une de ses rfrences
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[212] The Illegalists by Doug Imrie. Recollectionbooks.com
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[223] Los anarco-individualistas, G.I.A. ... Una escisin de la

FAI producida en el IX Congreso (Carrara, 1965) se pr
odujo cuando un sector de anarquistas de tendencia humanista rechazan la interpretacin que ellos juzgan disciplinaria del pacto asociativo clsico, y crean los GIA
(Gruppi di Iniziativa Anarchica) . Esta pequea federacin de grupos, hoy nutrida sobre todo de veteranos
anarco-individualistas de orientacin pacista, naturista,
etctera deende la autonoma personal y rechaza a rajatabla toda forma de intervencin en los procesos del sistema, como sera por ejemplo el sindicalismo. Su portavoz
es L'Internazionale con sede en Ancona. La escisin de los
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pronto haba de comenzar en el seno del movimientoEl
movimiento libertario en Italia by Bicicleta. REVISTA
DE COMUNICACIONES LIBERTARIAS Year 1 No.
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[213] Pre-WWI France was the setting for the only documented anarchist revolutionary movement to embrace all
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[215] At this point, encouraged by the disillusionment that
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[226] Horst Biography

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cc=labadie;view=toc;idno=2917084.0001.001 Anarall that says Oscar Wilde Democracy is the people who
chism and Law. on Anarchism Pamphlets in the Labadie
govern the people with blows of the club for love of the
Collection
people." Towards the Hurricane by Renzo Novatore
[245] When Oscar Wildes plea for penal reform, The Ballad [267] Alexei Borovoi (from individualism to the Platform)" by
Anatoly Dubovik
of Reading Gaol, was widely criticized, Tucker enthusiastically endorsed the poem, urging all of his subscribers
[268] Rama, Carlos M; Cappellett, ngel J (1990). El Anarto read it. Tucker, in fact, published an American edition.
quismo en Amrica Latina (in Spanish). p. CLVII. ISBN
From its early championing of Walt Whitmans Leaves of
9789802761173
Grass to a series of short stories by Francis du Bosque
in its last issues, Liberty was a vehicle of controversial, [269] Panclasta, Bilo (1928). Comprimidos psicolgicos de
avant-garde literature.Benjamin Tucker, Individualism,
los revolucionarios criollos. Peridico Claridad (in Span& Liberty: Not the Daughter but the Mother of Order by
ish) (Bogot) (5256).
Wendy McElroy
[270] Horst Matthai Quelle. Textos Filoscos (19891999). p.
[246] "The Soul of Man under Socialism" by Oscar Wilde
15
[247] George Woodcock. Anarchism: A History of Libertarian [271] El nico: publicacion peridica de pensamiento individIdeas and Movements. 1962. (p. 447)
ualista (in Spanish). AR

122

[272] Argentinian anarchist periodicals. RA Forum

CHAPTER 10. INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM

[287] Machan, T.R. (2006). Libertarianism Defended. Ashgate

Publishing. p. 257. ISBN 0754652165.

[273] Mndez, Nelson; Vallota, Alfredo. Bitcora de la Utopa:

[288] Carey, G.W. (1984). Freedom and Virtue: The ConserAnarquismo para el Siglo XXI
vative/libertarian Debate. University Press of America.
[274] Bookchin, Murray (1995). Social Anarchism or Lifestyle
ISBN 0819143340.
Anarchism. Stirling: AK Press. ISBN 9781873176832.
[289] Harcourt, GC. The Capitalist Alternative: An Introduc[275] Bookchin, Murray. Communalism: The Democratic Dition to Neo-Austrian Economics. JSTOR.
mensions of Social Anarchism. Anarchism, Marxism and
the Future of the Left: Interviews and Essays, 19931998.
AK Press, 1999, p. 155

10.9 External links

[276] Meltzer, Albert. Anarchism: Arguments For and Against.

AK Press, 2000. pp. 114115
[277] Grith, Gareth. Socialism and Superior Brain: The Political Thought of George Bernard Shaw. Routledge (UK).
1993. p. 310

Enemies of Society An anthology of individualist

and egoist thought
The Bonnot Gang: The Story of the French Illegalists
by Richard Parry

[278] Anderson, Carlotta R. All-American Anarchist: Joseph A.

Labadie and the Labor Movement, Wayne State University
Press, 1998, p. 250

A.3.1 What are the dierences between individualist

and social anarchists?, An Anarchist FAQ

[279] Tucker, Benjamin. Economic Rent.

I-studies: a journal of Stirner studies and personalist

philosophy

[280] Ostergaard, Georey. Anarchism. The Blackwell Dictionary of Modern Social Thought. Blackwell Publishing.
p. 14.
[281] Carson, Kevin, A Mutualist FAQ.
[282] Long, Roderick. T. An Interview With Roderick Long
[283] Morris, Christopher. 1992. An Essay on the Modern State.
Cambridge University Press. p. 61. (Used synonymously
with individualist anarchism when referring to individualist anarchism that supports a market society)
[284] One is anarcho-capitalism, a form of libertarian anarchism which demands that the state should be abolished
and that private individuals and rms should control social
and economic aairs (Barbara Goodwin, Using Political Ideas, fourth edition, John Wiley & Sons (1987), pp.
137138)
[285] the 'libertarian anarchist' could on the face of it either be
in favour of capitalism or against it ... Pro-capitalist anarchism, is as one might expect, particularly prevalent in
the U.S. where it feeds on the strong individualist and libertarian currents that have always been part of the American political imaginary. To return to the point, however,
there are individualist anarchists who are most certainly
not anti-capitalist and there are those who may well be.
Tormey, Simon, Anti-Capitalism, A Beginners Guide,
Oneworld Publications, 2004, pp. 118119
[286] Friedman presents practical and economic arguments
for both libertarianism in general and libertarian anarchism, which he calls anarcho-capitalism. Burton, Daniel
C. Libertarian Anarchism: Why It Is Best For Freedom,
Law, The Economy And The Environment, And Why Direct Action Is The Way To Get It, Political Notes No. 168,
Libertarian Alliance (2001), ISSN 0267-7058 ISBN 185637-504-8, pp. 1 & 7 Note: Burton is the founder
of the Individualist Anarchist Society at the University of
California at Berkeley.

Les en-dehors:Anarchistes individualistes et illgalistes la Belle poque by Anne Steiner.

LEchappe. 2008 in French
Internet Archive of Individualist Anarchism
Mutualist.org. Free market anti-capitalism
Voluntary non-submission. Spanish individualist
anarchism during dictatorship and the second republic (19231938) by Xavier Diez PDF in Spanish
An Introduction to Individualist Anarchism by
Andrew Rogers
L'En Dehors current French individualist anarchist
magazine and website
Archives of individualist and egoist texts at the Anarchist Library
William D. P. Bliss, Historical Sketch of Individualist Anarchism (1897) With further references

Chapter 11

Anarchism and violence

Anarchism and violence have become closely con- sympathetically of him and described his act as the result
nected in popular thought, in part because of a concept of a violent society. Her defense of Czolgosz was met
of "propaganda of the deed". Propaganda of the deed, or with open hostility from most of the anarchist press.
attentt, was espoused by a number of leading anarchists
in the late nineteenth century, and was associated with a
number of incidents of violence. Anarchist thought, however, is quite diverse on the question of violence. Some
anarchists have opposed coercion, while others have sup- 11.2 Public perception
ported it, particularly in the form of violent revolution
on the path to anarchy.[1] Anarchism includes a school of
thought which rejects all violence (anarcho-pacism).
Many anarchists regard the state to be at the denitional
center of structural violence: directly or indirectly preventing people from meeting their basic needs, calling for
violence as self-defense.[2]
Perhaps the rst anarchist periodical was named The
Peaceful Revolutionist, a strain of anarchism has followed
Tolstoys pacism.

11.1 Propaganda of the deed

Main article: Propaganda of the deed
Late in the 19th century, anarchist labor unions began
to use the tactic of general strike. This was often met
with violence and some of the strikes even resulted in
massacres of the striking workers by militaries, police,
and state militias; as well as by mercenaries hired by the
bosses. The Pinkerton Security group was particularly
notorious in 19th century America as mercenaries for
hire and were responsible for many mass killings of trade An American political cartoon, published in 1919, depicting a
European anarchist preparing to destroy the Statue of Liberty.
unionists and anarchists.
In this climate, some anarchists began to advocate and
practice terrorism or assassination, which they referred
to as propaganda of the deed. United States President
William McKinley was assassinated by Leon Czolgosz,
a registered Republican who, after his arrest, claimed he
had been inuenced by the writings of Emma Goldman
and others. Czolgosz' actions were widely condemned by
anarchists, but the media widely characterized Czolgosz
as a typical anarchist even though he had never actually
belonged to any anarchist organization. Goldman spoke

Depictions in the press and popular ction helped create

a lasting public impression that anarchists are violent terrorists. This perception was enhanced by events such as
the Haymarket Riot, where anarchists were blamed for
throwing a bomb at police who came to break up a public meeting in Chicago. The writer J. R. R. Tolkien, in
a letter to his son, briey described anarchy philosophically understood as meaning abolition of control not
whiskered men with bombs.[3]

123

124

11.3 Anarcho-pacism

CHAPTER 11. ANARCHISM AND VIOLENCE

Britain and the United States and was a strong presence
in the subsequent campaigns for nuclear disarmament.

11.4 Anarchist theory

See also: anarchist schools of thought
Anarchism encompasses a variety of views about violence. The Tolstoyan tradition of non-violent resistance
is prevalent among some anarchists. Ursula K. Le Guin's
novel The Dispossessed expressed this anarchism:

Blessed are the Peacemakers by George Bellows, The Masses,

1917.

See also: Anarcho-pacism

Anarcho-pacism (also pacist anarchism or anarchist
pacism) is a form of anarchism which completely rejects the use of violence in any form for any purpose.
Important proponents include Leo Tolstoy and Bart de
Ligt. Mohandas Gandhi is an important inuence.
Henry David Thoreau, though not a pacist himself,[4]
inuenced both Leo Tolstoy and Mohandas Gandhis advocacy of Nonviolent resistance through his work Civil
Disobedience.[5]
At some point anarcho-pacism had as its main proponent Christian anarchism. The rst large-scale anarchopacist movement was the Tolstoyan peasant movement
in Russia. They were a predominantly peasant movement
that set up hundreds of voluntary anarchist pacist communes based on their interpretation of Christianity as requiring absolute pacism and the rejection of all coercive
authority.
Dutch anarchist-pacist Bart de Ligts 1936 treatise The
Conquest of Violence (with its none too subtle allusion
to Kropotkins The Conquest of Bread) was also of signal importance.[6] Gandhis ideas were popularised in
the West in books such as Richard Gregg's The Power of
Nonviolence (1935), and Bart de Ligts The Conquest of
Violence (1937).
As a global movement, anarchist pacism emerged
shortly before World War II in the Netherlands, Great

Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bombin-the-pocket stu, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the
social-Darwinist economic 'libertarianism' of
the far right; but anarchism, as pregured in
early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman.
Anarchisms principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principle moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic,
and to me the most interesting, of all political
theories.[7]
Other anarchists have believed that violence (especially
self-defense) is justied as a way to provoke social upheaval which could lead to a social revolution. Errico
Malatesta, an anarchist-communist, propounded that it is
necessary to destroy with violence, since one cannot do
otherwise, the violence which denies [the means of life
and for development] to the workers.[8] Anarchists with
this view advocate violence insofar as they see it to be
necessary in ridding the world of exploitation, and especially states. Emma Goldman included in her denition
of Anarchism the observation that all governments rest on
violence, and this is one of the many reasons they should
be opposed. Goldman herself didn't oppose tactics like
assassination in her early career, but changed her views
after she went to Russia, where she witnessed the violence
of the Russian state and the Red Army. From then on she
condemned the use of terrorism, especially by the state,
and advocated violence only as a means of self-defense.
Goldmans views were in keeping with those of Johann
Most, who advocated propaganda of the deed.

11.5 References
[1] Fowler, R.B. The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 25,
No. 4. (Dec. 1972), pp. 743-744
[2] right of self-defense
[3] (our emphasis)

11.6. FURTHER READING

[4] Thoreau, Henry. Rosenblum, Nancy, ed. Thoreau: Political Writings. Cambridge University Press. p. xxiv. ISBN
0521476755.
[5] Resiting the Nation State, the pacist and anarchist tradition by Georey Ostergaard
[6] Anarchism and the Movement for a New Society: Direct Action and Pregurative Community in the 1970s and
80s by Andrew Cornell
[7] Ursula K. Le Guin|Preface of 'The Day Before the Revolution' ('In Memorial to Paul Goodman 1911-1972'), published in the anthology 'The Winds Twelve Quarters Vol2'
[8] The revolutionary haste by Errico Malatesta

11.6 Further reading

Forman, James (1975). Anarchism: Political Innocence or Social Violence?. New York: F. Watts.
ISBN 0-531-02790-2.
Richards, Vernon (1983). Violence and Anarchism.
London: Freedom Press. ISBN 0-900384-70-0.
Gelderloos, Peter (2007). How Nonviolence Protects
the State. Boston: South End Press. ISBN 0-89608772-7.
Churchill, Ward (2007). Pacism as Pathology.
Stirling: AK Press. ISBN 1-904859-18-6.
You can't Blow up a Social Relationship: The Anarchist case against Terrorism. Australia: Anares
Books. 1979.

125

Chapter 12

Green anarchism
Green anarchism (or eco-anarchism) is a school of
thought within anarchism which puts a particular emphasis on environmental issues. A green anarchist theory
is normally one that extends anarchist ideology beyond
a critique of human interactions, and includes a critique
of the interactions between humans and non-humans as
well.[1] This often culminates in an anarchist revolutionary praxis that is not merely dedicated to human liberation, but also to some form of ecological liberation,[2]
and that aims to bring about an environmentally sustainable anarchist society.
Important early inuences were Henry David Thoreau,
Leo Tolstoy[3] and lise Reclus.[4] In the late 19th
century there emerged anarcho-naturism as the fusion of anarchism and naturist philosophies within
individualist anarchist circles in France, Spain, Cuba,[5]
and Portugal.[3][6] Important contemporary currents
(some of which may be mutually exclusive) include
anarcho-primitivism, which oers a critique of technology and argues that anarchism is best suited to pre"civilised ways of life, veganarchism, which argues that
human liberation and animal liberation are inseparable,[7]
and social ecology, which argues that the hierarchical Henry David Thoreau, inuential early green-anarchist who
domination of nature by human stems from the hierar- wrote Walden
chical domination of human by human.[8]

12.1 Early ecoanarchism

12.1.1

Henry David Thoreau

Main article: Henry David Thoreau

Anarchism started to have an ecological view mainly in
the writings of American anarchist and transcendentalist
Henry David Thoreau. In his book Walden he advocates simple living and self-suciency among natural
surroundings in resistance to the advancement of industrial civilization.[9] The work is part personal declaration
of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual
discovery, satire, and manual for self-reliance.[10] First
published in 1854, it details Thoreaus experiences over
the course of two years, two months, and two days in
a cabin he built near Walden Pond, amidst woodland
owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emer-

son, near Concord, Massachusetts. The book compresses

the time into a single calendar year and uses passages
of four seasons to symbolize human development. By
immersing himself in nature, Thoreau hoped to gain a
more objective understanding of society through personal
introspection. Simple living and self-suciency were
Thoreaus other goals, and the whole project was inspired
by transcendentalist philosophy, a central theme of the
American Romantic Period. As Thoreau made clear in
his book, his cabin was not in wilderness but at the edge
of town, about two miles (3 km) from his family home.
As such Many have seen in Thoreau one of the precursors of ecologism and anarcho-primitivism represented
today in John Zerzan. For George Woodcock this attitude can be also motivated by certain idea of resistance
to progress and of rejection of the growing materialism
which is the nature of American society in the mid XIX
century.[9] John Zerzan himself included the text Excursions (1863) by Thoreau in his edited compilation of

126

12.1. EARLY ECOANARCHISM

writings called Against civilization: Readings and reections from 1999.[11]

127
governments that always try to homogenize diverse geographical areas.

For the authors of An Anarchist FAQ Reclus argued that

a secret harmony exists between the earth and the people whom it nourishes, and when imprudent societies let
Main article: lise Reclus
lise Reclus (15 March 1830 4 July 1905), also themselves violate this harmony, they always end up regretting it. Similarly, no contemporary ecologist would
disagree with his comments that the truly civilised man
[and women] understands that his [or her] nature is bound
up with the interest of all and with that of nature. He [or
she] repairs the damage caused by his predecessors and
works to improve his domain.[13]

12.1.2

lise Reclus

Reclus advocated nature conservation and opposed meateating and cruelty to animals. He was a vegetarian.[14]
As a result, his ideas are seen by some historians as anticipating the modern social ecology and animal rights
movements.[15] Shortly before his death, Reclus completed L'Homme et la terre (1905).[16] In it, he added to his
previous greater works by considering humanitys development relative to its geographical environment. Reclus
was also an early proponent of naturism.[4]

12.1.3 Anarcho-naturism
Main article: Anarcho-naturism
In the late 19th century Anarchist naturism appeared as the union of anarchist and naturist
philosophies.[3][17][18][19] Mainly it had importance within individualist anarchist circles[6][20] in
Spain,[3][6][18] France,[6][21] Portugal,[22] and Cuba.[23]
lise Reclus, French anarchist geographer and early environmentalist

known as Jacques lise Reclus, was a renowned French

geographer, writer and anarchist. He produced his 19volume masterwork La Nouvelle Gographie universelle,
la terre et les hommes (Universal Geography), over a
period of nearly 20 years (18751894). In 1892 he was
awarded the prestigious Gold Medal of the Paris Geographical Society for this work, despite his having been
banished from France because of his political activism.
According to Kirkpatrick Sale:[12]
His geographical work, thoroughly researched and uninchingly scientic, laid out a
picture of human-nature interaction that we today would call bioregionalism. It showed, with
more detail than anyone but a dedicated geographer could possibly absorb, how the ecology of a place determined the kinds of lives
and livelihoods its denizens would have and
thus how people could properly live in selfregarding and self-determined bioregions without the interference of large and centralized

Anarcho-naturism advocated vegetarianism, free love,

nudism and an ecological world view within anarchist
groups and outside them.[3][20] Anarcho-naturism promoted an ecological worldview, small ecovillages, and
most prominently nudism as a way to avoid the articiality of the industrial mass society of modernity.[24] Naturist individualist anarchists saw the individual in his biological, physical and psychological aspects and tried to
eliminate social determinations.[24] Important promoters
of this were Henri Zisly and Emile Gravelle who collaborated in La Nouvelle Humanit followed by Le Naturien,
Le Sauvage, L'Ordre Naturel, & La Vie Naturelle[25]
France
Richard D. Sonn comments on the inuence of naturist
views in the wider French anarchist movement:
Henri Zisly

Main article: Henri Zisly

Henri Zisly (born in Paris, November 2, 1872; died

in 1945)[27] was a French individualist anarchist and

128
naturist.[28] He participated alongside Henri Beylie and
mile Gravelle in many journals such as La Nouvelle Humanit and La Vie Naturelle, which promoted anarchistnaturism. In 1902, he was one of the main initiators,
alongside Georges Butaud and Sophie Zakowska, of the
cooperative Colonie de Vaux established in Essmes-surMarne, in l'Aisne.
Zislys political activity, primarily aimed at supporting a
return to 'natural life' through writing and practical involvement, stimulated lively confrontations within and
outside the anarchist environment. Zisly vividly criticized
progress and civilization, which he regarded as 'absurd,
ignoble, and lthy.' He openly opposed industrialization, arguing that machines were inherently authoritarian,
defended nudism, advocated a non-dogmatic and nonreligious adherence to the 'laws of nature,' recommended
a lifestyle based on limited needs and self-suciency, and
disagreed with vegetarianism, which he considered 'antiscientic.'"[29]

CHAPTER 12. GREEN ANARCHISM

but also mainstream literary publications...From 1912 to
1913 he edited the freethinking journal El Audaz. Then
he began his largest publishing job by helping to found
and edit the monthly alternative health magazine that followed the anarcho-naturist line Pro-Vida.[5]
Spain

Cuba
The historian Kirwin R. Schaer in his study of
Cuban anarchism reports anarcho-naturism as A third
strand within the islands anarchist movement alongside
anarcho-communism and anarcho-syndicalism.[5] Naturism was a global alternative health and lifestyle movement. Naturists focused on redening ones life to live
simply, eat cheap but nutritious vegetarian diets, and raise
ones own food if possible. The countryside was posited
as a romantic alternative to urban living, and some naturists even promoted what they saw as the healthful benets of nudism. Globally, the naturist movement counted
anarchists, liberals, and socialists as its followers. However, in Cuba a particular anarchist dimension evolved
led by people like Adrin del Valle, who spearheaded the
Cuban eort to shift naturisms focus away from only individual health to naturism having a social emancipatory function.[5]
Schaer reports the inuence that anarcho-naturism had
outside naturists circles. So For instance, nothing inherently prevented an anarcho-syndicalist in the Havana
restaurant workers union from supporting the alternative health care programs of the anarcho-naturists and
seeing those alternative practices as revolutionary."".[5]
Anarcho-naturists promoted a rural ideal, simple living, and being in harmony with Nature as ways to save
the laborers from the increasingly industrialized character
of Cuba. Besides promoting an early twentieth-century
"back-to-the-land" movement, they used these romantic
images of Nature to illustrate how far removed a capitalist industrialized Cuba had departed from an anarchist view of natural harmony.[5] The main propagandizer in Cuba of anarcho-naturism was the Catalonia born
Adrin del Valle (aka Palmiro de Lidia)...Over the following decades, Del Valle became a constant presence
in not only the anarchist press that proliferated in Cuba

Isaac Puente, spanish anarchist naturist and anarcho-communist

Anarcho-naturism was quite important at the end of the

1920s in the spanish anarchist movement[30] In France,
later important propagandists of anarcho-naturism include Henri Zisly[31] and mile Gravelle whose ideas
were important in individualist anarchist circles in Spain,
where Federico Urales (pseudonym of Joan Montseny)
promoted the ideas of Gravelle and Zisly in La Revista
Blanca (18981905).[32]
The relation between Anarchism and Naturism gives
way to the Naturist Federation, in July 1928, and to the
lV Spanish Naturist Congress, in September 1929, both
supported by the Libertarian Movement. However, in
the short term, the Naturist and Libertarian movements
grew apart in their conceptions of everyday life. The Naturist movement felt closer to the Libertarian individualism of some French theoreticians such as Henri Ner (real
name of Han Ryner) than to the revolutionary goals proposed by some Anarchist organisations such as the FAI,
(Federacin Anarquista Ibrica)".[30] This ecological tendency in Spanish anarchism was strong enough as to call
the attention of the CNTFAI in Spain. Daniel Gurin in

12.1. EARLY ECOANARCHISM

Anarchism: From Theory to Practice reports:

Isaac Puente

Main article: Isaac Puente

Isaac Puente was an inuential Spanish anarchist during the 1920s and 1930s and an important propagandist of anarcho-naturism,[34][35] was a militant of both
the CNT anarcho-syndicalist trade union and Iberian Anarchist Federation. He published the book El Comunismo Libertario y otras proclamas insurreccionales y
naturistas (en:Libertarian Communism and other insurrectionary and naturist proclaims) in 1933, which sold
around 100,000 copies,[36] and wrote the nal document
for the Extraordinary Confederal Congress of Zaragoza
of 1936 which established the main political line for
the CNT for that year.[37] Puente was a doctor who approached his medical practice from a naturist point of
view.[34] He saw naturism as an integral solution for the
working classes, alongside Neo-Malthusianism, and believed it concerned the living being while anarchism addressed the social being.[38] He believed capitalist societies endangered the well-being of humans from both
a socioeconomic and sanitary viewpoint, and promoted
anarcho-communism alongside naturism as a solution.[34]

Other countries
Naturism also met anarchism in the United Kingdom.
In many of the alternative communities established in
Britain in the early 1900s nudism, anarchism, vegetarianism and free love were accepted as part of a politically radical way of life. In the 1920s the inhabitants
of the anarchist community at Whiteway, near Stroud
in Gloucestershire, shocked the conservative residents of
the area with their shameless nudity.[39] In Italy, during the IX Congress of the Italian Anarchist Federation in Carrara in 1965, a group decided to split o
from this organization and created the Gruppi di Iniziativa Anarchica. In the seventies, it was mostly composed of veteran individualist anarchists with an orientation of pacism, naturism, etc,....[40] American anarchosyndicalist Sam Dolgo shows some of the criticism that
some people on the other anarchist currents at the time
had for anarcho-naturist tendencies. Speaking of life at
the Stelton Colony of New York in the 1930s, noted with
disdain that it, like other colonies, was infested by vegetarians, naturists, nudists, and other cultists, who sidetracked true anarchist goals. One resident always went
barefoot, ate raw food, mostly nuts and raisins, and refused to use a tractor, being opposed to machinery, and
he didn't want to abuse horses, so he dug the earth himself. Such self-proclaimed anarchists were in reality oxcart anarchists, Dolgo said, who opposed organization
and wanted to return to a simpler life. In an interview
with Paul Avrich before his death, Dolgo also grumbled,
I am sick and tired of these half-assed artists and poets

129
who object to organization and want only to play with
their belly buttons."".[41]

12.1.4 Leo Tolstoy and tolstoyanism

Main articles: Leo Tolstoy and tolstoyanism
Russian christian anarchist and anarcho-pacist Leo Tolstoy is also recognized as an early inuence in green
anarchism.[3] The novelist was struck by the description
of Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu ascetic renunciation as
being the path to holiness. After reading passages such
as the following, which abound in Schopenhauers ethical
chapters, the Russian nobleman chose poverty and formal
denial of the will:
But this very necessity of involuntary suffering (by poor people) for eternal salvation is
also expressed by that utterance of the Savior
(Matthew 19:24): It is easier for a camel to go
through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man
to enter into the kingdom of God. Therefore
those who were greatly in earnest about their
eternal salvation, chose voluntary poverty when
fate had denied this to them and they had been
born in wealth. Thus Buddha Sakyamuni was
born a prince, but voluntarily took to the mendicants sta; and Francis of Assisi, the founder
of the mendicant orders who, as a youngster
at a ball, where the daughters of all the notabilities were sitting together, was asked: Now
Francis, will you not soon make your choice
from these beauties?" and who replied: I have
made a far more beautiful choice!" Whom?"
"La poverta (poverty)": whereupon he abandoned every thing shortly afterwards and wandered through the land as a mendicant.[42]
Despite his misgivings about anarchist violence, Tolstoy took risks to circulate the prohibited publications of
anarchist thinkers in Russia, and corrected the proofs of
Kropotkins Words of a Rebel, illegally published in
St Petersburg in 1906.[43] Tolstoy was enthused by the
economic thinking of Henry George, incorporating it approvingly into later works such as Resurrection, the book
that played a major factor in his excommunication.[44]
Tolstoyans identify themselves as Christians, but do not
generally belong to an institutional Church. They attempt to live an ascetic and simple life, preferring to
be vegetarian, non-smoking, teetotal and chaste. Tolstoyans are considered Christian pacists and advocate
nonresistance in all circumstances.[45] They do not support or participate in the government which they consider
immoral, violent and corrupt. Tolstoy rejected the state
(as it only exists on the basis of physical force) and all institutions that are derived from it - the police, law courts
and army.[46] Tolstoy inuenced Mohandas Karamchand
Gandhi who set up a cooperative colony called Tolstoy

130

CHAPTER 12. GREEN ANARCHISM

iments in the United States[48] where the residents were
also inuenced by the views of Henry George and Edward
Bellamy.,[49] as well as in Russia,[50] England[51] and the
Netherlands.[52]

12.2 Mid twentieth century

Several anarchists from the mid twentieth century, including Herbert Read, Ethel Mannin, Leopold Kohr,[53]
and Paul Goodman,[54] also held proto-environmental
views linked to their anarchism. Mannins 1944 book
Bread and Roses: A Utopian Survey and Blue-Print has
been described by anarchist historian Robert Graham
as setting forth an ecological vision in opposition to
the prevailing and destructive industrial organization of
society.[54]

12.2.1 Leopold Kohr

Main article: Leopold Kohr
Leopold Kohr (5 October 1909 in Oberndorf bei
Salzburg, Austria 26 February 1994 in Gloucester, England) was an economist, philosopher and political scientist known both for his opposition to the cult of bigness
in social organization and as one of those who initiated
the small is beautiful movement. For almost twenty years
he was Professor of Economics and Public Administration at the University of Puerto Rico. He described himself as a "philosophical anarchist. In 1937, Kohr became
a freelance correspondent during the Spanish Civil War,
where he was impressed by the limited, self-contained
governments of the separatist states of Catalonia and
Aragon, as well as the small Spanish anarchist city states
of Alcoy and Caspe. In his rst published essay Disunion
Now: A Plea for a Society based upon Small Autonomous
Units, published in Commonweal in 1941, Kohr wrote
about a Europe at war: We have ridiculed the many little states, now we are terrorized by their few successors.
He called for the breakup of Europe into hundreds of city
states.[53] Kohr developed his ideas in a series of books,
including The Breakdown of Nations (1957), Development without Aid (1973) and The Overdeveloped Nations
(1977).[55] From Leopold Kohrs most popular work The
Breakdown of Nations:

Tolstoy dressed in peasant clothing, by Ilya Repin (1901)

Farm near Johannesburg, South Africa, having been inspired by Tolstoys ideas. The colony comprising 1,100
acres (4.5 km2 ) was funded by the Gandhian Herman
Kallenbach and placed at the disposal of the satyagrahis
from 1910.[47] He also inspired similar communal exper-

[...] there seems to be only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness. Oversimplied as this may seem, we shall nd the
idea more easily acceptable if we consider that
bigness, or oversize, is really much more than
just a social problem. It appears to be the
one and only problem permeating all creation.
Whenever something is wrong, something is
too big. [...] And if the body of a people becomes diseased with the fever of aggression,

12.2. MID TWENTIETH CENTURY

brutality, collectivism, or massive idiocy, it is
not because it has fallen victim to bad leadership or mental derangement. It is because
human beings, so charming as individuals or
in small aggregations, have been welded into
overconcentrated social units.

131
post-scarcity societies, and can thus imagine the fulllment of the social and cultural potentialities latent in a
technology of abundance.[63] The self-administration of
society is now made possible by technological advancement and, when technology is used in an ecologically sensitive manner, the revolutionary potential of society will
be much changed.[64] In 1982, his book The Ecology of
Freedom had a profound impact on the emerging ecology movement, both in the United States and abroad. He
was a principal gure in the Burlington Greens in 198690, an ecology group that ran candidates for city council on a program to create neighborhood democracy. In
From Urbanization to Cities (originally published in 1987
as The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship), Bookchin traced the democratic traditions that inuenced his political philosophy and dened the implementation of the libertarian municipalism concept. A few
years later The Politics of Social Ecology, written by his
partner of 20 years, Janet Biehl, briey summarized these
ideas.

Later in his academic and writing career he protested the

cult of bigness and economic growth and promoted the
concept of human scale and small community life. He
argued that massive external aid to poorer nations stied
local initiatives and participation. His vision called for a
dissolution of centralized political and economic structures in favor of local control.[55] Kohr was an important inspiration to the Green, bioregional, Fourth World,
decentralist, and anarchist movements, Kohr contributed
often to John Papworth's `Journal for the Fourth World',
Resurgence. One of Kohrs students was economist E. F.
Schumacher, another prominent inuence on these movements, whose best selling book Small Is Beautiful took
its title from one of Kohrs core principles.[56] Similarly,
his ideas inspired Kirkpatrick Sale's books Human Scale
(1980) and Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vi- 12.2.3 Jacques Ellul
sion (1985). Sale arranged the rst American publication of The Breakdown of Nations in 1978 and wrote the Main article: Jacques Ellul
foreword.[53]
Jacques Ellul (January 6, 1912 May 19, 1994) was
a French philosopher, law professor, sociologist, lay
12.2.2 Murray Bookchin
theologian, and Christian anarchist. He wrote several
books about Christianity, the technological society, proMain article: Murray Bookchin
paganda, and the interaction between religion and politics. Professor of History and the Sociology of InstituMurray Bookchin (January 14, 1921 July 30, 2006)[57] tions on the Faculty of Law and Economic Sciences at
was an American libertarian socialist author, orator, and the University of Bordeaux, he authored 58 books and
philosopher. In 1958, Murray Bookchin dened him- more than a thousand articles over his lifetime in all, the
self as an anarchist,[58] seeing parallels between anar- dominant theme of which has been the threat to human
chism and ecology. His rst book, Our Synthetic Envi- freedom and religion created by modern technique. The
ronment, was published under the pseudonym Lewis Her- Ellulian concept of technique is briey dened within the
ber in 1962, a few months before Rachel Carson's Silent Notes to Reader section of The Technological Society
Spring.[59] The book described a broad range of envi- (1964). What many consider to be Elluls most important
ronmental ills but received little attention because of its work, The Technological Society (1964) was originally tipolitical radicalism. His groundbreaking essay Ecology tled: La Technique: L'enjeu du sicle (literally, The Stake
and Revolutionary Thought introduced ecology as a con- of the Century).[65] In it, Ellul set forth seven charactercept in radical politics.[60] In 1968 he founded another istics of modern technology that make eciency a negroup that published the inuential Anarchos magazine, cessity: rationality, articiality, automatism of techniwhich published that and other innovative essays on post- cal choice, self-augmentation, monism, universalism, and
scarcity and on ecological technologies such as solar and autonomy.[66]
wind energy, and on decentralization and miniaturization. For Ellul the rationality of technique enforces logical and
Lecturing throughout the United States, he helped popu- mechanical organization through division of labor, the
larize the concept of ecology to the counterculture.
setting of production standards, etc. And it creates an arPost-Scarcity Anarchism is a collection of essays written
by Murray Bookchin and rst published in 1971 by Ramparts Press.[61] It outlines the possible form anarchism
might take under conditions of post-scarcity. It is one
of Bookchins major works,[62] and its radical thesis
provoked controversy for being utopian and messianic
in its faith in the liberatory potential of technology.[63]
Bookchin argues that post-industrial societies are also

ticial system which eliminates or subordinates the natural world. Today, he argues, the technological society is
generally held sacred (cf. Saint Steve Jobs[67] ). Since he
denes technique as the totality of methods rationally arrived at, and having absolute eciency (for a given stage
of development) in every eld of human activity,[68] it is
clear that his sociological analysis focuses not on the society of machines as such, but on the society of ecient

132
techniques.

12.3 Contemporary developments

CHAPTER 12. GREEN ANARCHISM

used to achieve this is called Libertarian Municipalism
which involves the establishment of face-to-face democratic institutions which are to grow and expand confederally with the goal of eventually replacing the nation-state.

Janet Biehl (born 1953) is a writer associated with social

ecology,
the body of ideas developed and publicized by
Notable contemporary writers espousing green anarchism
Murray
Bookchin.
In 1986, she attended the Institute for
include Derrick Jensen, Jaime Semprun, George Draan,
Social
Ecology
and
there, began a collaborative relation[69]
John Zerzan, Starhawk and Alan Carter.
ship with Bookchin, working intensively with him over
the next two decades in the explication of social ecology
from their shared home in Burlington, Vermont.[71]
12.3.1 Social ecology and communalism
From 1987 to 2000, she and Bookchin co-wrote and coMain articles: Social ecology and Communalism (Politi- published the theoretical newsletter Green Perspectives,
cal Philosophy)
later renamed Left Green Perspectives.[72] She is the editor
Social ecology is closely related to the work and ideas and compiler of The Murray Bookchin Reader (1997);[73]
the author of The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian
Municipalism (1998) and Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics
(1991); and coauthor (with Peter Staudenmaier) of Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience (1995).

12.3.2 Green Anarchist

Main article: Green Anarchist
The magazine Green Anarchist was for a while the prin-

Murray Bookchin

of Murray Bookchin and inuenced by anarchist Peter

Kropotkin. Social ecologists assert that the present
ecological crisis has its roots in human social problems,
and that the domination of human-over-nature stems
from the domination of human-over-human.[70]
Bookchin later developed a political philosophy to complement social ecology which he called "Communalism"
(spelled with a capital C to dierentiate it from other
forms of communalism). While originally conceived as a
form of Social anarchism, he later developed Communalism into a separate ideology which incorporates what he
Cover of the rst issue of 'Green Anarchist' magazine (Summer
saw as the most benecial elements of Anarchism, Marx- 1984), featuring artwork by then editor Richard Hunt
ism, syndicalism, and radical ecology.
Politically, Communalists advocate a network of directly cipal voice in the UK advocating green anarchism, an exdemocratic citizens assemblies in individual communi- plicit fusion of libertarian socialist and ecological thinkties/cities organized in a confederal fashion. This method ing. Founded after the 1984 Stop the City protests, the

12.3. CONTEMPORARY DEVELOPMENTS

magazine was launched in the summer of that year by
an editorial collective consisting of Alan Albon, Richard
Hunt and Marcus Christo. Early issues featured a range
of broadly anarchist and ecological ideas, bringing together groups and individuals as varied as Class War,
veteran anarchist writer Colin Ward, anarcho-punk band
Crass, as well as the Peace Convoy, anti-nuclear campaigners, animal rights activists and so on. However
the diversity that many saw as the publications greatest
strength quickly led to irreconcilable arguments between
the essentially pacist approach of Albon and Christo,
and the advocacy of violent confrontation with the State
favoured by Hunt. During the 1990s Green Anarchist
came under the helm of an editorial collective that included Paul Rogers, Steve Booth and others, during which
period the publication became increasingly aligned with
primitivism, an anti-civilization philosophy advocated by
writers such as John Zerzan, Bob Black and Fredy Perlman. Starting in 1995, Hampshire Police began a series
of at least 56 raids, code named 'Operation Washington',
that eventually resulted in the August to November 1997
Portsmouth trial of Green Anarchist editors Booth, Saxon
Wood, Noel Molland and Paul Rogers, as well as Animal
Liberation Front (ALF) Press Ocer Robin Webb and
Animal Liberation Front Supporters Group (ALFSG)
newsletter editor Simon Russell. The defendants organised the GANDALF Defence campaign. Three of the
editors of Green Anarchist, Noel Molland, Saxon Wood
and Booth were jailed for 'conspiracy to incite'. However,
all three were shortly afterwards released on appeal.

12.3.3

John Zerzan, anarcho-primitivism theorist

are other non-anarchist forms of primitivism, and not all

primitivists point to the same phenomenon as the source
of modern, civilized problems. Anarcho-primitivists are
often distinguished by their focus on the praxis of achieving a feral state of being through "rewilding".

Fredy Perlman

Main article: Fredy Perlman

Fredy Perlman (August 20, 1934 July 26, 1985) was a
Czech-born, naturalised American author, publisher and
militant. His most popular work, the book Against HisStory, Against Leviathan!, details the rise of state domination with a retelling of history through the Hobbesian
metaphor of the Leviathan. The book remains a major
source of inspiration for anti-civilization perspectives in
contemporary anarchism, most notably on the thought of
philosopher John Zerzan.[74]

12.3.4

133

Anarcho-primitivism

Main article: Anarcho-primitivism

Anarcho-primitivism is an anarchist critique of the origins and progress of civilization. According to anarchoprimitivism, the shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural
subsistence gave rise to social stratication, coercion, and
alienation. Anarcho-primitivists advocate a return to non"civilized ways of life through deindustrialisation, abolition of the division of labour or specialization, and abandonment of large-scale organization technologies. There

John Zerzan
Main article: John Zerzan
John Zerzan is an American anarchist and primitivist
philosopher and author. His works criticize agricultural
civilization as inherently oppressive, and advocate drawing upon the ways of life of hunter gatherers as an inspiration for what a free society should look like. Some
subjects of his criticism include domestication, language,
symbolic thought (such as mathematics and art) and the
concept of time.
His ve major books are Elements of Refusal (1988),
Future Primitive and Other Essays (1994), Running on
Emptiness (2002), Against Civilization: Readings and Reections (2005) and Twilight of the Machines (2008).
Zerzan was one of the editors of Green Anarchy, a controversial journal of anarcho-primitivist and insurrectionary
anarchist thought. He is also the host of Anarchy Radio in Eugene on the University of Oregon's radio station KWVA. He has also served as a contributing editor at Anarchy Magazine and has been published in magazines such as AdBusters. He does extensive speaking
tours around the world, and is married to an indepen-

134
dent consultant to museums and other nonprot organizations. In 1974, Black and Red Press published Unions
Against Revolution by Spanish ultra-left theorist Grandizo
Munis that included an essay by Zerzan which previously
appeared in the journal Telos. Over the next 20 years,
Zerzan became intimately involved with the Fifth Estate,
Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, Demolition Derby
and other anarchist periodicals. He began to question civilization in the early 80s, after having sought to confront
issues around the neutrality of technology and division of
labour, at the time when Fredy Perlman was making similar conclusions.[75]

CHAPTER 12. GREEN ANARCHISM

critical draw between anarchy and anthropology, attacks
on Reason and the Progress/linear views of human history and Future that stand at the base of the ideology of
civilization.

12.3.5 Vegan anarchism

Main article: Veganarchism

Veganarchism or vegan anarchism, is the political philosophy of veganism (more specically animal liberation and earth liberation) and anarchism,[79][80] creating a
combined praxis that is designed to be a means for social
Green Anarchy
revolution.[81][82] This encompasses viewing the state as
unnecessary and harmful to animals, both human and
Main article: Green Anarchy
non-human, whilst practising a vegan lifestyle. It is either
perceived as a combined theory, or that both philosophies
Green Anarchy was a magazine published by a collec- are essentially the same.[83] It is further described as an
tive located in Eugene, Oregon. The magazines focus anti-speciesist perspective on green anarchism, or an anwas primitivism, post-left anarchy, radical environmen- archist perspective on animal liberation.[82]
talism, African American struggles, anarchist resistance,
Veganarchists typically view oppressive dynamics within
indigenous resistance, earth and animal liberation, antisociety to be interconnected, from statism, racism and
capitalism and supporting political prisoners. It had a
sexism to human supremacy[84] and redene veganism
circulation of 8,000, partly in prisons, the prison subas a radical philosophy that sees the state as harmful to
scribers given free copies of each issue as stated in the
animals.[85] Those who believe in veganarchy can be eimagazine.[76] Green Anarchy was started in 2000 and in
ther against reform for animals or for it, although do not
2009 the Green Anarchy website shut down, leaving a limit goals to changes within the law.[86][87]
nal, brief message about the cessation of the magazines
publication. The subtitle of the magazine is An AntiCivilization Journal of Theory and Action. Author John
12.3.6 Derrick Jensen
Zerzan was one of the publications editors.[77]
Main article: Derrick Jensen
Species Traitor
Main article: Species Traitor
Species Traitor is a sporadically published journal of
insurrectionary anarcho-primitivism. It is printed as
a project of Black and Green Network and edited by
anarcho-primitivist writer, Kevin Tucker.[78] ST was initially labeled as a project of the Coalition Against Civilization (CAC) and the Black and Green Network (BAG).
The CAC was started towards the end of 1999 in the
aftermath of the massive street protests in Eugene (Reclaim the Streets) and in Seattle (WTO) of that year.
That aftermath gave a new voice and standing for green
anarchist and anarcho-primitivist writers and viewpoints
within both the anarchist milieu and the culture at large.
The rst issue came out in winter of 2000-2001 (currently
out of print) and contained a mix of reprints and some
original articles from Derrick Jensen and John Zerzan
among others. Issue two came in the following year in the
wake of Sept. 11 and took a major step from the rst issue in becoming something of its own rather than another
mouthpiece of green anarchist rhetoric. The articles took
a more in depth direction opening a more analytical and

Derrick Jensen is an American author and environmental

activist (and critic of mainstream environmentalism) living in Crescent City, California.[88] Jensens work is
sometimes characterized as anarcho-primitivist,[89][90] although he has categorically rejected that label, describing
primitivist as a racist way to describe indigenous peoples. He prefers to be called "indigenist" or an ally to
the indigenous, because indigenous peoples have had
the only sustainable human social organizations, and... we
need to recognize that we [colonizers] are all living on
stolen land.[91]
A Language Older Than Words uses the lens of domestic
violence to look at the larger violence of western culture. The Culture of Make Believe begins by exploring racism and misogyny and moves to examine how
this cultures economic system leads inevitably to hatred
and atrocity. Strangely Like War is about deforestation.
Walking on Water is about education (It begins: As is
true for most people I know, Ive always loved learning.
As is also true for most people I know, I always hated
school. Why is that?").[92] Welcome to the Machine is
about surveillance, and more broadly about science and
what he perceives to be a Western obsession with con-

12.3. CONTEMPORARY DEVELOPMENTS

trol. Resistance Against Empire consists of interviews
with J. W. Smith (on poverty), Kevin Bales (on slavery), Anuradha Mittal (on hunger), Juliet Schor ('globalization' and environmental degradation), Ramsey Clark
(on US 'defense'), Stephen Schwartz (editor of The Nonproliferation Review, on nukes), Alfred McCoy (politics
and heroin), Christian Parenti (the US prison system),
Katherine Albrecht (on RFID), and Robert McChesney
(on (freedom of) the media) conducted between 1999 and
2004. Endgame is about what he describes as the inherent unsustainability of civilization. In this book he asks:
Do you believe that this culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living?" Nearly everyone he talks to says no. His next question is: How would this understanding that this culture will not voluntarily stop destroying the natural world,
eliminating indigenous cultures, exploiting the poor, and
killing those who resist shift our strategy and tactics?
The answer? Nobody knows, because we never talk about
it: were too busy pretending the culture will undergo a
magical transformation. Endgame, he says, is about that
shift in strategy, and in tactics.[93] Jensen co-wrote the
book Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet
with Lierre Keith and Aric McBay

12.3.7

CrimethInc.

Main article: CrimethInc.

CrimethInc. is a decentralized anarchist collective of
autonomous cells.[94] CrimethInc. emerged in the mid1990s,[95] initially as the hardcore zine Inside Front, and
began operating as a collective in 1996.[96] It has since
published widely read articles and zines for the anarchist movement and distributed posters and books of
its own publication.[97] Individuals adopting the CrimethInc. nom de guerre have included convicted ELF
arsonists,[98] as well as hacktivists who successfully attacked the websites of DARE, Republican National Committee and sites related to U.S. President George W.
Bush's 2004 re-election campaign.[99][100] The creation of
propaganda has been described as the collectives core
function.[101] Among their best-known publications are
the books Days of War, Nights of Love, Expect Resistance,
Evasion, Recipes for Disaster: An Anarchist Cookbook
and the pamphlet Fighting For Our Lives (of which, to
date, they claim to have printed 600,000 copies),[102] the
hardcore punk/political zine Inside Front, and the music
of hardcore punk bands. As well as the traditional anarchist opposition to the state and capitalism, agents have, at
times, advocated a straight edge lifestyle, the total supersession of gender roles,[103] violent insurrection against the
state,[104] and the refusal of work.[105]

135

12.3.8 Direct action

Main articles: Radical environmental movement, Animal
liberation movement and Anarchism and animal liberation
Some Green Anarchists engage in direct action, (not

An ALF raid removing 82 beagles and 26 rabbits from

Interfauna in Cambridge on St Patricks Night 1990.[106]

to be confused with ecoterrorism). Organizing themselves through groups like Earth First!, Root Force, or
more drastically, the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), Earth
Liberation Army (ELA) and Animal Liberation Front
(ALF). They may take direct action against what they see
as systems of oppression, such as the logging industry,
the meat and dairy industries, animal testing laboratories,
genetic engineering facilities and, more rarely, government institutions.
Such actions are usually, though not always, non-violent,
with groups such as The Olga Cell attempting assassinations of nuclear scientists, and other related groups
sending letterbombs to nano tech and nuclear tech-related
targets.[107] Though not necessarily Green anarchists, activists have used the names Animal Rights Militia, Justice
Department and Revolutionary Cells among others, to
claim responsibility for openly violent attacks.
Convictions
Main articles: GANDALF trial, SHAC 7 and Stop
Huntingdon Animal Cruelty Operation Achilles
Rod Coronado is an eco-anarchist and is an unocial
spokesperson for the Animal Liberation Front and Earth
Liberation Front. On February 28, 1992, Coronado carried out an arson attack on research facilities at Michigan
State University (MSU), and released mink from a nearby
research farm on campus, an action claimed by the ALF,
and for which Coronado was subsequently convicted.
In 1997, the editors of Green Anarchist magazine and two
British supporters of the Animal Liberation Front were
tried in connection with conspiracy to incite violence, in
what came to be known as the GANDALF trial.

136
Green anarchist Tre Arrow[108][109] was sought by the FBI
in connection with an ELF arson on April 15, 2001 at
Ross Island Sand and Gravel in Portland, torching three
trucks amounting of $200,000 in damage. Another arson occurred a month later at Ray Schoppert Logging
Company in Estacada, Oregon, on June 1, 2001 against
logging trucks and a front loader, resulting in $50,000
damage.[110] Arrow was indicted by a federal grand jury
in Oregon and charged with four felonies for this crime
on October 18, 2002.[111] On March 13, 2004, after eeing to British Columbia, he was arrested in Victoria for
stealing bolt cutters and was also charged with being in
Canada illegally.[112] He was then sentenced on August
12, 2008 to 78 months in federal prison for his part in the
arson and conspiracy ELF attacks in 2001.[113][114]
In January 2006, Eric McDavid, a green
anarchist,[115][116] was convicted of conspiring to
use re or explosives to damage corporate and government property.[117] On March 8, he formally declared
a hunger strike due to the jail refusing to provide him
with vegan food. He has been given vegan food o
and on since.[118] In September 2007, he was convicted
on all counts after the two activists he conspired with
pled guilty testied against him.[117][119][120] An FBI
condential source named Anna was revealed as a
fourth participant, in what McDavids defense argued
was entrapment.[121] In May 2008, he was sentenced to
nearly 20 years in prison.[122][123]
On March 3, 2006, a federal jury in Trenton, New Jersey convicted six members of SHAC, including greenanarchist Joshua Harper,[124][125][126] for terrorism and
Internet stalking, according to the New York Times, nding them guilty of using their website to incite attacks
on those who did business with Huntingdon Life Sciences
HLS.[127] In September 2006, the SHAC 7 received jail
sentences of 3 to 6 years.
Other prisoners
Marco Camenisch; Italian green anarchist accused
of arson against electricity pylon.[128][129]
Nicole Vosper; green anarchist who pleaded guilty
to charges against HLS.[130][131]
Marie Jeanette Mason #04672-061, FMC Carswell,
Federal Medical Center, P.O. Box 27137, Fort
Worth, TX 76127, USA. Serving 21 years and 10
months for her involvement in an ELF arson against
a University building carrying out Genetically Modied crop tests. Marie also pleaded guilty to conspiring to carry out ELF actions and admitted involvement in 12 other ELF actions. (vegan).[132]

12.4 See also

Degrowth

CHAPTER 12. GREEN ANARCHISM

Bioregionalism
Deep ecology
Deindustrialization
Earth First!
Earth liberation
Eco-feminism
Eco-socialism
Green Scare
Green syndicalism
Intentional community
Naturism
Neo-Luddism
Operation Backre (FBI)
Permaculture

12.5 References
[1] 'Green Anarchism: Towards the Abolition of Hierarchy'
[2] 'Steve Best on total liberation'
[3] EL NATURISMO LIBERTARIO EN LA PENNSULA
IBRICA (1890-1939) by Jose Maria Rosello
[4] The pioneers
[5] Introduction to Anarchism and countercultural politics in
early twentieth-century Cuba by Kirwin R. Shaer
[6] LA INSUMISIN VOLUNTARIA. EL ANARQUISMO INDIVIDUALISTA ESPAOL DURANTE
LA DICTADURA Y LA SEGUNDA REPBLICA
(1923-1938)" by Xavier Diez
[7] 'Animal Liberation and Social Revolution'
[8] While almost all forms of modern anarchism consider
themselves to have an ecological dimension, the specically eco-anarchist thread within anarchism has two main
focal points, Social Ecology and primitivist."An Anarchist FAQ by Various authors
[9] Su obra ms representativa es Walden, aparecida en
1854, aunque redactada entre 1845 y 1847, cuando
Thoreau decide instalarse en el aislamiento de una cabaa
en el bosque, y vivir en ntimo contacto con la naturaleza,
en una vida de soledad y sobriedad. De esta experiencia, su losofa trata de transmitirnos la idea que resulta necesario un retorno respetuoso a la naturaleza, y
que la felicidad es sobre todo fruto de la riqueza interior
y de la armona de los individuos con el entorno natural. Muchos han visto en Thoreau a uno de los precursores del ecologismo y del anarquismo primitivista representado en la actualidad por John Zerzan. Para George

12.5. REFERENCES

Woodcock, esta actitud puede estar tambin motivada

por una cierta idea de resistencia al progreso y de rechazo al materialismo creciente que caracteriza la sociedad
norteamericana de mediados de siglo XIX.LA INSUMISIN VOLUNTARIA. EL ANARQUISMO INDIVIDUALISTA ESPAOL DURANTE LA DICTADURA Y
LA SEGUNDA REPBLICA (1923-1938)" by Xavier
Diez
[10] Thoreau, Henry David. Henry David Thoreau : A Week on
the Concord and Merrimack Rivers / Walden / The Maine
Woods / Cape Cod. Library of America. ISBN 0-94045027-5.
[11] 'Against civilization: Readings and reections by [[John
Zerzan] (editor)]]].
[12] Sale, Kirkpatrick (2010-07-01) Are Anarchists Revolting?, The American Conservative
[13] quoted by George Woodcock, Introduction, Marie
Fleming, The Geography of Freedom, p. 15An Anarchist FAQ by Various authors
[14] History of Vegitarianism lise Reclus (1830 1905)".
ivu.org. International Vegetarian Union. Retrieved January 23, 2010.
[15] Marshall, Peter (1993). "lise Reclus: The Geographer of Liberty. Demanding the Impossible: A History
of Anarchism. London: Fontana. ISBN 0-00-686245-4.
OCLC 490216031.

137

[23] The historian Kirwin R. Schaer in his study of

cuban anarchism reports anarcho-naturism as A
third strand within the islands anarchist movement alongside anarcho-communism and anarchosyndicalismIntroduction to Anarchism and countercultural politics in early twentieth-century Cuba by Kirwin R.
Shaer
[24] EL NATURISMO LIBERTARIO EN LA PENNSULA
IBRICA (18901939)" by Josep Maria Rosell
[25] The daily bleed
[26] Sonn, Richard D. (2010). Sex, Violence, and the AvantGarde. Penn State University. ISBN 978-0-271-03663-2.
[27] Henri Zisly page; from the Daily Bleeds Anarchist Encyclopedia
[28] Henri Zisly, self-labeled individualist anarchist, is considered one of the forerunners and principal organizers
of the naturist movement in France and one of its most
able and outspoken defenders worldwide.Zisly, Henri
(18721945)" by Stefano Boni
[29] Zisly, Henri (18721945)" by Stefano Boni
[30] Anarchism - Nudism, Naturism by Carlos Ortega at
Asociacion para el Desarrollo Naturista de la Comunidad
de Madrid. Published on Revista ADN. Winter 2003
[31] Zisly, Henri (18721945)" by Stefano Boni

[16] lise Reclus, L'Homme et la terre (1905), e-text, Internet

Archive
[17] Anarchism and the dierent Naturist views have always
been related.Anarchism - Nudism, Naturism by Carlos Ortega at Asociacion para el Desarrollo Naturista de la
Comunidad de Madrid. Published on Revista ADN. Winter 2003
[18] Anarchism - Nudism, Naturism by Carlos Ortega at
Asociacion para el Desarrollo Naturista de la Comunidad
de Madrid. Published on Revista ADN. Winter 2003
[19] In many of the alternative communities established in
Britain in the early 1900s nudism, anarchism, vegetarianism and free love were accepted as part of a politically radical way of life. In the 1920s the inhabitants of the anarchist community at Whiteway, near Stroud in Gloucestershire, shocked the conservative residents of the area with
their shameless nudity.Nudism the radical tradition by
Terry Phillips
[20] Les anarchistes individualistes du dbut du sicle
l'avaient bien compris, et intgraient le naturisme dans
leurs proccupations. Il est vraiment dommage que ce
discours se soit peu peu eac, d'antan plus que nous
assistons, en ce moment, un retour en force du puritanisme (conservateur par essence).Anarchisme et naturisme, aujourd'hui. by Cathy Ytak
[21] Recension des articles de l'En-Dehors consacrs au naturisme et au nudisme
[22] ["Anarchisme et naturisme au Portugal, dans les annes
1920 in Les anarchistes du Portugal by Joo Freire]

[32] Los origenes del naturismo libertario por Agustn

Morn
[33] http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Daniel_Guerin_
_Anarchism__From_Theory_to_Practice.html
Anarchism: From theory to practice by Daniel Gurin
[34] Isaac Puente. El Comunismo Libertario y otras proclamas
insurreccionales y naturistas.
[35] Miguel Iiguez. Anarquismo y naturismo: El caso de Isaac
Puente. Asociacin Isaac Puente.
[36] Isaac Puente. El Comunismo Libertario y otras proclamas
insurreccionales y naturistas. pg. 4
[37] De hecho, el documento de Isaac Puente se convirti en
dictamen ocial aprobado en el Congreso Extraordinario
Confederal de Zaragoza de 1936 que serva de base para
jar la lnea poltica de la CNT respecto a la organizacin
social y poltica futura. Existe una versin resumida en
iguez (1996), pp. 31-35. La versin completa se puede
encontrar en las actas ociales del congreso, publicadas en
CNT: El Congreso Confederal de Zaragoza, Zeta, Madrid,
1978, pp. 226-242.Xavier Diez. El anarquismo individualista en Espaa (19231938). Virus editorial. 2007
[38] Y complementarlos puesto que se ocupan de aspectos distintos, el uno redime al ser vivo, el otro al ser
socialIsaac Puente. El Comunismo Libertario y otras
proclamas insurreccionales y naturistas.
[39] Nudism the radical tradition by Terry Phillips

138

[40] Los anarco-individualistas, G.I.A...Una escisin de la

FAI producida en el IX Congreso (Carrara, 1965) se pr
odujo cuando un sector de anarquistas de tendencia humanista rechazan la interpretacin que ellos juzgan disciplinaria del pacto asociativo clsico, y crean los GIA
(Gruppi di Iniziativa Anarchica) . Esta pequea federacin de grupos, hoy nutrida sobre todo de veteranos
anarco-individualistas de orientacin pacista, naturista,
etctera deende la autonoma personal y rechaza a rajatabla toda forma de intervencin en los procesos del sistema, como sera por ejemplo el sindicalismo. Su portavoz
es L'Internazionale con sede en Ancona. La escisin de los
GIA preguraba, en sentido contrario, el gran debate que
pronto haba de comenzar en el seno del movimientoEl
movimiento libertario en Italia by Bicicleta. REVISTA
DE COMUNICACIONES LIBERTARIAS Year 1 No.
Noviembre, 1 1977
[41] Brian Oliver Sheppard. Anarchism vs. Primitivism
[42] Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. II, 170
[43] Peter Kropotkin: from prince to rebel. G Woodcock, I
Avakumovi.1990.
[44] Wenzer, Kenneth C. (1997). Tolstoys Georgist Spiritual
Political Economy (18971910): Anarchism and Land
Reform. The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 56 (4, Oct). JSTOR 3487337.
[45] Gerard Bane (Easter 2011). Tolstoyan Nonresistance.
A Pinch of Salt (Issue 23). p. 2. Check date values in:
|date= (help)
[46] Christoyannopoulos, Alexandre (2010). Christian Anarchism: A Political Commentary on the Gospel. Exeter: Imprint Academic. pp. 1720. Leo Tolstoy
[47] Tolstoy Farm. South African Historical Journal, No. 7.
November 1975.
[48] Ernest Howard Crosby was a notable Tolstoyan in the
United States. He was a supporter of the Christian Commonwealth Colony in Georgia, which was established in
1896 by a number of Christian socialists and comprised
932 acres (3.77 km2 ).Commonwealth, Georgia. The
Georgia Archaeological Site File (GASF).
[49] Alston, Charlotte (2010). Tolstoys Guiding Light. History Today 60 (10). Retrieved 2013-10-13.
[50] In Russia censorship meant that many of Tolstoys nonction works in the 1880s and 1890s were published
abroad rst, either in Russian or in translation, delaying the authors inuence in his country of birth. However, with Vladimir Chertkov (18541936) as a key promoter of Tolstoys ideas, a movement started over the
1890s. The movement continued to grow after the writers
death and was at its strongest in the years immediately
following the revolutions of 1917 with agricultural communities established in the provinces of Smolensk, Tver,
Samara, Kursk, Perm and Kiev. The Tolstoyan communities that proliferated between 1917 and 1921 were
eventually wiped out or stripped of their independence
as collectivisation and ideological purges got under way
in the late 1920s. Colonies, such as the Life and Labor

CHAPTER 12. GREEN ANARCHISM

Commune, relocated to Siberia to avoid being liquidated.

Several Tolstoyan leaders, including Yakov Dragunovsky
(1886-1937), were put on trial and then sent to the
Gulags.Charles Chateld, Ruzanna Iliukhina Peace/Mir:
An Anthology of Historic Alternatives to War Syracuse
University Press, 1994. ISBN 0815626010, (p.245, 249250).
[51] In England John Coleman Kenworthy of the Brotherhood
Church established a colony at Purleigh, Essex in 1896.
This community closed a few years later but its residents spawned the Whiteway Colony in Gloucestershire
and Stapleton Colony in Yorkshire, both of which are still
going today. Although given Whiteway soon abandoned
Tolstoys principles, it has been regarded by many, including Gandhi who visited in 1909, as a failed Tolstoyan experiment.Hunt, James D. (2005). An American looks at
Gandhi: essays in satyagraha, civil rights, and peace. p.
43.
[52] Johannes Van der Veer was the key gure in the Dutch
Tolstoyan movement. In the Netherlands two colonies
were started, a short-lived one at Bussum in North Holland and a more successful one at Blaricum near Utrecht.
The reasons attributed to the failure of Tolstoyan communities across Europe have included the personal incompatibility of the participants and a general lack of practical agricultural experience.Christoyannopoulos, Alexandre (2010). Christian Anarchism: A Political Commentary
on the Gospel. Exeter: Imprint Academic. p. 257. Tolstoyism and Tolstoyan colonies
[53] Kirkpatrick Sale, foreword to E.P. Dutton 1978 edition of
Leopold Kohrs Breakdown of Nations.
[54] Robert Graham, Anarchism Volume Two: The Anarchist
Current (19392006). Black Rose Books, 2009 ISBN
1551643103, (p.72-5, p. 272).
[55] Right Livelihood Award: Leopold Kohr. Retrieved
2008-02-22.
[56] Dr. Leopold Kohr, 84; Backed Smaller States, New York
Times obituary, 28 February 1994.
[57] Small, Mike. Murray Bookchin, The Guardian August
8, 2006
[58] "Anarchism In America documentary.
2007-01-09. Retrieved 2012-05-11.

Youtube.com.

[59] "A Short Biography of Murray Bookchin by Janet Biehl.

Dwardmac.pitzer.edu. Retrieved 2012-05-11.
[60] Ecology and Revolution. Dwardmac.pitzer.edu. 200406-16. Retrieved 2012-05-11.
[61] Post-scarcity
anarchism,
[WorldCat.org]".
WorldCat.org. Retrieved 2008-06-10.
[62] Smith, Mark (1999). Thinking through the Environment.
New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-21172-7.
[63] Call, Lewis (2002). Postmodern Anarchism. Lexington:
Lexington Books. ISBN 0-7391-0522-1.
[64] Post-Scarcity Anarchism. AK Press. Retrieved 200806-10.

12.5. REFERENCES

[65] Taylor, Paul A. and Jan Ll. Harris. Digital Matters: The
Theory and Culture of the Matrix. (London: Routledge,
2005), 23.
[66] Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society, trans. John
Wilkinson (New York: Random House, 1964), 79.
[67] Brooks, Michael E. Death of Secular Saint Steve Jobs in a
Theologically Devoid Culture The Christian Post Sept. 2,
2012
[68] Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society, trans. John
Wilkinson (New York: Random House, 1964), Note to
the Reader.
[69] Ward, Colin (2004). Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, USA. ISBN 0-19-2804774.
[70] Bookchin, Murray (1994). The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism. Black Rose Books.
pp. 119120. ISBN 978-1-55164-018-1.
[71] Janet Biehl: Short Biography & Selected Works. Canto
Libertrio. Retrieved 19 September 2011.
[72] Left Green Perspectives (1988-1998)". Institute for Social Ecology. Retrieved 19 September 2011.
[73] Biehl, Janet. The Murray Bookchin Reader: Introduction. Anarchy Archives. Retrieved 19 September 2011.

139

[83] Dominick, Brian. Animal Liberation and Social Revolution: A vegan perspective on anarchism or an anarchist
perspective on veganism, third edition, Firestarter Press,
1997, inside page.
[84] Dominick, Brian. Animal Liberation and Social Revolution: A vegan perspective on anarchism or an anarchist
perspective on veganism, third edition, Firestarter Press,
1997, page 7.
[85] Dominick, Brian. Animal Liberation and Social Revolution: A vegan perspective on anarchism or an anarchist
perspective on veganism, third edition, Firestarter Press,
1997, page 9.
[86] Dominick, Brian. Animal Liberation and Social Revolution: A vegan perspective on anarchism or an anarchist
perspective on veganism, third edition, Firestarter Press,
1997, page 8.
[87] Dominick, Brian. Animal Liberation and Social Revolution: A vegan perspective on anarchism or an anarchist
perspective on veganism, third edition, Firestarter Press,
1997, page 12.
[88] Endgame, Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization, Seven
Stories Press (ISBN 1-58322-730-X), p. 17.
[89] Sean Esbjrn-Hargens; Michael E. Zimmerman (2009).
Integral ecology: uniting multiple perspectives on the natural world. p. 492.

[74] Purkis, Johnathan (2004). Anarchy Unbound. In John

Moore. I Am Not a Man, I Am Dynamite! Friedrich Nietzsche and the Anarchist Tradition. Brooklyn: Autonomedia. p. 6. ISBN 1-57027-121-6.

[90] Bob Torres (2007). Making a killing: the political economy

of animal rights. p. 68.

[75] Interview: Anarcho-Primitivist Thinker and Activist

John Zerzan | CORRUPT.org: Conservation & Conservatism. CORRUPT.org. December 7, 2008. Retrieved
November 13, 2011.

[92] Walking on Water, p. 1.

[91] Blunt, Zoe (2011). Uncivilized. Canadian Dimension.

Retrieved 24 May 2011.

[93] Endgame V.1, p. 1.

[94]

[76] Wild Times Ahead by Bill O'Driscoll, Pittsburgh City Paper, 7/13/2006
[77] Link label
[78] Wild Times Ahead: Waiting for the End of Civilization
with Anarcho-Primitivist Kevin Tucker. Pittsburgh City
Paper. 2006-07-13. Retrieved 2009-11-03.
[79] Alberwite, Jonny. Why Veganism if for the Common Good
of All Life, Animal Liberation Front Supporters Group
Newsleter April 2009, p7-8.
[80] Veganarchy.net. Veganarchy: Issue 1, July 2009.
[81] Dominick, Brian. Animal Liberation and Social Revolution: A vegan perspective on anarchism or an anarchist
perspective on veganism, third edition, Firestarter Press,
1997, page 6.
[82] Dominick, Brian. Animal Liberation and Social Revolution: A vegan perspective on anarchism or an anarchist
perspective on veganism, third edition, Firestarter Press,
1997, page 5.

Gordon, Uri (2728 May 2005). Thinking the

Present : The Beginnings and Ends of Political Theory. University of California, Berkeley. |chapter=
ignored (help)
Thompson, Stacy (October 2004). Crass Commodities. Popular Music & Society 27 (3): 307
322(16). doi:10.1080/03007760410001733152.
Archived from the original on January 1, 2008. Retrieved 2007-07-08.
Ludwig, Mike (2007-07-30). Melee breaks out
uptown at end of anarchist confab. The Athens
News. Archived from the original on September 28,
2007. Retrieved 2007-08-01.

[95] Frequently Asked Questions.

trieved 2007-10-31.

Crimethinc.com.

Re-

[96] Thompson, Stacy (2004). Punk Productions: Unnished

Business. Albany: SUNY Press. p. 109. ISBN 0-79146187-4.
[97] Brandt, Jed. Crimethinc: In Love With Love Itself.
Clamor. Archived from the original on February 11, 2009.
Retrieved January 14, 2008.

140

CHAPTER 12. GREEN ANARCHISM

[98] 3 plead guilty in attempts at arson. The Sacramento Bee. [120] [ECO-TERRORIST CONVICTED: Sacramento federal
2005-10-15.
jury convicts Eric McDavid with conspiracy to commit
domestic terrorism. Federal Bureau of Investigation. 27
[99] Schachtman, Noah (2004-08-17). Hackers Take Aim at
September 2007. Retrieved 12 March 2008.
GOP. Wired. Retrieved 2008-02-22.
[121] Weigel, Rafal (27 September 2007). Convicted Of Plot[100] Deagon, Brian (2004-10-22). GOP Sites Hit By Denial
ting To Blow Up Nimbus Dam. CW31. Retrieved 27
Of Service Attack; Hard To Tell Who Culprits Are. InApril 2008.
vestors Business Daily.
[122] McDavid Sentenced to 20 Years in Prison as a Terrorist,
[101] Power, Matthew (March 2008). Mississippi Drift
Green Is The New Red, May 9, 2008.
(PDF). Harpers Magazine: 5463. Retrieved 2008-03[123] 'Eco-terrorist' gets 20 years for plotting bombing cam10.
paign 'Eco-terrorist' gets 20 years for plotting bombing
campaign, Turkish Press, May 9, 2008.
[102] pfm (2008-05-28). Fourth FFOL Printing Hits the
Streets. CrimethInc. Far East Blog. Retrieved 2008-06[124] Statement from Joshua Harper - SHAC 7, Infoshop, July
14.
17, 2008.
[103] Nicholas, Lucy (Spring 2007). Approaches to Gender,
[125] Eco-Terrorism: Extremism in the Animal Rights and EnPower and Authority in Contemporary Anarcho-punk:
vironmental Movements, Anti-Defamation League, 2005.
Poststructuralist Anarchism?" (PDF). ESharp (9). ISSN
1742-4542. Retrieved 2008-04-07.
[126] Conict Industry, Fur Commission USA, August 12, 2001.
[104] Let Me Light My Cigarette on Your Burning Blockade. [127] Six Animal Rights Advocates Are Convicted Of TerrorCrimethinc.com. Retrieved 2007-10-31.
ism, New York Times, March 3, 2006
[105] D., Brian. How I Spent My Permanent Vacation. [128] Newsletter 150, The Nuclear Resister.
Crimethinc.com. Retrieved 2008-01-13.
[129] Prisoner Addresses, Earth Liberation Prisoner Support
Network.
[106] The man, the activist, rst published in Arkangel.
[107] Anarchists attack science, Nature, May 28, 2012

[130] Support Nicole

[108] Anarchist Eco-Terrorist Tre Arrow To Be Deported, [131] Support Nicole Vosper - Green Anarchist / SHAC Prisoner, Indymedia UK, March 19, 2009.
Toronoto Sun, May 6, 2006.
[109] Tre Arrow says hes not guilty of burning trucks, Portland [132] Support Marie Mason - Green Anarchist / Green Scare.
Tribune, May 4, 2008.
[110] Tre Arrow sentenced to 6 1 2 years in prison, Oregon Live,
August 12, 2008.
[111] EPA Misled Public on Quality of U.S. Drinking Water.
Environment News Service. March 16, 2004. Retrieved
17 June 2007.
[112] Hunting Americas Most Wanted Eco-Terrorist : Rolling
Stone
[113] Eco-arsonist Sentenced to 78 Months Prison, Most
Wanted Hoes, August 13, 2008.
[114] Denson, Bryan (March 1, 2008). Fugitive Tre Arrow
back in Portland. The Oregonian.
[115] About Eric McDavids Sentencing, Animal Liberation
Front Website, May 11, 2008.
[116] Update, Support Eric, February 16, 2006.
[117] Eco-Terror Suspect Guilty in Bomb Plot, News 10,
September 27, 2007.

12.6 Bibliography
Biehl, Janet. Finding our Way. Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics (1991) ISBN 0-921689-78-0
Biehl, Janet. Ecofascism: Lessons from the German
Experience (1996) ISBN 1-873176-73-2
Biehl, Janet. The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism (1997) ISBN 1-55164-100-3
Biehl, Janet. The Murray Bookchin Reader (1997)
ISBN 0-304-33874-5
Biehl, Janet. Mumford Gutkind Bookchin: The
Emergence of Eco-Decentralism (2011) ISBN 97882-93064-10-7
Biehl, Janet and Staudenmaier, Peter). Ecofascism:
Lessons from the German Experience (1995)

[118] Updates, Support Eric.

Bookchin, Murray. Our Synthetic Environment

(1962) published under the pseudonym of Lewis
Herber

[119] Walsh, Denny (26 September 2007). Leader or led by the

FBI?". The Sacramento Bee (The McClatchy Company).
Retrieved 13 March 2008.

Bookchin, Murray. Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971

and 2004) ISBN 1-904859-06-2.

12.6. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bookchin, Murray. The Limits of the City (1973)
ISBN 0-06-091013-5.
Bookchin, Murray. Toward an Ecological Society
(1980) ISBN 0-919618-98-7.

141
Jensen, Derrick. 2002 The Culture of Make Believe, New York: Context Books, ISBN 1-89395628-8 Republished 2004 by Chelsea Green Publishing Company, ISBN 978-1-931498-57-9

Bookchin, Murray. The Rise of Urbanization and

the Decline of Citizenship (1987 and 1992) ISBN
978-0-87156-706-2

Jensen, Derrick. 2003, Strangely Like War: The

Global Assault on Forests (with George Draan),
Chelsea Green, ISBN 978-1-931498-45-6

Bookchin, Murray. The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism (1990 and
1996) Montreal: Black Rose Books ISBN 978-155164-019-8

Jensen, Derrick. 2004, Welcome to the Machine:

Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control
(with George Draan), Chelsea Green Publishing
Company, ISBN 1-931498-52-0

Bookchin, Murray.
Re-Enchanting Humanity
(1995) ISBN 0-304-32843-X.

Jensen, Derrick. 2005, Walking on Water: Reading,

Writing, and Revolution, Chelsea Green, ISBN 9781-931498-78-4

Bookchin, Murray. Social Ecology and Communalism, with Eirik Eiglad, AK Press, 2007
CrimethInc. Days of War, Nights of Love Crimethink For Beginners (2001)

Jensen, Derrick. 2006, Endgame, Volume 1: The

Problem of Civilization, Seven Stories Press, ISBN
1-58322-730-X

CrimethInc. Recipes for Disaster An Anarchist

Cookbook (2004)

Jensen, Derrick. 2006, Endgame, Volume 2: Resistance, Seven Stories Press, ISBN 1-58322-724-5

CrimethInc. Expect Resistance A crimethink eld

manual (2007)

Jensen, Derrick. 2007, Thought to Exist in the Wild:

Awakening from the Nightmare of Zoos (with Karen
Tweedy-Holmes), No Voice Unheard, ISBN 978-09728387-1-9

CrimethInc. Work An economic and ethical analysis of capitalism (2011)

Ellul, Jacques. La technique ou l'enjeu du sicle.
Paris: Armand Colin, 1954. Paris: conomica,
1990 & 2008
Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Trans.
John Wilkinson. New York: Knopf, 1964. London: Jonathan Cape, 1965. Rev. ed.: New York:
Knopf/Vintage, 1967. with introduction by Robert
K. Merton (professor of sociology, Columbia University).
Ellul, Jacques. The Technological System. Trans.
Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Continuum,
1980.
Jensen, Derrick. 1995, Listening to the Land: Conversations about Nature, Culture, and Eros (with
George Draan and John Osborn), Sierra Club
Books, ISBN 0-87156-417-3 Republished 2004 by
Chelsea Green Publishing Company, ISBN 978-1931498-56-2
Jensen, Derrick. 1995, Railroads and Clearcuts:
Legacy of Congresss 1864 Northern Pacic Railroad Land Grant (with George Draan and John
Osborn), Keokee Company Publishing, ISBN 1879628-08-2
Jensen, Derrick. 2000, A Language Older Than
Words, Context Books, ISBN 1-893956-03-2 Republished 2004 by Chelsea Green Publishing Company, ISBN 978-1-931498-55-5

Jensen, Derrick. 2007, As the World Burns: 50

Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial (with
Stephanie McMillan), Seven Stories Press, ISBN 158322-777-6
Jensen, Derrick. 2008, How Shall I Live My Life?:
On Liberating the Earth from Civilization, PM Press,
ISBN 978-1-60486-003-0
Jensen, Derrick. 2010, Lives Less Valuable, PM
Press, ISBN 978-1-60486-045-0
Jensen, Derrick. 2010, Resistance Against Empire,
PM Press, ISBN 978-1-60486-046-7
Jensen, Derrick. 2010, Mischief in the Forest: A
Yarn Yarn (with Stephanie McMillan), PM Press,
ISBN 978-1-60486-081-8
Jensen, Derrick. 2011, Deep Green Resistance (with
Lierre Keith and Aric McBay), Seven Stories Press,
ISBN 978-1-58322-929-3
Jensen, Derrick. 2011, Truths Among Us: Conversations on Building a New Culture, PM Press, ISBN
978-1-60486-299-7
Jensen, Derrick. 2012, The Derrick Jensen Reader:
Writings on Environmental Revolution (edited by
Lierre Keith), Seven Stories Press, ISBN 978-160980-404-6 (pbk.)

142

CHAPTER 12. GREEN ANARCHISM

Jensen, Derrick. 2012, Earth at Risk: Building a Resistance Movement to Save the Planet (edited by D.J.
and Lierre Keith), PM Press, ISBN 978-1-60486674-2
Kohr, Leopold. The Breakdown of Nations, Routledge & K. Paul, 1957 (1986 Routledge version
at books.google.com); Chelsea Green Publishing
Company edition, 2001.
Kohr, Leopold. The Overdeveloped Nations: The
Diseconomies Of Scale, Schocken, 1978.
Kohr, Leopold. *Disunion Now: A Plea for a Society based upon Small Autonomous Units, originally published in The Commonweal (26 September 1941) under the pseudonym Hans Kohr.Telos 91
(Spring 1992). New York: Telos Press. 1941
Mannin, Ethel. Small is Beautiful: Selected Writings
from the complete works. Posthumous collection,
Vienna, 1995.
Mannin, Ethel. Bread and Roses: A Utopian Survey
and Blue-Print. 1944
Perlman, Fredy.
Leviathan

Against His-Story, Against

Puente, Isaac. El Comunismo Libertario y otras

proclamas insurreccionales y naturistas. 1933
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; or, Life in the
Woods. 1854
Zerzan, John. Future Primitive Revisited. Feral
House, May 2012.
Zerzan, John. Origins of the 1%: The Bronze Age
pamphlet. Left Bank Books, 2012.
Zerzan, John. Origins: A John Zerzan Reader. Joint
publication of FC Press and Black and Green Press,
2010.
Zerzan, John. Twilight of the Machines. Feral
House, 2008.
Zerzan, John. Running On Emptiness. Feral House,
2002.
Zerzan, John. Against Civilization (editor). Uncivilized Books, 1999; Expanded edition, Feral House,
2005.
Zerzan, John.
1994.

Future Primitive.

Autonomedia,

Zerzan, John. Questioning Technology (co-edited

with Alice Carnes). Freedom Press, 1988; 2d edition, New Society, 1991, ISBN 978-0-900384-44-8
Zerzan, John. Elements of Refusal. Left Bank
Books, 1988; 2d edition, C.A.L. Press, 1999.

12.7 External links

The Institute for Social Ecology
Articles tagged with "green" and "ecology" at The
Anarchist Library
Green Anarchy
REWILD.info
Primitivism
Tiamat Publications
The News from Nowhere Practical Green Anarchist
ideas and theory

Chapter 13

Eco-socialism
Green red redirects here. For other uses, see Red
green (disambiguation).
Green socialism redirects here. For the model of
government inspired by Muammar Gadda, see Third
International Theory.

ist greens, a term usually associated with Deep Ecology

even though the German Green Party fundi faction included eco-socialists, and eco-socialists in other Green
Parties, like Derek Wall, have been described in the press
as fundies.[9][10]

Eco-socialism, green socialism or socialist ecology

is an ideology merging aspects of Marxism, socialism,
and/or libertarian socialism with that of green politics,
ecology and alter-globalization. Eco-socialists generally
believe that the expansion of the capitalist system is the
cause of social exclusion, poverty, war and environmental
degradation through globalization and imperialism, under the supervision of repressive states and transnational
structures.[1]

Eco-socialists also criticise bureaucratic and elite theories

of self-described socialism such as Maoism, Stalinism
and what other critics have termed Bureaucratic collectivism or state capitalism. Instead, eco-socialists focus on
imbuing socialism with ecology while keeping the emancipatory goals of rst-epoch socialism.[1] Eco-socialists
aim for communal ownership of the means of production by freely associated producers with all forms of
domination eclipsed, especially gender inequality and
racism.[1]

Eco-socialists advocate dismantling capitalism, focusing on common ownership of the means of production by freely associated producers, and restoring the
commons.[1]

13.1 Ideology

This often includes the restoration of commons land in

opposition to private property,[11] in which local control of resources valorizes the Marxist concept of use
value above exchange value.[12] Practically, eco-socialists
have generated various strategies to mobilise action on an
internationalist basis, developing networks of grassroots
individuals and groups that can radically transform society through nonviolent pregurative projects for a postcapitalist, post-statist world.[12]

Eco-socialists are critical of many past and existing forms

of both Green politics and socialism. They are often
described as "Red Greens - adherents to Green pol- 13.2
itics with clear anti-capitalist views, often inspired by
Marxism (Red Greens are in contrast to eco-capitalists
13.2.1
and Green anarchists).
The term watermelon is commonly applied, often pejoratively, to Greens who seem to put "social justice"
goals above ecological ones, implying they are green
on the outside but red on the inside"; the term is
usually attributed to either Petr Beckmann or, more
frequently, Warren T. Brookes,[2][3][4] both critics of
environmentalism, and is common in Australia,[5][6] New
Zealand[7] and the United States.[8]
A New Zealand website, The Watermelon, uses the term
proudly, stating that it is green on the outside and liberal
on the inside, while also citing socialist political leanings, reecting the use of the term liberal to describe
the left wing in many English-speaking countries.[7] Red
Greens are often considered "fundies" or fundamental-

History
1880s-1930s - Marx, Morris and inuence on the Russian Revolution

Contrary to the depiction of Karl Marx by some

environmentalists,[13] social ecologists[14] and fellow
socialists[15] as a productivist who favoured the domination of nature, eco-socialists have revisited Marxs
writings and believe that he was a main originator of
the ecological world-view.[12] Eco-socialist authors, like
John Bellamy Foster[16] and Paul Burkett,[17] point to
Marxs discussion of a metabolic rift between man and
nature, his statement that private ownership of the globe
by single individuals will appear quite absurd as private
ownership of one man by another and his observation
that a society must hand it [the planet] down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.[18] Nonethe-

143

144

CHAPTER 13. ECO-SOCIALISM

less, other eco-socialists feel that Marx overlooked a

recognition of nature in and for itself, ignoring its receptivity and treating nature as subjected to labor from
the start in an entirely active relationship.[12]
Therefore William Morris, the English novelist, poet and
designer, is largely credited with developing key principles of what was later called eco-socialism.[19] During the
1880s and 1890s, Morris promoted his eco-socialist ideas
within the Social Democratic Federation and Socialist
League.[20]
Following
the
Russian
Revolution,
some
environmentalists and environmental scientists attempted
to integrate ecological consciousness into Bolshevism,
although many such people were later purged from the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union.[21] The prerevolutionary environmental movement, encouraged
by revolutionary scientist Aleksandr Bogdanov and
the Proletkul't organisation, made eorts to integrate
production with natural laws and limits in the rst
decade of Soviet rule, before Joseph Stalin attacked
ecologists and the science of ecology and the Soviet
Union fell into the pseudo-science of the state biologist
Trom Lysenko, who set about to rearrange the Russian Murray Bookchin
map in ignorance of environmental limits.[12]

13.2.2

Ecoanarchism

Main article: Green anarchism

Green anarchism, or ecoanarchism, is a school of
thought within anarchism which puts a particular emphasis on environmental issues. An important early
inuence was the thought of the American anarchist
Henry David Thoreau and his book Walden[22] as well
as Leo Tolstoy[23] and Elisee Reclus.[24][25] In the late
19th century there emerged anarcho-naturism as the
fusion of anarchism and naturist philosophies within
individualist anarchist circles in France, Spain, Cuba[26]
and Portugal.[23][27] Several anarchists from the mid-20th
century, including Herbert Read, Ethel Mannin, Leopold
Kohr,[28] Jacques Ellul,[29] and Paul Goodman,[30] also
held proto-environmental views linked to their anarchism. Mannins 1944 book Bread and Roses: A Utopian
Survey and Blue-Print has been described by anarchist
historian Robert Graham as setting forth an ecological
vision in opposition to the prevailing and destructive
industrial organization of society.[30] Important contemporary currents are anarcho-primitivism and social ecology.[31]

Kropotkin. Social ecologists assert that the present

ecological crisis has its roots in human social problems,
and that the domination of human-over-nature stems
from the domination of human-over-human.[32] In 1958,
Murray Bookchin dened himself as an anarchist,[33] seeing parallels between anarchism and ecology. His rst
book, Our Synthetic Environment, was published under
the pseudonym Lewis Herber in 1962, a few months before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.[34] The book described
a broad range of environmental ills but received little attention because of its political radicalism. His groundbreaking essay Ecology and Revolutionary Thought introduced ecology as a concept in radical politics.[35] In
1968 he founded another group that published the inuential Anarchos magazine, which published that and other
innovative essays on post-scarcity and on ecological technologies such as solar and wind energy, and on decentralization and miniaturization. Lecturing throughout the
United States, he helped popularize the concept of ecology to the counterculture.

Post-Scarcity Anarchism is a collection of essays written

by Murray Bookchin and rst published in 1971 by Ramparts Press.[36] It outlines the possible form anarchism
might take under conditions of post-scarcity. It is one
of Bookchins major works,[37] and its radical thesis
provoked controversy for being utopian and messianic
in its faith in the liberatory potential of technology.[38]
Social ecology and communalism
Bookchin argues that post-industrial societies are also
Main article: Social ecology
post-scarcity societies, and can thus imagine the fulllMain article: Communalism (Political Philosophy)
ment of the social and cultural potentialities latent in a
Social ecology is closely related to the work and ideas technology of abundance.[38] The self-administration of
of Murray Bookchin and inuenced by anarchist Peter society is now made possible by technological advance-

13.2. HISTORY
ment and, when technology is used in an ecologically sensitive manner, the revolutionary potential of society will
be much changed.[39] In 1982, his book The Ecology of
Freedom had a profound impact on the emerging ecology
movement, both in the United States and abroad. He was
a principal gure in the Burlington Greens in 1986-90,
an ecology group that ran candidates for city council on
a program to create neighborhood democracy.
Bookchin later developed a political philosophy to complement social ecology which he called "Communalism"
(spelled with a capital C to dierentiate it from other
forms of communalism). While originally conceived as a
form of Social anarchism, he later developed Communalism into a separate ideology which incorporates what he
saw as the most benecial elements of Anarchism, Marxism, syndicalism, and radical ecology.

145
Greens adopted a policy of proscription of other political groups in August 1991.[45] The DSP also published a
comprehensive policy resolution, Socialism and Human
Survival in book form in 1990, with an expanded second edition in 1999 entitled Environment, Capitalism
& Socialism.[46]

13.2.4 1990s onwards - Engagement with

the anti-globalization movement
and The Ecosocialist Manifesto
The 1990s saw the socialist feminists Mary Mellor[47] and Ariel Salleh[48] address environmental issues
within an eco-socialist paradigm. With the rising prole of the anti-globalization movement in the Global
South, an "environmentalism of the poor, combining
ecological awareness and social justice, has also become
prominent.[11] David Pepper also released his important
work, Ecosocialism: From Deep Ecology to Social Justice,
in 1994, which critiques the current approach of many
within Green politics, particularly deep ecologists.[49]

Politically, Communalists advocate a network of directly

democratic citizens assemblies in individual communities/cities organized in a confederal fashion. This method
used to achieve this is called Libertarian Municipalism
which involves the establishment of face-to-face democratic institutions which are to grow and expand confederally with the goal of eventually replacing the nation-state. In 2001, Joel Kovel, a social scientist, psychiatrist and former candidate for the Green Party of the United States
(GPUS) Presidential nomination in 2000, and Michael
Lwy, an anthropologist and member of the Reunied
13.2.3 1970s-1990s - Rise of environmen- Fourth International (a principal Trotskyist organisatalism and engagement with Marx- tion), released An ecosocialist manifesto, which has been
ism and 'actually existing socialism' adopted by some organisations[20] and suggests possible
routes for the growth of eco-socialist consciousness.[1]
In the 1970s, Barry Commoner, suggesting a left- Kovels 2002 work, The Enemy of Nature: The End of
wing response to the Limits to Growth model that Capitalism or the End of the World?,[12] is considered by
predicted catastrophic resource depletion and spurred many to be the most up-to-date exposition of eco-socialist
environmentalism, postulated that capitalist technolo- thought.[19]
gies were chiey responsible for environmental degrada- In October 2007, the International Ecosocialist Network
tion, as opposed to population pressures.[40] East Ger- was founded in Paris.[50]
man dissident writer and activist Rudolf Bahro published
two books addressing the relationship between socialism
and ecology - The Alternative in Eastern Europe[41] and 13.2.5 Inuence on current Green and soSocialism and Survival[42] - which promoted a 'new party'
cialist movements
and led to his arrest, for which he gained international
notoriety.
Currently, many Green Parties around the world, such as
At around the same time, Alan Roberts, an Australian
Marxist, posited that peoples unfullled needs fuelled
consumerism.[43] Fellow Australian Ted Trainer further
called upon socialists to develop a system that met human needs, in contrast to the capitalist system of created
wants.[44] A key development in the 1980s was the creation of the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism in
short CNS with James O'Connor as founding editor and
the rst issue in 1988. The debates ensued led to a host of
theoretical works by O'Connor, Carolyn Merchant, Paul
Burkett and others.

the Dutch Green Left Party (GroenLinks), contain strong

eco-socialist elements. Radical Red-green alliances have
been formed in many countries by eco-socialists, radical Greens and other radical left groups. In Denmark,
the Red-Green Alliance was formed as a coalition of
numerous radical parties. Within the European Parliament, a number of far-left parties from Northern Europe
have organized themselves into the Nordic Green Left Alliance. Red Greens feature heavily in the Green Party of
Saskatchewan (in Canada but not necessarily aliated to
the Green Party of Canada) and GPUS.

The Australian Democratic Socialist Party launched the

Green Left Weekly newspaper in 1991, following a period of working within Green Alliance and Green Party
groups in formation. This ceased when the Australian

The Green Party of England and Wales features an ecosocialist group, Green Left, that was founded in June
2005 and whose members hold a number of inuential positions within the party, including both the for-

146

CHAPTER 13. ECO-SOCIALISM

October 7, 2007 in Paris.[56] The meeting attracted more
than 60 activists from Argentina, Australia, Belgium,
Brazil, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy,
Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the United States
and elected a Steering Committee featuring representatives from Britain, the United States, Canada, France,
Greece, Argentina, Brazil and Australia, including Joel
Kovel, Michael Lwy, Derek Wall, Ian Angus (editor of
Climate and Capitalism in Canada) and Ariel Salleh. The
Committee states that it wants to incorporate members
from China, India, Africa, Oceania and Eastern Europe.
EIN held its second international conference in January
2009, in association with the next World Social Forum in
Brazil.[57] The conference released The Belem EcosoInuence on existing socialist cialist Declaration.[58]

mer Principal Speakers Sin Berry and Dr. Derek Wall,

himself an eco-socialist and marxist academic, as well as
prominent Green Party candidate and human rights activist Peter Tatchell.[20] Many Marxist organisations also
contain eco-socialists, as evidenced by Lwys involvement in the reunied Fourth International and Socialist
Resistance, a British Marxist newspaper that reports on
eco-socialist issues and has published two collections of
essays on eco-socialist thought: Ecosocialism or Barbarism?, edited by Jane Kelly and Sheila Malone, and The
Global Fight for Climate Justice, edited by Ian Angus with
a foreword by Derek Wall.[51][52]

13.2.6

regimes

International networking by eco-socialists has already

been seen in the Praxis Research and Education Center, a group on international researchers and activists.
Based in Moscow and established in 1997, Praxis, as
well as publishing books by libertarian socialists, Marxist humanists, anarchists, [and] syndicalists", running the
Victor Serge Library and opposing war in Chechnya,
states that it believes that capitalism has brought life on
the planet near to the brink of catastrophe, and that a form
of ecosocialism needs to emerge to replace capitalism before it is too late.[59][60]

Eco-socialism has had a minor inuence over developments in the environmental policies of what can be called
existing socialist" regimes, notably the Peoples Republic of China. Pan Yue, Deputy Director of the PRC's
State Environmental Protection Administration, has acknowledged the inuence of eco-socialist theory on his
championing of environmentalism within China, which
has gained him international acclaim (including being
nominated for the Person of the Year Award 2006 by The
New Statesman,[53] a British current aairs magazine).
Yue stated in an interview that, while he often nds ecosocialist theory too idealistic and lacking ways of solving actual problems, he believes that it provides politi- 13.3 Critique of capitalist expancal reference for Chinas scientic view of development,
sion and globalisation
gives socialist ideology room to expand and oers a
theoretical basis for the establishment of fair international
Merging
aspects
of
Marxism,
socialism,
rules on the environment.
environmentalism and ecology, eco-socialists genHe echoes much of eco-socialist thought, attacking in- erally believe that the capitalist system is the cause of
ternational environmental inequality, refusing to focus social exclusion, inequality and environmental degraon technological xes and arguing for the construction dation through globalization and imperialism under
of a harmonious, resource-saving and environmentally- the supervision of repressive states and transnational
friendly society. He also shows a knowledge of eco- structures.
socialist history, from the convergence of radical green
politics and socialism and their political "red-green al- In the Ecosocialist manifesto, Kovel and Lwy suggest
liances" in the post-Soviet era. This focus on eco- that capitalist expansion causes both crises of ecology
socialism has informed an essay, On Socialist Ecologi- through rampant industrialization" and societal breakcal Civilisation, published in September 2006, which, ac- down that springs from the form of imperialism known
cording to chinadialogue, sparked debate in China.[54] as globalization. They believe that capitalisms expanThe current Constitution of Bolivia, promulgated in sion exposes ecosystems" to pollutants, habitat destruc2009, is the rst both ecologic and pro-socialist Consti- tion and resource depletion, reducing the sensuous vitaltution in the world, making the Bolivian state ocially ity of nature to the cold exchangeability required for the
accumulation of capital", while submerging the majority
ecosocialist.[55]
of the worlds people to a mere reservoir of labor power
as it penetrates communities through "consumerism and
13.2.7 Ecosocialist International Network depoliticization.[1]

(EIN) and other international eco- Other eco-socialists, like Wall, highlight how, in
the Global South, free-market capitalism structures
socialist organisations
economies to produce export-geared crops that take waIn 2007, it was announced that attempts to form an ter from traditional subsistence farms, increasing hunger
Ecosocialist International Network (EIN) would be made and the likelihood of famine; furthermore, forests are inand an inaugural meeting of the International occurred on creasingly cleared and enclosed to produce cash crops that

13.3. CRITIQUE OF CAPITALIST EXPANSION AND GLOBALISATION

147

separate people from their local means of production and

aggravate poverty. Wall shows that many of the worlds
poor have access to the means of production through
non-monetised communal means of production", such
as subsistence farming, but, despite providing for need
and a level of prosperity, these are not included in conventional economics measures, like GNP.

believes that it illustrates the eect market forces can

have on increasing the likelihood of ecological and social
problems.[12]

Wall therefore views neo-liberal globalization as part

of the long struggle of the state and commercial interests to steal from those who subsist by removing
access to the resources that sustain ordinary people
across the globe.[19] Furthermore, Kovel sees the form
of neo-liberal globalization as a return to the pure logic
of capital that has eectively swept away measures
which had inhibited capitals aggressivity, replacing them
with naked exploitation of humanity and nature"; for
Kovel, this tearing down of boundaries, which was
a deliberate response to a serious accumulation crisis in the 1970s, has become the denition of modern
'globalization'.[61]

Eco-socialism focuses closely on Marxs theories about

the contradiction between use values and exchange values. Kovel posits that, within a market economy, goods
are not produced to meet needs but are produced to be
exchanged for money that we then use to acquire other
goods; as we have to keep selling in order to keep buying,
we must persuade others to buy our goods just to ensure
our survival, which leads to the production of goods with
no previous use that can be sold to sustain our ability to
buy other goods.[12]

Furthermore, Guha and Martinez-Alier blame globalization for creating increased levels of waste and pollution,
and then dumping the waste on the most vulnerable in
society, particularly those in the Global South.[11] Others have also noted that capitalism disproportionately affects the poorest in the Global North as well, leading to
examples of resistance such as the environmental justice
movement in the USA, consisting of working-class people and ethnic minorities who highlight the tendency for
waste dumps, major road projects and incinerators to be
constructed around socially excluded areas. However, as
Wall highlights, such campaigns are often ignored or persecuted precisely because they originate among the most
marginalized in society: the African-American radical
green religious group MOVE, campaigning for ecological revolution and animal rights from Philadelphia, had
many members imprisoned or even killed by US authorities from the 1970s onwards.[19]
Eco-socialism disagrees with the elite theories of capitalism, which tend to label a specic class or social group
as conspirators who construct a system that satises their
greed and personal desires. Instead, eco-socialists suggest that the very system itself is self-perpetuating, fuelled by extra-human or impersonal forces. Kovel
uses the Bhopal industrial disaster as an example. Many
anti-corporate observers would blame the avarice of those
at the top of many multi-national corporations, such as
the Union Carbide Corporation in Bhopal, for seemingly
isolated industrial accidents. Conversely, Kovel suggests
that Union Carbide were experiencing a decrease in sales
that led to falling prots, which, due to stock market
conditions, translated into a drop in share values. The
depreciation of share value made many shareholders sell
their stock, weakening the company and leading to costcutting measures that eroded the safety procedures and
mechanisms at the Bhopal site. Though this did not, in
Kovels mind, make the Bhopal disaster inevitable, he

13.3.1 Use and exchange value

Such goods, in an eco-socialist analysis, produce

exchange values but have no use value. Eco-socialists like
Kovel stress that this contradiction has reached a destructive extent, where certain essential activities - such as caring for relatives full-time and basic subsistence - are unrewarded, while unnecessary commodities earn individuals
huge fortunes and fuel consumerism and resource depletion.[12]

13.3.2 The second contradiction of capitalism

James O'Connor argues for a second contradiction of
underproduction, to complement Marx's rst contradiction of capital and labor. While the second contradiction is often considered a theory of environmental
degradation, O'Connors theory in fact goes much further.
Building on the work of Karl Polanyi, along with Marx,
O'Connor argues that capitalism necessarily undermines
the conditions of production necessary to sustain the
endless accumulation of capital. These conditions of production include soil, water, energy, and so forth. But they
also include an adequate public education system, transportation infrastructures, and other services that are not
produced directly by capital, but which capital needs in
order accumulate eectively. As the conditions of production are exhausted, the costs of production for capital
increase. For this reason, the second contradiction generates an underproduction crisis tendency, with the rising
cost of inputs and labor, to complement the overproduction tendency of too many commodities for too few customers. Like Marxs contradiction of capital and labor,
the second contradiction therefore threatens the systems
existence.[62][63]
In addition, O'Connor believes that, in order to remedy
environmental contradictions, the capitalist system innovates new technologies that overcome existing problems
but introduce new ones.[62]
O'Connor cites nuclear power as an example, which he

148
sees as a form of producing energy that is advertised as
an alternative to carbon-intensive, non-renewable fossil
fuels, but creates long-term radioactive waste and other
dangers to health and security. While O'Connor believes that capitalism is capable of spreading out its economic supports so widely that it can aord to destroy
one ecosystem before moving onto another, he and many
other eco-socialists now fear that, with the onset of globalization, the system is running out of new ecosystems.[62]
Kovel adds that capitalist rms have to continue to extract
prot through a combination of intensive or extensive exploitation and selling to new markets, meaning that capitalism must grow indenitely to exist, which he thinks is
impossible on a planet of nite resources.[12]

CHAPTER 13. ECO-SOCIALISM

13.4 Tensions within the EcoSocialist discourse

Reecting tensions within the environmental and socialist
movements, there is some conict of ideas. In practice
however, a synthesis is emerging which calls for democratic regulation of industry in the interests of people and
the environment, nationalisation of some key (environmental) industries, local democracy and an extension of
co-ops and the library principle.[64]

13.5 Critique of other forms of

green politics

Eco-socialists criticise many within the Green movement

for not being overtly anti-capitalist, for working within
the existing capitalist, statist system, for voluntarism, or
13.3.3 The role of the state and transna- for reliance on technological xes. The eco-socialist ideology is based on a critique of other forms of Green
tional organisations
politics, including various forms of Green economics,
Localism, Deep Ecology, Bioregionalism and even some
Capitalist expansion is seen by eco-socialists as being manifestations of radical green ideologies such as Ecohand in glove with corrupt and subservient client feminism and Social Ecology.
states that repress dissent against the system, governed
As Kovel puts it, eco-socialism diers from Green polby international organisations under the overall superviitics at the most fundamental level because the 'Four
sion of the Western powers and the superpower United
Pillars' of Green politics (and the 'Ten Key Values of
States", which subordinate peripheral nations economithe US Green Party) do not include the demand for
[1]
cally and militarily. Kovel further claims that capitalthe emancipation of labour and the end of the separaism itself spurs conict and, ultimately, war. Kovel states
tion between producers and the means of production.[12]
that the 'War on Terror', between Islamist extremists and
Many eco-socialists also oppose Malthusianism[19] and
the USA, is caused by oil imperialism, whereby the
are alarmed by the gulf between Green politics in the
capitalist nations require control over sources of energy,
Global North and the Global South.[11]
especially oil, which are necessary to continue intensive
industrial growth - in the quest for control of such resources, Kovel argues that the capitalist nations, specically the USA, have come into conict with the predom- 13.5.1 Opposition to within-system approaches, voluntarism and technoinantly Muslim nations where oil is often found.[12]
Eco-socialists believe that state or self-regulation of markets does not solve the crisis because to do so requires
setting limits upon accumulation, which is unacceptable for a growth-orientated system; they believe that
terrorism and revolutionary impulses cannot be tackled
properly because to do so would mean abandoning the
logic of empire". Instead, eco-socialists feel that increasing repressive counter-terrorism increases alienation and
causes further terrorism and believe that state counterterrorist methods are, in Kovel and Lwy's words, evolving into a new and malignant variation of fascism". They
echo Rosa Luxemburg's stark choice between socialism or barbarism, which was believed to be a prediction of the coming of fascism and further forms of destructive capitalism at the beginning of the twentieth century (Luxemburg was in fact murdered by proto-fascist
Freikorps in the revolutionary atmosphere of Germany
in 1919).[1]

logical xes

Eco-socialists are highly critical of those Greens who

favour working within the system. While eco-socialists
like Kovel recognise the ability of within-system approaches to raise awareness, and believe that the struggle
for an ecologically rational world must include a struggle for the state, he believes that the mainstream Green
movement is too easily co-opted by the current powerful socio-political forces as it passes from citizen-based
activism to ponderous bureaucracies scuing for 'a seat
at the table'".[12]
For Kovel, capitalism is happy to enlist the Green
movement for convenience, control over popular dissent and rationalization. He further attacks withinsystem green initiatives like carbon trading, which he sees
as a capitalist shell game that turns pollution into a
fresh source of prot.[12] Brian Tokar has further crit-

13.5. CRITIQUE OF OTHER FORMS OF GREEN POLITICS

149

icised carbon trading in this way, suggesting that it aug- vision of a capitalism of small producers, freely exments existing class inequality and gives the largest 'play- changing with each other, which is self-regulating and
ers... substantial control over the whole 'game'".[65]
competitive.[12]
In addition, Kovel criticises the defeatism of
voluntarism in some local forms of environmentalism
that do not connect: he suggests that they can be drawn
o into individualism" or co-opted to the demands of
capitalism, as in the case of certain recycling projects,
where citizens are induced to provide free labor to
waste management industries who are involved in the
capitalization of nature. He labels the notion on
voluntarism "ecopolitics without struggle.[12]
Technological xes to ecological problems are also rejected by eco-socialists. Saral Sarkar has updated the
thesis of 1970s 'limits to growth' to exemplify the limits
of new capitalist technologies such as hydrogen fuel cells,
which require large amounts of energy to split molecules
to obtain hydrogen.[66] Furthermore, Kovel notes that
events in nature are reciprocal and multi-determined
and can therefore not be predictably xed"; socially,
technologies cannot solve social problems because they
are not mechanical. He posits an eco-socialist analysis, developed from Marx, that patterns of production and social organisation are more important than the
forms of technology used within a given conguration of
society.[12]

The school is represented by thinkers like David Korten who believe in regulated markets checked by
government and civil society but, for Kovel, they do not
provide a critique of the expansive nature of capitalism away from localised production and ignore questions of class, gender or any other category of domination. Kovel also criticises their fairy-tale view of history, which refers to the abuse of "natural capital" by the
materialism of the Scientic Revolution, an assumption
that, in Kovels eyes, seems to suggest that nature had
toiled to put the gift of capital into human hands, rather
than capitalism being a product of social relations in human history.[12]

Other forms of Community-based economics are also

rejected by eco-socialists such as Kovel, including followers of E. F. Schumacher and some members of the
Cooperative movement, for advocating no more than a
very halting and isolated rst step. He thinks that their
principles are only partially realizable within the institutions of cooperatives in capitalist society because the
internal cooperation of cooperatives is forever hemmed
in and compromised by the need to expand value and
compete within the market.[12] Marx also believed that
Under capitalism, he suggests that technology has been cooperatives within capitalism make workers into their
own capitalist... by enabling them to use the means of
the sine qua non of growth" - thus he believes that,
[18]
even in a world with hypothetical free energy, the ef- production for the employment of their own labour.
fect would be to lower the cost of automobile produc- For Kovel and other eco-socialists, Community-based
tion, leading to the massive overproduction of vehicles, economics and Green Localism are a fantasy because
collapsing infrastructure, chronic resource depletion strict localism belongs to the aboriginal stages of sociand the paving over of the remainder of nature". In ety and would be an ecological nightmare at present
the modern world, Kovel considers the supposed e- population levels due to heat losses from a multitude
ciency of new post-industrial commodities is a plain il- of dispersed sites, the squandering of scarce resources,
lusion, as miniaturized components involve many sub- the needless reproduction of eort, and cultural impovstances and are therefore non-recyclable (and, theoreti- erishment. While he feels that small-scale production
cally, only simple substances could be retrieved by burn- units are an essential part of the path towards an ecologing out-of-date equipment, releasing more pollutants). ical society, he sees them not as an end in itself"; in his
He is quick to warn environmental liberals" against over- view, small enterprises can be either capitalist or socialist
selling the virtues of renewable energies that cannot meet in their conguration and therefore must be consistently
the mass energy consumption of the era; although he anti-capitalist", through recognition and support of the
would still support renewable energy projects, he believes emancipation of labour, and exist in a dialectic with the
it is more important to restructure societies to reduce en- whole of things, as human society will need large-scale
ergy use before relying on renewable energy technologies projects, such as transport infrastructures.[12]
alone.[12]
He highlights the work of Herman Daly, who exempli-

13.5.2

Critique of Green economics

Eco-socialists have based their ideas for political strategy on a critique of several dierent trends in Green economics. At the most fundamental level, eco-socialists reject what Kovel calls "ecological economics" or the ecological wing of mainstream economics for being uninterested in social transformation. He furthers rejects
the Neo-Smithian school, who believe in Adam Smith's

es what eco-socialists see as the good and bad points of

ecological economics - while he oers a critique of capitalism and a desire for workers ownership, he only believes in workers ownership kept rmly within a capitalist market, ignoring the eco-socialist desire for struggle
in the emancipation of labour and hoping that the interests of labour and management today can be improved so
that they are in harmony.[12]

150

13.5.3

CHAPTER 13. ECO-SOCIALISM

Critique of Deep Ecology

Despite the inclusion of both in political factions like

the 'Fundies' of the German Green Party, eco-socialists
and deep ecologists hold markedly opposite views. Ecosocialists like Kovel have attacked deep ecology because,
like other forms of Green politics and Green economics,
it features virtuous souls who have no internal connection with the critique of capitalism and the emancipation
of labor. Kovel is particularly scathing about deep ecology and its fatuous pronouncement that Green politics
is neither left nor right, but ahead, which, for him, ignores the notion that that which does not confront the
system comes its instrument.[12]

tions, and evidences the fact that Native Americans held

land in commons, rather than private property - thus, for
eco-socialists, bioregionalism provides no understanding
of what is needed to transform society, and what the inevitable response of the capitalist state would be to people constructing bioregionalism.[12]

Kovel also attacks the problems of self-suciency.

Where Sale believes in self-sucient regions each developing the energy of its peculiar ecology, such as wood
in the northwest [USA]",[67] Kovel asks how on earth
these can be made sucient for regional needs, and notes
the environmental damage of converting Seattle into
a forest-destroying and smoke-spewing wood-burning
city. Kovel also questions Sale's insistence on bioregions
Even more scathingly, Kovel suggests that in its eort that do not require connections with the outside, but
to decentre humanity within nature, deep ecologists can within strict limits, and whether this precludes journeys
go too far and argue for the splitting away of un- to visit family members and other forms of travel.[12]
wanted people, as evidenced by their desire to preserve
wilderness by removing the groups that have lived there
from time immemorial". Kovel thinks that this lends le- 13.5.5 Critique of variants of ecofeminism
gitimacy to "capitalist elites, like the US State Department and the World Bank, who can make preservation
of wilderness a part of their projects that have added Like many variants of socialism and Green politics, ecovalue as sites for ecotourism" but remove people from socialists recognise the importance of the gendered bitheir land. Between 1986 and 1996, Kovel notes that furcation of nature and support the emancipation of
over three million people were displaced by conserva- gender as it is at the root of patriarchy and class". Nevtion projects"; in the making of the US National Parks, ertheless, while Kovel believes that any path out of capthree hundred Shoshone Indians were killed in the devel- italism must also be eco-feminist", he criticises types of
ecofeminism that are not anti-capitalist and can essenopment of Yosemite.[12]
tialize womens closeness to nature and build from there,
Kovel believes that deep ecology has aected the rest
submerging history into nature, becoming more at place
of the Green movement and led to calls from restricin the comforts of the New Age Growth Centre. These
tions on immigration, often allying with reactionaries in
limitations, for Kovel, keep ecofeminism from becom[12]
a... cryptically racist quest. Indeed, he nds traces of
ing a coherent social movement.[12]
deep ecology in the biological reduction of Nazism, an
ideology many organicist thinkers have found appealing, including Herbert Gruhl, a founder of the German 13.5.6 Critique of Social Ecology
Green Party (who subsequently left when it became more
Left-wing) and originator of the phrase neither left nor While having much in common with the radical tradiright, but ahead. Kovel warns that, while 'ecofascism' is tion of Social Ecology, eco-socialists still see themselves
conned to a narrow band of far right intellectuals and as distinct. Kovel believes this is because Social Ecolodisaected white power skinheads who involved them- gists see hierarchy in-itself as the cause of ecological
selves alongside far left groups in the anti-globalization destruction, whereas eco-socialists focus on gender and
movement, it may be imposed as a revolution from above class domination embodied in capitalism and recognise
to install an authoritarian regime in order to preserve the that forms of authority that are not an expropriation
main workings of the system in times of crisis.[12]
of human power for... self-aggrandizement, such as a

13.5.4

Critique of bioregionalism

Bioregionalism, a philosophy developed by writers like

Kirkpatrick Sale who believe in the self-suciency of
appropriate bioregional boundaries drawn up by inhabitants of an area,[67] has been thoroughly critiqued
by Kovel, who fears that the vagueness of the area
will lead to conict and further boundaries between
communities.[12] While Sale cites the bioregional living
of Native Americans,[67] Kovel notes that such ideas are
impossible to translate to populations of modern propor-

student-teacher relationship that is reciprocal and mutual, are benecial.[12]

In practice, Kovel describes Social Ecology as continuing
the anarchist tradition of non-violent direct action, which
is necessary but not sucient because it leaves unspoken the question of building an ecological society
beyond capital". Furthermore, Social Ecologists and
anarchists tend to focus on the state alone, rather than
the class relations behind state domination (in the view
of Marxists). Kovel fears that this is political, springing
from historic hostility to Marxism among anarchists and
sectarianism, which he points out as a fault of the bril-

13.6. CRITIQUE OF OTHER FORMS OF SOCIALISM

151

liant but dogmatic founder of Social Ecology, Murray 13.6.1

Bookchin.[12]

13.5.7

Critique of 'Actually Existing Socialisms

For Kovel and Lowy, eco-socialism is the realization

Opposition to Malthusianism and of the rst-epoch socialisms by resurrecting the noNeo-Malthusianism

tion of free development of all producers, distanc-

ing themselves from the attenuated, reformist aims of

social democracy and the productivist structures of the
bureaucratic variations of socialism, such as forms of
Leninism and Stalinism.[1] They ground the failure of past
socialist movements in underdevelopment in the context
of hostility by existing capitalist powers, which led to
the denial of internal democracy and emulation of capitalist productivism".[1] Kovel believes that the forms of
'actually existing socialism' consisted of public ownership of the means of production", rather than meeting
the true denition of socialism as a free association
of producers", with the Party-State bureaucracy acting as
[12]
Neo-Malthusians have slightly modied this analysis by the alienating substitute 'public'".
increasing their focus on overconsumption - nonetheless, In analysing the Russian Revolution, Kovel feels that
eco-socialists nd this attention inadequate. They point to conspiratorial revolutionary movements cut o from
the fact that Malthus did not thoroughly examine ecology the development of society will nd society an inert
and that Garrett Hardin, a key Neo-Malthusian, suggested mass requiring leadership from above. From this, he
that further enclosed and privatised land, as opposed to notes that the anti-democratic Tsarist heritage meant that
commons, would solve the chief environmental problem, the Bolsheviks, who were aided into power by World War
which Hardin labeled the 'Tragedy of the Commons'.[19] One, were a minority who, when faced with a counterWhile Malthusianism and eco-socialism overlap within
the Green movement because both address overindustrialism, and despite the fact that Eco-socialists,
like many within the Green movement, are described as
neo-Malthusian because of their criticism of economic
growth, Eco-socialists are opposed to Malthusianism.
This divergence stems from the dierence between
Marxist and Malthusian examinations of social injustice - whereas Marx blames inequality on class injustice,
Malthus argued that the working-class remained poor because of their greater fertility and birth rates.

revolution and invading Western powers, continued the

extraordinary needs of 'war communism'", which put
13.5.8 The two varieties of environmen- the seal of authoritarianism" on the revolution; thus, for
talism
Kovel, Lenin and Trotsky resorted to terror, shut down
the Soviets (workers councils) and emulated capitalist
Guha and Martinez-Alier attack the gulf between what eciency and productivism as a means of survival, setthey see as the two varieties of environmentalism" - ting the stage for Stalinism.[12]
the environmentalism of the North, an aesthetic environmentalism that is the privilege of wealthy people who no Lenin, in Kovels eyes, came to oppose the nascent
longer have basic material concerns, and the environmen- Bolshevik environmentalism and its champion Aleksandr
talism of the South, where peoples local environment is a Bogdanov, who was later attacked for idealism"; Kovel
source of communal wealth and such issues are a question describes Lenin's philosophy as a sharply dualistic
of survival.[11] Nonetheless, other eco-socialists, such as materialism, rather similar to the Cartesian separation of
Wall, have also pointed out that capitalism disproportion- matter and consciousness, and perfectly tooled... to the
ately aects the poorest in the Global North as well, lead- active working over of the dead, dull matter by the huing to examples of resistance such as the environmental man hand, which led him to want to overcome Russian
justice movement in the US and groups like MOVE.[19] backwardness through rapid industrialization. This tendency was, according to Kovel, augmented by a desire to
catch-up with the West and the severe crisis of the revolutions rst years.[12]

13.6 Critique of other forms of socialism

Eco-socialists choose to use the term 'socialist', despite

the failings of its twentieth century interpretations, because it still stands for the supersession of capital" and
thus the name, and the reality must become adequate
for this time.[1] Eco-socialists have nonetheless often diverged with other Marxist movements. Eco-socialism
has also been partly inuenced by and associated with
agrarian socialism as well as some forms of Christian socialism, especially in the United States.

Furthermore, Kovel quotes Trotsky, who believed in a

Communist superman who would learn how to move
rivers and mountains.[68] Kovel believes that, in Stalin's
revolution from above and mass terror in response to
the early 1930s economic crisis, Trotsky's writings were
given ocial imprimatur, despite the fact that Trotsky
himself was eventually purged, as Stalinism attacked the
very notion of ecology... in addition to ecologies. Kovel
adds that Stalin would win the gold medal for enmity
to nature, and that, in the face of massive environmental
degradation, the inexible Soviet bureaucracy became increasingly inecient and unable to emulate capitalist ac-

152

CHAPTER 13. ECO-SOCIALISM

cumulation, leading to a vicious cycle that led to its Kovel focuses on working-class involvement in the forcollapse.[12]
mation of eco-socialist parties or their increased involvement in existing Green Parties; however, he believes that,
unlike many other forms of socialist analysis, there is
13.6.2 Critique of the wider socialist move- no privileged agent or revolutionary class, and that there
is potential for agency in numerous autonomous, grassment
roots individuals and groups who can build preguraBeyond the forms of 'actually existing socialism', Kovel tive projects for non-violent radical social change. He
criticises socialists in general as treating ecology as an denes preguration as the potential for the given to
afterthought and holding a naive faith in the ecological contain the lineaments of what is to be, meaning that a
capacities of a working-class dened by generations of moment toward the future exists embedded in every point
[12]
capitalist production. He exemplies David McNally, of the social organism where a need arises.
who advocated increasing consumption levels under so- If everything has pregurative potential, Kovel notes
cialism, which, for Kovel, contradicts any notion of nat- that forms of potential ecological production will be
ural limits. He also criticises McNallys belief in re- scattered, and thus suggests that the task is to free
leasing the positive side of capital's self-expansion[69] them and connect them. While all human ecosystems"
after the emancipation of labor; instead, Kovel argues have ecosocialist potential, Kovel points out that ones
that a socialist society would seek not to become larger such as the World Bank have low potential, whereas interbut would rather become more realized", choosing suf- nally democratic anti-globalization anity groups have
ciency and eschewing economic growth. Kovel further a high potential through a dialectic that involves the acadds that the socialist movement was historically condi- tive bringing and holding together of negations, such as
tioned by its origins in the era of industrialization so that, the group acting as an alternative institution (producwhen modern socialists like McNally advocate a social- tion of an ecological/socialist alternative) and trying to
ism that cannot be at the expense of the range of human shut down a G8 summit meeting (resistance to capital).
satisfaction,[69] they fail to recognize that these satis- Therefore practices that in the same motion enhance
factions can be problematic with respect to nature when use-values and diminish exchange-values are the ideal
they have been historically shaped by the domination of for eco-socialists.[12]
nature.[12]

13.7.2 Preguration

13.7 Eco-socialist strategy

Eco-socialists generally advocate the non-violent dismantling of capitalism and the state, focusing on collective
ownership of the means of production by freely associated producers and restoration of the Commons.[1] To
get to an eco-socialist society, eco-socialists advocate
working-class anti-capitalist resistance but also believe
that there is potential for agency in autonomous, grassroots individuals and groups across the world who can
build pregurative projects for non-violent radical social change.[12]

For Kovel, the main pregurative steps are that people

ruthlessly criticize the capitalist system... and that they
include in this a consistent attack on the widespread belief that there can be no alternative to it, which will then
deligitimate the system and release people into struggle.
Kovel justies this by stating that radical criticism of the
given... can be a material force, even without an alternative, because it can seize the mind of the masses of people, leading to dynamic and exponential, rather than
incremental and linear, victories that spread rapidly.
Following this, he advocates the expansion of the dialectical eco-socialist potential of groups through sustaining
the confrontation and internal cohesion of human ecosystems, leading to an activation of potentials in others that
will spread across the whole social eld as a new set of
orienting principles that dene an ideology or "'partylife' formation.[12]

These pregurative steps go beyond the market and the

state[19] and base production on the enhancement of use
values, leading to the internationalization of resistance
communities in an 'Eco-socialist Party' or network of
grassroots groups focused on non-violent, radical social
transformation. An 'Eco-socialist revolution' is then car- In the short-term, eco-socialists like Kovel advocate acried out.[12]
tivities that have the promise of breaking down the commodity form. This includes organizing labor, which is a
reconguring of the use-value of labor power"; form13.7.1 Agency
ing cooperatives, allowing a relatively free association
of labor"; forming localised currencies, which he sees as
Many eco-socialists, like Alan Roberts, have encouraged undercutting the value-basis of money"; and supporting
working-class action and resistance, such as the 'green radical media that, in his eyes, involve an undoing of
ban' movement in which workers refuse to participate the fetishism of commodities. Arran Gare, Wall and
in projects that are ecologically harmful.[43] Similarly, Kovel have advocated economic localisation in the same

13.8. THE REVOLUTION AND TRANSITION TO ECO-SOCIALISM

153

vein as many in the Green movement, although they stress ized in the face of globalization, as evidenced by a wave
that it must be a pregurative step rather than an end in of strikes across the Global South in the rst half of the
itself.[19][70]
year 2000; indeed, he says that labors most cherished
[12]
Kovel also advises political parties attempting to de- values are already immanently ecocentric.
mocratize the state that there should be dialogue but
no compromise with established political parties, and
that there must be a continual association of electoral
work with movement work to avoid being sucked back
into the system. Such parties, he believes, should focus
on the local rungs of the political system rst, before
running national campaigns that challenge the existing
system by the elementary means of exposing its broken
promises.[12]
Kovel believes in building pregurations around forms
of production based on use values, which will provide
a practical vision of a post-capitalist, post-statist system.
Such projects include Indymedia (a democratic rendering of the use-values of new technologies such as the
Internet, and a continual involvement in wider struggle),
open-source software, Wikipedia, public libraries and
many other initiatives, especially those developed within
the anti-globalisation movement.[12] These strategies, in
Wall's words, go beyond the market and the state by
rejecting the supposed dichotomy between private enterprise and state-owned production, while also rejecting
any combination of the two through a mixed economy.
He states that these present forms of amphibious politics, which are half in the dirty water of the present but
seeking to move on to a new, unexplored territory.[19]
Wall suggests that open source software, for example,
opens up a new form of commons regime in cyberspace",
which he praises as production for the pleasure of invention that gives access to resources without exchange.
He believes that open source has bypassed both the
market and the state, and could provide developing
countries with free access to vital computer software.
Furthermore, he suggests that an "open source economy
means that the barrier between user and provider is
eroded, allowing for cooperative creativity. He links
this to Marxism and the notion of usufruct, asserting that
Marx would have been a Firefox user.[19]

13.7.3

Kovel therefore thinks that these universalizing tendencies must lead to the formation of a consciously 'Ecosocialist Party'" that is neither like a parliamentary or
vanguardist party. Instead, Kovel advocates a form of
political party grounded in communities of resistance,
where delegates from these communities form the core of
the partys activists, and these delegates and the open and
transparent assembly they form are subject to recall and
regular rotation of members. He holds up the Zapatista
Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and the Gaviotas
movement as examples of such communities, which are
produced outside capitalist circuits and show that there
can be no single way valid for all peoples.[12]
Nonetheless, he also rmly believes in connecting these
movements, stating that ecosocialism will be international or it will be nothing and hoping that the Ecosocialist Party can retain the autonomy of local communities while supporting them materially. With an
ever-expanding party, Kovel hopes that defections by
capitalists will occur, leading eventually to the armed
forces and police who, in joining the revolution, will signify that the turning point is reached.[12]

13.8 The Revolution and transition to eco-socialism

'The Revolution' as envisaged by eco-socialists involves

an immediate socio-political transition. Internationally,
eco-socialists believe in a reform of the nature of money
and the formation of a 'World Peoples Trade Organisation' (WPTO) that democratizes and improves world
trade through the calculation of an 'Ecological Price' (EP)
for goods. This would then be followed by a transformation of socioeconomic conditions towards ecological production, commons land and notions of usufruct (that seek
to improve the common property possessed by society) to
end private property. Eco-socialists assert that this must
Internationalization of pregura- be carried out with adherence to non-violence[12]

tion and the 'Eco-socialist Party'

Many eco-socialists have noted that the potential for
building such projects is easier for media workers than
for those in heavy industry because of the decline in trade
unionism and the globalized division of labor which divides workers. However, Kovel believes that examples
like the Christian Bruderhof Communities (despite elements of patriarchy that he attacks) show that communistic organizations can survive rather well in a heavily
industrialized market" if they are protected from the
dependence on the market by "anti-capitalist intentionality. He further posits that class struggle is international-

13.8.1 The immediate aftermath of the

revolution
Eco-socialists like Kovel use the term Eco-socialist revolution to describe the transition to an eco-socialist world
society. In the immediate socio-political transition, he
believes that four groups will emerge from the revolution revolutionaries, those whose productive activity is directly compatible with ecological production
(such as nurses, schoolteachers, librarians, independent
farmers and many other examples), those whose pre-

154

CHAPTER 13. ECO-SOCIALISM

revolutionary practice was given over to capital" (including the bourgeoisie, advertising executives and more) and
the workers whose activity added surplus value to capitalist commodities.[12]
In terms of political organisation, he advocates an interim assembly made up of the revolutionaries that can
devise incentives to make sure that vital functions are
maintained (such as short-term continuation of dierential remuneration for labor), handle the redistribution of social roles and assets, convene in widespread
locations, and send delegates to regional, state, national
and international organisations, where every level has an
executive council that is rotated and can be recalled.
From there, he asserts that productive communities will
form the political as well as economic unit of society
and organize others to make a transition to eco-socialist
production.[12]
He adds that people will be allowed to be members of
any community they choose with associate membership
of others, such as a doctor having main membership of
healthcare communities as a doctor and associate membership of child-rearing communities as a father. Each locality would, in Kovels eyes, require one community that
administered the areas of jurisdiction through an elected
assembly. High-level assemblies would have additional
supervisory roles over localities to monitor the development of ecosystemic integrity, and administer societywide services like transport in state-like functions, before the interim assembly can transfer responsibilities to
the level of the society as a whole through appropriate
and democratically responsive committees.[12]

13.8.2

Transnational trade and capital reform

Part of the eco-socialist transition, in Kovels eyes, is the

reforming money to retain its use in enabling exchanges
while reducing its functions as a commodity in its own
right and repository of value. He argues for directing
money to enhancement of use-values" through a subsidization of use-values" that preserves the functioning
core of the economy while gaining time and space for
rebuilding it. Internationally, he believes in the immediate cessation of speculation in currencies (breaking
down the function of money as commodity, and redirecting funds on use-values"), the cancellation of the debt of
the Global South (breaking the back of the value function of money) and the redirecting the vast reservoir
of mainly phony value to reparations and ecologically
sound development. He suggests the end of military aid
and other forms of support to "comprador elites in the
South" will eventually lead to their collapse.[12]

duction, meaning that farmers would have a special say

over food trade and so on. He posits that the WPTO
should have an elected council that will oversee a reform
of prices in favour of an Ecological Price (EP) determined by the dierence between actual use-values and
fully realized ones, thus having low taris for forms of
ecological production like organic agriculture; he also envisages the high taris on non-ecological production providing subsidies to ecological production units.[12]
The EP would also internalize the costs of current
externalities (like pollution) and would be set as a function of the distance traded, reducing the eects of longdistance transport like carbon emissions and increased
packaging of goods. He thinks that this will provide a
standard of transformation for non-ecological industries, like the automobile industry, thus spurring changes
towards ecological production.[12]

13.8.3 Ecological production

Eco-socialists pursue "ecological production that, according to Kovel, goes beyond the socialist vision of the
emancipation of labor to the realization of use-values
and the appropriation of intrinsic value. He envisions a
form of production in which the making of a thing becomes part of the thing made so that, using a high quality
meal as an analogy, pleasure would obtain for the cooking of the meal - thus activities reserved as hobbies under capitalism would compose the fabric of everyday
life under eco-socialism.[12]
This, for Kovel, is achieved if labor is freely chosen and
developed... with a fully realized use-value" achieved by
a negation of exchange-value, and he exemplies the
Food Not Bombs project for adopting this. He believes
that the notion of mutual recognition... for the process as
well as the product will avoid exploitation and hierarchy.
With production allowing humanity to live more directly
and receptively embedded in nature", Kovel predicts that
a reorientation of human need will occur that recognises ecological limits and sees technology as fully participant in the life of eco-systems", thus removing it from
prot-making exercises.[12]

In the course on an Eco-socialist revolution, writers like

Kovel advocate the a rapid conversion to ecosocialist
production for all enterprises, followed by restoring
ecosystemic integrity to the workplace through steps like
workers ownership. He then believes that the new enterprises can build socially developed plans of production for societal needs, such as ecient light-rail transport components. At the same time, Kovel argues for
the transformation of essential but, under capitalism,
non-productive labour, such as child care, into produclabour a status
In terms of trade, Kovel advocates a World Peoples tive labour, thereby giving reproductive
[12]
equivalent
to
productive
labour.
Trade Organization (WPTO), responsible to a confederation of popular bodies, in which the degree of con- During such a transition, he believes that income should
trol over trade is... proportional to involvement with pro- be guaranteed and that money will still be used under

13.8. THE REVOLUTION AND TRANSITION TO ECO-SOCIALISM

new conditions of value according to use and to the
degree to which ecosystem integrity is developed and advanced by any particular production. Within this structure, Kovel asserts that markets and will become unnecessary although market phenomena in personal exchanges and other small instances might be adopted and
communities and elected assemblies will democratically
decide on the allocation of resources.[12] Istvan Meszaros
believes that such genuinely planned and self-managed
(as opposed to bureaucratically planned from above) productive activities are essential if eco-socialism is to meet
its fundamental objectives.[71]

155

when he stated that human beings are no more than the

planets "usufructaries, and, like boni patres familias, they
must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.[18] Kovel and others have taken on this
reading, asserting that, in an eco-socialist society, everyone will have... rights of use and ownership over those
means of production necessary to express the creativity of
human nature, namely a place of ones own to decorate
to personal taste, some personal possessions, the body and
its attendant sexual and reproductive rights.[12]
However, Kovel sees property as self-contradictory because individuals emerge in a tissue of social relations
and nested circles, with the self at the centre and extended circles where issues of sharing arise from early
childhood on. He believes that the full self is enhanced
more by giving than by taking and that eco-socialism is
realized when material possessions weigh lightly upon
the self thus restoration of use-value allows things to
be taken concretely and sensuously but lightly, since
things are enjoyed for themselves and not as buttresses
for a shaky ego.[12]

Eco-socialists are quick to assert that their focus on production does not mean that there will be an increase in
production and labor under Eco-socialism. Kovel thinks
that the emancipation of labor and the realization of usevalue will allow the spheres of work and culture to be
reintegrated. He cites the example of Paraguayan Indian
communities (organised by Jesuits) in the eighteenth century who made sure that all community members learned
musical instruments, and had labourers take musical instruments to the elds and takes turns playing music or This, for Kovel, reverses what Marxists see as the
harvesting.[12]
commodity fetishism and atomization of individuals
(through the unappeasable craving for having and excluding others from having) under capitalism. Under
13.8.4 Commons, property and usufruct eco-socialism, he therefore believes that enhancement of
use-value will lead to dierentiated ownership between
Most eco-socialists, including Guha and Martinez-Alier, the individual and the collective, where there are distinct
echo subsistence eco-feminists like Vandana Shiva when limits on the amount of property individuals control and
they argue for the restoration of commons land over no-one can take control of resources that would permit
private property. They blame ecological degradation on the alienation of means of production from another. He
the inclination to short-term, prot-inspired decisions in- then hopes that the hubris of the notion of ownership
herent within a market system. For them, privatization of the planet will be replaced with usufruct.[12]
of land strips people of their local communal resources
in the name of creating markets for neo-liberal globalisation, which benets a minority. In their view, successful commons systems have been set up around the world
throughout history to manage areas cooperatively, based
on long-term needs and sustainability instead of short- 13.8.5 Non-violence
term prot.[11]
Many eco-socialists focus on a modied version of the
notion of Usufruct to replace capitalist private property
arrangements. As a legal term, Usufruct refers to the legal right to use and derive prot or benet from property
that belongs to another person, as long as the property is
not damaged. According to eco-socialists like Kovel, a
modern interpretation of the idea is where one uses, enjoys and through that, improves anothers property,
as its Latin etymology condenses the two meanings of
use as in use-value, and enjoyment and as in the gratication expressed in freely associated labour. The idea,
according to Kovel, has roots in the Code of Hammurabi
and was rst mentioned in Roman law where it applied
to ambiguities between masters and slaves with respect
to property"; it also features in Islamic Sharia law, Aztec
law and the Napoleonic Code.[12]

Most eco-socialists are involved in peace and antiwar

movements, and eco-socialist writers, like Kovel, generally believe that violence is the rupturing of ecosystems"
and is therefore deeply contrary to ecosocialist values. Kovel believes that revolutionary movements must
prepare for post-revolutionary violence from counterrevolutionary sources by prior development of the democratic sphere within the movement, because to the degree that people are capable of self-government, so will
they turn away from violence and retribution for a selfgoverned people cannot be pushed around by any alien
government. It is therefore essential, in Kovels view,
that the revolution takes place in or spreads quickly to
the USA, which is capitals gendarme and will crush
any serious threat, and that revolutionaries reject the
death penalty and retribution against former opponents
Crucially for eco-socialists, Marx mentioned the idea or counter-revolutionaries.[12]

156

13.9 Criticisms of eco-socialism

While in many ways the criticisms of eco-socialism combine the traditional criticisms of both socialism and Green
politics, there are unique critiques of eco-socialism,
which are largely from within the traditional Socialist or
Green movements themselves, along with conservative
criticisms.
Some socialists are critical of the word 'eco-socialism'.
David Reilly, who questions whether his argument is improved by the use of an exotic word, argues instead that
the real socialism is also a green or 'eco'" one that you
get to by dint of struggle.[72] Other socialists, like Paul
Hampton of the Alliance for Workers Liberty (a British
third camp socialist party), see eco-socialism as classless
ecology, wherein eco-socialists have given up on the
working class" as the privileged agent of struggle by borrowing bits from Marx but missing the locus of Marxist
politics.[73]

CHAPTER 13. ECO-SOCIALISM

exclusively on long-term societal transformation. Johns
believes that species extinction started much earlier
than capitalism and suggests that eco-socialism neglects
the fact that an ecological society will need to transcend
the destructiveness found in all large-scale societies.[76]
the very tendency that Kovel himself attacks among capitalists and traditional leftists who attempt to reduce nature
to linear human models.[12] Johns questions whether
non-hierarchical social systems can provide for billions of
people, and criticises eco-socialists for neglecting issues
of population pressure. Furthermore, Johns describes
Kovels argument that human hierarchy is founded on
raiding to steal women as archaic.

13.10 List of eco-socialists

Chico Mendes
Ian Angus

Writing in Capitalism Nature Socialism, Doug Boucher,

Peter Caplan, David Schwartzman and Jane Zara criticise
eco-socialists in general (and Joel Kovel in particular) for
a deterministic "catastrophism" that overlooks the countervailing tendencies of both popular struggles and the efforts of capitalist governments to rationalize the system
and the accomplishments of the labor movement" that
demonstrate that despite the interests and desires of capitalists, progress toward social justice is possible. They
argue that an ecological socialism must be built on hope,
not fear.[74]

Rudolph Bahro

Conservatives have criticised the perceived opportunism

of left-wing groups who have increased their focus on
green issues since the fall of Communism. Fred L. Smith
Jr., President of the Competitive Enterprise Institute
think-tank, exemplies the conservative critique of left
Greens, attacking the "pantheism" of the Green movement and conating "eco-paganism" with eco-socialism.
Like many conservative critics, Smith uses the term 'ecosocialism' to attack non-socialist environmentalists for
advocating restrictions on the free market, although he
does recognise and condemn the inuence of socialist ideals on many in the Green movement who reject private
property, and instead advocates market-based solutions
to ecological problems. He nevertheless wrongly claims
that eco-socialists endorse the Malthusian view of the
relationship between man and nature, and states that Al
Gore, a former Democratic Party Vice President of the
United States and now a climate change campaigner, is
an eco-socialist, despite the fact that Gore has never used
this term and is not recognised as a such by other followers of either Green politics or socialism.[75]

Joel Kovel

Some environmentalists and conservationists have criticised eco-socialism from within the Green movement. In
a review of Joel Kovel's The Enemy of Nature, David M.
Johns criticises eco-socialism for not oering suggestions about near term conservation policy and focusing

John Bellamy Foster

Murray Bookchin
Walt Brown
Barry Commoner
Ramachandra Guha
Joan Herrera i Torres

Michael Lwy
David McReynolds
Manuel Sacristn
William Morris
James O'Connor (academic)
David Orton
Alan Roberts
Ral Romeva
Ariel Salleh
Joan Saura
Alan Thornett
Derek Wall
Peter Tatchell
Saral Sarkar
Chris Williams

13.12. REFERENCES

157

13.11 See also

[14] Clark, J., The Anarchist Moment, 1984 (Montreal: Black

Rose)

Socialism

[15] Benton, T. (ed.), The Greening of Marxism, 1996 (New

York: Guildford)

Social ecology

[16] Foster, J. B., Marxs Ecology, 2000 (New York: Monthly

Review Press)

Green politics
Green anarchism

[17] Burkett, P., Marx and Nature, 1999 (New York: St. Martins Press)

EcoCommunalism
Inclusive Democracy

[18] Marx, K., Capital Vol. 3., 1894

Marxism

[19] Wall, D., Babylon and Beyond: The Economics of AntiCapitalist, Anti-Globalist and Radical Green Movements,
2005

Environmentalism
Environmental justice

[20] Green Left (Green Party of England and Wales) Website

Environmental movement

[21] Gare, A., Soviet Environmentalism: The Path Not Taken,

in Benton, E. (ed.) The Greening of Marxism, 1996

Anti-globalization
Anti-capitalism
Green Parties
Agrarian socialism
Green Left (disambiguation)
Green left

13.12 References
[1] Kovel, J.; Lwy, M. (2001). An ecosocialist manifesto.
[2] "A Blogroll, please" (Blog). Rats Nest.
[3] No Watermelons Allowed (Blog).
[4] The Man Who Saw Tomorrow. The American Spectator. 13 July 2007.
[5] Stolen watermelons. Media Watch.
[6] Brown dismisses Govt name-calling. ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). September 7, 2004.
[7] The Watermelon.
[8] FrontPage magazine.com ::
Christopher Archangelli

The Green Menace by

[9] Triumph for 'Fundies hits Green Party, Daily Mail, 21

September 1989
[10] Mark Lynas New Statesman Blog - Even Greens need leaders
[11] Guha, R. and Martinez-Alier, J., Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South, 1997
[12] Kovel, J., The Enemy of Nature, 2002.
[13] Eckersley, R., Environmentalism and Political Theory,
1992 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press)

[22] Su obra ms representativa es Walden, aparecida en

1854, aunque redactada entre 1845 y 1847, cuando
Thoreau decide instalarse en el aislamiento de una cabaa
en el bosque, y vivir en ntimo contacto con la naturaleza,
en una vida de soledad y sobriedad. De esta experiencia, su losofa trata de transmitirnos la idea que resulta necesario un retorno respetuoso a la naturaleza, y
que la felicidad es sobre todo fruto de la riqueza interior
y de la armona de los individuos con el entorno natural. Muchos han visto en Thoreau a uno de los precursores del ecologismo y del anarquismo primitivista representado en la actualidad por John Zerzan. Para George
Woodcock, esta actitud puede estar tambin motivada
por una cierta idea de resistencia al progreso y de rechazo al materialismo creciente que caracteriza la sociedad
norteamericana de mediados de siglo XIX.LA INSUMISIN VOLUNTARIA. EL ANARQUISMO INDIVIDUALISTA ESPAOL DURANTE LA DICTADURA Y
LA SEGUNDA REPBLICA (1923-1938)" by Xavier
Diez
[23] EL NATURISMO LIBERTARIO EN LA PENNSULA
IBRICA (1890-1939) by Jose Maria Rosello
[24] The pioneers
[25] An Anarchist FAQ by Various authors
[26] Introduction to Anarchism and countercultural politics in
early twentieth-century Cuba by Kirwin R. Shaer
[27] LA INSUMISIN VOLUNTARIA. EL ANARQUISMO INDIVIDUALISTA ESPAOL DURANTE
LA DICTADURA Y LA SEGUNDA REPBLICA
(1923-1938)" by Xavier Diez
[28] Kirkpatrick Sale, foreword to E.P. Dutton 1978 edition of
Leopold Kohrs Breakdown of Nations.
[29] Ellul, Jacques (1988). Anarchy and Christianity. Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans. pp. 7174. The rst beast comes
up from the sea...It is given 'all authority and power over
every tribe, every people, every tongue, and every nation'
(13:7). All who dwell on earth worship it. Political power
could hardly, I think, be more expressly described, for it

158

CHAPTER 13. ECO-SOCIALISM

is this power which has authority, which controls military

force, and which compels adoration (i.e., absolute obedience).
[30] Robert Graham, Anarchism Volume Two: The Anarchist
Current (19392006). Black Rose Books, 2009 ISBN
1551643103, (p.72-5, p. 272).

[54] chinadialogue Interview with Pan Yue 18 December 2006

- The rich consume and the poor suer the pollution
[55]
[56] Climate and Capitalism Blog - International Ecosocialist
Meeting Planned

[31] While almost all forms of modern anarchism consider

themselves to have an ecological dimension, the specically eco-anarchist thread within anarchism has two main
focal points, Social Ecology and primitivist."An Anarchist FAQ by Various authors

[57] Ecosocialist International Network Website

[32] Bookchin, Murray (1994). The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism. Black Rose Books.
pp. 119120. ISBN 978-1-55164-018-1.

[60] Praxis Research and Education Center Website

[33] "Anarchism In America documentary.

2007-01-09. Retrieved 2012-05-11.

Youtube.com.

[34] "A Short Biography of Murray Bookchin by Janet Biehl.

Dwardmac.pitzer.edu. Retrieved 2012-05-11.
[35] Ecology and Revolution. Dwardmac.pitzer.edu. 200406-16. Retrieved 2012-05-11.
[36] Post-scarcity
anarchism,
[WorldCat.org]".
WorldCat.org. Retrieved 2008-06-10.
[37] Smith, Mark (1999). Thinking through the Environment.
New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-21172-7.
[38] Call, Lewis (2002). Postmodern Anarchism. Lexington:
Lexington Books. ISBN 0-7391-0522-1.
[39] Post-Scarcity Anarchism. AK Press. Retrieved 200806-10.
[40] Commoner, B., The Closing Circle, 1972
[41] Bahro, R., The Alternative in Eastern Europe, 1978
[42] Bahro, R., Socialism and Survival, 1982
[43] Roberts, A., The Self-Managing Environment, 1979
[44] Trainer, T., Abandon Auence!, 1985
[45] Green Politics at an impasse http://www.dsp.org.au/
node/140
[46] http://www.dsp.org.au/node/85
[47] Mellor, M., Breaking the Boundaries: Towards a Feminist,
Green Socialism, 1992
[48] Saller, A., Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the
Postmodern, 1997
[49] Pepper, D., Ecosocialism: From Deep Ecology to Social
Justice, 1994
[50] UK Indymedia - Ecosocialist International Founded
[51] Socialist Resistance Newspaper Website

[58] http://www.ecosocialistnetwork.org/
[59] United States Social Forum - Ecosocialism vs. Capitalist
Ecoside: how do we get from here to there?

[61] New Socialist Group: WHY ECOSOCIALISM TODAY?

Joel Kovel NS 61
[62] O'Connor, J., Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism, 1998
[63] Moore, Jason W. 2011. Transcending the Metabolic
Rift: A Theory of Crises in the Capitalist WorldEcology, The Journal of Peasant Studies 38(1), 1-46,
http://www.jasonwmoore.com/Essays.html
[64] For example, Scottish Green Peter McColl argues that
elected governments should abolish poverty through a Citizens Income scheme, regulate against social and environmental malpractice and encourage environmental good
practice through state procurement. At the same time economic and political power should be devolved as far as is
possible through co-operatives, and increased local decision making. By putting political and economic power
into the hands of the people most likely to be aected by
environmental injustice it is less likely that the injustice
will take place - see http://www.redflag.org.uk/frontline/
frJune08/ecosoc2.html
[65] Tokar, B., Earth for Sale, 1997 (Boston:South End Press)
[66] Sarkar, S., Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism?: A Critical Analysis of Humanitys Fundamental Choices, 1999
(London:Zed Books)
[67] Sale, K., 'Principle of Bioregionalism', in Goldsmith, E.,
and Mander, J. (eds),The Case against the Global Economy, Sierra Club Books (San Francisco, CA), 1996
[68] Trotsky, L., Literature and Revolution, 1924
[69] McNally, D., Against the Market, 1993 (London: Verso
Books)
[70] Gare, A., Creating an ecological socialist future in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 11 (2), 2000
[71] Meszaros, I., Beyond Capital, 1996 (New York:Monthly
Review Press)
[72] LeftClick Blog: What is ecosocialism?

[52] Socialist Resistance Books Blog

[73] Joel Kovel meeting - why I'm sceptical about ecosocialism | Workers Liberty

[53] The New Statesman 18 December 2006 - Person of the

year: The man making China green

[74] Capitalism Nature Socialism September 2003 - Another

look at the end of the world

13.13. EXTERNAL LINKS

[75] Policy Counsel - Eco-Paganism - Eco-socialism: Severe

Threats to Americas Future
[76] New Political Science, Volume 25, Number 1, March 2003
- Reviews

13.13 External links

An ecosocialist manifesto by Joel Kovel and Michael
Lowy on Ozleft
The Ecosocialist International Network
Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (CNS) (Journal).
Climate and Capitalism. (An online journal edited
by Ian Angus).
Democratic Socialist Perspective, Environment,
Capitalism & Socialism (book) (1999).
Extract from Ecology and Socialism by The Socialist
Party of Great Britain on Common Voice
Takis Fotopoulos, Is de-growth compatible with
a market economy?, The International Journal of
Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2007).
Another Green World: Derek Walls Ecosocialist
Blog
Dan Jakopovich, Green Unionism In Theory
and Practice, Synthesis/Regeneration 43 (Spring
2007).
(preview) Dan Jakopovich, Uniting to Win: LaborEnvironmental Alliances, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Vol. 20, Is. 2 (2009), pages 7496
Ecosocialism: A Weblog of Ecosocialist Opinion
Amazon.com: So You'd Like to... Replace Capitalism
with Ecosocialism
Robyn Eckersley, Ecosocialism: The Post-Marxist
Svnthesis
Robin Hahnel Protecting the Environment in a Participatory Economy, Synthesis/Regeneration 34
(Spring 2004). Retrieved (31-03-2013).
Ecosocialism: Where Anticapitalism and Ecology Intersect, video presentation by Ian Angus
After Bali: The Global Fight for Climate Justice ,
video presentation by Patrick Bond
The ocial site of Ecosocialists Greece Political
Organization
John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark Capitalism
and Ecological Destruction, Monthly Review
(November 2009). Retrieved (31-03-2013).

159
John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdo What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism (book)
Ecosocialist Horizons

Chapter 14

Libertarian Marxism
Libertarian Marxism refers to a broad scope of economic and political philosophies that emphasize the antiauthoritarian aspects of Marxism. Early currents of libertarian Marxism, known as left communism,[1] emerged
in opposition to MarxismLeninism[2] and its derivatives, such as Stalinism, Maoism, and Trotskyism.[3] Libertarian Marxism is also critical of reformist positions,
such as those held by social democrats.[4] Libertarian
Marxist currents often draw from Marx and Engels later
works, specically the Grundrisse and The Civil War in
France;[5] emphasizing the Marxist belief in the ability
of the working class to forge its own destiny without the
need for a revolutionary party or state to mediate or aid its
liberation.[6] Along with anarchism, Libertarian Marxism
is one of the main currents of libertarian socialism.[7]
Libertarian Marxism includes such currents as council
communism, left communism, Socialisme ou Barbarie
Lettrism/Situationism and operaismo/autonomism, and
New Left.[8] Libertarian Marxism has often had a strong
inuence on both post-left and social anarchists. Notable
theorists of libertarian Marxism have included Anton
Pannekoek, Raya Dunayevskaya, CLR James, Antonio
Negri, Cornelius Castoriadis, Maurice Brinton, Guy
William Morris, an early English libertarian Marxist
Debord, Daniel Gurin, Ernesto Screpanti, and Raoul
Vaneigem.

14.1 Overview
Marxism started to develop a libertarian strand of thought
after specic circumstances. One does nd early expressions of such perspectives in Morris and the Socialist
Party of Great Britain (the SPGB), then again around
the events of 1905, with the growing concern at the
bureaucratisation and de-radicalisation of international
socialism.[9] Morris established the Socialist League in
December 1884, which was encouraged by Friedrich Engels and Eleanor Marx. As the leading gure in the
organization Morris embarked on a relentless series of
speeches and talks on street corners, in working mens
clubs and lecture theatres across England and Scotland.
From 1887, anarchists began to outnumber socialists in
the Socialist League.[10] The 3rd Annual Conference of
the League, held in London on 29 May 1887 marked the

change, with a majority of the 24 branch delegates voting in favor of an anarchist-sponsored resolution declaring that This conference endorses the policy of abstention from parliamentary action, hitherto pursued by
the League, and sees no sucient reason for altering
it.[11] Morris played peacemaker but sided with the antiParliamentarians, who won control of the League, which
consequently lost the support of Engels and saw the departure of Eleanor Marx and her partner Edward Aveling
to form the separate Bloomsbury Socialist Society.
However, the most important ruptures are to be traced to
the insurgency during and after the First World War. Disillusioned with the capitulation of the social democrats,
excited by the emergence of workers councils, and slowly
distanced from Leninism, many communists came to reject the claims of socialist parties and to put their faith
instead in the masses. For these socialists, "[t]he intuition of the masses in action can have more genius in it
than the work of the greatest individual genius. Lux-

160

14.1. OVERVIEW
emburgs workerism and spontaneism are exemplary of
positions later taken up by the far-left of the period
Pannekoek, Roland Holst, and Gorter in the Netherlands,
Sylvia Pankhurst in Britain, Gramsci in Italy, Lukacs in
Hungary. In these formulations, the dictatorship of the
proletariat was to be the dictatorship of a class, not
of a party or of a clique.[9] However, within this line
of thought, "[t]he tension between anti-vanguardism and
vanguardism has frequently resolved itself in two diametrically opposed ways: the rst involved a drift towards the
party; the second saw a move towards the idea of complete proletarian spontaneity.... The rst course is exemplied most clearly in Gramsci and Lukacs.... The second
course is illustrated in the tendency, developing from the
Dutch and German far-lefts, which inclined towards the
complete eradication of the party form.[9]
In the emerging Soviet state, there appeared left-wing
uprisings against the Bolsheviks which were a series of
rebellions and uprisings against the Bolsheviks led or supported by left wing groups including Socialist Revolutionaries,[12] Left Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks,
and anarchists.[13] Some were in support of the White
Movement while some tried to be an independent force.
The uprisings started in 1918 and continued through the
Russian Civil War and after until 1922. In response, the
Bolsheviks increasingly abandoned attempts to get these
groups to join the government and suppressed them with
force.
For many Marxian libertarian socialists, the political
bankruptcy of socialist orthodoxy necessitated a theoretical break. This break took a number of forms. The
Bordigists and the SPGB championed a super-Marxian
intransigence in theoretical matters. Other socialists
made a return 'behind Marx' to the anti-positivist programme of German idealism. Libertarian socialism has
frequently linked its anti-authoritarian political aspirations with this theoretical dierentiation from orthodoxy.... Karl Korsch... remained a libertarian socialist
for a large part of his life and because of the persistent
urge towards theoretical openness in his work. Korsch
rejected the eternal and static, and he was obsessed by
the essential role of practice in a theorys truth. For Korsch, no theory could escape history, not even Marxism.
In this vein, Korsch even credited the stimulus for Marxs
Capital to the movement of the oppressed classes.[9]
In rejecting both capitalism and the state, some libertarian socialists align themselves with anarchists in opposition to both capitalist representative democracy and to
authoritarian forms of Marxism. Although anarchists and
Marxists share an ultimate goal of a stateless society, anarchists criticise most Marxists for advocating a transitional phase under which the state is used to achieve this
aim. Nonetheless, libertarian Marxist tendencies such as
autonomist Marxism and council communism have historically been intertwined with the anarchist movement.
Anarchist movements have come into conict with both
capitalist and Marxist forces, sometimes at the same time,

161
as in the Spanish Civil War, though as in that war Marxists themselves are often divided in support or opposition
to anarchism. Other political persecutions under bureaucratic parties have resulted in a strong historical antagonism between anarchists and libertarian Marxists on the
one hand, and Leninist Marxists and their derivatives such
as Maoists on the other. In recent history, however, libertarian socialists have repeatedly formed temporary alliances with Marxist-Leninist groups in order to protest
institutions they both reject. Part of this antagonism
can be traced to the International Workingmens Association, the First International, a congress of radical workers, where Mikhail Bakunin, who was fairly representative of anarchist views, and Karl Marx, whom anarchists
accused of being an authoritarian, came into conict on
various issues. Bakunins viewpoint on the illegitimacy of
the state as an institution and the role of electoral politics
was starkly counterposed to Marxs views in the First International. Marx and Bakunins disputes eventually led
to Marx taking control of the First International and expelling Bakunin and his followers from the organization.
This was the beginning of a long-running feud and schism
between libertarian socialists and what they call authoritarian communists, or alternatively just authoritarians.
Some Marxists have formulated views that closely resemble syndicalism, and thus express more anity with anarchist ideas. Several libertarian socialists, notably Noam
Chomsky, believe that anarchism shares much in common with certain variants of Marxism such as the council
communism of Marxist Anton Pannekoek. In Chomskys
Notes on Anarchism,[14] he suggests the possibility that
some form of council communism is the natural form of
revolutionary socialism in an industrial society. It reects
the belief that democracy is severely limited when the industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic
elite, whether of owners, managers, and technocrats, a
'vanguard' party, or a State bureaucracy.
In the mid-20th century, some libertarian socialist groups
emerged from disagreements with Trotskyism which presented itself as Leninist anti-Stalinism. As such, the
French group Socialisme ou Barbarie emerged from
the Trotskyist Fourth International, where Castoriadis
and Claude Lefort constituted a ChaulieuMontal Tendency in the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste
in 1946. In 1948, they experienced their nal disenchantment with Trotskyism,[15] leading them to break
away to form Socialisme ou Barbarie, whose journal began appearing in March 1949. Castoriadis later said of
this period that the main audience of the group and
of the journal was formed by groups of the old, radical
left: Bordigists, council communists, some anarchists and
some ospring of the German 'left' of the 1920s.[16] In
the United Kingdom, the group Solidarity was founded
in 1960 by a small group of expelled members of the
Trotskyist Socialist Labour League. Almost from the
start, it was strongly inuenced by the French Socialisme ou Barbarie group, in particular by its intellectual
leader Cornelius Castoriadis, whose essays were among

162

CHAPTER 14. LIBERTARIAN MARXISM

the many pamphlets Solidarity produced. The intellec- ian marxism [sic] thinks of the eects of surprise, provotual leader of the group was Chris Pallis (who wrote under cation and boldness, refuses to be cluttered and paralysed
the name Maurice Brinton).[17]
by a heavy 'scientic' apparatus, doesn't equivocate or
from adventurism as much as from
In the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) since 1967, blu, and guards itself [23]
fear
of
the
unknown.
In the US from 1970 to 1981
the terms ultra-Left and left communist refers to politithere
existed
the
publication
Root & Branch[24] which had
cal theory and practice self-dened as further "left" than
[25]
that of the central Maoist leaders at the height of the as a subtitle A Libertarian Marxist Journal.
GPCR ("Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution"). The
terms are also used retroactively to describe some early
20th century Chinese anarchist orientations. As a slur,
the Communist Party of China (CPC) has used the term
ultra-left more broadly to denounce any orientation it
considers further left than the party line. According
to the latter usage, in 1978 the CPC Central Committee denounced as ultra-left the line of Mao Zedong
from 1956 until his death in 1976. Ultra-left refers to
those GPCR rebel positions that diverged from the central Maoist line by identifying an antagonistic contradiction between the CPC-PRC party-state itself and the
masses of workers and peasants[18] conceived as a single proletarian class divorced from any meaningful control over production or distribution. Whereas the central Maoist line maintained that the masses controlled the
means of production through the Partys mediation, the
ultra-left argued that the objective interests of bureaucrats were structurally determined by the centralist stateform in direct opposition to the objective interests of the
masses, regardless of however red a given bureaucrats
thought might be. Whereas the central Maoist leaders encouraged the masses to criticize reactionary ideas and
habits among the alleged 5% of bad cadres, giving them
a chance to turn over a new leaf after they had undergone "thought reform, the ultra-left argued that cultural revolution had to give way to political revolution in
which one class overthrows another class.[19][20]
The emergence of the New Left in the 1950s and 1960s
led to a revival of interest in libertarian socialism.[21] The
New Lefts critique of the Old Left's authoritarianism
was associated with a strong interest in personal liberty,
autonomy (see the thinking of Cornelius Castoriadis) and
led to a rediscovery of older socialist traditions, such as
left communism, council communism, and the Industrial
Workers of the World. The New Left also led to a revival
of anarchism. Journals like Radical America and Black
Mask in America, Solidarity, Big Flame and Democracy
& Nature, succeeded by The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy,[22] in the UK, introduced a range of
left libertarian ideas to a new generation.

Autonomist Marxism, neo-Marxism and situationist theory are also regarded as being anti-authoritarian variants
of Marxism that are rmly within the libertarian socialist tradition. For libcom.org, "[i]n the 1980s and 90s,
a series of other groups developed, inuenced also by
much of the above work. The most notable are Kolinko,
Kurasje and Wildcat in Germany, Aufheben in England,
Theorie Communiste in France, TPTG in Greece and
Kamunist Kranti in India. They are also connected to
other groups in other countries, merging autonomia, operaismo, Hegelian Marxism, the work of the JFT, Open
Marxism, the ICO, the Situationist International, anarchism and post-68 German Marxism.[8] Related to this
were intellectuals who were inuenced by Italian left
communist Amadeo Bordiga but who disagreed with his
Leninist positions, including Jacques Camatte, editor of
the French publication Invariance, and Gilles Dauve who
published Troploin with Karl Nesic.

14.2 Notable libertarian Marxist

tendencies
14.2.1 De Leonism
Main article: De Leonism

De Leonism, occasionally known as MarxismDeleonism, is a form of syndicalist Marxism developed

by Daniel De Leon. De Leon was an early leader
of the rst United States socialist political party, the
Socialist Labor Party of America. De Leon combined
the rising theories of syndicalism in his time with
orthodox Marxism. According to De Leonist theory,
militant industrial unions are the vehicle of class struggle.
Industrial Unions serving the interests of the proletariat
will bring about the change needed to establish a socialist
system. The only way this diers from some currents
in anarcho-syndicalism is that, according to De Leonist
thinking, a revolutionary political party is also necessary
In 1969, French platformist anarcho-communist Daniel to ght for the proletariat on the political eld.
Gurin published an essay called Libertarian Marxism?" De Leonism lies outside the Leninist tradition of commuin which he dealt with the debate between Karl Marx and nism. It predates Leninism as De Leonisms principles
Mikhail Bakunin at the First International and afterwards developed in the early 1890s with De Leons assuming
suggested that "[l]ibertarian marxism [sic] rejects deter- leadership of the Socialist Labor Party; Leninism and its
minism and fatalism, giving the greater place to individ- vanguard party idea took shape after the 1902 publication
ual will, intuition, imagination, reex speeds, and to the of Lenins What Is to Be Done?. The highly decentralized
deep instincts of the masses, which are more far-seeing in and democratic nature of the proposed De Leonist govhours of crisis than the reasonings of the 'elites; libertar- ernment is in contrast to the democratic centralism of

14.2. NOTABLE LIBERTARIAN MARXIST TENDENCIES

163
and the economy should be managed by workers councils, composed of delegates elected at workplaces and recallable at any moment. As such, council communists
oppose state-run bureaucratic socialism. They also oppose the idea of a revolutionary party, since council
communists believe that a revolution led by a party will
necessarily produce a party dictatorship. Council communists support a workers democracy, which they want
to produce through a federation of workers councils.
The Russian word for council is soviet, and, during the
early years of the revolution, workers councils were politically signicant in Russia. It was to take advantage
of the aura of workplace power that the word became
used by Lenin for various political organs. Indeed, the
name Supreme Soviet, which the parliament was called,
and that of the Soviet Union itself, make use of this terminology, but they do not imply any decentralization.

First English edition of Lenins Left-Wing Communism: An

Infantile Disorder, published by the Executive Committee of
the Communist International for delegates to its 2nd World
Congress.[26]

MarxismLeninism and what they see as the dictatorial

nature of the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of
China and other communist states. The success of the
De Leonist plan depends on achieving majority support
among the people both in the workplaces and at the polls,
in contrast to the Leninist notion that a small vanguard
party should lead the working class to carry out the revolution.

Furthermore, council communists held a critique of the

Soviet Union as a capitalist state, believing that the
Bolshevik revolution in Russia became a bourgeois revolution when a party bureaucracy replaced the old feudal
aristocracy. Although most felt the Russian Revolution
was working class in character, they believed that, because capitalist relations still existed (i.e. the workers had
no say in running the economy), the Soviet Union ended
up as a state capitalist country, with the state replacing the
individual capitalist. Thus, council communists support
workers revolutions, but oppose one-party dictatorships.
Council communists also believed in diminishing the role
of the party to one of agitation and propaganda, rejected
all participation in elections or parliament, and argued
that workers should leave the reactionary trade unions to
form one big, revolutionary union.

14.2.3 Left communism

Main article: Left communism

14.2.2

Council communism

Main article: Council Communism

Council communism was a radical left movement originating in Germany and the Netherlands in the 1920s. Its
primary organization was the Communist Workers Party
of Germany (KAPD). Council communism continues today as a theoretical and activist position within Marxism,
and also within libertarian socialism. The central argument of council communism, in contrast to those of social
democracy and Leninist communism, is that workers
councils arising in the factories and municipalities are
the natural and legitimate form of working class organisation and government power. This view is opposed to
the reformist and Bolshevik stress on vanguard parties,
parliaments, or the state.

Left communism describes the range of communist viewpoints held by the communist left, which criticizes the political ideas of the Bolsheviks at certain periods, from a
position that is asserted to be more authentically Marxist
and proletarian than the views of Leninism held by the
Communist International after its rst and during its second congress.
Although she lived before left communism became a distinct tendency, Rosa Luxemburg has heavily inuenced
most left communists, both politically and theoretically.
Proponents of left communism have included Amadeo
Bordiga, Herman Gorter, Anton Pannekoek, Otto Rhle,
Karl Korsch, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Paul Mattick.

Prominent left communist groups existing today include the International Communist Current and the
International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party. Also,
The core principle of council communism is that the state dierent factions from the old Bordigist International

164

CHAPTER 14. LIBERTARIAN MARXISM

Communist Party are considered left communist organizations.

14.2.4

Within Freudo-Marxism

Main article: Freudo-Marxism

Two Marxist and Freudian psychoanalitic theorists have
received the libertarian label or have been associated with
it due to their emphasis on auti-authoritarianism and freedom issues.
Wilhelm Reich[27][28][29][30] was an Austrian psychoanalyst, a member of the second generation of psychoanalysts after Sigmund Freud, and one of the most radical gures in the history of psychiatry. He was the author of several inuential books and essays, most notably Character Analysis (1933), The Mass Psychology
of Fascism (1933), and The Sexual Revolution (1936).[31]
His work on character contributed to the development
of Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), and his idea of muscular armourthe expression of the personality in the way the body moves
shaped innovations such as body psychotherapy, Fritz
Perls's Gestalt therapy, Alexander Lowen's bioenergetic
analysis, and Arthur Janov's primal therapy. His writing
inuenced generations of intellectuals: during the 1968
student uprisings in Paris and Berlin, students scrawled
his name on walls and threw copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism at the police.[32] On 23 August, six tons of
his books, journals, and papers were burned in the 25th
Street public incinerator in New York, the Gansevoort incinerator. The burned material included copies of several
of his books, including The Sexual Revolution, Character
Analysis and The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Though
these had been published in German before Reich ever
discussed orgone, he had added mention of it to the English editions, so they were caught by the injunction.[33]
As with the accumulators, the FDA was supposed only to
observe the destruction. It has been cited as one of the
worst examples of censorship in the United States. Reich became a consistent propagandist for sexual freedom
going as far as opening free sex-counselling clinics in Vienna for working-class patients[34] as well as coining the
phrase "sexual revolution" in one of his books from the
1940s.[35]
On the other hand, Herbert Marcuse was a German
philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist, associated
with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. His work
Eros and Civilization (1955) discusses the social meaning of biology - history seen not as a class struggle, but
a ght against repression of our instincts. It argues that
advanced industrial society (modern capitalism) is preventing us from reaching a non-repressive society based
on a fundamentally dierent experience of being, a fundamentally dierent relation between man and nature,
and fundamentally dierent existential relations.[38] It

Herbert Marcuse, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical

theory, was an inuential libertarian socialist[36] philosopher of
the New Left[37]

contends that Freuds argument that repression is needed

by civilization to persist is mistaken, as Eros is liberating and constructive. Marcuse argues that the irreconcilable conict is not between work (reality principle) and Eros (pleasure principle), but between alienated labour (performance principle) and Eros.[39] Sex
is allowed for the betters (capitalists), and for workers
only when not disturbing performance. Marcuse believes
that a socialist society could be a society without needing the performance of the poor and without as strong a
suppression of our sexual drives: it could replace alienated labor with non-alienated libidinal work resulting
in a non-repressive civilization based on 'non-repressive
sublimation'".[39] During the 1960s, Marcuse achieved
world renown as the guru of the New Left, publishing
many articles and giving lectures and advice to student
radicals all over the world. He travelled widely and his
work was often discussed in the mass media, becoming
one of the few American intellectuals to gain such attention. Never surrendering his revolutionary vision and
commitments, Marcuse continued to his death to defend
the Marxian theory and libertarian socialism. [40]

14.2.5 Socialisme ou Barbarie

Main article: Socialisme ou Barbarie
Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism) was
a French-based radical libertarian socialist group of the
post-World War II period, whose name comes from a
phrase Rosa Luxemburg used in her 1916 essay The Junius Pamphlet. It existed from 1948 until 1965. The animating personality was Cornelius Castoriadis, also known
as Pierre Chaulieu or Paul Cardan.[41] The group originated in the Trotskyist Fourth International, where Castoriadis and Claude Lefort constituted a ChaulieuMontal
Tendency in the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste in 1946. In 1948, they experienced their nal disenchantment with Trotskyism,[42] leading them to break

14.2. NOTABLE LIBERTARIAN MARXIST TENDENCIES

165
They fought against the main obstacle on the fulllment
of such superior passional living, identied by them in
advanced capitalism. Their theoretical work peaked on
the highly inuential book The Society of the Spectacle
by Guy Debord. Debord argued in 1967 that spectacular
features like mass media and advertising have a central
role in an advanced capitalist society, which is to show
a fake reality in order to mask the real capitalist degradation of human life. To overthrow such a system, the
Situationist International supported the May '68 revolts,
and asked the workers to occupy the factories and to run
them with direct democracy, through workers councils
composed by instantly revocable delegates.

After publishing in the last issue of the magazine an analysis of the May 1968 revolts, and the strategies that will
need to be adopted in future revolutions,[44] the SI was
[45]
away to form Socialisme ou Barbarie, whose journal be- dissolved in 1972.
gan appearing in March 1949. Castoriadis later said of
this period that the main audience of the group and 14.2.7 Solidarity
of the journal was formed by groups of the old, radical
left: Bordigists, council communists, some anarchists and Main article: Solidarity (UK)
some ospring of the German 'left' of the 1920s.[43] The
group was composed of both intellectuals and workers,
and agreed with the idea that the main enemies of society Solidarity was a small libertarian socialist organisation
were the bureaucracies which governed modern capital- from 1960 to 1992 in the United Kingdom. It published
ism. They documented and analysed the struggle against a magazine of the same name. Solidarity was close to
that bureaucracy in the groups journal. The thirteenth is- council communism in its prescriptions and was known
sue (JanuaryMarch 1954), as an example, was devoted for its emphasis on workers self-organisation and for its
to the East German revolt of June 1953 and the strikes radical anti-Leninism. Solidarity was founded in 1960
which erupted amongst several sectors of French work- by a small group of expelled members of the Trotskyist
ers that summer. Following from the belief that what the Socialist Labour League. It was initially known as Soworking class was addressing in their daily struggles was cialism Rearmed. The group published a journal, Agthe real content of socialism, the intellectuals encouraged itator, which after six issues was renamed Solidarity,
the workers in the group to report on every aspect of their from which the organisation took its new name. Almost
from the start it was strongly inuenced by the French
working lives.
Socialisme ou Barbarie group, in particular by its intellectual leader Cornelius Castoriadis, whose essays were
among the many pamphlets Solidarity produced. Soli14.2.6 Situationist International
darity existed as a nationwide organisation with groups
in London and many other cities until 1981, when it imMain article: Situationist International
ploded after a series of political disputes. Solidarity the
magazine continued to be published by the London group
The Situationist International was a restricted group of until 1992; other former Solidarity members were beinternational revolutionaries founded in 1957, and which hind Wildcat in Manchester and Here and Now magahad its peak in its inuence on the unprecedented general zine in Glasgow. The intellectual leader of the group was
wildcat strikes of May 1968 in France.
Chris Pallis, whose pamphlets (written under the name
With their ideas rooted in Marxism and the 20th cen- Maurice Brinton) included Paris May 1968, The Bolshetury European artistic avant-gardes, they advocated ex- viks and Workers Control 1917-21 and 'The Irrational
periences of life being alternative to those admitted by in Politics.[46] Other key Solidarity writers were Andy
the capitalist order, for the fulllment of human primi- Anderson (author of Hungary 1956), Ken Weller (who
tive desires and the pursuing of a superior passional qual- wrote several pamphlets on industrial struggles and overity. For this purpose they suggested and experimented saw the groups Motor Bulletins on the car industry), Joe
with the construction of situations, namely the setting up Jacobs (Out of the Ghetto), John Quail (The Slow-Burning
of environments favorable for the fulllment of such de- Fuse), Phil Mailer (Portugal:The Impossible Revolution)
sires. Using methods drawn from the arts, they devel- John King (The Political Economy of Marx, A History
oped a series of experimental elds of study for the con- of Marxian Economics), George Williamson (writing as
struction of such situations, like unitary urbanism and James Finlayson, Urban Devastation - The Planning of
psychogeography.
Incarceration), [David Lamb] (Mutinies) and Liz Willis
The journal Socialisme ou Barbarie

166

CHAPTER 14. LIBERTARIAN MARXISM

(Women in the Spanish Revolution).

Nick Dyer-Witheford.

14.2.8

14.2.9 Communization

Autonomism

Main article: Autonomism

Main article: Communization
Autonomism refers to a set of left-wing political and
Communization mainly refers to a contemporary
communist theory in which we nd is a mixing-up
of insurrectionist anarchism, the communist ultra-left,
postautonomists, anti-political currents, groups like
the Invisible Committee, as well as more explicitly
communizing currents, such as Thorie Communiste
and Endnotes. Obviously at the heart of the word is
communism and, as the shift to communization suggests,
communism as a particular activity and process...[47]
The association of the term communization with a selfidentied "ultra-left" was cemented in France in the
1970s, where it came to describe not a transition to a
higher phase of communism but a vision of communist
revolution itself. Thus the 1975 Pamphlet A World Without Money states: insurrection and communisation are
intimately linked. There would not be rst a period of insurrection and then later, thanks to this insurrection, the
transformation of social reality. The insurrectional process derives its force from communisation itself.[48]
Antonio Negri, main theorist of Italian autonomism.

social movements and theories close to the socialist

movement. As an identiable theoretical system it rst
emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerist (operaismo)
communism. Later, post-Marxist and anarchist tendencies became signicant after inuence from the
Situationists, the failure of Italian far-left movements in
the 1970s, and the emergence of a number of important
theorists including Antonio Negri, who had contributed
to the 1969 founding of Potere Operaio, Mario Tronti,
Paolo Virno, etc.
Through translations made available by Danilo Montaldi
and others, the Italian autonomists drew upon previous
activist research in the United States by the Johnson
Forest Tendency and in France by the group Socialisme
ou Barbarie.
It inuenced the German and Dutch Autonomen, the
worldwide Social Centre movement, and today is inuential in Italy, France, and to a lesser extent the Englishspeaking countries. Those who describe themselves as
autonomists now vary from Marxists to post-structuralists
and anarchists. The Autonomist Marxist and Autonomen
movements provided inspiration to some on the revolutionary left in English speaking countries, particularly among anarchists, many of whom have adopted
autonomist tactics. Some English-speaking anarchists
even describe themselves as Autonomists. The Italian
operaismo movement also inuenced Marxist academics
such as Harry Cleaver, John Holloway, Steve Wright, and

The term is still used in this sense in France today and has
spread into English usage as a result of the translation of
texts by Gilles Dauv and Thorie Comuniste, two key gures in this tendency. But in the late 1990s a close but not
identical sense of communization was developed by the
French post-situationist group Tiqqun. In keeping with
their ultra-left predecessors, Tiqquns predilection for the
term seems to be its emphasis on communism as an immediate process rather than a far-o goal, but for Tiqqun
it is no longer synonymous with the revolution considered as an historical event, but rather becomes identiable
with all sorts of activities from squatting and setting
up communes to simply sharing that would typically
be understood as pre-revolutionary.[49] From an ultraleft perspective such a politics of dropping-out or, as
Tiqqun put it, desertion setting up spaces and practices that are held to partially autonomous from capitalism
is typically dismissed as either naive or reactionary.[50]
Due to the popularity of the Tiqqun-related works Call
and The Coming Insurrection in US anarchist circles it
tended to be this latter sense of communization that was
employed in US anarchist and "insurrectionist" communiques, notably within the Californian student movement
of 20092010.[51]

14.3 References
[1] Pierce, Wayne.Libertarian Marxisms Relation to Anarchism The Utopian 73-80.

14.3. REFERENCES

[2] Herman Gorter, Anton Pannekoek, Sylvia Pankhurst,

Otto Ruhl Non-Leninist Marxism: Writings on the Workers
Councils. Red and Black, 2007.

167

[23] Libertarian Marxism? by Daniel Gurin. Theanarchistlibrary.org. 2011-04-23. Retrieved 2013-10-11.

[24] Root & Branch at libcom.org

[3] Marot, Eric. Trotsky, the Left Opposition and the Rise
of Stalinism: Theory and Practice

[25] Root & Branch # 7 at libcom.org

[4] The Retreat of Social Democracy ... Re-imposition of

Work in Britain and the 'Social Europe'" Aufheben Issue
#8 1999.

[26] Charles Shipman, It Had to Be Revolution: Memoirs of an

American Radical. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1993; pg. 107.

[5] Ernesto Screpanti, Libertarian communism: Marx Engels

and the Political Economy of Freedom, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2007.

[27] Wilhelm Reich is again the main pioneer in this eld (an
excellent, short introduction to his ideas can be found in
Maurice Brintons The Irrational in Politics). In Children
of the Future, Reich made numerous suggestions, based
on his research and clinical experience, for parents, psychologists, and educators striving to develop libertarian
methods of child rearing. (He did not use the term libertarian, but that is what his methods are.) Hence, in
this and the following sections we will summarise Reichs
main ideas as well as those of other libertarian psychologists and educators who have been inuenced by him, such
as A.S. Neill and Alexander Lowen. J.6 What methods
of child rearing do anarchists advocate?" in An Anarchist
FAQ by Various Authors.

[6] Draper, Hal. The Principle of Self-Emancipation in

Marx and Engels The Socialist Register. Vol 4.
[7] Chomsky, Noam. Government In The Future Poetry
Center of the New York YM-YWHA. Lecture.
[8] A libertarian Marxist tendency map. Libcom.org. Retrieved 2013-10-11.
[9] The 'Advance Without Authority': Post-modernism,
Libertarian Socialism and Intellectuals by Chamsy Ojeili,
Democracy & Nature vol.7, no.3, 2001.
[10] Beer, A History of British Socialism, vol. 2, pg. 256.
[11] Marx-Engels Collected Works: Volume 48. New York: International Publishers, 2001; pg. 538, fn. 95.
[12] Carr, E.H. The Bolshevik Revolution 19171923. W.
W. Norton & Company 1985.
[13] Avrich, Paul. Russian Anarchists and the Civil War,
Russian Review, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Jul., 1968), pp. 296
306. Blackwell Publishing
[14] Noam Chomsky Notes on Anarchism
[15] Castoriadis, Cornelius (1975). An Interview. Telos
(23)., p. 133
[16] Castoriadis, Cornelius (1975). An Interview. Telos
(23)., p. 134
[17] Brinton, Maurice (Goodway, David ed). For Workers
Power: the selected writings of Maurice Brinton. AK Press.
2004. ISBN 1-904859-07-0
[18] Peasant ( )" was the ocial term for workers on
peoples communes. According to the Ultra-Left, both
peasants and (urban) workers together composed a
proletarian class divorced from any meaningful control
over production or distribution.
[19] See, for instance, Whither China?" by Yang Xiguang.
[20] The 70s Collective, ed. 1996. China: The Revolution is
Dead, Long Live the Revolution. Montreal: Black Rose
Books.
[21] Robin Hahnel, Economic Justice and Democracy: From
Competition to Cooperation Part II ISBN 0-415-93344-7
[22] The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy. Inclusivedemocracy.org. Retrieved on 2011-12-28.

[28] In an earlier article (Some Thoughts on Libertarianism,

Broadsheet No. 35), I argued that to dene a position as
anti-authoritarian is not, in fact, to dene the position
at all but merely to indicate a relationship of opposition
to another position, the authoritarian one...On the psychoanalytic side, Wilhelm Reich (The Sexual Revolution, Peter Neville-Vision Press, London, 1951| Character Analysis, Orgone Institute Press, N.Y., 1945; and The Function
of the Orgasm, Orgone Institute Press, N.Y., 1942) was
preferred to Freud because, despite his own weaknesses
his Utopian tendencies and his eventual drift into orgones and bions Reich laid more emphasis on the social conditions of mental events than did Freud (see, e.g.,
A.J. Baker, Reichs Criticism of Freud, Libertarian No.
3, January 1960). A Reading List for Libertarians by
David Iverson. Broadsheet No. 39
[29] I will also discuss other left-libertarians who wrote about
Reich, as they bear on the general discussion of Reichs
ideas...In 1944, Paul Goodman, author of Growing Up
Absurd, The Empire City, and co-author of Gestalt Therapy, began to discover the work of Wilhelm Reich for his
American audience in the tiny libertarian socialist and anarchist milieu. Orgone Addicts: Wilhelm Reich Versus
The Situationists. Orgone Addicts Wilhelm Reich versus the Situationists by Jim Martin
[30] In the summer of 1950-51, numerous member of the
A.C.C. and other interested people held a series of meetings in the Ironworkers Hall with a view to forming a
downtown political society. Here a division developed
between a more radical wing (including e.g. Waters and
Grahame Harrison) and a more conservative wing (including e.g. Stove and Eric Dowling). The general orientation
of these meetings may be judged from the fact that when
Harry Hooton proposed Anarchist and some of the conservative proposed Democratic as the name for the new
Society, both were rejected and Libertarian Society was
adopted as an acceptable title. Likewise then accepted as

168

CHAPTER 14. LIBERTARIAN MARXISM

the motto for this Society - and continued by the later Libertarian society - was the early Marx quotation used by
Wilhelm Reich as the motto for his The Sexual Revolution, vis: Since it is not for us to create a plan for the future that will hold for all time, all the more surely what we
contemporaries have to do is the uncompromising critical
evaluation of all that exists, uncompromising in the sense
that our criticism fears neither its own results nor the conict with the powers that be. SYDNEY LIBERTARIANISM & THE PUSH by A.J. Baker, in Broadsheet, No
81, March, 1975. (abridged)

[34] Sex-Pol stood for the German Society of Proletarian Sexual Politics. Danto writes that Reich oered a mixture
of psychoanalytic counseling, Marxist advice and contraceptives, and argued for a sexual permissiveness, including for young people and the unmarried, that unsettled other psychoanalysts and the political left. The clinics
were immediately overcrowded by people seeking help.
Danto, Elizabeth Ann (2007). Freuds Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis & Social Justice, 19181938, Columbia University Press, rst published 2005., pp. 118120, 137,
198, 208.

[31] That he was one of the most radical gures in psychiatry,

see Sheppard 1973.

[35] The Sexual Revolution, 1945 (Die Sexualitt im Kulturkampf, translated by Theodore P. Wolfe)

Danto 2007, p. 43: Wilhelm Reich, the second

generation psychoanalyst perhaps most often associated with political radicalism ...

[36] During the 1960s, Marcuse achieved world renown as

the guru of the New Left, publishing many articles and
giving lectures and advice to student radicals all over the
world. He travelled widely and his work was often discussed in the mass media, becoming one of the few American intellectuals to gain such attention. Never surrendering his revolutionary vision and commitments, Marcuse continued to his death to defend the Marxian theory and libertarian socialism. Douglas Kellner Marcuse,
Herbert

Turner 2011, p. 114: "[Reichs mobile clinic was]

perhaps the most radical, politically engaged psychoanalytic enterprise to date.
For the publication and signicance of The Mass
Psychology of Fascism and Character Analysis, see
Sharaf 1994, pp. 163164, 168.
For Character Analysis being an important contribution to psychoanalytic theory, see:
Young-Bruehl 2008, p. 157: Reich,
a year and a half younger than Anna
Freud, was the youngest instructor at
the Training Institute, where his classes
on psychoanalytic technique, later presented in a book called Character Analysis, were crucial to his whole group of
contemporaries.
Sterba 1982, p. 35: This book [Character Analysis] serves even today as an
excellent introduction to psychoanalytic
technique. In my opinion, Reichs understanding of and technical approach
to resistance prepared the way for Anna
Freuds Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936).
Guntrip 1961, p. 105: "... the two
important books of the middle 1930s,
Character Analysis (1935) by Wilhelm
Reich and The Ego and the Mechanisms
of Defence (1936) by Anna Freud.
For more on the inuence of The Mass Psychology
of Fascism, see Kirkpatrick 1947, Burgess 1947;
Bendix 1947; and Turner 2011, p. 152.
[32] For Anna Freud, see Bugental, Schneider and Pierson
2001, p. 14: Anna Freuds work on the ego and the
mechanisms of defense developed from Reichs early research (A. Freud, 1936/1948).
For Perls, Lowen and Janov, see Sharaf 1994, p. 4.
For the students, see Elkind, 18 April 1971; and
Turner 2011, pp. 1314.
[33] Sharaf 1994, pp. 419, pp. 460461.

[37] Douglas Kellner Herbert arcuse

[38] Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization, 2nd edition.
London: Routledge, 1987.
[39] Young, Robert M. (1969).THE NAKED MARX: Review of
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical
Inquiry into Freud, New Statesman, vol. 78, 7 November
1969, pp. 666-67
[40] Douglas Kellner Marcuse, Herbert
[41] Howard, Dick (1975). Introduction to Castoriadis. Telos (23): 118.
[42] Castoriadis, Cornelius (1975). An Interview. Telos
(23): 133.
[43] Castoriadis, Cornelius (1975). An Interview. Telos
(23): 134.
[44] The Beginning of an Era (part1, part 2) Situationist International #12, 1969
[45] Karen Elliot (2001-06-01). Situationism in a nutshell.
Barbelith Webzine. Retrieved 2008-06-23.
[46] (now collected in a book, Maurice Brinton, For Workers
Power)
[47] Benjamin Noys (ed). Communization and its Discontents:
Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles. Minor Compositions, Autonomedia. 2011. 1st ed.
[48] A World Without Money by Les amis de 4 millions de
jeunes travailleurs. (quoted passage not included in this
English extract)
[49] As we apprehend it, the process of instituting communism can only take the form of a collection of acts of
communisation, of making common such-and-such space,
such-and-such machine, such-and-such knowledge. That

14.5. EXTERNAL LINKS

is to say, the elaboration of the mode of sharing that attaches to them. Insurrection itself is just an accelerator, a
decisive moment in this process. Anonymous, Call
[50] For a critique of Tiqqun from an ultra-left perspective, as
well as a description of the opposition between the two
sense of communization see "Reexions Around Call"
Letters Journal #3. See also Dauv and Nesic, Un Appel
et une Invite.
[51] See e.g. After the Fall: Communiqus from Occupied
California

14.4 Bibliography
Pioneers of Anti-Parliamentarism by Guy Aldred.
Glasgow: Bakunin Press.
Non-Leninist Marxism: Writings on the Workers
Councils (a collection of writings by Gorter, Pannekoek, Pankhurst, and Ruhle). Red and Black Publishers, St Petersburg, Florida, 2007. ISBN 978-09791813-6-8
The International Communist Current, itself a Left
Communist grouping, has produced a series of studies of what it views as its own antecedents. The book
on the German-Dutch current, which is by Philippe
Bourrinet (who later left the ICC), in particular contains an exhaustive bibliography.
The Italian Communist Left 19261945 (ISBN
1897980132)
The Dutch-German Communist Left (ISBN
1899438378)
The Russian Communist Left, 19181930
(ISBN 1897980108)
The British Communist Left, 19141945
(ISBN 1897980116)
(English) Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, ed. Sylvere Lotringer & Christian Marazzi. New York:
Semiotext(e), 1980, 2007. ISBN 1-58435-053-9,
ISBN 978-1-58435-053-8.
(French) LAutonomie. Le mouvement autonome en
France et en Italie, ditions Spartacus 1978
Benjamin Noys (ed). Communization and its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles. Minor Compositions, Autonomedia.
2011. 1st ed.

14.5 External links

Libertarian Communist Library
Libertarian Marxism?" by Daniel Gurin

169
Situationist International online
Libertarian Marxisms Relation to Anarchism by
Wayne Price
Franz Kafka and Libertarian Socialism by
Michael Lwy.
Kropotkin, Self-valorization And The Crisis Of
Marxism. by Harry Cleaver. Written for and
presented to the Conference on Pyotr Alexeevich
Kropotkin organized by the Russian Academy of
Science in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Dimitrov
on December 8 14, 1992.
For Communism John Gray WebSite: large online
library of libertarian communist texts
Left Communism collection on the Marxists Internet Archive
The Libertarian Marxism of Andre Breton" by
Michael Lowy.

Chapter 15

Anarchism and Marxism

Anarchism and Marxism are similar political philosophies which emerged in the nineteenth century. While
Anarchism and Marxism are both complex movements
driven by internal conict, as ideological movements their
primary attention has been on human liberation achieved
through political action. Similarly, both have been intensely interested in abolishing social inequalities present
in societies as a result of wage labour and the Industrial
Revolution. In their most socially signicant forms, both
movements have been revolutionary, and have focused on
the working class as the agent of revolution. As working class movements Marxism and anarchism have been
sometimes allied and sometimes opposed groups. In particular revolutions there has been signicant armed conict between Marxist and anarchist groups.
Conicts between anarchist and Marxist movements have
emerged in terms of theory, strategy, practice and immediate political goals. Agreements between anarchism
and Marxism have tended to focus on ideological convergence based around the concept of the working class
as the group that creates real human freedom. The rst
major ideological conict between anarchists and Marxists occurred within the First International, a European
revolutionary communist political movement. The rst
major armed conicts between anarchists and Marxists
occurred during the 19171923 revolutions in the Russian Empire between urban anarchists, rural Makhnovist
anarchists, the Marxist Menshevik Russian Social Democratic Party and the Marxist Bolshevik Russian Social
Democratic Party. A major armed conict occurred during the Spanish Civil War between the Spanish anarchist
movement and the Communist Party of Spain, which at
the time was under inuence from the Soviet Union; see
May Days.
After World War Two, in the West major conicts between anarchism and Marxism have been generally conned to sectarian left-wing bickering between anarchist
groups and Trotskyist or Trotsky-inspired organisations
over minor points of tactics or language use. Additionally, since the New Left period, major convergences between minor trends of thought within Marxism and anarchism have occurred, generally in the area of exploring
working class self-liberation. After the fall of the Soviet
Union, little conict has occurred between Stalin, post-

Stalin or Stalin-inspired Marxists and anarchists, due to

the dissolution of the Soviet Unions inuence within
Marxist circles. Prior to 2000, there was little conict
between pro-property anarchism and Marxism, due to
the small size of pro-property anarchist movements and
the focus of pro-property anarchist movements on behavioural change within their own perceived movement.
Anthropologist David Graeber has distinguished the two
philosophies as follows:
1. Marxism has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about revolutionary strategy.
2. Anarchism has tended to be an ethical
discourse about revolutionary practice.[1]

15.1 Historical relationships between anarchists and Marxists

15.1.1 International Workingmens Association
The International Workingmens Association (the First
International), at its founding, was an alliance of socialist groups, including both anarchists and Marxists. Both
sides had a common aim and common enemies. But each
was critical of the other, and the inherent conict between the two groups soon embodied itself in an ongoing argument between Mikhail Bakunin, representative
of anarchist ideas, and Karl Marx himself. The Marxist branch tended to support the formation of workers or
socialist parties that participated in parliamentary politics
in Western liberal democracies to advance their agendas,
while anarchists tended to criticize parliamentary politics as not being suciently democratic from the bottom up and as providing no democratic control over the
workplace and the means of production. In 1872, the
conict in the First International climaxed with the expulsion of Bakunin and those who had become known as
the Bakuninists when they were outvoted by the Marx
party at the Hague Congress. Their ideas might have been

170

15.2. ARGUMENTS SURROUNDING THE ISSUE OF THE STATE

171

quite similar (possible non statist marxists explained by onment at the hands of the Bolshevik Red Army and poChomsky).
litical police.

15.1.2

Industrial Workers of the World

15.1.4 Spanish Civil War

In the late 19th and early 20th century, many Marxists

and anarchists joined syndicalist movements for militant
revolutionary labor unions, such as the Industrial Workers
of the World. The IWW drew upon principles of Anarchism and Marxism.

During the Spanish Civil War of 19361939, although

the anarchists and Marxists both fought in a united
front against the fascist movement of General Francisco
Franco, the revolutionary Marxists of the Workers Party
of Marxist Unication (POUM), the anarcho-syndicalists
Many communists left the IWW in the period from 1919 of the Confederacin Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), and
to 1925 due to an ideological split between centralists the anarchists of the Federacin Anarquista Ibrica (FAI)
and decentralists within the IWW, and with encourage- faced repression and attacks from the Communist party.
ment from the Bolshevik government in Moscow to work
within the more mainstream American Federation of Labor unions. The decentralists, or E.P.-ers (for Emergency 15.1.5 Attempted theoretical syntheses
Program) in the IWW opposed an emphasis on political
action, and favored a greater focus on organizing centered A number of political ideologies and movements have
attempted some degree of synthesis of the Marxist and
within stronger industrial union divisions.
anarchist traditions with the aim of a liberated workers
society. These include the followers of Joseph Dietzgen
in the 19th century, syndicalism, Jan Wacaw Machajski,
15.1.3 Russian Revolution
De Leonism, and council communism in the rst half of
Both anarchists and Marxists participated in the over- the 20th century, and the Situationist International and
throw of the Tsar in February 1917 in the beginning Autonomist Marxism in the second half of the 20th censtages of the 1917 Russian Revolution. However, a hos- tury. The modern Zapatista Army of National Liberation
tile relationship quickly developed between anarchists movement in Chiapas, Mexico also incorporates both anand Bolsheviks, so that anarchists generally opposed the archist and Marxist ideas, along with indigenous Mayan
Bolshevik-initiated transfer of power from the Provisional political thought.
Government to the Bolshevik commissars (acting on behalf of Bolshevik-led workers councilsknown in Russian as soviets), in October 1917. Even the ensuing 15.1.6 Alliances and joint movements
civil war pitting the Bolshevik government and Red Army
against the Tsarist White Armies did not reconcile anar- There have been overlaps between Anarchism and Marxism historically, including hybrid movements of anarchists and Bolsheviks.
chism and anti-authoritarian Marxism such as libertarian
The Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, led Marxism and Autonomism.
by anarchists, fought counter-revolutionary forces in a
tenuous alliance with the Red Army. These Ukrainian anarchists were highly critical of other anarchists in the Russian Revolution who lacked their discipline. The RIAU 15.2 Arguments surrounding the
was later suppressed by Red Army over the issue of the
issue of the state
integration of the RIAU into the Red Army.
Russian anarchists were the rst organized victims of the
CHEKA in April and May 1918.[2] They were arguing
for free soviets, freedom of expression and association
and the establishment of free communes on the basis of
voluntary association. As a result of their interpretation
of the Bolshevik hegemony over the revolution, some urban anarchists engaged in protest and civil disobedience.
Most Russian anarchists were imprisoned and their press
silenced.

Modern political scientists generally dene the state as

a centralized, hierarchical, governing institution which
maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical
force, in keeping with the denition originally proposed
by the German sociologist Max Weber in his 1918 essay
"Politics as a Vocation". Marxists, and some anarchists,
dispute this denition. Marxism has a unique denition
of the state: that the state is an organ of one classs repression of all other classes. To Marxists, any state is intrinsiAt the end of the civil war, sailors at Kronstadt inuenced cally a dictatorship by one class over all others. Therefore,
by anarchists and dissident Marxists mutinied, demand- within Marxist theory, should the dierentiation between
ing more political liberties while defending socialism and classes disappear, so too will the state.
workers democracy, and were surrounded, attacked, and However, there is some convergence of views. Anarchists
suered reprisal by mass execution and political impris- believe that any statebe it a workers state or a bour-

172

CHAPTER 15. ANARCHISM AND MARXISM

geois statewill inevitably be created and ruled by a political and economic elite, therefore becoming an organ
of class domination. Conversely, Marxists believe that
successful class repression almost always requires a superior capacity for violence, and that all societies prior to
socialism are ruled by a minority class, so that in Marxist
theory any non-socialist state will possess the properties
attributed to all states by anarchists and others.

and accuse Marxism of being too authoritarian, though

they have been much less critical of libertarian varieties
of Marxism than scientic communism, Leninism and
Stalinism.[4] Anarchists contend that the workers state
advocated by Marxists is a logical impossibility since, as
soon as a group -be it the workers- begins to govern by
means of a state apparatus, they gain power and become
oppressors. It is important to note however that this argument is a misrepresentation in that it uses the Anarchist
Disputes arise between anarchists and those Marxists who
believe that a state is required for the repression of classes denition of the state and not that of the Marxists, ascribing to the workers state, characteristics which the
other than the working class. In example, Bakunin wrote
Marxists do not necessarily imply by the word state.
in his work "Anarchism and the State":
They [the Marxists] maintain that only a
dictatorshiptheir dictatorship, of course
can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any
other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it
can beget only slavery in the people tolerating
it; freedom can be created only by freedom,
that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of
the people and free organization of the toiling
masses from the bottom up.

The idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat has been

criticized by most anarchists both on a theoretical and historical basis. Mainly, it is argued that it is not a class that
takes power but at best a minority of that class, a party
in the Leninist sense, and so is a dictatorship over the
proletariat. They point to the measures taken by Lenin,
Trotsky and Stalin during the Russian Revolution since as
early as 1917 as evidence of this. Anarchists support their
arguments by pointing to the undemocratic nature of the
Soviet Union and other self-identied Marxist states.
Some Marxists criticise the immediatist anarchist position by arguing that any revolutionary institution using
armed force is acting as a state, regardless of its name
or self-conception. Other Marxists argue for the necessity of a strong and cohesive repressive institution during
revolutions, and support this position by pointing to the
defeat of anarchist-led revolutions such as that during the
Spanish Civil War, or other revolutions which were defeated.

Bakunin believed that Marxs desire to abolish the state

and create, in the last analysis, an anarchist system via
state power is irrational. Commenting on that he added
that anarchism or freedom is the aim, while the state and
dictatorship is the means, and so, [for Marxists] in order
to free the masses, they have rst to be enslaved.[3] Marx
replied to Bakhunins criticisms by jotting marginal notes
in his copy of Anarchism and the State.
Therefore, both Marxists and anarchists wish to abolish
the existing state. Immediately after abolishing the existing state, Marxists seek to replace it with a workers state,
15.2.1 The process of transition
i.e. the dictatorship of the proletariat, or the workers
organized as the ruling class. From this point, as exThe theory of the state leads directly into the practical
pressed by Frederick Engels, the workers state will begin
question of what form the transition to the stateless soto wither away, nally ceasing to exist when class antagociety both anarchists and Marxists view as their end goal
nisms have been defeated. On the other hand, anarchists
will take.
feel the re-creation of any sort of state will place power in
Marxists believe that a successful transition to a stateless the hand of a tiny minority, that States with their repressociety communism will require the repression of cap- sive capacities and massive bureaucracies tend to be selfitalists in order for them not to re-establish their con- perpetuating and do not wither away, and that in practrol. That requires, according to Marxists, the existence tice establishing a new state is thus counter-revolutionary
of a state in some form run by workers (there is a dis- because in order to eventually eliminate it a second revpute on whether the dictatorship of the proletariat is a olution will be required. Anarchists point to the collapse
state as we conceive it today). This formulation can be of the Soviet Union and the demands by grassroots movegross, envisaging the dictatorship of the proletariat as a ments throughout the Soviet block to abolish the dictatorpolitical dictatorship; or, it can be nuanced, seeing the ship but keep socialism as a failed attempt to make such a
dictatorship of the proletariat as an internally democratic second revolution. The failure of such movements as they
amongst workers. The kind of workers state envisaged were co-opted by former Soviet leaders (nomenklatura)
varies between the bureaucratic apparatus and internally who instead kept the dictatorship and abolished socialundemocratic state departments and armed forces of cap- ism, is seen as evidence that such a long and circuitous
italist states through to internally democratic and anti- route from capitalism to freedom is inecient and unbureaucratic structures such as workers councils.
likely to actually result in freedom. Marxists respond to
Anarchists and some libertarian socialists reject the this saying that the organized, centralized repression of
Marxist view that a transitional phase will be needed the capitalist class will be absolutely necessary, and that

15.3. ARGUMENTS SURROUNDING THE ISSUE OF CLASS

173

the proletariat can only accomplish this by the use of the that the bourgeoisie will inevitably use violence against
state.
the organized workers movement.
The Marxist position blends into anarchism at one end of
the spectrum, mostly due to the wide variety of Marxist and Anarchist movements. The anarchists disagree
among themselves if a system of democratic workers
councils constitutes a state or not, while on the other hand
Marxists disagree widely among themselves over the form
and the existence of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

On the other hand, some anarchists promote self-defense

rather than large-scale anti-state violence. Some promote
non-violent protests, marches, and general strikes, only
condoning violence in self-defense against aggressive actions taken by the state to prevent non-violent anarchist
revolutions. Some view force as inherently authoritarian.
Indeed, this was an argument made by Karl Marx against
the logic of anarchism as promoted by Mikhail Bakunin.
Many social, individualist and mutualist anarchists however sometimes prefer reformist approaches rather than
15.2.2 Political parties
open violence and would only advocate such under exThe issue of seizing state power brings up the issue of treme circumstances.
political parties, which also divides anarchists and Marxists. Most Marxists see political parties as useful or even
necessary tools for seizing state power, since they view a 15.3 Arguments surrounding the
centrally coordinated eort as necessary to successfully
issue of class
defeat the capitalist class and state and establish a body
capable of maintaining power. However, Marxists disagree on whether a revolutionary party ought to partici- Both Marxist and socialist anarchist class analyses are
pate in bourgeois elections, what role it should have after based on the idea that society is divided into classes,
a revolution, and how it should be organized.
which are created based on the control each class has
Anarchists generally refuse to participate in governments, upon the means of production and hence each class havand so do not form parliamentary political parties. How- ing diering interests. The two dier, however, in where
ever, the organisations formed by anarchists have either they draw the lines between these groups. Anarchobeen political federations, such as the FAI, or often re- primitivists and post-left anarchists reject left wing polsemble the non-parliamentary roles of a political party itics in general (and theoretically by extension Marxist
by having a shared membership, set of principles, plat- class analysis) as they typically see left wing politics as
form for action and media such as newspapers. Many of corrupt and in the former case see civilization as unrethese organisations have been characterised by attempts formable.
at direct democracy, federalism or participatory democracy. When anarchist organisations have been pushed by
historical circumstances, such as the controversy over the
CNT-FAIs participation in the Spanish Popular Front,
some anarchist organisations have acted as representative
or commanding organisations. Marxists often point to
the irony of this situation, and use it to argue in favour
of a more honest approach to the relationship between
party, or party like organisation, and the rest of the working class.

15.2.3

Violence and revolution

See also: Anarchism and violence and insurrectionary

anarchism
Another practical question closely related to the theory of
the state is whether and how much violence is acceptable
in order to achieve a successful revolution. Some anarchist trends rely more on propaganda of the deed, actions
they perceive as inspirational to the working class. Marxists and many anarchists believe that violent revolution is
necessary or inevitable. Such anarchists often believe the
anarchist revolution will be a spontaneous, unorganized
uprising, while Marxists and anarcho-syndicalists believe

For Marxists, the two most relevant classes are the

"bourgeoisie", those who own the means of production,
and the "proletariat", more explicitly, the wage laborers. Marx believed that the industrial workers -and
only them- would organize together, abolish the state,
take control over the means of production, collectivize
them, and create a classless society administered by
and for workers. He believed that only the workers
have the motive and power to do that. For this reason, he dismissed peasants,the petty-bourgeois, and the
lumpen-proletariatthe unemployed underclassas
incapable of creating revolution.
The anarchist class analysis predates Marxism and contradicts it. Anarchists argue that it is not the whole bourgeoisie who has control over the means of production
and the state, but only a minority of them, which is part
of the ruling class, but has its own concerns. Also, traditionally anarchists have rejected Marxs dismissal of
the lumpen proletariat and the peasantry as revolutionary
and argued that a revolution, in order to be successful,
needs the support of the peasants. Classical Anarchists
believed that this is only possible through the redistribution of land. That is, they explicitly reject imposing state
property of the land, although voluntary collectivization
is seen as more ecient and thus supported (indeed, during the Spanish revolution anarchists impulsed hundreds

174

CHAPTER 15. ANARCHISM AND MARXISM

of collectivizations but only a tiny minority had all the Some believe that Marxism fails because its theoretical
land in the area, small peasants were allowed to cultivate socialist mode of production involves centralizing and
their own land without hired labour).
empowering the State apparatus which empowers people
Some modern anarchists (particularly pareconists) argue from the coordinator class to seize control of the State and
that there are three classes, which have relevance to so- means of production to manage the labor class, eectively
cial changenot two. The rst is the labor class (which acting as a surrogate capital class. However, this is less of
includes everyone whose labor is involved in producing a problem for libertarian Marxists who believe that such
and distributing goods as well as much of the so-called as State apparatus should operate on working class-led
participatory democracy or even as a consociational state.
service industry). This includes farmers, peasants, industrial workers, small landowners, small business own- Key dierences thus include the fact that Anarchists do
ers who labor with their employees and blue, pink and not dierentiate between peasants, lumpen, and proletarwhite-collar workers. The second is the coordinator class ians and instead dene all people who work for the prot
which includes everyone whose labor is primarily con- of others as members of the working class, regardless of
cerned with coordinating and managing the labor of occupation; and that anarchists do dierentiate between
others primarily on behalf of the bourgeoisie, adminis- the economic and political elites who set policy and the
trating organizations, setting the intellectual status quo business and government functionaries that carry those
or managing the State apparatus. The anarchist de- policies out whereas Marxists lump the two together.
nition of the coordinator class includes people such Further, some Anarchists argue that Marxism fails beas bureaucrats, technocrats, managers, administrators, cause it springs from the minds of middle class intelmiddle-class intellectuals (such as economists, political lectuals, while arguing that anarchism springs spontaand social scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, etc.), neously from the self-activity and self-organization of the
physical scientists, judges, lawyers, military ocials, po- labor class. They point to the fact that the major schools
litical party organizers and leaders, etc. And nally the of Marxism are often named after the intellectuals who
elite owning class or capital class which derives its in- formed the movements through high analytical and philocome from its control of wealth, land, property and re- sophical praxis theorization. While schools of Anarchism
sources. Marxists vigorously debate the exact compo- tend to emerge from organizational principles or forms of
sition of the middle class under capitalism. Some also practice and are rarely (if ever) named after or centered
describe a co-ordinating class which implements capi- around an individual intellectual. Anarchists distinguish
talism on behalf of the capitalists, composed of the petit themselves by what they do, and how they organize thembourgeoisie, professionals and managers. Others dispute
selves whereas Marxists tend to distinguish themselves
this, freely using the term middle class to refer to au- by their strategic approach and their philosophical or inent white-collar workers as described above (even though,
tellectual methodology. Marxists, however, contend that
in Marxist terms, they are part of the proletariatthe their ideas are not new ideologies which sprang from inworking class). Still others (for example, Council comtellectuals but are ideas which form from the class conmunists) allege, like anarchists, that there is a class com- tradictions of each economic and social mode of history.
prising intellectuals, technocrats and managers which
They argue that Marxian socialism in particular arose
seeks power in its own right. This last group of commu- from the minds of the working class due to the class connists allege that such technocratic middle classes seized tradictions of the capitalist mode of production. Some
power and government for themselves in Soviet-style so- Marxists even argue that anarchism springs from the ideas
cieties.
of proletarians (or even petty bourgeoisie) who have been
Anarchists contend that Marxism fails, and will always marginalized by capitalism as an unorganized and unrefail, because it creates a dictatorship of the coordinat- ned reactionary struggle against the forces of capitalism.
ing technocratic/managerial class and that a dictatorship of the proletariat is a logical impossibility. Mikhail
15.3.1 Other axes of oppression
Bakunin foreshadowed this argument when he wrote:
[The] State has always been the patrimony
of some privileged class: a priestly class,
an aristocratic class, a bourgeois class. And
nally, when all the other classes have exhausted themselves, the State then becomes the
patrimony of the bureaucratic class and then
fallsor, if you will, risesto the position of
a machine.
On the International Workingmens Association and Karl Marx, 1872

The Marxist analysis of class struggles and of power as

the cause of injustice has consequences on how Marxists
relate themselves to the liberation movements of groups
such as women, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities,
and cultural minorities (such as homosexuals). Classical
Marxism generally dismissed such movements since, for
Marxists, class struggle had to take precedence over all
other forms of struggle. They argued that only the class
struggle could allow the working class to seize power via
seizing the state. Once state power had been seized, issues like racism or sexism, could be much more easily
dealt with. Since the 1970s, however, most Marxist or-

15.4. NATIONALISM AND RELATIONSHIPS WITH INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND STATELESS NATIONS
ganizations explicitly support such liberation movements,
not only because they are worthy in and of themselves, but
also on the grounds that they are seen as necessary for a
working-class revolution. Many Marxists believe that attempts by oppressed people to liberate themselves will
continue to fail to achieve their full aims until class society is done away with, because under capitalism and other
class societies, social power rests at the point of production.
Anarchists, other political movements and a lot of theorists criticize classical Marxism for giving class priority
and argue that this way of explaining social movements
denigrates other oppressions, which operate with their
own independent dynamics. Most Anarchists see liberation movements by oppressed people as fundamentally
legitimate, be they "peasants", "proletarians", or bourgeoisie, without needing to t these movements into a
predetermined schema for revolution. However, many
anarchists believe that single issue struggles are extremely
limited and not powerful enough to change in depth societal conditions. Nevertheless, they still support and participate in them since they still think of them as useful.
Marxists tend to view people as sharing a certain class
consciousness based on their station in capitalist society. They believe that people share a collective socioeconomic mindset and that freedom comes from liberating the class of its class status shackles, thus eventually
empowering the individual. Anarchists on the other hand
tend to view people as social individuals who share a common condition in capitalist society, but don't necessarily
share a uniform class consciousness.
Religion

175

America, most notably with the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil.

Anarchists advocate resistance to oppressive and authoritarian institutions, including religious ones; and in extreme cases this may include violent resistance. During the Spanish Civil War, for instance, the Catholic
Church was one of the biggest landowners and allied itself with the Falangist Fascist movement led by Francisco
Franco. Opposition to Catholic institutions and the collectivization of church lands by peasants formed a major
part of the anarchist revolution that opposed Franco in
Barcelona. In the Basque Country, however, most priests
deed the church and opposed Fascism and urged their
congregations to do likewise, and so on the ground there
was little in the way of physical conict between anarchists and Catholics over religion.
In contrast to Marxism, anarchism has historically been
more accepting of personal spirituality and egalitarian
religions. Anarchism has also historically gained much
more support amongst religious communities and at various times and places explicitly anarchist forms of Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and other religions have
claimed tens of thousands of members. Some anarchists
envision future society as being free of religion while others envision a future society in which egalitarian religions
and spirituality being a private matter equally tolerated
with non-religious tendencies in a neutral, secular society.
A smaller number envision spirituality or egalitarian religions playing a prominent role in society, most recently
Neopaganism, with its focus on the sanctity of nature and
equality, along with its often decentralized nature, has led
to a number of Neopagan inspired anarchists. One of the
most prominent is Starhawk, who writes extensively about
both spirituality and activism.

See also: Anarchism and religion

Religion is another area of disagreement amongst anarchists and Marxists. Marx in the Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right
described religion as the instrument of the bourgeois class
to easily dominate the minds of the proletariat and inspire
subservience to authority and acceptance of the status quo
in return for future reward in the after death 'life'. Most
Marxists tend to envision a pure communism as being
free of religion, sometimes promoting violence against
clergy and religious institutions. Nonetheless, religious
marxists exist all over the world.

15.4 Nationalism and relationships

with indigenous peoples and
stateless nations
Main articles: Anarchism and nationalism and National
Bolshevism
Anarchism and Marxism dier in their relationships with
Indigenous peoples and national minorities. The classical Anarchist position was that the coming revolution
would wipe away all distinctions of nationality, since nationality is socially constructed, that the proletariat has
no nation, and that the natural form for socialism was
internationalism. This remained the established position
of the entire anti-capitalist left up until the early 1900s
and still holds considerable sway in both anarchist and
Marxist circles. Marxists acknowledge boundaries and
development of the nation state.

Despite the hostility of Marxism to organized religion,

there have been attempts to fuse the two, Liberation theology being the most obvious example. Some Priests
associated with Liberation Theology have even joined
and fought with armed guerrillas, Camilo Torres, for instance, joined and fought with the ELN (National Liberation Army) in Colombia and died in combat. Although
the Vatican has actively condemned liberation theology,
liberation theology remains inuential in parts of Latin During the build-up to the Russian revolution, however,

176
Lenin and the Bolsheviks found it expedient to promise
independence to the various indigenous non-Russian national minorities, notably the Ukrainians and the Poles,
in return for their support against the Czarist empire.
Whilst some Bolsheviks continued to support this position, the dominant Bolshevik faction grouped around
Lenin in Moscow rst drove the National Communists
underground and the liquidating them in 1928. Subsequently all nationalist movements throughout the USSR
were brutally crushed by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and
all their successors until the collapse of the USSR as
a political unit. In the run-up to World War II Russias foreign policy centered around the idea of National
Bolshevism, through which the Bolshevik political elite
in Russia sought to instigate and support communistnationalist revolutions around the world, most notably in
Hungary and Germany, and then absorb the newly independent areas into a Soviet commonwealtha goal
that was achieved after World War II with the Warsaw
Pact. Elements of this persisted in Soviet foreign policy throughout the cold war and helped motivate support
of nationalist and anti-imperialist movements throughout
the third world. Aid by Russia to the Chinese Communist Party during the Chinese revolution was driven by
the same motivation, but once in power Mao refused to
allow the USSR to control Chinese policy, leading to a
break with Stalin that culminated in a brief war between
the two powers. The same process would later play out in
the relationship between Communist rulers in China and
Vietnam.
During the Chinese revolution a parallel process occurred
as Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party rst
promised independence and self-determination to all of
Chinas many stateless nations, and then not only refused
to deliver once the CCPs grip on power was solidied but
actually invaded and annexed Tibet, which he regarded
as a renegade province. Every successive Communist
government throughout the world has followed this same
pattern of rst promising indigenous national minorities
self-determination in order to gain their support and then
actively opposing that self-determination once in power.
In a nutshell, the general policy of Marxist governments
from Lenin on has been to support revolution nationalism and the rights of indigenous groups in theory and
to oppose it in practice. Most recently, the Sandinistas
in Nicaragua were accused of carrying out campaigns of
ethnic cleansing against indigenous peoples in order to
seize their land.
Ward Churchill has gone so far as to argue in his essay
on Marxism and Indigenism that Marxism is inherently
imperialist and racist in eect, if not in intent, because
it is based on the idea of historical progress and industrialization as inevitable, and sees industrial proletarianbased societies as more advanced than other societies
(particularly indigenous societies). Other scholars argue
that the conict has to do with the demands of running
a State structure and argue that if the Bolsheviks had

CHAPTER 15. ANARCHISM AND MARXISM

come to power in Poland (for example) instead of Russia
they would have had to become Polish nationalists and
would have bitterly opposed Russian attempts to dominate Poland. Seizing the Russian State, however, meant
that they had to defend the interests of that State; and the
rights of stateless nations thus became anathema.
The position of Anarchism is somewhat the reverse.
Most Anarchists, both historically and up to the present
day, see borders and national divisions as detrimental
and envision a world in which distinctions of race and
ethnicity fade and disappear over time as the ideal. In
practice, however, Anarchism is based on small-scale systems of self-determination, local self-governance, and
mutual aid that fulll the desire of national minorities
for self-determination on a defacto basis; and has thus
been historically compatible with anti-state forms of
nationalism. The most notable collaboration, of course,
being the movements for self-rule by the Catalans and
Basques in Spain which found expression under the banner of the anarchist CNT during the Spanish Civil War.
More recently there has been an attempt at an explicit
fusion of Anarchism and native-American political traditions manifested in the modern Indigenist movement.
Anti-State nationalist organizations that explicitly describe their politics as Anarchist currently exist in Ireland
and Brittany. Many members of the modern American
Indian Movement also consider themselves Anarchists.

15.5 Methodological
ments

disagree-

Marxism uses a form of analysis of human societies

called "historical materialism. The central idea of historical materialism is the idea that people live in a determined material world, and act in order to produce changes
upon this predetermined world, without being able to fundamentally change it. In economic terms, the relations of
production are the driving force of history. Underlying
these processes, as a dialectical background notion, is the
idea that contradictions and opposed social groups are the
ones that form and drive social progress.
Marx formulated the concept of historical materialism from a critique of Hegels Idealism and dialectics. Marx only applied historical materialism to human
history; however, Marxists claim that his methodology
can be applied to all phenomena and they usually describe it as dialectical materialism. Anarchist philosopher Murray Bookchin developed dialectical naturalism
out of a combination of Marxist and Hegelian dialectics,
and Kropotkins biological outlook.
Classical Anarchists saw value in historical materialism
as a tool for social analysis. Contemporary anarchists use
a wide variety of tools of social analysis, historical materialism included. The Irish Workers Solidarity Movement, for instance, makes agreeing with the historical ma-

15.6. NOTES
terialist methods value a central point of unity. Many
anarchists, however, dismiss dialectical materialism as a
pseudo-science based on untestable and unfalsiable universal claims. Anarchists were among the rst to criticise the dialectical materialist trend as pseudo-science
and generally criticised either the Marxist methodologies
as such, or the applications of them, on the basis that both
historical and dialectical materialism dehumanise people as the agents of history. Within Marxism these criticisms are mirrored by the criticisms of socialist humanists, Western Marxists, Autonomist Marxists and other
similar thinkers.
The rule of heaven and the rule of natureangels, spirits,
devils, molecules, atoms, ether, the laws of God-Heaven
and the laws of Nature, forces, the inuence of one body
on anotherall this is invented, formed, created by society. Marxism is the new scientic Christianity, designed
to conquer the bourgeois world by deceiving the people,
the proletariat, just as Christianity deceived the feudal
world.
Abba and V.L. Gordin, Russian anarchists.[5]

177

15.6 Notes
[1] Graeber, David (2004). Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. ISBN 09728196-4-9.
[2] P. Avrich. G. Maximo
[3] Bakunin, Mikhail.
Marxists.org.

Statism

and

Anarchism.

[4] An Anarchist FAQ: Section H - Why do anarchists oppose

state socialism? & Appendix 3 - Anarchism and Marxism
[5] Cliord Harper, ed. (1994). Prolegomena: To a Study
of the Return of the Repressed in History. London: Rebel
Press. ISBN 0-946061-13-0.

15.7 References
Bakunin, Mikhail (1950). Marxism, Freedom and
the State. London: Freedom Press. ISBN 0-90038427-1.
Thomas, Paul (1985). Karl Marx and the Anarchists. London: Routledge/Kegan Paul. ISBN 07102-0685-2.

15.5.1

Determinism

A simple interpretation of historical materialism suggests

that if Marxism is right about the class forces operating in capitalism, a successful working-class revolution
is inevitable. Some Marxists, notably the leaders of the
Second International in the late 19th and early 20th century, have believed this. However, the degree to which
the revolution must be made by conscious forces has always been a matter of dispute among Marxists, with many
arguing that Marx' famous statement that I am not a
Marxist was a rejection of determinism, and the split
was sharpened by the First World War, when the social
democratic parties of the Second International supported
their respective nations war eorts. Many Marxist opponents of the war, such as Rosa Luxemburg, blamed the
Second Internationals betrayal partly on its doctrine of
the inevitability of socialism, which justied its attempt
to reform existing capitalist states. Luxemburg put the
alternatives for the future, instead, as socialism or barbarism.
Since an inuential segment of anarchists reject either
dialectical materialism or historical materialism or both,
these anarchists usually do not claim that revolution and
the reorganization of society are inevitable, only that they
are desirable. Some anarchists, while rejecting dialetical or historical materialism claim other bases for the
inevitability of revolution, such as the natural yearning
of consciousness for freedom; these anarchists nd their
mirror within Marxist intellectual movements in individuals such as Herbert Marcuse.

15.8 Further reading

Barker, John H. Individualism and Community: The
State in Marx and Early Anarchism. New York:
Greenwood Press, 1986. ISBN 0-313-24706-4
Blackledge, Paul (2010) Marxism and anarchism
from International Socialism See debate - replies to
Blackledge by Lucien van der walt and Ian Birchall
and Blackledges response
Carter, Alan, Marx: A Radical Critique. Boulder:
Westview Press, 1988. ISBN 0-7108-0449-0
Churchill, Ward. Acts of Rebellion: The Ward
Churchill Reader. New York: Routledge, 2003.
ISBN 9780415931557
D'Agostino, Anthony. Marxism and the Russian
Anarchists. San Francisco: Germinal Press, 1977.
ISBN 0-918064-03-1.
Dolgo, Sam (ed.). Bakunin on Anarchism. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2002. ISBN 0-91961905-3 (Hardcover), ISBN 0-919619-06-1 (Paperback)
Thomas, Paul. Karl Marx and the Anarchists. London: Routledge, 1985. ISBN 0-7102-0685-2
Vincent, K. Steven. Between Marxism and Anarchism: Benoit Malon and French Reformist Socialism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
ISBN 0-918064-03-1

178

15.9 External links

The Philosophical Roots of the Marx-Bakunin ConictAn outline of the divergent philosophical and
methodological foundations of Mikhail Bakunin, as
a prime representative of the anarchist critic of
Marxism, and Karl Marx, concerning human nature,
freedom and political organization.
Anarchism vs. MarxismA Marxist perspective on
the dierences between anarchism and Marxism.
Anarchy After LeftismEssay by Bob Black, hosted
by Infoshop.org
Bakunin vs. MarxA libertarian socialist analysis
of the dierences between Bakunin in Marx.
Libertarian Communist LibraryAnarchist, Marxist and crossover texts from Libcom.org
An Anarchist FAQ: Section H - Why do anarchists
oppose state socialism? & Appendix 3 - Anarchism
and Marxism

CHAPTER 15. ANARCHISM AND MARXISM

Chapter 16

Mutualism (economic theory)

This article is about the economic theory. For the biologi- Mutualists have distinguished mutualism from state socal term and other uses, see Mutualism (disambiguation). cialism, and do not advocate state control over the means
of production. Benjamin Tucker said of Proudhon, that
though opposed to socializing the ownership of capital,
Mutualism is an economic theory and anarchist school
of thought that advocates a society where each person [Proudhon] aimed nevertheless to socialize its eects by
making its use benecial to all instead of a means of immight possess a means of production, either individually or collectively, with trade representing equivalent poverishing the many to enrich the few...by subjecting
capital to the natural law of competition, thus bringing
amounts of labor in the free market.[1] Integral to the
[10]
scheme was the establishment of a mutual-credit bank the price of its own use down to cost.
that would lend to producers at a minimal interest rate,
just high enough to cover administration.[2] Mutualism
is based on a labor theory of value that holds that when
labor or its product is sold, in exchange, it ought to receive goods or services embodying the amount of labor necessary to produce an article of exactly similar and
equal utility.[3] Mutualism originated from the writings
of philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

16.1 History

Mutualists oppose the idea of individuals receiving an income through loans, investments, and rent, as they believe these individuals are not laboring. Though Proudhon opposed this type of income, he expressed that he
had never intended "...to forbid or suppress, by sovereign
decree, ground rent and interest on capital. I think that
all these manifestations of human activity should remain
free and voluntary for all: I ask for them no modications, restrictions or suppressions, other than those which
result naturally and of necessity from the universalization
of the principle of reciprocity which I propose.[4] Insofar as they ensure the workers right to the full product of
their labor, mutualists support markets (or articial markets) and property in the product of labor. However, they
argue for conditional titles to land, whose ownership is legitimate only so long as it remains in use or occupation
(which Proudhon called possession);[5] thus advocating
personal property, but not private property.
Though mutualism is similar to the economic doctrines
of the nineteenth-century American individualist anarchists, unlike them, mutualism is in favor of large
industries.[6] Mutualism has therefore been retrospectively characterized sometimes as being a form of individualist anarchism,[7] and as ideologically situated between individualist and collectivist forms of anarchism as
well.[8] Proudhon himself described the liberty he pursued as the synthesis of communism and property.[9]

Portrait of philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (18091865) by

Gustave Courbet. Proudhon was the primary proponent of anarchist mutualism, and inuenced many later individualist anarchist and social anarchist thinkers.

Mutualism, as a term, has seen a variety of related uses.

Charles Fourier rst used the French term mutualisme
in 1822,[11] although the reference was not to an eco-

179

180
nomic system. The rst use of the noun mutualist was
in the New-Harmony Gazette by an American Owenite
in 1826.[12] In the early 1830s, a labor organization in
Lyons, France, called themselves the Mutuellists.
Pierre Joseph Proudhon was involved with the Lyons
mutualists and later adopted the name to describe his
own teachings.[13] In What Is Mutualism? Clarence
Lee Swartz gives his own account of the origin of the
term, claiming that "[t]he word mutualism seems to
have been rst used by John Gray, an English writer,
in 1832.[14] When John Grays 1825 Lecture on Human Happiness was rst published in the United States
in 1826, the publishers appended the Preamble and constitution of the Friendly Association for Mutual Interests,
located at Valley Forge. 1826 also saw the publication
of the Constitution of the Friendly Association for Mutual
Interests at Kendal, Ohio. By 1846, Pierre Joseph Proudhon was speaking of mutualit" in his writings, and he
used the term mutuellisme, at least as early as 1848, in
his Programme Rvolutionnaire. William B. Greene,
in 1850, used the term mutualism to describe a mutual credit system similar to that of Proudhon. In 1850,
the American newspaper The Spirit of the Age, edited
by William Henry Channing, published proposals for a
mutualist township by Joshua King Ingalls[15] and Albert Brisbane,[16] together with works by Proudhon,[17]
William B. Greene, Pierre Leroux, and others. During
the Second French Republic (18481852), Proudhon had
his biggest public eect through journalism. He got involved with four newspapers: Le Reprsentant du Peuple (February 1848 August 1848); Le Peuple (September 1848 June 1849); La Voix du Peuple (September
1849 May 1850); Le Peuple de 1850 (June 1850
October 1850). His polemical writing style, combined
with his perception of himself as a political outsider, produced a cynical, combative journalism that appealed to
many French workers but alienated others. He repeatedly criticised the governments policies and promoted
reformation of credit and exchange. He tried to establish a popular bank (Banque du peuple) early in 1849,
but despite over 13,000 people signing up (mostly workers), receipts were limited falling short of 18,000FF and
the whole enterprise was essentially stillborn. Proudhon
ran for the constituent assembly in April 1848, but was
not elected, although his name appeared on the ballots in
Paris, Lyon, Besanon, and Lille, France. He was successful, in the complementary elections of June 4, and
served as a deputy during the debates over the National
Workshops, created by the February 25, 1848, decree
passed by Republican Louis Blanc. The workshops were
to give work to the unemployed. Proudhon was never enthusiastic about such workshops, perceiving them to be
essentially charitable institutions that did not resolve the
problems of the economic system. He was against their
elimination unless an alternative could be found for the
workers who relied on the workshops for subsistence.

CHAPTER 16. MUTUALISM (ECONOMIC THEORY)

France. He participated in the February uprising and
the composition of what he termed the rst republican
proclamation of the new republic. But he had misgivings
about the new provisional government, headed by Dupont
de l'Eure (17671855), who, since the French Revolution
in 1789, had been a longstanding politician, although often in the opposition. Proudhon published his own perspective for reform which was completed in 1849, Solution du problme social ("Solution of the Social Problem"), in which he laid out a program of mutual nancial cooperation among workers. He believed this would
transfer control of economic relations from capitalists and
nanciers to workers. The central part of his plan was the
establishment of a bank to provide credit at a very low rate
of interest and the issuing of exchange notes that would
circulate instead of money based on gold.

Mutualism has been associated with two types of currency reform. Labor notes were rst discussed in Owenite
circles and received their rst practical test in 1827 in
the Time Store of former New Harmony member and
individualist anarchist Josiah Warren. Mutual banking
aimed at the monetization of all forms of wealth and
the extension of free credit. It is most closely associated with William B. Greene, but Greene drew from
the work of Proudhon, Edward Kellogg, and William
Beck, as well as from the land bank tradition. Mutualism can in many ways be considered the original anarchy, since Proudhon was the rst to identify himself
as an anarchist. Though mutualism is generally associated with anarchism, it is not necessarily anarchist. Historian Wendy McElroy reports that American individualist anarchism received an important inuence of 3 European thinkers. One of the most important of these
inuences was the french political philosopher PierreJoseph Proudhon whose words Liberty is not the Daughter But the Mother of Order appeared as a motto on
Liberty's masthead [18] (inuential individualist anarchist
publication of Benjamin Tucker). For American anarchist historian Eunice Minette Schuster It is apparent...that Proudhonian Anarchism was to be found in the
United States at least as early as 1848 and that it was
not conscious of its anity to the Individualist Anarchism of Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews ...
William B. Greene presented this Proudhonian Mutualism in its purest and most systematic form..[19] After 1850 he became active in labor reform.[19] He was
elected vice-president of the New England Labor Reform League, the majority of the members holding to
Proudhons scheme of mutual banking, and in 1869 president of the Massachusetts Labor Union.[19] He then publishes Socialistic, Mutualistic, and Financial Fragments
(1875).[19] He saw mutualism as the synthesis of liberty
and order.[19] His associationism...is checked by individualism..."Mind your own business, Judge not that
ye be not judged. Over matters which are purely personal, as for example, moral conduct, the individual is
Proudhon was surprised by the Revolutions of 1848 in sovereign, as well as over that which he himself produces.
For this reason he demands mutuality in marriagethe

16.1. HISTORY

181

equal right of a woman to her own personal freedom and

property.[19]
Later, Benjamin Tucker, editor of the anarchist publication Liberty, connected his economic views with those of
Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Josiah Warren and Karl Marx,
taking sides with Proudhon and Josiah Warren:
The economic principles of Modern Socialism are a logical deduction from the principle laid down by Adam Smith in the early chapters of his Wealth of Nations, namely, that
labor is the true measure of price ... Half a century or more after Smith enunciated the principle above stated, Socialism picked it up where
he had dropped it, and in following it to its logical conclusions, made it the basis of a new economic philosophy ... This seems to have been
done independently by three dierent men, of
three dierent nationalities, in three dierent
languages: Josiah Warren, an American; Pierre
J. Proudhon, a Frenchman; Karl Marx, a German Jew ... That the work of this interesting
trio should have been done so nearly simultaneously would seem to indicate that Socialism
was in the air, and that the time was ripe and
the conditions favorable for the appearance of
this new school of thought. So far as priority
of time is concerned, the credit seems to belong to Warren, the American, a fact which
should be noted by the stump orators who are
so fond of declaiming against Socialism as an
imported article. Benjamin Tucker. Individual
Liberty[20]
Mutualist ideas found a fertile ground in the nineteenth
century in Spain. In Spain Ramn de la Sagra established the anarchist journal El Porvenir in La Corua in
1845 which was inspired by Proudhons ideas.[21] The
catalan politician Francesc Pi i Margall became the principal translator of Proudhons works into Spanish[22] and
later briey became president of Spain in 1873 while
being the leader of the Democratic Republican Federal
Party. According to George Woodcock These translations were to have a profound and lasting eect on the
development of Spanish anarchism after 1870, but before
that time Proudhonian ideas, as interpreted by Pi, already
provided much of the inspiration for the federalist movement which sprang up in the early 1860s.[23] According to the Encyclopedia Britannica During the Spanish
revolution of 1873, Pi y Margall attempted to establish a
decentralized, or cantonalist, political system on Proudhonian lines.[21] Pi i Margall was a dedicated theorist in
his own right, especially through book-length works such
as La reaccin y la revolucin (en:"Reaction and revolution from 1855), Las nacionalidades (en:"Nationalities
from 1877), and La Federacin from 1880. For prominent anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker The rst movement of the Spanish workers was strongly inuenced by

Francesc Pi i Margall, catalan brief President of the First Spanish

Republic and main spanish translator of Proudhons works

the ideas of Pi y Margall, leader of the Spanish Federalists and disciple of Proudhon. Pi y Margall was one of the
outstanding theorists of his time and had a powerful inuence on the development of libertarian ideas in Spain.
His political ideas had much in common with those of
Richard Price, Joseph Priestly, Thomas Paine, Jeerson,
and other representatives of the Anglo-American liberalism of the rst period. He wanted to limit the power
of the state to a minimum and gradually replace it by a
Socialist economic order.[24]
For historian of the First International G. M. Steklo:
In April, 1856, there arrived from Paris a deputation
of Proudhonist workers whose aim it was to bring about
the foundation of a Universal League of Workers. The
object of the League was the social emancipation of the
working class, which, it was held, could only be achieved
by a union of the workers of all lands against international capital. Since the deputation was one of Proudhonists, of course this emancipation was to be secured,
not by political methods, but purely by economic means,
through the foundation of productive and distributive cooperatives.[25] Later It was in the 1863 elections that
for the rst time workers candidates were run in opposition to bourgeois republicans, but they secured very
few votes...agroup of working-class Proudhonists (among
whom were Murat and Tolain, who were subsequently to
participate in the founding of the (First) International issued the famous Manifesto of the Sixty, which, though
extremely moderate in tone, marked a turning point in
the history of the French movement. For years and years

182
the bourgeois liberals had been insisting that the revolution of 1789 had abolished class distinctions. The Manifesto of the Sixty loudly proclaimed that classes still existed. These classes were the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The latter had its specic class interests, which
none but workers could be trusted to defend. The inference drawn by the Manifesto was that there must be independent working-class candidates.[26] For Steklo the
Proudhonists, who were at that date the leaders of the
French section of the International. They looked upon
the International Workingmens Association as a sort of
academy or synagogue, where Talmudists or similar experts could investigate the workers problem; where in
the spirit of Proudhon they could excogitate means for an
accurate solution of the problem, without being disturbed
by the stresses of a political campaign. Thus Fribourg,
voicing the opinions of the Parisian group of the Proudhonists (Tolain and Co.) assured his readers that the International was the greatest attempt ever made in modern times to aid the proletariat towards the conquest, by
peaceful, constitutional, and moral methods, of the place
which rightly belongs to the workers in the sunshine of
civilisation.[27]
The Belgian Federation threw in its lot with the anarchist
International at its Brussels Congress, held in December, 1872...those taking part in the socialist movement
of the Belgian intelligentsia were inspired by Proudhonist ideas which naturally led them to oppose the Marxist
outlook.[28]
Nineteenth-century mutualists considered themselves
libertarian socialists.[29] While still oriented towards
cooperation, mutualists favor free market solutions, believing that most inequalities are the result of preferential
conditions created by government intervention.[30] Mutualism is something of a middle way between classical economics and socialism, with some characteristics of both.
Modern-day Mutualist Kevin Carson, considers anarchist
mutualism to be free market socialism.
Proudhon supported labor-owned cooperative rms and
associations[31] for we need not hesitate, for we have
no choice ... it is necessary to form an ASSOCIATION
among workers ... because without that, they would remain related as subordinates and superiors, and there
would ensue two ... castes of masters and wage-workers,
which is repugnant to a free and democratic society and
so it becomes necessary for the workers to form themselves into democratic societies, with equal conditions for
all members, on pain of a relapse into feudalism.[32] As
for capital goods (man-made, non-land, "means of production"), mutualist opinions diers on whether these
should be commonly managed public assets or private
property.

CHAPTER 16. MUTUALISM (ECONOMIC THEORY)

made by members of various anarchist factions, including the mutualists Courbet, Longuet, and Vermorel, the
libertarian collectivists Varlin, Malon, and Lefrangais,
and the bakuninists Elie and Elise Reclus and Louise
Michel.[33]

16.1.1 Mutualism today

Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist and author
of Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. In its preface Carson describes this work as an attempt to revive
individualist anarchist political economy, to incorporate
the useful developments of the last hundred years, and
to make it relevant to the problems of the twenty-rst
century.[34] Contemporary mutualists are among those
involved in the Alliance of the Libertarian Left and in
the Voluntary Cooperation Movement.
Carson holds that capitalism has been founded on an
act of robbery as massive as feudalism, and argues that
capitalism could not exist in the absence of a state. He
says "[i]t is state intervention that distinguishes capitalism
from the free market.[35] He does not dene capitalism
in the idealized sense, but says that when he talks about
capitalism he is referring to what he calls "actually existing capitalism. He believes the term laissez-faire capitalism is an oxymoron because capitalism, he argues, is
organization of society, incorporating elements of tax,
usury, landlordism, and tari, which thus denies the Free
Market while pretending to exemplify it. However, he
says he has no quarrel with anarcho-capitalists who use
the term laissez-faire capitalism and distinguish it from
actually existing capitalism. He says he has deliberately
chosen to resurrect an old denition of the term.[36]
Carson argues that the centralization of wealth into a
class hierarchy is due to state intervention to protect the
ruling class, by using a money monopoly, granting patents
and subsidies to corporations, imposing discriminatory
taxation, and intervening militarily to gain access to international markets. Carsons thesis is that an authentic
free market economy would not be capitalism as the separation of labor from ownership and the subordination of
labor to capital would be impossible, bringing a class-less
society where people could easily choose between working as a freelancer, working for a fair wage, taking part of
a cooperative, or being an entrepreneur. He notes, as did
Tucker before him, that a mutualist free market system
would involve signicantly dierent property rights than
capitalism is based on, particularly in terms of land and
intellectual property.

16.2 Theory

Mutualism also had a considerable inuence in the Paris

Commune. George Woodcock manifests that a noSee also: Cost the limit of price
table contribution to the activities of the Commune and
particularly to the organization of public services was
The primary aspects of mutualism are free association,

16.2. THEORY
mutualist credit, contract (or federation/confederation),
and gradualism (or dual-power). Mutualism is often described by its proponents as advocating an anti-capitalist
free market.
Mutualists argue that most of the economic problems associated with capitalism each amount to a violation of the
cost principle, or as Josiah Warren interchangeably said,
Cost the limit of price. It was inspired by the labor
theory of value, which was popularized, though not invented, by Adam Smith in 1776 (Proudhon mentioned
Smith as an inspiration). The labor theory of value holds
that the actual price of a thing (or the true cost) is the
amount of labor that was undertaken to produce it. In
Warrens terms, cost should be the limit of price, with
cost referring to the amount of labor required to produce a good or service. Anyone who sells goods should
charge no more than the cost to himself of acquiring these
goods. Proudhon also held that the real value of products was determined by labour time, and that all kinds
of labour should be regarded as equally eective in the
value-creating process, and he advocated therefore equality of wages and salaries.[37]

16.2.1

Free association

Mutualists argue that association is only necessary where

there is an organic combination of forces. For instance,
an operation that requires specialization and many dierent workers performing their individual tasks to complete
a unied product, i.e., a factory. In this situation, workers are inherently dependent on each other and without
association they are related as subordinate and superior,
master and wage-slave.
An operation that can be performed by an individual
without the help of specialized workers does not require
association. Proudhon argued that peasants do not require societal form, and only feigned association for the
purposes of solidarity in abolishing rents, buying clubs,
etc. He recognized that their work is inherently sovereign
and free. In commenting on the degree of association that
is preferable Proudhon said:
In cases in which production requires great
division of labour, it is necessary to form an
ASSOCIATION among the workers... because without that they would remain isolated
as subordinates and superiors, and there would
ensue two industrial castes of masters and wage
workers, which is repugnant in a free and
democratic society. But where the product
can be obtained by the action of an individual or a family... there is no opportunity for
association.[38]

183
handed over to democratically organised workers associations ... We want these associations to be models for agriculture, industry and trade, the pioneering
core of that vast federation of companies and societies
woven into the common cloth of the democratic social
Republic.[39] He urged workers to form themselves into
democratic societies, with equal conditions for all members, on pain of a relapse into feudalism. This would result in Capitalistic and proprietary exploitation, stopped
everywhere, the wage system abolished, equal and just
exchange guaranteed.[40] Workers would no longer sell
their labour to a capitalist but rather work for themselves
in co-operatives.
As Robert Graham notes, Proudhons market socialism
is indissolubly linked to his notions of industry democracy and workers self-management.[41] K. Steven Vincent notes in his in-depth analysis of this aspect of Proudhons ideas that Proudhon consistently advanced a program of industrial democracy which would return control
and direction of the economy to the workers. For Proudhon, "... strong workers associations ... would enable
the workers to determine jointly by election how the enterprise was to be directed and operated on a day-to-day
basis.[42]

16.2.2 Mutual credit

Main article: Mutual credit
Mutualists argue that free banking should be taken back
by the people to establish systems of free credit. They
contend that banks have a monopoly on credit, just as capitalists have a monopoly on the means of production, and
landlords have a monopoly on land. Banks are essentially
creating money by lending out deposits that do not actually belong to them, then charging interest on the dierence. Mutualists argue that by establishing a democratically run mutual bank or credit union, it would be possible
to issue free credit so that money could be created for the
benet of the participants rather than for the benet of the
bankers. Individualist anarchists noted for their detailed
views on mutualist banking include Proudhon, William
B. Greene, and Lysander Spooner.
Some modern forms of mutual credit are LETS and the
Ripple monetary system project.

In a session of the French legislature, Proudhon proposed

a government-imposed income tax to fund his mutual
banking scheme, with some tax brackets reaching as high
as 331 3 percent and 50 percent, which was turned down
by the legislature.[43] This income tax Proudhon proposed
to fund his bank was to be levied on rents, interest, debts,
and salaries.[44][45] Specically, Proudhons proposed law
would have required all capitalists and stockholders to
disburse one sixth of their income to their tenants and
For Proudhon, mutualism involved creating indus- debtors, and another sixth to the national treasury to fund
trial democracy, a system where workplaces would be the bank.[46]

184

CHAPTER 16. MUTUALISM (ECONOMIC THEORY)

This scheme was vehemently objected to by others in

the legislature, including Frdric Bastiat;[46] the reason
given for the income taxs rejection was that it would result in economic ruin and that it violated the right of
property.[47] In his debates with Bastiat, Proudhon did
once propose funding a national bank with a voluntary
tax of 1%.[48] Proudhon also argued for the abolition of
all taxes.[49]

16.2.3

Contract and federation

Mutualism holds that producers should exchange their

goods at cost-value using systems of contract. While
Proudhons early denitions of cost-value were based on
xed assumptions about the value of labor-hours, he later
redened cost-value to include other factors such as the
intensity of labor, the nature of the work involved, etc.
He also expanded his notions of contract into expanded
notions of federation. As Proudhon argued,

16.2.4

Gradualism and dual-power

Main article: Dual power

Beneath the governmental machinery, in

the shadow of political institutions, out of the
sight of statemen and priests, society is producing its own organism, slowly and silently; and
constructing a new order, the expression of its
vitality and autonomy...[51]

16.3 Mutualism and capitalism

Pierre Joseph Proudhon was one of the most famous
philosophers who articulated thoughts on the nature of
property. He is known for claiming that "property is
theft", but is less known for the claims that property
is liberty and property is impossible. According to
Colin Ward, Proudhon did not see a contradiction between these slogans. This was because Proudhon distinguished between what he considered to be two distinct
forms of property often bound up in the single label. To
the mutualist, this is the distinction between property created by coercion and property created by labor. Property
is theft when it is related to a landowner or capitalist
whose ownership is derived from conquest or exploitation and [is] only maintained through the state, property
laws, police, and an army. Property is freedom for the
peasant or artisan family [who have] a natural right to a
home, land [they may] cultivate, [...] to tools of a trade,
and the fruits of that cultivation but not to ownership
or control of the lands and lives of others. The former
is considered illegitimate property, the latter legitimate
property.

Proudhon argued that property in the product of labor is

essential to liberty, while property that strayed from possession (occupancy and use) was the basis for tyranny
and would lead a society to destroy itself. The conception
of entitlement property as a destructive force and illegitimate institution can be seen in this quote by Proudhon,
Then if we are associated for the sake of
liberty, equality, and security, we are not associated for the sake of property; then if property
is a natural right, this natural right is not social,
but anti-social. Property and society are utterly irreconcilable institutions. It is as impossible to associate two proprietors as to join two
magnets by their opposite poles. Either society must perish, or it must destroy property. If
property is a natural, absolute, imprescriptible,
and inalienable right, why, in all ages, has there
been so much speculation as to its origin? for
this is one of its distinguishing characteristics.
The origin of a natural right! Good God! who
ever inquired into the origin of the rights of liberty, security, or equality? (What is Property?)
Mutualist, Clarence Lee Swartz, says in What is Mutualism:
It is, therefore, one of the purposes of
Mutualists, not only to awaken in the people the appreciation of and desire for freedom, but also to arouse in them a determination to abolish the legal restrictions now placed
upon non-invasive human activities and to institute, through purely voluntary associations,
such measures as will liberate all of us from the
exactions of privilege and the power of concentrated capital.
Swartz also states that mutualism diers from anarchocommunism and other collectivist philosophies by its support of private property: One of the tests of any reform
movement with regard to personal liberty is this: Will
the movement prohibit or abolish private property? If it
does, it is an enemy of liberty. For one of the most important criteria of freedom is the right to private property
in the products of ones labor. State Socialists, Communists, Syndicalists and Communist-Anarchists deny private property.
However, Proudhon warned that a society with private
property without equality would lead to statist-like relations between people.
The purchaser draws boundaries, fences
himself in, and says, 'This is mine; each one
by himself, each one for himself.' Here, then,
is a piece of land upon which, henceforth, no
one has right to step, save the proprietor and

16.5. SEE ALSO

his friends; which can benet nobody, save the
proprietor and his servants. Let these multiply,
and soon the people ... will have nowhere to
rest, no place of shelter, no ground to till. They
will die of hunger at the proprietors door, on
the edge of that property which was their birthright; and the proprietor, watching them die,
will exclaim, 'So perish idlers and vagrants.'[52]
Unlike capitalist private-property supporters, Proudhon
stressed equality. He thought all workers should own
property and have access to capital. He stressed that in
every cooperative every worker employed in the association [must have] an undivided share in the property of the
company.[53] This distinction Proudhon made between
dierent kinds of property has been articulated by some
later anarchist and socialist theorists as one of the rst
distinctions between private property and personal property; the latter having actual use-value to the individual
possessing it.

185
from the skies, bringing with them speech, will, original
thought, and as if they were alien to anything of the earth,
that is, anything having social origin.[62]
Criticism from pro-market sectors has been common as
well. Economist George Reisman charges that mutualism supports exploitation when it does not recognize a
right of an individual to protect land that he has mixed
his labor with if he happens to not be using it. Reisman
sees the seizure of such land as the theft of the product
of labor and has said that Mutualism claims to oppose
the exploitation of labor, i.e. the theft of any part of its
product. But when it comes to labor that has been mixed
with land, it turns a blind eye out foursquare on the side
of the exploiter.[63]

16.5 See also

Labor theory of property
Left-libertarianism

16.4 Criticisms
In Europe a contemporary critic of Proudhon was the
early anarchist communist Joseph Djacque[54][55] Unlike
and against Proudhon, he argued that, it is not the product of his or her labor that the worker has a right to, but to
the satisfaction of his or her needs, whatever may be their
nature.[56][57][58] Returning to New York he was able to
serialise his book in his periodical Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement social. Published in 27 issues from
June 9, 1858, to February 4, 1861, Le Libertaire was the
rst anarcho-communist journal published in the United
States.

Libertarian socialism
Socialist economics
Syndicalism
Worker cooperative
Workplace democracy
Workers self-management

16.6 Notes and references

One area of disagreement between mutualists and 16.6.1 Notes

anarchist communists stems from Proudhons advocacy
1. ^ Involved with radical politics and in his contact
of money and later labour vouchers to compensate indiwith the Marxists, he [Proudhon] soon rejected their
viduals for their labor as well as markets or articial mardoctrine, seeking rather a middle way between sokets for goods and services. Peter Kropotkin, like other
cialist theories and classical economics. - Irving
anarchist communists, advocated the abolition of labor
Horowitz, The Anarchists, 1964, Dell Publishing
remuneration and questioned, how can this new form of
wages, the labor note, be sanctioned by those who admit
2. ^ Some critics object to the use of the term capthat houses, elds, mills are no longer private property,
italism in reference to historical or actually existthat they belong to the commune or the nation?"[59] Acing economic arrangements, which they term mixed
cording to George Woodcock, Kropotkin believed that
economies. They reserve the term for the abstract
a wage system in any form, whether administered by
ideal or future possibility of a genuinely free market.
Banks of the People or by workers associations through
This sort of free-market capitalism may closely follabor cheques" is a form of compulsion.[60]
low Carsons free-market anti-capitalism in its pracCollectivist anarchist Michael Bakunin was an adamant
tical details except for the fact that Carson does not
critic of Proudhonian mutualism as well,[61] stating, How
recognize a right of an individual to protect land that
ridiculous are the ideas of the individualists of the Jean
he has transformed through labor or purchased to
Jacques Rousseau school and of the Proudhonian mutualbe protected when he is not using it. Carson, like
ists who conceive society as the result of the free contract
other mutualists, only recognize occupancy and use
of individuals absolutely independent of one another and
as the standard for retaining legitimate control over
entering into mutual relations only because of the convensomething. According to Carson, For mutualists,
tion drawn up among men. As if these men had dropped
occupancy and use is the only legitimate standard

186

CHAPTER 16. MUTUALISM (ECONOMIC THEORY)

for establishing ownership of land, regardless of how
many times it has changed hands. An existing owner
may transfer ownership by sale or gift; but the new
owner may establish legitimate title to the land only
by his own occupancy and use. A change in occupancy will amount to a change in ownership. Absentee landlord rent, and exclusion of homesteaders
from vacant land by an absentee landlord, are both
considered illegitimate by mutualists. The actual occupant is considered the owner of a tract of land, and
any attempt to collect rent by a self-styled landlord
is regarded as a violent invasion of the possessors
absolute right of property. (p. 200. of Carsons
Mutualist Political Economy).

3. ^ See The Iron Fist Behind The Invisible Hand.

4. ^ For mutualists, occupancy and use is the only legitimate standard for establishing ownership of land,
regardless of how many times it has changed hands.
According the mutualist Kevin Carson A change in
occupancy will amount to a change in ownership.
An existing owner may transfer ownership by sale or
gift; but the new owner may establish legitimate title
to the land only by his own occupancy and use. A
change in occupancy will amount to a change in
ownership. Absentee landlord rent, and exclusion
of homesteaders from vacant land by an absentee
landlord, are both considered illegitimate by mutualists. The actual occupant is considered the owner
of a tract of land, and any attempt to collect rent
by a self-styled landlord is regarded as a violent invasion of the possessors absolute right of property.
(p. 200. of Carsons Mutualist Political Economy.
(editors emphasis)

Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought, Blackwell

Publishing 1991 ISBN 0-631-17944-5, p.11
[9] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property?, p. 281.
[10] Tucker, Benjamin, State Socialism and Anarchism, State
Socialism and Anarchism
[11] Fourier, Charles, Trait (1822), cited in Arthur E. Bestor,
Jr., The Evolution of the Socialist Vocabulary, Journal
of the History of Ideas, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Jun., 1948), 259302.
[12] New-Harmony Gazette, I, 301-02 (14 June 1826) cited in
Arthur E. Bestor, Jr., The Evolution of the Socialist Vocabulary, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 9, No. 3
(Jun., 1948), 259-302.
[13] Woodcock, George. Anarchism: A History Of Libertarian Ideas And Movements. Broadview Press. p. 100
[14] Swartz, Clarence Lee. What is Mutualism?
[15] Joshua King Ingalls, A Practical Movement for Transition, Spirit of the Age, II, 13 (March 30, 1850), p. 2024.
[16] Albert Brisbane, The Mutualist Township, The Spirit of
the Age, II, 12 (March 23, 1850), 179-183.; II, 13 (March
30, 1850), 200-202.
[17] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, The Coming Era of Mutualism, Spirit of the Age, I, 7 (August 18, 1849), 107-8.
[18] Wendy McElroy. The culture of individualist anarchist
in Late-nineteenth century America
[19] Native American Anarchism: A Study of Left-Wing American Individualism by Eunice Minette Schuster
[20] Individual Liberty by Benjamin Tucker

16.6.2

References

[21] Anarchism at the Encyclopedia Britannica online.

[1] Introduction. Mutualist.org. Retrieved 2010-04-29.

[22] George Woodcock. Anarchism: a history of libertarian

movements. Pg. 357

[2] Miller, David. 1987. Mutualism. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought. Blackwell Publishing. p.
11

[23] George Woodcock. Anarchism: a history of libertarian

movements. Pg. 357

[3] Tandy, Francis D., 1896, Voluntary Socialism, chapter 6,

paragraph 15.
[4] Proudhons Solution of the Social Problem, Edited by
Henry Cohen. Vanguard Press, 1927.
[5] Swartz, Clarence Lee. What is Mutualism? VI. Land and
Rent
[6] Woodcock, George. Anarchism: A History of Libertarian
Ideas and Movements, Broadview Press, 2004, p. 20
[7] Carson, Kevin A. Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
Preface.
[8] Avrich, Paul. Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America, Princeton University Press 1996 ISBN
0-69-04494-5, p.6

[24] Anarchosyndicalism by Rudolf Rocker

[25] History of The First International by G. M. Steklo. London. Martin Lawrence Limited
[26] History of The First International by G. M. Steklo. London. Martin Lawrence Limited
[27] History of The First International by G. M. Steklo. London. Martin Lawrence Limited
[28] History of The First International by G. M. Steklo. London. Martin Lawrence Limited
[29] A Mutualist FAQ: A.4. Are Mutualists Socialists?". Mutualist.org. Retrieved 2010-04-29.
[30] Libertarian Socialism by Paul E. Gagnon

16.6. NOTES AND REFERENCES

187

[31] Hymans, E., Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, pp. 1901,

Woodcock, George. Anarchism: A History of Libertarian
Ideas and Movements, Broadview Press, 2004, pp. 110 &
112

[49] Henry Cohen, ed. Proudhons Solution of the Social Problem. Vanguard Press, 1927. p 46.

[32] General Idea of the Revolution, Pluto Press, pp. 215216

and p. 277

[51] Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth

Century. Translated by John Beverly Robinson. New
York: Haskell House Publishers, Ltd., 1923, 1969 [1851].
p 243.

[33] Woodcock, George (1962). Anarchism: A History of

Libertarian Ideas and Movements. The World Publishing
Company. ISBN 978-0140168211.
[34] Kevin Carson. Studies in Mutualist Political Economy.
[35] Carson, Kevin. Mutualist Political Economy, Preface
[36] Carson, Kevin A. Carsons Rejoinders. Journal of Libertarian Studies, Volume 20, No. 1 (Winter 2006): 97-136,
pp. 116, 117
[37] Ryan, John Augustine. Distributive Justice: The Right
and Wrong of Our Present Distribution of Wealth.
Macmillan. 1916. p 342
[38] Some background about the name: What is mutualism?".
Mutualism.de. Retrieved 2010-04-29.
[39] Guerin, Daniel (ed.) No Gods, No Masters, AK Press, vol.
1, p. 62
[40] The General Idea of the Revolution, Pluto Press, p. 277
and p. 281
[41] Introduction, General Idea of the Revolution, p. xxxii
[42] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican
Socialism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1984, p. 230
and p. 156
[43] Anderson, Edwin Robert. 1911. The Income Tax: A
Study of the History, Theory and Practice of Income Taxation at Home and Abroad. The MacMillan Company. p.
279
[44] Burton, Richard D. E. 1991. Baudelaire and the Second Republic: Writing and Revolution. Oxford University Press. p. 122
[45] Corkran, John Frazer. 1849. History of the National Constituent Assembly, from May, 1848. Harper & Brothers.
p. 275
[46] Martin, Henri, & Alger, Abby Langdon. A Popular History of France from the First Revolution to the Present
Time. D. Estes and C.E. Lauria. p. 189
[47] Augello, Massimo M., Luigi, Marco Enrico. 2005.
Economists in Parliament in the Liberal Age. Ashgate
Publishing, Ltd. p. 123
[48] Suppose that all the producers in the republic, numbering
more than ten millions, tax themselves, each one, to the
amount of only one per cent of their capital ... Suppose
that by means of this tax a bank be founded, in Competition with the Bank (miscalled) of France, discounting and
giving credit on mortgages at the rate of one-half of one
per cent. Henry Cohen, ed. Proudhons Solution of the
Social Problem. Vanguard Press, 1927. pp 1189.

[50] System of Economical Contradictions, p. 202

[52] Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. What is Property? p. 118

[53] quoted by James J. Martin. Men Against the State, p. 223
[54] Joseph Djacque, De l'tre-humain mle et femelle - Lettre P.J. Proudhon par Joseph Djacque (in French)
[55] The Anarchist FAQ Editorial Collective. 150 years of
Libertarian.
[56] Graham, Robert (2005). Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas: from Anarchy to Anarchism
(300 Ce to 1939). Black Rose Books. ISBN 978-155164-251-2.
[57] l'Echange, article in Le Libertaire no 6, September 21,
1858, New York.
[58] Djacque criticized French mutualist anarchist Pierre
Joseph Proudhon as far as the Proudhonist version of
Ricardian socialism, centred on the reward of labour
power and the problem of exchange value. In his
polemic with Proudhon on womens emancipation, Djacque urged Proudhon to push on as far as the abolition of the contract, the abolition not only of the sword
and of capital, but of property and authority in all their
forms, and refuted the commercial and wages logic of
the demand for a fair reward for labour (labour power).
Djacque asked: Am I thus... right to want, as with the
system of contracts, to measure out to each according
to their accidental capacity to produce what they are
entitled to? The answer given by Djacque to this question is unambiguous: it is not the product of his or her
labour that the worker has a right to, but to the satisfaction of his or her needs, whatever may be their nature.
[...] For Djacque, on the other hand, the communal state
of aairs the phalanstery without any hierarchy, without any authority except that of the statistics book
corresponded to natural exchange, i.e. to the unlimited
freedom of all production and consumption; the abolition
of any sign of agricultural, individual, artistic or scientic property; the destruction of any individual holding of
the products of work; the demonarchisation and the demonetarisation of manual and intellectual capital as well
as capital in instruments, commerce and buildings.Alain
Pengam. Anarchist-Communism
[59] Kropotkin, Peter. The Wage System, Freedom Pamphlets
No. 1, New Edition 1920
[60] Woodcock, George. Anarchism: A History of Libertarian
Ideas and Movements. Broadview Press 2004. p. 168
[61] Bookchin, Murray. The Spanish Anarchists. AK Press.
1996. p. 25

188

[62] Cited in Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism by

Murray Bookchin, from Maximo, Political Philosophy
of Bakunin, p. 167
[63] Reisman, George. Mutualisms Support for the Exploitation of Labor and State Coercion.

16.7 Bibliography
Thomas B Backer. The mutualists : the heirs of
Proudhon in the rst international, 18651878. University of Cincinnati, 1978

16.8 External links

Mutualism from The Conquest of Power, by Albert
Weisbord
Plan of the Cincinnati Labor for Labor Store by
Josiah Warren
Proudhon and Anarchism by Larry Gambone
contains a discussion on Proudhonist mutualism
Mutual Banking by William B. Greene
What is Mutualism? by Clarence Lee Swartz (1927)
- A classic text on Mutualism
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution Peter Kropotkin
1902
Anarchist-Mutualism by John William Lloyd, a criticism
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy by Kevin Carson. For more of Carsons points of view about mutualism you can check his blog.
Journal of Libertarian Studies Vol. 20 Num. 1. This
issue is devoted to Kevin Carsons Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. It includes critiques and Carsons rejoinders.
Mutualism: A Philosophy for Thieves by George
Reisman.

CHAPTER 16. MUTUALISM (ECONOMIC THEORY)

Chapter 17

Collectivist anarchism
Collectivist anarchism (also known as anarchocollectivism) is a revolutionary[1] anarchist doctrine that
advocates the abolition of both the state and private ownership of the means of production. It instead envisions the
means of production being owned collectively and controlled and managed by the producers themselves.
For the collectivization of the means of production, it
was originally envisaged that workers will revolt and
forcibly collectivize the means of production.[1] Once
collectivization takes place, money would be abolished
to be replaced with labour notes and workers' salaries
would be determined, in democratic organizations of
voluntary membership, based on job diculty and the
amount of time they contributed to production. These
salaries would be used to purchase goods in a communal market.[2] This contrasts with anarcho-communism
where wages would be abolished, and where individuals
would take freely from a storehouse of goods to each according to his need. Thus, Bakunins Collectivist Anarchism, notwithstanding the title, is seen as a blend of
individualism and collectivism.[3]
Collectivist anarchism is most commonly associated with
Mikhail Bakunin, the anti-authoritarian sections of the
First International, and the early Spanish anarchist movement.
Collectivist anarchist Mikhail Bakunin

17.1 The First International

[4]

Giuseppe Fanelli met Bakunin at Ischia in 1866. In

October 1868 Bakunin sponsored Fanelli to travel to
Barcelona to share his libertarian visions and recruit revolutionists to the International Workingmens Association.[5] Fanellis trip and the meeting he organised during
his travels provided the catalyst for the Spanish exiles, the
largest workers and peasants movement in modern Spain
and the largest Anarchist movement in modern Europe.[6]
Fanellis tour took him rst to Barcelona, where he met
and stayed with Elie Recluse.[6] Recluse and Fanelli were
at odds over Recluses friendships with Spanish republicans, and Fanelli soon left Barcelona for Madrid.[6]
Fanelli stayed in Madrid until the end of January 1869,
conducting meetings to introduce Spanish workers, including Anselmo Lorenzo, to the First National.[7] In

February 1869 Fanelli left Madrid, journeying home

via Barcelona.[4] While in Barcelona again, he met with
painter Jos Lus Pellicer and his nephew, Rafael Farga
Pellicer along with others who were to play an important
role establishing the International in Barcelona,[4] as well
as the Alliance section.
In 1870 Bakunin led a failed uprising in Lyon on the
principles later exemplied by the Paris Commune, calling for a general uprising in response to the collapse of
the French government during the Franco-Prussian War,
seeking to transform an imperialist conict into social
revolution. In his Letters to A Frenchman on the Present
Crisis, he argued for a revolutionary alliance between the
working class and the peasantry, advocated a system of
militias with elected ocers as part of a system of selfgoverning communes and workplaces, and argued the

189

190

CHAPTER 17. COLLECTIVIST ANARCHISM

time was ripe for revolutionary action:

we must spread our principles, not with
words but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible
form of propaganda.[8]
These ideas and corresponded strikingly closely with the
program of the Paris Commune of 1871, much of which
was developed by followers of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon;
Marxists were almost entirely absent from the Commune.
Bakunin was a strong supporter of the Commune, which
was brutally suppressed by the French government. He
saw the Commune as above all a rebellion against the
State, and commended the Communards for rejecting
not only the State but also revolutionary dictatorship.[9]
In a series of powerful pamphlets, he defended the Commune and the First International against the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, thereby winning over many
Italian republicans to the International and the cause of
revolutionary socialism. The collectivist anarchists at rst
used the term collectivism to distinguish themselves
from the mutualism of the followers of Proudhon and
the state socialists associated with Karl Marx. Bakunin
wrote, we shall always protest against anything that
may in any way resemble communism or state socialism, which Bakunin regarded as fundamentally authoritarian (Federalism, Socialism, and Anti-Theologism,
1867).[10]
Bakunins disagreements with Marx, which led to the
attempt by the Marx party to expel him at the Hague
Congress (see below), illustrated the growing divergence
between the "anti-authoritarian" sections of the International, which advocated the direct revolutionary action
and organization of the workers and peasants in order
to abolish the state and capitalism, and the sections allied with Marx, which advocated the conquest of political power by the working class. Bakunin was Marxs
amboyant chief opponent, and presciently warned
against the emergence of a communist authoritarianism
that would take power over working people.[11]

The anti-authoritarian sections of the First International

proclaimed at the St. Imier Congress (1872) that the aspirations of the proletariat can have no purpose other than
the establishment of an absolutely free economic organization and federation, founded upon the labour and equality of all and absolutely independent of all political government, in which each worker will have the right to the
enjoyment of the gross product of his labours and thereby
the means of developing his full intellectual, material and
moral powers in a collective setting. This revolutionary
transformation could only be the outcome of the spontaneous action of the proletariat itself, its trades bodies
and the autonomous communes.[14] A similar position
was adopted by the Workers Federation of the Spanish
Region in 1882, as articulated by an anarchist veteran of
the First International, Jose Llunas Pujols, in his essay,
Collectivism.[14]
By the early 1880s, most of the European anarchist movement had adopted an anarchist communist position, advocating the abolition of wage labour and distribution according to need. Ironically, the collectivist label then
became more commonly associated with Marxist state socialists who advocated the retention of some sort of wage
system during the transition to full communism. The anarchist communist, Peter Kropotkin, attacked this position in his essay, The Collectivist Wages System, which
was reprinted in his book The Conquest of Bread in 1892.

17.2 Theory

Bakunins socialism was known as collectivist anarchism, where socially: it seeks the conrmation of political equality by economic equality. This is not the removal of natural individual dierences, but equality in
the social rights of every individual from birth; in particular, equal means of subsistence, support, education, and
The anti-authoritarian majority, which included most
opportunity for every child, boy or girl, until maturity,
sections of the International, created their own First Inand equal resources and facilities in adulthood to create
ternational at the St. Imier Congress, adopted a revohis own well-being by his own labor.[15]
lutionary anarchist program, and repudiated the Hague
resolutions, rescinding Bakunins alleged expulsion [12] Collectivist anarchism advocates the abolition of both
Although Bakunin accepted elements of Marxs class the state and private ownership of the means of producanalysis and theories regarding capitalism, acknowledg- tion. It instead envisions the means of production being Marxs genius, he thought Marxs analysis was ing owned collectively and controlled and managed by
one-sided, and that Marxs methods would compromise the producers themselves. For the collectivization of
the social revolution. More importantly, Bakunin criti- the means of production, it was originally envisaged that
cized "authoritarian socialism" (which he associated with workers will revolt and forcibly collectivize the means of
Marxism) and the concept of dictatorship of the prole- production.[1] Once collectivization takes place, money
would be abolished to be replaced with labour notes and
tariat which he adamantly refused.
workers' salaries would be determined in democratic orIf you took the most ardent revolutionary,
ganizations based on job diculty and the amount of
vested him in absolute power, within a year he
time they contributed to production. These salaries would
would be worse than the Tsar himself.[13]
be used to purchase goods in a communal market.[16]

17.2. THEORY

191
the people and free organization of the toiling
masses from the bottom up.
Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchism[19]

While both social anarchists and Marxists share the same

nal goal, the creation of a free, egalitarian society
without social classes and government, they strongly disagree on how to achieve this goal. Anarchists believe
that the classless, stateless society should be established
by the direct action of the masses, culminating in social
revolution, and refuse any intermediate stage such as the
dictatorship of the proletariat, on the basis that such a
dictatorship will become a self-perpetuating fundament.
For Bakunin, the fundamental contradiction is that for the
Marxists, anarchism or freedom is the aim, while the
state and dictatorship is the means, and so, in order to
free the masses, they have rst to be enslaved.[20]
However, Bakunin also wrote of meeting Marx in 1844
that:

Bakunin speaking to members of the IWA at the Basel Congress

in 1869

17.2.1

Critique of Marxism

The dispute between Mikhail Bakunin and Karl Marx

highlighted the dierences between anarchism and
Marxism. Bakunin arguedagainst certain ideas of a
number of Marxiststhat not all revolutions need be
violent. He also strongly rejected Marxs concept of
the "dictatorship of the proletariat", a concept that vanguardist socialism including Marxist-Leninism would use
to justify one-party rule from above by a party 'representing' the proletariat.[17] Bakunin insisted that revolutions must be led by the people directly while any enlightened elite must only exert inuence by remaining
"invisible...not imposed on anyone...[and] deprived of all
ocial rights and signicance.[18] He held that the state
should be immediately abolished because all forms of
government eventually lead to oppression.[17] Libertarian
Marxists argue Marx used the phrase to mean the worker
control at the point of production, not a party, would still
be a state until society is reorganized according to socialist principles.
They [the Marxists] maintain that only a
dictatorshiptheir dictatorship, of course
can create the will of the people, while our
answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any
other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it
can beget only slavery in the people tolerating
it; freedom can be created only by freedom,
that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of

As far as learning was concerned, Marx

was, and still is, incomparably more advanced
than I. I knew nothing at that time of political
economy, I had not yet rid myself of my metaphysical observations... He called me a sentimental idealist and he was right; I called him a
vain man, perdious and crafty, and I also was
right.[21]
Bakunin found Marxs economic analysis very useful and
began the job of translating Das Kapital into Russian. In
turn Marx wrote of the rebels in the Dresden insurrection
of 1848 that In the Russian refugee Michael Bakunin
they found a capable and cool headed leader.[22] Marx
wrote to Engels of meeting Bakunin in 1864 after his
escape to Siberia saying On the whole he is one of the
few people whom I nd not to have retrogressed after 16
years, but to have developed further.[23]
Bakunin has sometimes been called the rst theorist of
the "new class", meaning that a 'class of intellectuals and
bureaucrats running the state in the name of the people
or the proletariat but in reality in their own interests
alone. Bakunin argued that the State has always been
the patrimony of some privileged class: a priestly class,
an aristocratic class, a bourgeois class. And nally, when
all the other classes have exhausted themselves, the State
then becomes the patrimony of the bureaucratic class and
then fallsor, if you will, risesto the position of a
machine.[24]
Also Bakunin had a dierent view as compared to Marxs
on the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat
and the proletariat. As such Both agreed that the proletariat would play a key role, but for Marx the proletariat was the exclusive, leading revolutionary agent while
Bakunin entertained the possibility that the peasants and
even the lumpenproletariat (the unemployed, common

192

CHAPTER 17. COLLECTIVIST ANARCHISM

criminals, etc.) could rise to the occasion.[25] Bakunin

considers workers integration in capital as destructive of
more primary revolutionary forces. For Bakunin, the revolutionary archetype is found in a peasant milieu (which
is presented as having longstanding insurrectionary traditions, as well as a communist archetype in its current social formthe peasant commune) and amongst educated
unemployed youth, assorted marginals from all classes,
brigands, robbers, the impoverished masses, and those on
the margins of society who have escaped, been excluded
from, or not yet subsumed in the discipline of emerging
industrial work...in short, all those whom Marx sought to
include in the category of the lumpenproletariat.[26]

according to his needs.[27]

The dierence between collectivist anarchism and anarchist communism is that collectivist anarchism stresses
collective ownership of productive, subsistence and distributary property, while communist anarchism negates
the concept of ownership in favor of usage or possession
with productive means being a possession not owned by
any individual or particular group.[28][29] Communist Anarchists believe that subsistence, productive and distributive property should be common or social possessions
while personal property should be private possessions.[30]
Collectivist anarchists agree with this, however, disagree
on the subject of remuneration; some collectivist anarchists, such as Mikhail Bakunin, believe in the remuneration of labor, while communist anarchists, such as
Peter Kropotkin, believe that such remuneration would
lead to the recreation of currency and that this would need
a State.[31] Thus, it could be said that collectivist anarchists believe in freedom through collective ownership of
production and a communal market of sorts to distribute
goods and services and compensate workers in the form
of remuneration. Thus, collectivist anarchism could be
seen as a combination of communism and mutualism.
Collectivist anarchists are not necessarily opposed to the
use of currency, but some while opposing the retaining of
money propose the adoption of labour vouchers or personal credit (such as Participatory Economists). Most
collectivist anarchists see their philosophy as a carryover
to communist anarchism, but some see the system and
the use of a labour voucher system as permanent rather
than a transition. Collectivist anarchist James Guillaume
argued that such a society would guarantee the mutual
use of the tools of production which are the property of
each of these groups and which will by a reciprocal contract become the collective property of the whole ... federation. In this way, the federation of groups will be able to
... regulate the rate of production to meet the uctuating
needs of society. [32] They argue for workplace autonomy
and self-management the workers in the various factories have not the slightest intention of handing over their
hard-won control of the tools of production to a superior
power calling itself the 'corporation.'"[33]

Statism and Anarchy by Bakunin, Russian rst print 1873

17.2.2

The Anarchist FAQ compares and contrasts collectivist

anarchism with communist anarchism this way:
The collectivist anarchists at rst used the term collec-

Comparison with communist anar- tivism to distinguish themselves from the mutualism of
chism
the followers of Proudhon and the state socialists associ-

The dierence between collectivist anarchism and

anarchist communism is that under the former, a wage
system is retained based on the amount of labor performed. Anarchist communism, like collectivist anarchism, also advocates for the socialization of production,
but the distribution of goods as well. Instead of 'to each
according to his labor', in anarcho-communism the community would supply the subsistence requirements to each
member free of charge according to the maxim 'to each

ated with Karl Marx. Bakunin wrote, we shall always

protest against anything that may in any way resemble
communism or state socialism, which Bakunin regarded
as fundamentally authoritarian (Federalism, Socialism,
and Anti-Theologism, 1867).[36]

17.6. REFERENCES

193

17.3 Performance

[3] Morriss, Brian. Bakukunin: The Philosophy of Freedom.

Black Rose Books Ltd., 1993. p. 115

Application of many collectivist anarchists projects have

been successful,[37] sources during the Spanish Revolution noted that in the Catalan region,

[4] Bookchin 1998, p. 14.

Tom Wetzel describes another collectivization...

[6] Bookchin 1998, p. 12.

[5] Bookchin 1998, pp. 1215.

[7] Bookchin 1998, p. 13.

17.4 People
Michael Albert
Mikhail Bakunin
Giuseppe Fanelli
Sam Dolgo
Luce Fabbri
Luigi Fabbri
Mick Farren
Frank Fernndez (writer)
James Guillaume
Ricardo Mella
Robin Hahnel
Gustav Landauer
Anselmo Lorenzo
Csar De Paepe

17.5 See also

Direct democracy
Participatory Economics
Workers council
Workers self-management

17.6 References

[8] Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis, Mikhail

Bakunin, 1870
[9] The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State, Mikhail
Bakunin, 1871
[10] http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/
works/various/reasons-of-state.htm
[11] Verslius, Arthur (2005-06-20) Death of the Left?, The
American Conservative
[12] Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas
Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE to
1939), Robert Graham, Black Rose Books, March 2005
[13] Quoted in Daniel Guerin, Anarchism: From Theory to
Practice (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970),
pp.2526.
[14] No prole created for this contactAnarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume One |.
Black Rose Books. Retrieved on 2013-07-12.
[15] Revolutionary Catechism, Mikhail Bakunin, 1866
[16] Bakunin Mikail. Bakunin on Anarchism. Black Rose
Books. 1980. p. 369
[17] Woodcock, George (1962, 1975). Anarchism, 158. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14020622-1.
[18] Was Bakunin a secret authoritarian?, Struggle.ws, retrieved 2009-09-08
[19] Anarchist Theory FAQ Version 5.2, Gmu.edu, retrieved
2009-09-08
[20] Mikhail Bakunin, Works of Mikhail Bakunin 1873, Marxists.org, retrieved 2009-09-08
[21] Quoted in Brian Morris, Bakunin: The Philosophy of
Freedom, 1993, p14
[22] New York Daily Tribune (October 2, 1852) on 'Revolution and Counter Revolution in Germany'

Bookchin, Murray (1998), The Spanish Anarchists: [23] Quoted in Brian Morris, Bakunin: The Philosophy of
Freedom, 1993, p29
The Heroic Years 18681936, Canada: AK Press,
ISBN 1-873176-04-X
[24]

[1] Patsouras, Louis. 2005. Marx in Context. iUniverse. p.

54

[25] Marxism and Anarchism: The Philosophical Roots of the

Marx-Bakunin Conict Part Two by Ann Robertson.

[2] Bakunin Mikail. Bakunin on Anarchism. Black Rose

Books. 1980. p. 369

[26] Nicholas Thoburn. The lumpenproletariat and the proletarian unnameable in Deleuze, Marx and Politics

194

[27] This paragraph sourced by Shatz, Marshall; Guess, Raymond; Skinner, Quentin. The Conquest of Bread and
Other Writings. Cambridge University Press. p. xvi
[28] Proudhon. What is Property, pp. 395-6
[29] Berkman, Alexander. The ABC of Anarchism, p. 68
[30] What is Anarchism?, p. 217
[31] Kropotkin. Kropotkins Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 162
[32] James Guillaume, Bakunin on Anarchism, p. 376
[33] Guillaume, Bakunin on Anarchism, p. 364
[34] [Anarchism, p. 295]
[35] A.3 What types of anarchism are there?
[36] Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism by Michael
Bakunin. Marxists.org. Retrieved on 2013-07-12.
[37] Workers Power and the Spanish Revolution, by Tom Wetzel, http://libcom.org/library/
workers-power-and-the-spanish-revolution-tom-wetzel
[38] The Anarchist Collectives, p. 114

17.7 External links

The Collectivist Wages System. entry at the
Anarchy Archives Anarcho-communist Peter
Kropotkins criticism of collectivist anarchism,
from The Conquest of Bread
Caegory:Social anarchism

CHAPTER 17. COLLECTIVIST ANARCHISM

Chapter 18

Anarcho-syndicalism
Anarcho-syndicalism (also referred to as revolutionary syndicalism[1] ) is a theory of anarchism which views
revolutionary industrial unionism or syndicalism as a
method for workers in capitalist society to gain control
of an economy and, with that control, inuence broader
society. Syndicalists consider their economic theories a
strategy for facilitating worker self-activity and as an alternative co-operative economic system with democratic
values and production centered on meeting human needs.
The basic principles of anarcho-syndicalism are
solidarity, direct action (action undertaken without the
intervention of third parties such as politicians, bureaucrats and arbitrators) and direct democracy, or workers
self-management. The end goal of anarcho-syndicalism
is to abolish the wage system, regarding it as wage
slavery. Anarcho-syndicalist theory therefore generally
focuses on the labour movement.[2]
Anarcho-syndicalists view the primary purpose of the
state as being the defence of private property, and therefore of economic, social and political privilege, denying
most of its denizens the ability to enjoy material independence and the social autonomy which springs from it.[3]
In contrast with other bodies of thought, particularly with
MarxismLeninism, anarcho-syndicalists deny that there
can be any kind of workers state, or a state which acts in
the interests of workers, as opposed to those of the powerful, and posit that any state with the intention of empowering the workers will inevitably work to empower
itself or the existing elite at the expense of the workers.
Reecting the anarchist philosophy from which it draws
its primary inspiration, anarcho-syndicalism holds to the
idea that power corrupts.[3]

18.1 History
18.1.1

mile Pouget

In September 1903 and March 1904 Sam Mainwaring

published in Britain two issues of a short-lived newspaper called The General Strike, a publication which made
detailed criticisms of the ocialism of union bureaucracy and which publicised strikes in Europe making use
of syndicalist tactics.[5]

18.1.2 Revolutionary Syndicalism and the

International Workers Association

Origins

Hubert Lagardelle wrote that Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

laid out fundamental ideas of anarcho-syndicalism, and
repudiated both capitalism and the state in the process.
He viewed free economic groups and 'struggle', not pacism as dominant in humans.[4]

In 1910, in the middle of the restoration, the

Confederacin Nacional del Trabajo was founded
in Barcelona in a congress of the Catalonian trade
union Solidaridad Obrera (Workers Solidarity) with
the objective of constituting an opposing force to the
then-majority trade union, the socialist UGT and to

195

196

CHAPTER 18. ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM

The Argentine Workers Regional Organisation
(FORA): 200,000,
The General Confederation of Workers in Portugal:
150,000,
The Free Workers Union of Germany (FAUD):
120,000,
The Committee for the Defense of Revolutionary
Syndicalism in France: 100,000,
The Federation du Combattant from Paris: 32,000,

The 1910 Congress in which the spanish CNT was established

The Central Organisation of the Workers of Sweden

(SAC):32,000,

speed up the economic emancipation of the working

class through the revolutionary expropriation of the
bourgeoisie. The CNT started small, counting 26,571
members represented through several trade unions and
other confederations.[6] In 1911, coinciding with its
rst congress, the CNT initiated a general strike that
provoked a Barcelona judge to declare the union illegal
until 1914. That same year of 1911, the trade union
ocially received its name.[6] From 1918 on the CNT
grew stronger. The CNT had an outstanding role in
the events of the La Canadiense general strike, which
paralyzed 70% of industry in Catalonia in 1919, the
year the CNT reached a membership of 700,000.[7]
Around that time, panic spread among employers, giving
rise to the practice of pistolerismo (employing thugs to
intimidate active unionists), causing a spiral of violence
which signicantly aected the trade union. These
pistoleros are credited with killing 21 union leaders in 48
hours.[8]

National Labor Secretariat of the Netherlands:

22,500,
The Industrial Workers of the World in Chile:
20,000,
The Union for Syndicalist Propaganda in Denmark:
600.[13]
The rst secretaries of the International included the
famed writer and activist Rudolph Rocker, along with
Augustin Souchy and Alexander Schapiro. Following the
rst congress, other groups aliated from France, Austria, Denmark, Belgium, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Poland
and Romania. Later, a bloc of unions in the USA, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, Cuba, Costa Rica and
El Salvador also shared the IWAs statutes. The biggest
syndicalist union in the USA, the IWW, considered joining but eventually ruled out aliation in 1936, citing the
IWAs policies on religious and political aliation.[14]
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), although
not anarcho-syndicalist, were informed by developments
in the broader revolutionary syndicalist milieu at the turn
of the 20th century. At its founding congress in 1905,
inuential members with strong anarchist or anarchosyndicalist sympathies like Thomas J. Haggerty, William
Trautmann, and Lucy Parsons contributed to the unions
overall revolutionary syndicalist orientation.[15] Although
the terms anarcho-syndicalism and revolutionary syndicalism are often used interchangeably, the anarchosyndicalist label was not widely used until the early
1920s. The term anarcho-syndicalist only came into
wide use in 19211922 when it was applied polemically as a pejorative term by communists to any syndicalistswho opposed increased control of syndicalism
by the communist parties.[16] In fact, the original statement of aims and principles of the International Workers Association (drafted in 1922) refers not to anarchosyndicalism, but to revolutionary syndicalism or revolutionary unionism,[17][18] depending on the translation.

In 1922 the International Workers Association was

founded in Berlin; the CNT joined immediately. However, the following year, with the rise of Miguel Primo
de Rivera's dictatorship, the labor union was outlawed,
once again.[9] After the end of the war however, with
the workers movement resurgent following the Russian
Revolution, what was to become the modern IWA was
formed, billing itself as the true heir of the original
international.[10] The successful Bolshevik-led revolution
of 1918 in Russia was mirrored by a wave of syndicalist successes worldwide, including the struggle of the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the USA
alongside the creation of mass anarchist unions across
Latin America and huge syndicalist-led strikes in Germany, Portugal, Spain, Italy and France, where it was
noted that neutral (economic, but not political) syndicalism had been swept away. [11] The nal formation of
this new international, then known as the International
Workingmens Association, took place at an illegal conference in Berlin in December 1922, marking an irrevocable break between the international syndicalist move- The Biennio Rosso (English: Red Biennium) was a twoment and the Bolsheviks.[12]
year period, between 1919 and 1920, of intense social
conict in Italy, following the rst world war.[19] The Bi The Italian Syndicalist Union: 500,000 members,
ennio Rosso took place in a context of economic crisis at

18.1. HISTORY

Bandera de la CNT-FAI.

the end of the war, with high unemployment and political

instability. It was characterized by mass strikes, worker
manifestations as well as self-management experiments
through land and factories occupations.[19] In Turin and
Milan, workers councils were formed and many factory
occupations took place under the leadership of anarchosyndicalists. The agitations also extended to the agricultural areas of the Padan plain and were accompanied by
peasant strikes, rural unrests and guerilla conicts between left-wing and right-wing militias. According to
libcom.org, the anarcho-syndicalist trade union Unione
Sindacale Italiana grew to 800,000 members and the
inuence of the Italian Anarchist Union (20,000 members plus Umanita Nova, its daily paper) grew accordingly ... Anarchists were the rst to suggest occupying
workplaces.[20]

197
Many of the largest members of the IWA were broken,
driven underground or wiped out in the 1920s-30s as
fascists came to power in states across Europe and workers switched away from anarchism towards the seeming
success of the Bolshevik model of socialism. In Argentina, the FORA had already begun a process of decline by the time it joined the IWA, having split in 1915
into pro and anti-Bolshevik factions. From 1922, the
anarchist movement there lost most of its membership,
exacerbated by further splits, most notably around the
Severino Di Giovanni aair. It was crushed by General
Uriburus military coup in 1930.[21] Germanys FAUD
struggled throughout the late 1920s and early 30s as the
brownshirts took control of the streets. Its last national
congress in Erfurt in March 1932 saw the union attempt
to form an underground bureau to combat Hitlers fascists, a measure which was never put into practice as mass
arrests decimated the conspirators ranks.[22] The editor
of the FAUD organ Der Syndikalist, Gerhard Wartenberg
was killed in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Karl
Windho, delegate to the IWA Madrid congress of 1931
was driven out of his mind and also died in a Nazi death
camp. There were also mass trials of FAUD members
held in Wuppertal and Rhenanie, many of these never survived the death camps.[13] Italian IWA union the Unione
Sindacale Italiana, which had claimed a membership of
up to 600,000 people in 1922, was warning even at that
time of murders and repression from Benito Mussolini's
fascists.[23] It had been driven underground by 1924 and
although it was still able to lead signicant strikes by miners, metalworkers and marble workers, Mussolinis ascent to power in 1925 sealed its fate. By 1927 its leading
activists had been arrested or exiled.[24]

Portugals CGT was driven underground after an unsuccessful attempt to break the newly installed dictatorship
of Gomes da Costa with a general strike in 1927 which
led to nearly 100 deaths. It survived underground with
15-20,000 members until January 1934, when it called a
general revolutionary strike against plans to replace trade
unions with fascist corporations, which failed. It was able
to continue in a much reduced state until World War II
but was eectively nished as a ghting union.[25] Massive government repression repeated such defeats around
the world, as anarcho-syndicalist unions were destroyed in
Peru, Brazil, Colombia, Japan, Cuba, Bulgaria, Paraguay
and Bolivia. By the end of the 1930s legal anarchosyndicalist trade unions existed only in Chile, Bolivia,
Sweden and Uruguay.[12] But perhaps the greatest blow
was struck in the Spanish Civil War which saw the CNT,
then claiming a membership of 1.58 million, driven underground with the defeat of the Spanish Republic by
Francisco Franco. The sixth IWA congress took place
in 1936, shortly after the Spanish Revolution had begun,
but was unable to provide serious material support for the
section. The IWA held its last pre-war congress in Paris
in 1938, with months to go before the German invasion of
Rudolph Rocker, 1922 International Workers Association Secre- Poland it received an application from ZZZ,[26] a synditary
calist union in the country claiming up to 130,000 work-

198

CHAPTER 18. ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM

ers ZZZ members went on to form a core part of the

resistance against the Nazis, and participated in the Warsaw uprising. But the international was not to meet again
until after World War II had nished, in 1951. During the
war, only one member of the IWA was able to continue to
function as a revolutionary union, the SAC in Sweden.[13]
In 1927 with the moderate positioning of some cenetistas (CNT members) the Federacin Anarquista Ibrica
(FAI), an association of anarchist anity groups, was created in Valencia. The FAI would play an important role
during the following years through the so-called trabazn
(connection) with the CNT, that is, the presence of FAI
elements in the CNT, encouraging the labor union not to
move away from its anarchist principles, an inuence that
continues today.[27]

18.1.3

The Spanish Revolution

all living at the same level and mingling on

terms of equality. In theory it was perfect
equality, and even in practice it was not far
from it. There is a sense in which it would
be true to say that one was experiencing a
foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that
the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of
Socialism. Many of the normal motives of
civilised life snobbishness, money-grubbing,
fear of the boss, etc. had simply ceased to
exist. The ordinary class-division of society
had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England;
there was no one there except the peasants and
ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as
his master.
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, ch.
VII

Main articles: Spanish Revolution and Anarchist Catalonia

On 1 June 1936, the CNT joined the UGT in declar- Some of the most important communities in this respect
were those of Alcaiz, Calanda, Alcorisa, Valderrobres,
Fraga or Alcampel. Not only were the lands collectivized,
but collective labours were also undertaken, like the retirement home in Fraga, the collectivization of some hospitals (such as in Barbastro or Binfar), and the founding of schools such as the School of Anarchist Militants.
These institutions would be destroyed by the Nationalist
troops during the war.

Evolution of the number of aliates in the CNT from 1911 to

1937

ing a strike of building workers, mechanics, and lift

operators. A demonstration was held, 70,000 workers
strong. Members of the Falange attacked the strikers.
The strikers responded by looting shops, and the police
reacted by attempting to suppress the strike. By the beginning of July, the CNT was still ghting, while the UGT
had agreed to arbitration. In retaliation to the attacks
by the Falangists, anarchists killed three bodyguards of
the Falangist leader Jos Antonio Primo de Rivera. The
government then closed the CNTs centers in Madrid,
and arrested David Antona and Cipriano Mera, two CNT
militants.[28]

The Committee held an extraordinary regional plenary

session to protect the new rural organization, gathering
all the union representatives from the supporting villages
and backed by Buenaventura Durruti. Against the will
of the mainly Catalonian CNT National Committee, the
Regional Defence Council of Aragon was created. Following Largo Caballeros assumption of the position of
Prime Minister of the government, he invited the CNT
to join in the coalition of groups making up the national
government. The CNT proposed instead that a National
Defense Council should be formed, led by Largo Caballero, and containing ve members each from the CNT
and UGT, and four liberal republicans. When this proposal was declined, the CNT decided not to join the government. However, in Catalonia, the CNT joined the
Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias, which
joined the Generalitat on 26 September. For the rst
time, three members of the CNT were also members of
the government.[29]

George Orwell wrote of the nature of the new society that

arose in the communities:
In November, Caballero once again asked the CNT to
become part of the government. The leadership of the
I had dropped more or less by chance into
CNT requested the nance and war ministries, as well as
the only community of any size in Western
three others, but were given four posts, the ministries of
Europe where political consciousness and
health, justice, industry, and commerce. With Federica
disbelief in capitalism were more normal than
Montseny became Minister of Health, the rst female
minister in Spain. Juan Garca Oliver, as minister of
their opposites. Up here in Aragn one was
justice, abolished legal fees and destroyed all criminal
among tens of thousands of people, mainly
les. Shortly afterwards, despite the disapproval of the
though not entirely of working-class origin,

18.1. HISTORY

199

anarchist ministers, the capital was moved from Madrid

to Valencia.[30] On 23 December 1936, after receiving
in Madrid a retinue formed by Joaqun Ascaso, Miguel
Chueca and three republican and independent leaders, the
government of Largo Caballero, which by then had four
anarchists as ministers (Garca Oliver, Juan Lpez, Federica Montseny and Joan Peir), approved the formation
of the National Defense Committee. It was a revolutionary body which represented anarchists as much as socialists and republicans. Halfway through February 1937, a
congress took place in Caspe with the purpose of creating the Regional Federation of Collectives of Aragon.
456 delegates, representing more than 141,000 collective
members, attended the congress. The congress was also
attended by delegates of the National Committee of the
CNT.[31]
At a plenary session of the CNT in March 1937, the national committee asked for a motion of censure to suppress the Aragonese Regional Council. The Aragonese
regional committee threatened to resign, which thwarted
the censure eort. Though there had always been disagreements, that spring also saw a great escalation in confrontations between the CNT-FAI and the Communists.
In Madrid, Melchor Rodrguez, who was then a member of the CNT, and director of prisons in Madrid, published accusations that the Communist Jos Cazorla, who
was then overseeing public order, was maintaining secret CNT poster informing about the socialization of the Textiles inprisons to hold anarchists, socialists, and other republi- dustry
cans, and either executing, or torturing them as traitors.
Soon after, on this pretext, Largo Caballero dissolved the
Communist-controlled Junta de Defensa.[32] Cazorla reThese events, the fall of Largo Caballero's government,
acted by closing the oces of Solidaridad Obrera.[33]
and the new prime ministership of Juan Negrn soon led
The next day CNTs regional committee declared a to the collapse of much that the CNT had achieved immegeneral strike. The CNT controlled the majority of the diately following the rising the previous July. At the becity, including the heavy artillery on the hill of Montjuc ginning of July, the Aragonese organizations of the Popuoverlooking the city. CNT militias disarmed more than lar Front publicly declared their support for the alternative
200 members of the security forces at their barricades, council in Aragon, led by their president, Joaqun Ascaso.
allowing only CNT vehicles to pass through.[34] After Four weeks later the 11th Division, under Enrique Lster,
unsuccessful appeals from the CNT leadership to end entered the region. On 11 August 1937, the Republican
the ghting, the government began transferring Assault government, now situated in Valencia, dismissed the ReGuard from the front to Barcelona, and even destroyers gional Council for the Defense of Aragon.[37] Lsters difrom Valencia. On 5 May, the Friends of Durruti is- vision was prepared for an oensive on the Aragonese
sued a pamphlet calling for disarming of the paramili- front, but they were also sent to subdue the collectives run
tary police dissolution of the political parties" and by the CNT-UGT and in dismantling the collective strucdeclared Long live the social revolution! Down with tures created the previous twelve months. The oces of
the counter-revolution!" The pamphlet was quickly de- the CNT were destroyed, and all the equipment belonging
nounced by the leadership of the CNT.[35] The next day, to its collectives was redistributed to landowners.[37] The
the government agreed to a proposal by the leadership CNT leadership not only refused to allow the anarchist
of the CNT-FAI, that called for the removal of the As- columns on the Aragon front to leave the front to defend
sault Guards, and no reprisals against libertarians that had the collectives, but they failed to condemn the governparticipated in the conict, in exchange for the disman- ments actions against the collectives, causing much contling of barricades, and end of the general strike. How- ict between it and the rank and le membership of the
ever, neither the PSUC or the Assault Guards gave up union.[38]
their positions, and according to historian Antony Beevor
carried out violent reprisals against libertarians[36] By 8 In April 1938, Juan Negrn was asked to form a government, and included Segundo Blanco, a member of the
May, the ghting was over.
CNT, as minister of education, and by this point, the only
CNT member left in the cabinet. At this point, many

200

CHAPTER 18. ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM

in the CNT leadership were critical of participation in

the government, seeing it as dominated by the Communists. Prominent CNT leaders went so far as to refer to
Blanco as sop of the libertarian movement[39] and just
one more Negrnist.[40] On the other side, Blanco was responsible for installing other CNT members into the ministry of education, and stopping the spread of Communist propaganda by the ministry.[41] In March 1939, with
the war nearly over, CNT leaders participated in the National Defense Councils coup overthrowing the government of the Socialist Juan Negrn.[42] Those involved included the CNTs Eduardo Val and Jos Manuel Gonzlez
Marn serving on the council, while Cipriano Mera's 70th
Division provided military support, and Melechor Rodrquez became mayor of Madrid.[43] The Council attempted to negotiate a peace with Franco, though he
granted virtually none of their demands.

18.1.4

The Post World War II era

Logo of the French Confdration nationale du travail, established after the war

After World War II, an appeal in the Fraye Arbeter Shtime

detailing the plight of German anarchists and called for
Americans to support them.[44] By February 1946, the
sending of aid parcels to anarchists in Germany was a
large-scale operation. In 1947, Rudolf Rocker published
Zur Betrachting der Lage in Deutschland (Regarding the
Portrayal of the Situation in Germany) about the impossibility of another anarchist movement in Germany. It became the rst post-World War II anarchist writing to be
distributed in Germany. Rocker thought young Germans
were all either totally cynical or inclined to fascism and
awaited a new generation to grow up before anarchism
could bloom once again in the country. Nevertheless, the
Federation of Libertarian Socialists (FFS) was founded in
1947 by former FAUD members. Rocker wrote for its organ, Die Freie Gesellschaft, which survived until 1953.[45]
In 1949, Rocker published another well-known work. On
10 September 1958, Rocker died in the Mohegan Colony.
The Syndicalist Workers Federation was a syndicalist
group in active in post-war Britain,[46] and one of the Solidarity Federations earliest predecessors. It was formed

in 1950 by members of the dissolved Anarchist Federation of Britain.[46] Unlike the AFB, which was inuenced
by anarcho-syndicalist ideas but ultimately not syndicalist itself, the SWF decided to pursue a more denitely
syndicalist, worker-centred strategy from the outset.[46]
The Confdration nationale du travail (CNT, or National
Confederation of Labour) was founded in 1946 by Spanish anarcho-syndicalists in exile with former members of
the CGT-SR. The CNT later split into the CNT-Vignoles
and the CNT-AIT, which is the French section of the
IWA.
At the seventh congress in Toulouse in 1951 a much
smaller IWA was relaunched, again without the CNT,
which would not be strong enough to reclaim membership until 1958 as an exiled and underground organization. Delegates attended, though mostly representing
very small groups, from Cuba, Argentina, Spain, Sweden,
France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Britain, Bulgaria and Portugal. A message of support was received from Uruguay. But the situation remained dicult for the International, as it struggled to deal with the rise of state-sanctioned economic
trade unionism in the West, heavy secret service intervention as Cold War anti-communism reached its height
and the banning of all strikes and free trade unions in the
Soviet Union bloc of countries.[13] At the tenth congress
in 1958, the SACs response to these pressures led it into
a clash with the rest of the international. It withdrew
from the IWA following its failure to amend the bodys
statutes to allow it to stand in municipal elections[47] and
amid concerns over its integration with the state over distribution of unemployment benets.[48] For most of the
next two decades, the international struggled to prebuild
itself. In 1976, at the 15th congress, the IWA had only
ve member groups, two of which (the Spanish and Bulgarian members) were still operating in exile (though following Francos death in 1975, the CNT was already approaching a membership of 200,000).[23]
The Direct Action Movement was formed in 1979, when
the one remaining SWF branch, along with other smaller
anarchist groups, decided to form a new organisation of
anarcho-syndicalists in Britain.[49] The DAM was highly
involved in the Miners Strike as well as a series of industrial disputes later in the 1980s, including the Ardbride dispute in Ardrossan, Scotland, involving a supplier to Laura Ashley, for which the DAM received international support. From 1988 in Scotland, then England and Wales, the DAM was active in opposing the
Poll Tax.[50] In 1994 it adopted its current name, having previously been the Direct Action Movement since
1979, and before that the Syndicalist Workers Federation since 1950. In March 1994, DAM changed its
name to the Solidarity Federation. Presently, the Solidarity Federation publishes the quarterly magazine Direct
Action (presently on hiatus) and the newspaper Catalyst
In 1979 a split over representative unionism, professional
unionism and state-funded schemes saw the CNT di-

18.2. THEORY AND POLITICS

vided into two sections, the CNT as it is today and the
Confederacion General del Trabajo. After Franco's death
in November 1975 and the beginning of Spains transition
to democracy, the CNT was the only social movement to
refuse to sign the 1977 Moncloa Pact,[51] an agreement
amongst politicians, political parties, and trade unions
to plan how to operate the economy during the transition. In 1979, the CNT held its rst congress since 1936
as well as several mass meetings, the most remarkable
one in Montjuc. Views put forward in this congress
would set the pattern for the CNTs line of action for
the following decades: no participation in union elections, no acceptance of state subsidies,[52] no acknowledgment of works councils, and support of union sections. In this rst congress, held in Madrid,[53] a minority
sector in favor of union elections split from the CNT, initially calling themselves CNT Valencia Congress (referring to the alternative congress held in this city), and later
Confederacin General del Trabajo (CGT) after an April
1989 court decision determined that they could not use
the CNT initials.[54] In 1990, a group of CGT members
left this union because they rejected the CGTs policy
of accepting government subsidies, founding Solidaridad
Obrera. One year before, the 1978 Scala Case aected
the CNT. An explosion killed three people in a Barcelona
night club.[55] The authorities alleged that striking workers blew themselves up, and arrested surviving strikers, implicating them in the crime.[56] CNT members
declared that the prosecution sought to criminalize their
organization:[57]

18.1.5

Contemporary times

201
This body is in charge of the repatriation of the accumulated union wealth. In 2004 an agreement was reached
between the CNT and the District Attorneys Oce,
through which all charges were dropped against the hundred prosecuted for this occupation.
On 3 September 2009, six members of the Serbian IWA
section (ASI-MUR), including then-IWA General Secretary Ratibor Trivunac, were arrested[59] on suspicion
of international terrorism, a charge which was heavily
disputed by the international and other anarchist groups.
Shortly after their arrest, an open letter was circulated[60]
by Serbian academics criticizing the charges and the attitude of Serbian police. The six were formally indicted on
December 7 and after a lengthy trial procedure Trivunac,
along with other 5 anarchists, were freed on February
17, 2010. On 10 December 2009, the FAU local in
Berlin was eectively banned as a union following a public industrial dispute at the citys Babylon cinema. At
the XXIV annual congress of the IWA, which was held
in Brazil in December 2009, the rst time the congress
had been held outside Europe, motions of support were
passed for the Belgrade Six and FAU while members of
the Solidarity Federation temporarily took over duties as
Secretariat. The Internationals Norwegian section subsequently took on the Secretariat role in 2010. As part
of the anti-austerity movement in Europe, various IWA
sections have been highly active in the 2008-2012 period, with the CNT taking a leading role in agitating for
the general strikes which have occurred in Spain, the USI
in Milan taking on anti-austerity campaigns in the health
service and the ZSP organizing tenants against abuses in
rented accommodation.[61] "
The largest organised anarchist movement today is in
Spain, in the form of the Confederacin General del Trabajo (CGT) and the CNT. CGT membership was estimated at around 100,000 for 2003.[62] The regions with
the largest CNT membership are the Centre (Madrid
and surrounding area), the North (Basque country), Andaluca, Catalonia and the Balearic Islands.[63] The CNT
opposes the model of union elections and workplace
committees[64] and is critical of labor reforms and the
UGT and the CCOO,[65] standing instead on a platform
of reivindicacin, that is, return of what is due, or social
revolution.[66]

The following organizations are either member groups or

friends of the IWA.[67] Friends of the IWA are regarded
Members of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist trade union CNT as semi-ocial fellow travelers politically but have not
formally joined and do not have voting rights at Congress.
marching in Madrid in 2010
They are often invited to send observers to Congress.
After its legalization, the CNT began eorts to recover
the expropriations of 1939. The basis for such recovery would be established by Law 4/1986, which required
the return of the seized properties, and the unions right 18.2 Theory and politics
to use or yield the real estate. Since then the CNT has
been claiming the return of these properties from the Anarcho-syndicalists believe that direct actionaction
State. In 1996, the Economic and Social Council facil- carried out by workers, as opposed to indirect acities in Madrid were squatted by 105 CNT militants.[58] tion, such as electing a representative to a government

202

CHAPTER 18. ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM

what it sought, and why it was important to the future
of labour in his 1938 pamphlet Anarcho-Syndicalism. In
his article Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism, Rocker
points out that the anarcho-syndicalist union has a dual
purpose, 1. To enforce the demands of the producers for
the safeguarding and raising of their standard of living; 2.
To acquaint the workers with the technical management
of production and economic life in general and prepare
them to take the socio-economic organism into their own
hands and shape it according to socialist principles. In
short, laying the foundations of the new society within
the shell of the old. Up to the First World War and the
Russian Revolution, anarcho-syndicalist unions and organisations were the dominant actors in the revolutionary
left.
Noam Chomsky

Basic outline of syndicalism as an economic system.

positionwould allow workers to liberate themselves.[68]

Anarcho-syndicalists believe that workers organisations
that oppose the wage system will eventually form the
basis of a new society and should be self-managing.
They should not have bosses or business agents"; rather,
the workers alone should decide on that which aects
them.[69]

Noam Chomsky, who was inuenced by Rocker, wrote

the introduction to a modern edition of "Anarchosyndicalism: Theory and Practice". A member of the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Chomsky is a
self-described Anarcho-Syndicalist, a position which he
sees as the appropriate application of classical liberal political theory to contemporary industrial society:
'Now a federated, decentralised system of free associations, incorporating economic as well as other social institutions, would be what I refer to as anarcho-syndicalism;
and it seems to me that this is the appropriate form of social organisation for an advanced technological society in
which human beings do not have to be forced into the position of tools, of cogs in the machine. There is no longer
any social necessity for human beings to be treated as mechanical elements in the productive process; that can be
overcome and we must overcome it to be a society of freedom and free association, in which the creative urge that
I consider intrinsic to human nature will in fact be able to
realize itself in whatever way it will.'[70]

18.3 Anarcho-syndicalist groups

International Workers Association (IWA-AIT)
Anarcho-syndicalist ag.

Confederacin Nacional del Trabajo (CNT-AIT)

Spain

18.2.1

Federao Operria do Rio Grande do Sul Confederao Operria Brasileira (FORGS-COB-AIT)

Brazil

Notable theorists

Rudolf Rocker

Federacin Obrera Regional Argentina (FORAAIT) Argentina

Rudolf Rocker is one of the most inuential gures in

the anarcho-syndicalist movement. He dedicated himself to the organisation of Jewish immigrant workers in
Londons East End and led the 1912 garment workers
strike. He outlined a view of the origins of the movement,

Associao Internacional dos Trabalhadores Seco Portuguesa (AIT-SP) Portugal

Anarho-sindikalistika inicijativa (ASI-MUR) Serbia

18.4. CRITICISMS AND RESPONSES

203

18.4 Criticisms and responses

Anarcho-syndicalism has been criticised as anachronistic
by some contemporary anarchists.[71] Murray Bookchin
in 1992 spoke against its reliance on an outdated view of
work:
As practical and realistic as anarchosyndicalism may seem, it represents in my
view an archaic ideology rooted in a narrowly
economistic notion of bourgeois interest, indeed of a sectorial interest as such. It relies
on the persistence of social forces like the factory system and the traditional class consciousness of the industrial proletariat that are waning radically in the Euro-American world in
an era of indenable social relations and everbroadening social concerns. Broader movements and issues are now on the horizon of
modern society that, while they must necessarily involve workers, require a perspective that
is larger than the factory, trade union, and a
proletarian orientation.[72]
The Barcelona oces of the CNT.

Bookchin has said that it prioritizes the interests of the

working class, instead of communal freedom for society
Freie Arbeiterinnen- und Arbeiter-Union (FAU) as a whole; and that this view ultimately prevents a true
Germany
revolution. He argues that in instances like the Spanish
Revolution, it was in spite of the syndicalist-minded CNT
Konfederatsiya
Revolyutsionnikh
Anarkholeadership that the revolution occurred.[72]
Sindikalistov (KRAS-IWA) Russia
Direct action, being one of the main staples of anarchoMrea anarhosindikalista (MASA) Croatia
syndicalism, would extend into the political sphere acNorsk Syndikalistisk Forbund (NSF-IAA) Norway cording to its supporters. To them, the labour council is
the federation of all workplace branches of all industries
in a geographical area territorial basis of organisation
Priama Akcia (PA-IWA) Slovakia
linkage brought all the workers from one area together
Solidarity Federation (SF-IWA) Britain
and fomented working-class solidarity over and before
corporate solidarity.[73] Rudolf Rocker argues:
Unione Sindacale Italiana (USI) Italy

Workers Solidarity Alliance (WSA) USA

() Libertarian Syndicalist Union (ESE) Greece
Rocinante (Greece)
Freie ArbeiterInnen Union (FAU) Switzerland
SKT Siberian Confederation of Labour
Swedish Anarcho-syndicalist Youth Federation
(Syndikalistiska Ungdomsfrbundet, SUF) Sweden
Central Organisation of the Workers of Sweden (Sveriges Arbetares Centralorganisation, SAC)
Sweden
Anarcho-Syndicalistische Bond (ASB) The Netherlands

based on the principles of Federalism, on

free combination from below upwards, putting
the right of self-determination of every member
above everything else and recognising only the
organic agreement of all on the basis of like interests and common convictions.[74]
Thus, anarcho-syndicalism is not apolitical but instead
sees political and economic activity as the same. Unlike the propositions of some of its critics, anarchosyndicalism is dierent from reformist union activity in that it aims to obliterate capitalism "[Anarchosyndicalism] has a double aim: with tireless persistence,
it must pursue betterment of the working classs current conditions. But, without letting themselves become
obsessed with this passing concern, the workers should
take care to make possible and imminent the essential

204

CHAPTER 18. ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM

The April 28, 1987 episode of the U.S. series Max
Headroom entitled War featured a terrorist group
known as the White Brigade dedicated to 'neoradicalistic anarcho-syndicalism.'
A short song for BBC Radio 6 Music by Jake Yapp
featured "Elmo the anarcho-syndicalist". The song
lampooned the book Primetime Propaganda, whose
premise is that childrens programs have secret leftwing messages.[77]

18.6 See also

Confederacion General del Trabajo demonstration in Barcelona,
October 2005

Council Communism
General strike

act of comprehensive emancipation: the expropriation of

capital.[75]
While collectivist and communist anarchists criticise syndicalism as having the potential to exclude the voices of
citizens and consumers outside of the union, anarchosyndicalists argue that labour councils will work outside
of the workplace and within the community to encourage
community and consumer participation in economic and
political activity (even workers and consumers outside of
the union or nation) and will work to form and maintain
the institutions necessary in any society such as schools,
libraries, homes, etc. Murray Bookchin argues:
[a]t the same time that syndicalism exerts
this unrelenting pressure on capitalism, it tries to
build the new social order within the old. The
unions and the 'labour councils are not merely
means of struggle and instruments of social revolution; they are also the very structure around
which to build a free society. The workers are
to be educated [by their own activity within the
union] in the job of destroying the old propertied
order and in the task of reconstructing a stateless, libertarian society. The two go together.[76]

Kronstadt Rebellion
Libertarian socialism
List of federations of trade unions
Participatory Economics
Wildcat strike action
Workers self-management

18.7 References
[1] Revolutionary syndicalism, Encyclopedia Britannica
[2] Jeremy Jennings, Syndicalism in France (St Martins Press,
1990) ISBN 031204027X
[3] 1c. Why do anarcho-syndicalists oppose participation in
statist politics?". Anarcho-Syndicalism 101. Class Struggle Online. April 2002. Retrieved 20 June 2013.
[4] Jameson, J. F., The American Historical Review (American Historical Association, 1895), p. 731.
[5] The Great Dock Strike of 1889, Direct Action #47, August 11, 2009. Retrieved March 8, 2010.

18.5 In popular culture

One of the main characters in Eugene O'Neill's play
The Iceman Cometh (1939), Larry Slade is an exanarcho-syndicalist.
Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Dispossessed (1974)
shows a ctional functioning Anarcho-syndicalist
society. The novel is subtitled An Ambiguous
Utopia.

[6] Geary, Dick (1989). Labour and Socialist Movements in

Europe Before 1914. Berg Publishers. Pg. 261
[7] Beevor, Antony (2006). The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 19361939. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. p.13
[8] Beevor, Antony (2006). The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 19361939. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. p.15
[9] Beevor, Antony (2006). The Battle for Spain: The Span-

The 1975 comedy lm Monty Python and the Holy

ish Civil War 19361939. London: Weidenfeld & NicolGrail contains a scene wherein King Arthur encounson. p.17
ters uncooperative peasants who are part of an au[10] Wayne Thorpe (1989), The Workers Themselves
tonomous, anarcho-syndicalist commune.

18.7. REFERENCES

[11] Vadim Damier (2009), Anarcho-syndicalism in the 20th

Century
[12] Vadim Damier (2009), Anarcho-syndialism in the 20th
Century
[13] 1860-today: The International Workers Association.
Libcom.org. 2006. Retrieved 2009-09-29.
[14] Fred W. Thompson and Patrick Murn (1976), IWW: Its
First 70 Years, 1905-1975
[15] Salvatore Salerno, Red November, Black November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World
(State University of New York Press, 1989), pp. 6990,
ISBN 0-7914-0089-1
[16] David Berry, A History of the French Anarchist Movement,
19171945, (Greenwood, 2002), p. 134. ISBN 0-31332026-8
[17] Principles of Revolutionary Syndicalism, AnarchoSyndicalist Review
[18] The Statutes of Revolutionary Unionism (IWA)", The International Workers Association (IWA)
[19] Brunella Dalla Casa, Composizione di classe, rivendicazioni e professionalit nelle lotte del biennio rosso a
Bologna, in: AA. VV, Bologna 1920; le origini del fascismo, a cura di Luciano Casali, Cappelli, Bologna 1982,
p. 179.
[20] 19181921: The Italian factory occupations - Biennio
Rosso on libcom.org
[21] http://www.tau.ac.il/eial/VIII_1/oved.htm
[22] Organise Magazine issue 65. Anarchist Federation.
2005. Retrieved 2009-09-29.
[23] Global anarcho-syndicalism 1939-99. Selfed. 2001.
Retrieved 2009-09-29.
[24] G. Careri (1991), L'Unione Sindacale Italiana
[25] The IWA today South London DAM. DAM-IWA.
1985. Retrieved 2011-04-23.
[26] http://libcom.org/history/
anarchism-zzz-poland-1919-1939
[27] Roca Martnez 2006, p. 116
[28] Beevor 2006, p. 48
[29] Beevor 2006, pp. 146147
[30] Beevor 2006, p. 170
[31] Alexander 1999, p. 361
[32] Beevor 2006, p. 260
[33] Beevor 2006, p. 263
[34] Beevor 2006, pp. 263264
[35] Beevor 2006, pp. 266267
[36] Beevor 2006, p. 267

205

[37] Beevor 2006, p. 295

[38] Beevor 2006, p. 296
[39] Alexander 1999, p. 976
[40] Alexander 1999, p. 977
[41] Alexander 1999, p. 978
[42] Alexander 1999, p. 1055
[43] Beevor 2006, p. 490
[44]

Vallance, Margaret (July 1973). Rudolf Rocker

a biographical sketch. Journal of Contemporary
History (London/Beverly Hills: Sage Publications)
8 (3): 7595. doi:10.1177/002200947300800304.
ISSN 0022-0094. OCLC 49976309. Vallance
1973, pp. 7778

[45] Vallance 1973, pp. 9495

[46] Encyclopedia of British and Irish Political Organizations.
United Kingdom: Pinter Publishers. 2000. ISBN 9781855672642.
[47] SAC had begun contesting municipal elections under the
candidatures of Libertarian Municipal People
[48] Michael Schmidt and Lucien Van Der Walt (2009), Black
Flame
[49] http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/x69qfd
[50] Meltzer, Albert (2001). I Couldn't Paint Golden Angels.
United Kingdom: AK Press. ISBN 978-1873176931.
[51] Roca Martnez 2006, p. 108
[52] Roca Martnez 2006, p. 109
[53] Aguilar Fernndez 2002, p. 110
[54] FAQ. Un sector minoritario que es partidario de las
elecciones sindicales se escinde y pasa a llamarse CNT
congreso de valencia (en referencia al Congreso alternativo realizado en esa ciudad) y posteriormente, perdidas
judicialmente las siglas, a CGT.
[55] Alexander 1999, p. 1094
[56] Meltzer 1996, p. 265
[57] (Spanish) A series of three articles about the Scala Case
from the CNT point of view: (1) El Caso Scala. Un proceso contra el anarcosindicalismo, (The Scala Case. A
trial against anarcho-syndicalism), Jess Martnez, Revista Polmica online, 1 February 2006; (2) Segunda
parte. El proceso (Second part: the trial) 31 January
2006; (3) Tercera parte. El canto del Grillo (Third part:
Grillos song) 31 January 2006. All accessed online 6
January 2008.
[58] Los 117 detenidos de la CNT, en libertad tras prestar
declaracin. El Mundo (in Spanish). 1996-12-07. Retrieved 2008-01-14.

[59] http://libcom.org/news/
belgrade-anarchists-arrested-state-attorney-international-terrorism-0409200

206

CHAPTER 18. ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM

[60] http://asi.zsp.net.pl/belgrade-professors-send-open-letter-in-defense-of-arrested/
Rocker, Rudolf,
[61] The unocial IWA blog. ASI-MUR. 2011. Retrieved
2011-10-14. keeps an updated list of recent IWA member
activities
[62] Carley, Mark Trade union membership 19932003
(International:SPIRE Associates 2004).
[63] Beltrn Roca Martnez, Anarchism, Anthropology and
Andalucia, Anarchist Studies
[64] (Spanish) Que son las elecciones sindicales?, ocial
CNT site. Accessed online 6 January 2008.
[65] (Spanish) Otra reforma laboral Y ahora qu?, ocial
CNT site. Accessed online 6 January 2008.
[66] (Spanish) Plataforma Reivindicativa, ocial CNT site.
Accessed online 6 January 2008.
[67] IWA Congress 2013
[68] Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (AK Press, 2004), p. 73, ISBN 1-902593-92-8
[69] Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (AK Press, 2004), p. 62-63, ISBN 1-902593-92-8
[70] The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature, The
New Press, 2006, p.38-9
[71] Heider, Ulrike and Bode, Ulrike, Anarchism: Left, Right
and Green (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1994), p.
4. ISBN 0-87286-289-5
[72] Murray Bookchin, The Ghost of Anarcho-Syndicalism,
online at Anarchy Archives. Retrieved 27 January 2009.
[73] Romero Maura, The Spanish Case, contained in Anarchism Today, D. Apter and J. Joll (eds.), p. 75

Anarchism

Rocker, Rudolf (1938),

(book), Online here:

18.9 Film
Living Utopia, (Vivir la utopa, Documentary-lm
from 1997 about Anarcho-syndicalism and Anarchism in Spain)
Noam Chomsky: The Relevance of Anarchosyndicalism (interviewed by Peter Jay, 1976) (video
and text)

18.10 Fiction
Ursula K. Le Guin's 1974 science ction novel The
Dispossessed, subtitled An Ambiguous Utopia,
concerns a functioning anarcho-syndicalist society.

18.11 External links

A comprehensive list of Anarcho-syndicalist organisations
What is revolutionary syndicalism? An on-going
historical series on anarcho-syndicalism and revolutionary syndicalism from a communist perspective
Anarcho-Syndicalism 101
Anarcho-Syndicalist Review

[75] Emile Pouget in No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of

Anarchism, edited by Daniel Guerin (AK Press, 2005), p.
71. ISBN 1-904859-25-9

Syndicalism: Myth and Reality

[77] "Elmo the anarcho-syndicalist", New Left Project.

18.8 Further reading

Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of
Anarchism and Syndicalism (Counter-Power vol 1)
by Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt AK
Press. (April 1, 2009). ISBN 978-1-904859-16-1
Chomsky, Noam (ed. Barry Pateman), Chomsky on
Anarchism AK Press, 2005 ISBN 1-904859-20-8
Flank, Lenny (ed), IWW: A Documentary History,
Red and Black Publishers, St Petersburg, Florida,
2007. ISBN 978-0-9791813-5-1

Anarcho-

Anarcho-Syndicalism

[74] Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism, op. cit., p. 53

[76] Bookchin, M 1998, The Spanish Anarchists, AK Press,

California. p 121

and

Syndicalism

Revolutionary Unionism: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow by Dan Jakopovich

Anarcho-Syndicalism texts from the Kate Sharpley
Library

Chapter 19

De Leonism
De Leonism, occasionally known as Marxism
Deleonism, is a form of syndicalist Marxism developed
by Daniel De Leon. De Leon was an early leader of the
rst United States socialist political party, the Socialist
Labor Party of America. De Leon combined the rising
theories of syndicalism in his time with orthodox Marxism. According to De Leonist theory, militant industrial
unions (specialized trade unions) are the vehicle of class
struggle. Industrial Unions serving the interests of the
proletariat (working class) will bring about the change
needed to establish a socialist system. The only way this
diers from some currents in anarcho-syndicalism is
that, according to De Leonist thinking, a revolutionary
political party is also necessary to ght for the proletariat
on the political eld.

19.1 Tactics
According to the De Leonist theory, workers would
simultaneously form Socialist Industrial Unions in the
workplaces, and a socialist political party which would
organize in the political realm. Upon achieving sucient support for a victory at the polls, the political party
would be voted into oce, giving the De Leonist program a mandate from the people. It is assumed that at
that point, the Socialist Industrial Unions will have attained sucient strength in the workplaces for workers
there to take control of the means of production.

national councils representing their particular industry.

Workers would also elect representatives to a central
congress, called an All-Industrial Congress, which would
eectively function as the national government. These
representatives would be subject to a recall vote at any
time. De Leonism would thus reorganize the national
government along industrial lines with representatives
elected by industry, not by geographic location.

19.2 Comparison to other forms of

socialism
De Leonism lies outside the Leninist tradition of
communism. It predates Leninism as De Leonisms principles developed in the early 1890s with De Leons assuming leadership of the Socialist Labor Party; Leninism
and its vanguard party idea took shape after the 1902
publication of Lenins What Is to Be Done?. Its adherents are generally opposed to the policies of the former Soviet Union, and those of the Peoples Republic
of China, and other communist states, and do not consider them socialist, but rather state capitalist or following
'bureaucratic state despotism'. The highly decentralized
and democratic nature of the proposed De Leonist government is in contrast to the democratic centralism of
MarxismLeninism and what they see as the dictatorial
nature of the Soviet Union.

The De Leonist victory at the polls would be accompanied by a transfer of control of the factories, mines, farms
and other means of production to workers councils organized within the industrial unions. De Leonists distinguish this event from the general strike to take control
of the workplaces advocated by anarcho-syndicalists, and
refer to it instead as a general lockout of the ruling class.

The success of the De Leonist plan depends on achieving majority support among the people both in the workplaces and at the polls, in contrast to the Leninist notion that a small vanguard party should lead the working
class to carry out the revolution. De Leonisms stance
against reformism means that it is referred to by the label 'impossibilist', along with the Socialist Party of Great
The existing government would then be replaced with Britain.
a government elected from within the Socialist Indus- De Leonist political parties have also been criticized for
trial Unions, and the newly elected socialist government being allegedly overly dogmatic and sectarian. Despite
would quickly enact whatever constitutional amendments their rejection of Leninism and vanguardism, De Leonor other changes in the structure of government needed to ism also lies outside the "democratic socialist" and "social
bring this about, adjourning sine die. Workers on the democratic" tradition. Daniel De Leon and other De
shop oor would elect local shop oor committees needed Leonist writers have issued frequent polemics against
to continue production, and representatives to local and democratic socialist movements, especially the Socialist
207

208
Party of America, and consider them to be reformist or
"bourgeois socialist. De Leonists have traditionally refrained from any activity or alliances viewed by them as
trying to reform capitalism, though the Socialist Labor
Party in De Leons time was active during strikes and
such, such as social justice movements, preferring instead
to concentrate solely on the twin tasks of building support
for a De Leonist political party and organizing Socialist
Industrial Unions.

19.3 Political parties

Industrial Union Party
League for Socialist Reconstruction
New Union Party
Socialist Labour Party (Canada)
Socialist Labour Party (UK, 1903)
Socialist Labor Party of America
Socialist Union Party

19.4 See also

Impossibilism
Industrial Workers of the World
Libertarian Marxism

19.5 External links

DeLeonism.org

CHAPTER 19. DE LEONISM

Chapter 20

Council communism
Council communism (also councilism) is a current of
socialist thought that emerged from the November Revolution in the 1920s, characterized by its opposition
to state capitalism/state socialism and its advocacy of
workers councils as the basis for dismantling the class
state. Strong in Germany and the Netherlands during
the 1920s, council communism continues to exist today
within the greater socialist and communist movement.

ests and were no longer viable as organs of class struggle. Nevertheless, those Bordigists who put forward
this critique still held out the necessity of red unions
or class unions re-emerging, outside and against the
regime unions, which would openly advocate class struggle and allow the participation of communist militants.

20.1 History
As the Second International decayed at the beginning of
World War I, socialists who opposed nationalism and supported proletarian internationalism regrouped. In Germany, two major communist trends emerged. First, the
Spartacus League was created by the radical socialist
Rosa Luxemburg. The second trend emerged amongst
the German rank-and-le trade unionists who opposed
their unions and organized increasingly radical strikes towards the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1918. This
second trend created the German Left Communist movement that would become the KAPD after the abortive
German Revolution of 191819.

Despite a common general direction, and despite sharing the criticism of Lenin, there were few politics held in
common between these movements. An example of this
divergence is that the Italians supported the Right of Nations to Self Determination, while the Dutch and Germans
rejected this policy (seeing it as a form of bourgeois nationalism). However, all of the Left Communist tendencies opposed what they called "Frontism". Frontism was a
tactic endorsed by Lenin, where Communists sought tactical agreements with reformist (social democratic) parties in pursuit of a denite, usually defensive, goal. In
addition to opposing Frontism, the Dutch-German tendency, the Bulgarians and British also refused to participate in bourgeois elections, which they denounced as
parliamentarism.

As the Communist International inspired by the

Bolshevik revolution in Russia formed, a Left Communist tendency developed in the Cominterns German,
Dutch and Bulgarian sections. Key gures in this milieu
were Anton Pannekoek,[1][2] Otto Rhle and Herman
Gorter. In the United Kingdom, Sylvia Pankhurst's
group, the Communist Party (British Section of the
Third International), also identied with the Left
Communist tendency.

In Germany, the Left Communists were expelled from

the Communist Party of Germany, and they formed the
Communist Workers Party (KAPD). Similar parties were
formed in the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Britain. The
KAPD rapidly lost most of its members and it eventually dissolved. However, some of its militants had been
instrumental in organising factory-based unions like the
AAUD and AAUD-E, the latter being opposed to separate party organisation (see: Syndicalism).

Alongside these formal Left Communist tendencies, the

Italian group led by Amadeo Bordiga is often commonly
recognized as a Left Communist party, although both
Bordiga and the Italian Communist Left disputed this and
qualied their politics as separate, distinct and more in
line with the Third International's positions than the politics of Left Communism. Bordiga himself did not advocate abstention from the unions, although later Italian
Left currents developed a critique of the regime unions,
positing that most or all unions had become tools of
capitalism by submitting themselves to bourgeois inter-

The leading theoreticians of the KAPD had developed

a new series of ideas based on their opposition to party
organisation, and their conception of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia as having been a bourgeois revolution.
Their leading gures were Anton Pannekoek, Herman
Gorter and Otto Rhle. Rhle later left the KAPD,
and was one of the founders of the AAUD-E. Another
leading theoretician of Council Communism was Paul
Mattick, who later emigrated to the USA. A minor gure in the Council Communist movement in the Nether-

These various assorted groups were all criticized by

Vladimir Lenin in his booklet Left-Wing Communism:
An Infantile Disorder.

209

210
lands was Marinus van der Lubbe, who was accused of
the Reichstag arson in 1933 and consequently executed
by the nazis after a show trial that marked the beginning
of the persecution of socialist and communists in Nazi
Germany.
The early councilists are followed later by the Group of
Internationalist Communists, Henk Meijer, Cajo Brendel and Paul Mattick, Sr. There was a resurgence of
councilist groups and ideas in the 1960s, through the
Situationist International, Root and Branch in the United
States, Socialisme ou Barbarie in France, and Solidarity
in the UK.[3]
Alongside and sometimes connected to the councilists
were the early Hegelian Marxists, Gyrgy Lukcs (a
council communist himself from 191821 or 22) and
Karl Korsch (who turned to council communism in the
1930s).

CHAPTER 20. COUNCIL COMMUNISM

gle dissenting vote. Real power was concentrated in the
hands of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
On the topic of the Russian Revolution, Council Communists maintain that the February Revolution and the
soviets of the era were proletarian in nature. However, in
their view, the ascent of the Bolsheviks and the following
creation of a party bureaucracy constituted a "bourgeois
revolution"; with the Soviet Union itself being an example
of state capitalism rather than the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.[7] With the Soviet state's exclusive control over
the utilization of capital, it is argued by Council Communists that the party bureaucracy had simply taken the place
of individual capitalists and established its own form of
capitalist class relations; emphasized in part by the continued defence and perpetuation of capitalist relations after the revolution by means of the New Economic Policy.

20.4 See also

20.2 Ideas
Chief among the tenets of Council Communism is its
opposition to the party vanguardism[1][4] and democratic
centralism[5] of Leninist Ideologies and its contention that
democratic workers councils arising in the factories and
municipalities are the natural form of working class organization and authority. Council Communism also stands
in contrast to Social Democracy through its formal rejection of both the reformism and Parliamentarism.[6]

Anarcho-communism
Left communism
Marxist humanism
Libertarian socialism
Frankfurt School
List of left communist internationals
Social criticism

20.3 Council communism and the

Soviets in the Russian Revolu- 20.5 Notes
tion
[1] Anton Pannekoek (1936) Workers Councils
During the Russian Revolution of 1917, councils akin
to those advocated by Council Communists were a signicant political and organizational force; with the Russian word soviet itself meaning council. After the success of the February Revolution, the Bolsheviks sought
to capitalize on the inuence of the soviets in order to
boost their own popularity. Bolshevik leaders advocated
the transference of authority to the soviets and the dissolution of Russian Provisional Government by means
of a second revolution. When this campaign was successful and the October Revolution occurred, the creation of the Congress of Soviets marked the beginning
of a process by which the genuine workers control of the
soviets was diminished and the decisions of the Bolshevik
Party acquired the full authority of the State. By the time
new regime had developed into a single-party system, the
Supreme Soviet (successor to the Congress of Soviets)
had been relegated to the role of a rubber-stamp parliament, meeting just once a year to ratify decisions already
made at higher levels, in most cases without even a sin-

[2] Anton Pannekoek (1938) Lenin as philosopher - a critical

examination of the philosophical basis of Leninism
[3] A libertarian Marxist tendency map (Libcom.org)
[4] Notes on Trotsky, Pannekoek, Bordiga - Gilles Dauv
[5] Pannekoek, Anton. State Capitalism and Dictatorship International Council Correspondence, Vol.III, No.1, January 1937.
[6] Ruhle, Otto. The Revolution Is Not A Party Aair.
1920.
[7] Brendel, Cajo. Council Communism and the Critique of
Bolshevism Red and Black Notes #8. 1999.

20.6 References
Anton Pannekoek Workers Councils, AK Press,
2003

20.7. FURTHER READING

20.7 Further reading

Anton Pannekoek
Anton Pannekoek Archive
Herman Gorter, Sylvia Pankhurst, Otto Rhle,
'Non-Leninist Marxism: Writings on the
Workers Councils. St Petersburg, Florida:
Red and Black Publishers, 2007. ISBN 9780-9791813-6-8.
Collective Action Notes A collection of Council
Communist and other anti-authoritarian marxist literature
Communism or Reforms two articles by Sylvia
Pankhurst and Anton Pannekoek, rst published in
the Workers Dreadnought in 1922. First published
as a pamphlet in 1974 by Workers Voice, a Communist group based in Liverpool.
Kurasje The Council Communist Archive
Lenny Flank, 'Philosophy of Revolution: Towards
a Non-Leninist Marxism'. St Petersburg, Florida:
Red and Black Publishers, 2007. ISBN 978-09791813-8-2.
The communist tendency in history
Libcom.org Largest online archive of Council Communist texts.
Paul Mattick, Paul Mattick Archive
Peter Rachle Marxism and council communism :
the foundation for revolutionary theory for modern
society. New York, N.Y.: Revisionist Press, 1976.
Chapter 8: Council communist theory
Harry Cleaver Reading Capital Politically
Shipway, Mark (1987) Council Communism

211

Chapter 21

Left communism
Leftist errors redirects here. For the policy of terror
used by the Yugoslav Partisans during World War II, see
Leftist errors (Yugoslavia).
Not to be confused with the Left Opposition (a Russian
communist faction led by Leon Trotsky in the 1920s).

commonality at a level of abstract theory and more crucially, left communist groups from both traditions tend to
identify elements of commonality in each other.
The historical origins of left communism can be traced to
the period before the First World War, but it only came
into focus after 1918 . All left communists were supportive of the October Revolution in Russia but retained a
critical view of its development. Some, however, would
in later years come to reject the idea that the revolution
had a proletarian or socialist nature, asserting that it had
simply carried out the tasks of the bourgeois revolution
by creating a state capitalist system.

Left communism is the range of communist viewpoints

held by the communist left, which criticizes the political ideas of the Bolsheviks at certain periods, from a position that is asserted to be more authentically Marxist
and proletarian than the views of Leninism held by the
Communist International after its rst and during its second congress.[1]
Left communism rst came into being as a clear moveLeft Communists see themselves to the left of Leninists ment in or around 1918. Its essential features were: a
(whom they tend to see as 'left of capital', not socialists), stress on the need to build a communist party entirely sepanarchist communists (some of whom they consider in- arate from the reformist and centrist elements who were
ternationalist socialists) as well as some other revolution- seen as having betrayed socialism in 1914, opposition to
ary socialist tendencies (for example De Leonists, whom all but the most restricted participation in elections and an
they tend to see as being internationalist socialists only in emphasis on the need for revolutionaries to move on the
limited instances).
oensive. Apart from that, there was little in common
Although she died before left communism became a dis- between the various wings. Only the Italians accepted
tinct tendency, Rosa Luxemburg has heavily inuenced the need for electoral work at all for a very short period
most left communists, both politically and theoretically. of time, which they later vehemently opposed, attracting
in Left-Wing ComProponents of left communism have included Amadeo the wrath of Lenin attacking Bordiga
[3]
munism:
An
Infantile
Disorder.
Although
the GermanBordiga, Herman Gorter, Anton Pannekoek, Otto Rhle,
Dutch
and
Russian
wings
opposed
the
right
of nations
Sylvia Pankhurst and Paul Mattick.
to self-determination, which they denounced as a form
Left communist groups existing today include the of bourgeois nationalism, the Italians did not have a clear
International Communist Party, the International Com- position on national determination.
munist Current and the Internationalist Communist Tendency.

21.2 Russian left communism

21.1 Early history and overview
Two major traditions can be observed within left communism: the Dutch-German tradition and the Italian
tradition.[2] The political positions those traditions have
in common are a shared opposition to what is termed
frontism, many kinds of nationalism and thus national
liberation movements (although, it must be stressed that
Bordiga and many Bordigist groups have positions that
some left-communists consider supportive of national liberation) and parliamentarianism. There is an underlying

Russian left communism began in 1918 as a faction within

the Russian Communist Party named the Left Communists, which opposed the signing of the Brest-Litovsk
peace treaty with Imperial Germany. The Left Communists wanted international proletarian revolution across
the world. The leader of this faction, in the beginning,
was Nikolai Bukharin. They stood for a revolutionary war
against the Central Powers; opposed the right of nations
to self-determination (specically in the case of Poland,
since there were many Poles in this communist group and
they did not want a Polish capitalist state to be estab-

212

21.4. GERMAN-DUTCH LEFT COMMUNISM UNTIL 1933

213

lished); and they generally took a voluntarist stance re- development of the Bordigist current (as it is often porgarding the possibilities for social revolution at that time. trayed).
They began to publish a newspaper, Kommunist,[4] which
oered a critique of the direction in which the Bolsheviks were heading. They argued against the overbureaucratisation of the state and further argued that full
state ownership of the means of production should proceed at a quicker pace than Lenin desired.

The year 1925 was a turning point for the Italian left as it
was the year that the so-called Bolshevisation took place
in the sections of the Communist International. This plan
was designed to eliminate all social democratic deviations from the Comintern and develop them on Bolshevik
lines or at least along the lines of what Zinoviev, the secretary of the International, considered Bolshevik lines.
In practice, this meant top-down bureaucratic structures
in which the members were controlled by a leadership
approved of by the Cominterns International Executive
Committee. In Italy this meant that the leadership which
had formerly been in the hands of Bordiga was given to a
body that came into being when the Serrati-Ma minority of the PSI joined the PCI, although Bordigas group
were in a majority. The new leadership was supported
by Bordiga, who, as a centralist, accepted the will of the
International.

The Left Communists faded as the world revolutionary

wave died down in militancy; Lenin had shifted to a more
right-wing position and proved too strong a gure. They
also lost Bukharin as a leading gure, since his position
became more right-wing until he eventually came to agree
with Lenin. Being defeated in internal debates, they then
dissolved. A few very small left communist groups surfaced within the RSFSR in the next few years, but later
fell victim to repression by the state. In many ways,
the positions of the Left Communists were inherited by
the Workers Opposition faction and Gabriel Myasnikov's
Workers Group of the Russian Communist Party and to Nevertheless, Bordiga fought the IEC from within, only to
some extent by the Decists.
have an article of his which was favourable to Trotsky's
positions on the disputed Russian questions suppressed.
Meanwhile, sections of the left motivated by Onorato
formed the Entente Committee. This committee
21.3 Italian left communism until Damen
was ordered to dissolve itself by the incoming leadership,
1926
led now by Gramsci who only then opposed Bordigas positions, which had gained prestige after a successful reThe Italian left communists were named left commu- cruitment campaign. With the party Congress of 1926
nists at a later stage in their development, but when the held in Lyons, crowned by Gramscis famous Lyons TheCommunist Party of Italy (PCI) was founded, its mem- ses, the left majority was now defeated and on course to
bers actually represented the majority of communists in becoming a minority within the party. With the victory
that country. This was a result of the Abstentionist Com- of fascism in Italy, Bordiga was jailed and when he opmunist Faction of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) being posed a vote against Trotsky in the prison PCI group, he
in advance of other sections of the PSI in their realisa- was expelled from the party in 1930 . He took a stance
tion that a separate communist party had to be formed of non-involvement in politics for many years after this.
which did not include reformists. This gave them a great The victory of Italian fascism also meant that the Italian
advantage over the sections of the PSI who looked to g- left would enter into a new chapter in its development ures such as Serratti and Gramsci for leadership. It was a this time in exile.
consequence of the revolutionary impatience common at
a time when revolution, in the narrow sense of an insurrectionary attempt at the seizure of power, was expected
to develop in the very near future.
Under the leadership of Amadeo Bordiga, the left was to
control the PCI until the Lyons Congress of 1926. In this
period, the militants of the PCI would nd themselves
isolated from reformist workers and from other antifascist militants. At one stage this isolation was deepened when communist militants were instructed to leave
defense organisations that were not totally controlled by
the party. These sectarian tactics produced concern in
the leadership of the Communist International and led to
a developing opposition within the PCI itself. Eventually these two factors led to the displacement of Bordiga
from his position as rst secretary and his replacement
by Gramsci. By then, Bordiga was in a fascist jail and he
was to remain outside organised politics until 1952. The
development of the Left Communist Faction was not the

21.4 German-Dutch left communism until 1933

The German-Dutch tradition of left communism was so
named because the movement in both countries was very
closely connected. Among the leading theoreticians of
the more powerful German movement were Anton Pannekoek and Herman Gorter (for example) and German
activists found refuge in the Netherlands after the Nazis
came to power in 1933. This current could trace its
origins back before World War I, since in the Netherlands a revolutionary wing of Social Democracy had broken from the reformist party even before the war and
had built links with German activists. After the beginning of the German Revolution in 1918, a leftist mood
could be found among sections of the communist par-

214

CHAPTER 21. LEFT COMMUNISM

ties of both countries. In Germany this led directly to

the foundation of the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD) after its leading gures were expelled from
the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) by Paul Levi.
This development was mirrored in the Netherlands and
on a smaller scale in Bulgaria, where the left communist
movement was to mimic that of Germany.

in Western Europe, the Amsterdam Bureau. However,

this was little more than a very brief interlude and the
Bureau never functioned as a leadership body for Western
Europe as was originally intended. The Vienna Bureau of
the Comintern may also be classied as left communist,
but its personnel were not to evolve into either of the two
historic currents that made up left communism. Rather,
When it was founded, the KAPD included some tens the Vienna Bureau adopted the ultra-left ideas of the earliest period in the history of the Comintern.
of thousands of revolutionaries. However, within a few
years, it had broken up and practically dissolved. This Left communists supported the Russian Revolution, but
was because it was founded on the basis of revolutionary did not accept the methods of the Bolsheviks. Many of
optimism and a purism that rejected what became known the German-Dutch tradition adopted Rosa Luxembourg's
as frontism. Frontism entailed working in the same or- criticisms, as outlined in her posthumously published esganisations as reformist workers. Such work was seen say entitled "Marxism or Leninism?". In this essay, she
by the KAPD as unhelpful at a time when the revolu- rejected the Bolshevik position on distribution of land to
tion was thought to be an imminent event, and not merely the peasantry, and their espousal of the Right of nations
a goal to be aimed at. This led the members of the to Self Determination which she rejected as historically
KAPD to reject working in the traditional trade unions in outmoded. The Italian left communists did not at the time
favour of forming their own Revolutionary Unions. These accept any of these criticisms and both currents would
unionen, so called to distinguish them from the ocial evolve.
trade unions, had 80,000 members in 1920 and peaked in To a considerable degree, Lenins well known polemic
1921 with 200,000 members, after which they declined Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder,[3] is an atrapidly. They were also organisationally divided from the tack on the ideas of the emerging left communist currents.
beginning, with those unionen linked to the KAPD form- His main aim was to polemicise with currents moving
ing the AAU-D, and those in Saxony around Otto Rhle towards pure revolutionary tactics by showing them that
who opposed the conception of a party in favour of a uni- they could remain based on rmly revolutionary princitary class organisation being organised as the AAU-E.
ples while utilising a variety of tactics. Therefore Lenin
The KAPD was unable to reach even its founding
Congress prior to suering its rst split when the
so-called National Bolshevik tendency around Fritz
Wolheim and Heinrich Laufenberg appeared (it should
be noted that this tendency has no connection with modern political tendencies in Russia which use the same
name). More seriously, the KAPD lost most of its support very rapidly as it failed to develop lasting structures.
This also contributed to internecine quarrels and the party
actually split into two competing tendencies known as
the Essen and Berlin tendencies to the historians of the
left. The recently established Communist Workers International (KAI) split on exactly the same lines as did
the tiny Communist Workers Party of Bulgaria. The only
other aliates of the KAI were the Communist Workers
Party of Britain led by Sylvia Pankhurst, the Communist
Workers Party of the Netherlands (KAPN) in the Netherlands and a group in Russia. The AAU-D split on the
same lines, and it rapidly ceased to exist as a real tendency within the factories.

21.5 Left communism and the

Communist International
As discussed above, the left communists initially rallied
to the Russian Revolution of October 1917 and to the new
Communist International. In fact, they controlled the rst
body formed by the Comintern to coordinate its activities

defended the use of parliamentarism and working within

the ocial trade unions.
As the Kronstadt rebellion occurred at a time when the
debate on tactics was still raging within the Comintern, it
has been wrongly seen as being left communist by some
commentators. In fact, the left communist currents had
no connection with the rebellion - although they did rally
to its support when they learned of it. In later years, the
German-Dutch tradition in particular would come to see
the suppression of the revolt as the historic turning point
in the evolution of the Russian state after October 1917.

21.6 Italian left communism 1926

1939
After 1926, Italian left communism took shape in exile
and without the participation of Bordiga. Contacts between the Italians and the Germans had been made and
were developed in France, but the Italian left saw the
KAPDs stress on factory organisation as being similar
to the ideas of Gramscis L'Ordine Nuovo and therefore
rejected closer contact. Attempts to work with the group
around Karl Korsch also failed. The left faction of the
PCd'I was formally established in July 1927 by a number of young militants. This new group had members
in France, Belgium and the USA and published a review
entitled Prometeo. It was estimated in 1928 that it had at
most 200 militants, but it would seem that while it never

21.7. 19391945

215

had more than 100 militants active at any one time its inuence was actually far greater. The control of the PCd'I
apparatus by the Stalinists, however, meant that attempts
to reach other exiles was almost impossible and they were
driven back into small circle work.

tion was that the military support given to the Republican

forces by this minority was accompanied by political support (in that the minority wished to halt strikes among
loyalist workers in the name of military victory against
fascism). According to the Fraction, no support could be
The Italian left faction was for the rest of the 1930s led given to a bourgeois state, even in a struggle against fasby Ottorino Perrone (also known with the pseudonym cism.
Vercesi), although it was ercely opposed to the cult of The question of Spain forced the Belgian LCI to clarthe personality which was developing in the Comintern ify its positions and a split ensued as a result of debate
around Stalin in these years and resisted similar pres- within its ranks. At its February 1937 conference a misures in its own organisation. The faction had members in nority of the LCI led by Mitchell defended the positions
France, Belgium and the USA; how many in Italy looked of the Italian Left and were expelled. Although less than
to it cannot be ascertained (since all communist activ- ten in number, they formed a Belgian Fraction of the
ities there had been driven underground by the fascist Communist Left. It was at this point that the Italian Left
government). The main activity of the faction through learned of a group called the Grupo de Trabajadores in
these years was the publishing of its press, which con- Mexico with very similar positions to their own. It was
sisted of the paper Prometeo and the journal Bilan. With led by Paul Kirchho and had left the Mexican Trotskyits establishment as a group, the Fraction also looked for ist movement. Kircho had formerly been a member of
international co-thinkers. Seeing the International Left the KAPD in Germany, then a Trotskyist in the USA but
Opposition, led by Leon Trotsky, as central to the non- his tiny group would seem to have disappeared at the outStalinist Communist movement, they sought contact with break of war in 1939. In early 1938 the Italian and Belit. These contacts were to be severed when agreement on gian Fractions formed an International Bureau of the Left
basic principles proved impossible.
Fractions which published a review called Octobre.
The political distance between the faction and other communist currents would deepen throughout the 1930s as
the faction declared itself opposed to the tactics adopted
by the Left Opposition to broaden its support (i.e. the faction armed its opposition to fusion with centrist groups,
opposition to entryism, etc.) Always opposed to the
United Front tactic of the Comintern, the Fraction now
declared itself rmly opposed to the Popular Front after 1933 . Like the Trotskyists, it saw the failure of the
Communist Party of Germany in the face of fascism as its
historic failure and ceased to consider itself a fraction of
the Communist Party from the date of its 1935 Congress,
held in Brussels.
Isolated, the Left Fraction sought to discover allies within
the milieu of groups to the left of the Trotskyist movement. Typically these discussions came to nothing, but
they were able to recruit from the disintegrating Ligue
des Communistes Internationalistes (LCI) in Belgium, a
group which had broken from Trotskyism. A loose liaison was also maintained with the Council Communist
groups in the Netherlands and in particular with the GIK.
However, these discussions were pushed into the background as the attempted fascist coup in Spain led to revolution and civil war.

During this period the Italian Left also reviewed a number

of positions which it thought had become outdated. They
rejected the idea of national self-determination and began
to develop their views on the war economy and capitalist decadence. Much of this was carried out by Vercesi,
but Mitchell from the Belgian Fraction was also a leading
gure in the work. Perhaps most dramatically they also
reviewed their understanding of the Russian Revolution
and the state that had emerged from it. Eventually they
came to argue that the Russian state was by the late 1930s
state capitalist and was not to be defended. In short, they
believed there was need for a new revolution.

21.7 19391945

Many small currents to the left of the mass Communist

Parties collapsed at the beginning of the Second World
War and the Left Communists were initially silent too.
Despite having foreseen the war more clearly than some
other factions, when it began they were overwhelmed.
Many were persecuted by either German Nazism or Italian fascism. Leading militants of the Communist Left,
such as Mitchell, who was Jewish, were to die in the
Immediately after the civil war began, a minority
Buchenwald concentration camp.
emerged within the Left Fraction whose members sought
to participate in the events in Spain. This minority, Meanwhile, in Germany the nal council communist
including longtime members of the fraction, numbered groups had disappeared in the maelstrom and in the
some 26 militants mainly belonging to the Parisian fed- Netherlands the International Communist Group (GIK)
eration of the Fraction. They traveled to Barcelona to was moribund. The former "centrist" group led by
enlist in the workers militias and after a fruitless meeting Henk Sneevliet (the Revolutionary Socialist Workers
in September with a delegation from the Fraction back Party, RSAP) transformed itself into the Marx-Leninhome, they were expelled. The problem for the Frac- Luxemburg Front. But in April 1942 its leadership was
arrested by the Gestapo and killed. The remaining ac-

216
tivists then split into two camps, on the one hand some
turned to Trotskyism forming the Committee of Revolutionary Marxists (CRM) while the majority formed the
CommunistenBond-Spartacus. The latter group turned to
council communism and was joined by most members of
the GIK.
In 1941, the Italian Fraction was reorganised in France
and along with the new French Nucleus of the Communist
Left came into conict with the ideas which the Fraction
had propagated from 1936: of the social disappearance of
the proletariat and localised wars, etc. These ideas continued to be defended by Vercesi in Brussels. Gradually
the Left Fractions adopted positions drawn from German
Left Communism. They abandoned the conception that
the Russian state remained in some way proletarian and
also dropped Vercesis conception of localised wars in
favour of ideas on imperialism inspired by Rosa Luxemburg. Vercesis participation in a Red Cross committee
was also ercely contested.

CHAPTER 21. LEFT COMMUNISM

then joined Hugo Oehler's International Contact Commission for the Fourth (Communist) International and in
1939 were publishing Der Marxist in Antwerp.
With the beginning of the war, they took the name
Revolutionary Communists of Germany (RKD) and
came to dene Russia as state capitalist, in agreement
with Ante Ciligas book The Russian Enigma. At this
point they adopted a revolutionary defeatist position on
the war and condemned Trotskyism for its critical defence of Russia (which was seen by Trotskyists as a
degenerated workers state). After the fall of France,
they renewed contact with militants in the Trotskyist milieu in Southern France and recruited some of them into
the Communistes Revolutionnaires in 1942. This group
became known as Fraternisation Proletarienne in 1943
and then L'Organisation Communiste Revolutionnaire in
1944 . The CR and RKD were autonomous, and clandestine, but worked closely together with shared politics.
As the war ran its course, they evolved in a councilist direction, while also identifying more and more with Rosa
Luxemburgs work. They also worked with the French
Fraction of the Communist Left and seem to have disintegrated at the end of the war. This disintegration was
speeded no doubt by the capture of a leading militant,
Karl Fischer, who was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp where he was to participate in writing the
Declaration of the Internationalist Communists of Buchenwald when the camp was liberated.

The strike at FIAT in October 1942 had a major impact

on the Italian Fraction in France, which was deepened by
the fall of Mussolinis regime in July 1943. The Italian
Fraction now saw a pre-revolutionary situation opening in
Italy and prepared to participate in the coming revolution.
Revived by Marco in Marseilles, the Italian Fraction now
worked closely with the new French Fraction, which was
formally founded in Paris in December 1944. However
in May 1945 the Italian Fraction, many of whose members had already returned to Italy, voted to dissolve itself
so that its militants could integrate themselves as individuals into the Internationalist Communist Party. The conference at which this decision was made also refused to 21.8 19451952
recognise the French Fraction and expelled Marco from
their group.
The closing stages of the Second World War marked a
This led to a split in the French Fraction and the forma- watershed in the history of Left Communism, as was true
tion of the Gauche Communiste de France by the French for every other political tendency. Left Communists, like
Fraction led by Marco. The history of the GCF belongs the Trotskyists, expected the war to end with at least the
to the post-war period. Meanwhile the former members beginnings of a revolutionary wave of struggle similar to
of the French Fraction who sympathised with Vercesi that which had marked the end of the First World War.
and the Internationalist Communist party formed a new Therefore strikes in Italy from 1942 onwards were of inFrench Fraction, which published the journal L'Etincelle tense interest to them. Many Left Communists formerly
and was joined at the end of 1945 by the old minority of in exile, in jail or simply inactive due to repression rethe Fraction who had joined L'Union Communiste in the turned to active political activity in Italy. This had the
result that new organisations identifying with Left Com1930s.
munism came into being and older ones dissolved themOne other development during the war years merits menselves. We look at these organisations and in particular at
tion at this point. A small grouping of German and Austhe International Communist Party below.
trian militants came close to Left Communist positions
in these years. Best known, to those few who know If for the Italian Left the end of war marked a new beginof them, as the Revolutionary Communist Organisation, ning, it also did so for the German-Dutch Left. Although
these young militants were exiles from Nazism living in in Germany it was the case that the Communist Left tradiFrance at the start of World War II and were members of tion was all but extinguished, surviving only in the form of
the Trotskyist movement but they had opposed the for- a few scattered groups holding councilist views, France,
mation of the Fourth International in 1938 on the grounds by comparison, saw an interesting development with the
that it was premature. They were refused full delegates beginning of a conscious attempt to develop a synthesis
credentials and only admitted to the founding conference of the two strands of Left Communism in the form of the
of the Youth International on the following day. They Gauche Communiste de France, which built on pre-war
contributions.

21.12. REFERENCES

21.9 19521968
The year 1952 signaled the end of mass inuence on
the part of Italian Left Communism, as its sole remaining representative, the Internationalist Communist Party,
split in two sections; the group led by Bordiga took the
name International Communist Party, which continues
today. The Gauche Communiste de France (GCF) also
dissolved in the same year. Left Communists entered
a period of almost constant decline from this point onwards, although they were somewhat rejuvenated by the
events of 1968.

21.10 Since 1968

The uprisings of May 1968 led to a small resurgence of
interest in left communist ideas. Various small left communist groups emerged around the world, predominantly
in the leading capitalist countries. A series of conferences
of the communist left began in 1976, with the aim of promoting international and cross-tendency discussion, but
these petered out in the 1980s without having increased
the prole of the movement or its unity of ideas.[5]
Prominent post-1968 proponents of Left Communism
have included Paul Mattick and Maximilien Rubel.
Prominent left communist groups existing today include
the International Communist Party, International Communist Current and the Internationalist Communist Tendency. In addition to the left communist groups in
the direct lineage of the Italian and Dutch traditions,
a number of groups with similar positions have ourished since 1968, such as the workerist and autonomist
movements in Italy; Kolinko, Kurasje, Wildcat;[6] Subversion and Aufheben in England; Thorie Communiste
and Echanges & Mouvements in France; TPTG,[7] Blaumachen [8] in Greece; Kamunist Kranti in India; Collective Action Notes and Loren Goldner in the USA.

21.11 See also

Anarchist communism
Autonomism
Council communism
Left Communism in China
Libertarian socialism
List of left communist internationals
List of left communists
Luxemburgism
Ultra-leftism

217

21.12 References
[1] Non-Leninist Marxism: Writings on the Workers Councils (includes texts by Gorter, Pannekoek, Pankhurst and
Rhle), Red and Black Publishers, St Petersburg, Florida,
2007. ISBN 978-0-9791813-6-8
[2] Background on the Italian Communist Left, Bordiga and
Bordigism. Leftcom. 2003-08-01. Retrieved 2013-1017.
[3] Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder. Marxists.org. Retrieved 2013-10-17.
[4] Glossary of Periodicals: Ko. Marxists.org. Retrieved
2013-10-17.
[5] The International Conferences of the Communist
Left (1976-80) | International Communist Current.
En.internationalism.org. Retrieved 2013-10-17.
[6] Wildcat. Wildcat-www.de. 2013-09-21. Retrieved
2013-10-17.
[7] " ". Tapaidiatisgalarias.org. Retrieved 2013-10-17.
[8] Blaumachen - journal.
2013-10-17.

Blaumachen.gr.

Retrieved

21.13 Further reading

Non-Leninist Marxism: Writings on the Workers
Councils (includes texts by Gorter, Pannekoek,
Pankhurst and Rhle), Red and Black Publishers, St
Petersburg, Florida, 2007. ISBN 978-0-97918136-8
The International Communist Current, itself a Left
Communist grouping, has produced a series of studies of what it views as its own antecedents. The book
on the German-Dutch current, which is by Philippe
Bourrinet (who later left the ICC), in particular contains an exhaustive bibliography.
The Italian Communist Left 19261945 (ISBN
1897980132)
The Dutch-German Communist Left (ISBN
1899438378)
The Russian Communist Left, 19181930
(ISBN 1897980108)
The British Communist Left, 19141945
(ISBN 1897980116)
Also of interest is volume 5 number 4 of
Spring 1995 of the journal Revolutionary History :
Through Fascism, War and Revolution: Trotskyism and Left Communism in Italy.

218
In addition, there is a good deal of material published on the Internet in various languages. A useful starting point is the Left Communism collection
published on the Marxists Internet Archive.

CHAPTER 21. LEFT COMMUNISM

Chapter 22

Socialisme ou Barbarie
early days also brought debate with Anton Pannekoek and
an inux of ex-Bordigists into the group.
The group was composed of both intellectuals and workers, and agreed with the idea that the main enemies of
society were the bureaucracies which governed modern
capitalism. They documented and analysed the struggle
against that bureaucracy in the groups journal. The thirteenth issue (JanuaryMarch 1954), as an example, was
devoted to the East German revolt of June 1953 and the
strikes which erupted amongst several sectors of French
workers that summer. Following from the belief that what
the working class was addressing in their daily struggles
was the real content of socialism, the intellectuals encouraged the workers in the group to report on every aspect
of their working lives.

Copies of the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie.

Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism) was

a French-based radical libertarian socialist group of the
post-World War II period whose name comes from a
phrase Friedrich Engels used, which was cited by Rosa
Luxemburg in the 1916 essay The Junius Pamphlet.[1] It
existed from 1948 until 1965. The animating personality
was Cornelius Castoriadis, also known as Pierre Chaulieu
or Paul Cardan.[2]

Socialisme ou Barbarie was critical of Leninism, rejecting the idea of a revolutionary party, and placing an emphasis on the importance of workers councils. While
some members left to form other groups, those remaining
became more and more critical of Marxism over time.
Jean Laplanche, one of the groups founding members,
recalls the early days of the organization:

22.1 History

the atmosphere soon became impossible.

Castoriadis exerted hegemony over the journal (he wrote the main articles) and his central
idea in the mid-1950s was that a third world
war was inevitable. This was very hard for people in the group to stand: to continue our lives,
while thinking there would be an atomic explosion in a few years time. It was an apocalyptic
vision.[5]

The group originated in the Trotskyist Fourth International, where Castoriadis and Claude Lefort constituted
a ChaulieuMontal Tendency in the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste in 1946. In 1948, they experienced their nal disenchantment with Trotskyism,[3]
The Hungarian Revolution and other events of the midleading them to break away to form Socialisme ou Bar1950s led to a further inux into the group. By this time,
barie, whose journal began appearing in March 1949.
they were proposing the fundamental point as
Castoriadis later said of this period that the main audience of the group and of the journal was formed by
the necessity for capitalism on the one hand
groups of the old, radical left: Bordigists, council comto reduce workers to simple executors of tasks,
munists, some anarchists and some ospring of the Gerand on the other hand, in its impossibility to
man 'left' of the 1920s[4]
continue functioning if it succeeds in so doing.
They developed parallel to, and were in dialogue with,
Capitalism needs to achieve mutually incomthe JohnsonForest Tendency, which developed as a body
patible objectives: the participation and the
of ideas within American Trotskyist organisations. One
exclusion of the worker in production as of
faction of this group later formed Facing Reality. The
all citizens in relation to politics.[6]
219

220

CHAPTER 22. SOCIALISME OU BARBARIE

This became characterised as a distinction between the

dirigeant and excutant in French, usually translated as
order-givers and order-takers. This perspective enabled
the group to extend its understanding to the new forms of
social conict emerging outside the realm of production
as such. That was also the case for the 1960-1961 Winter
General Strike in Wallonia.
In 1958, disagreements on the organisational role of a
political group led to the departure of some prominent
members including Claude Lefort and Henri Simon to
form Informations et Liaison Ouvrires.
By 1960, the group had grown to around 100 members
and had developed new international links, primarily in
the emergence of a sister organisation in Britain called
Solidarity.
In the early 1960s, disputes within the group around Castoriadis increasing rejection of Marxism led to the departure of the group around the Pouvoir Ouvrier journal.
The main Socialisme ou Barbarie journal continued publishing until a nal edition in 1965, after which the group
became dormant and was then dissolved. An attempt by
Castoriadis to revive it during the May 1968 events failed.
The Situationist International was inuenced by the group
through Guy Debord who was a member of both. The
Italian social movement of Autonomia were also inuenced, but less directly.

22.2 Members
Members of Socialisme ou Barbarie included:
Danile Auray, b. 1943. Left SouB around 1965.
Daniel Blanchard (as Pierre Canjuers), b. 1934.
SouB: 1957- 1965.

Jacques Gautrat (as Daniel Moth), b. 1924. SouB

from 1952. As Daniel Moth: Journal d'un ouvrier,
1956-1958, ditions de Minuit, Paris, 1959.
Grard Genette, b. 1930. SouB: 1957- 1958.
Pierre Guillaume, b. 1941 (or 1940 ?). SouB: 19601963 (PO).
Alain Guillerm (19442005). SouB: 1962- 1967.
Jean Laplanche (as Marc Foucault) (1924-2012).
Claude Lefort (as Claude Montal) (1924-2010).
SouB until 1958.
Jean-Franois Lyotard (19241998). SouB: 19501963 (PO).
Albert Mas (as Vega, R.Maille) (19182001).
Spanish anarchist, POUM. SouB: 1950-1963 (PO).
La Bataille socialiste Mas page.
Edgar Morin, b. 1921 (some sources have him as a
member in the early 1950s).
Henri Simon, b. 1922. SouB: 1952- 1958.
Pierre Souyri (as Pierre Brune) (19251981).
SouB: 1954- 1963 (PO). La Bataille socialiste
Souyri page.
Benno Sternberg (as Hugo Bell, Sarel, Barois),
member from 1949 to 1967. He died in 1971. As
Benno Sarel: La classe ouvrire en Allemagne orientale, ditions Sociales, Paris 1958 (Turin, 1959;
Munich, 1975).
Translated for SouB: Paul Romano and Ria Stone:
The American Worker, Bewick, Detroit, 1947.

Source: Andrea Gabler: Arbeitsanalyse und Selbstbestim Pierre Canjuers, Guy Debord: Preliminaires mung. Zur Bedeutung und Aktualitt von Socialisme ou
pour une dnition de l'unit du programme Barbarie, Gttingen, 2006. This is a dissertation for
the Doktor (Ph. D.) in social sciences from the Georgrvolutionaire, Paris (July 20), 1960, (4 p.).
August-Universitt at Gttingen. Her many biographies
Transl. in: Ken Knabb, Situationist Internaare in Anhang C, pp. 210 223.
tional Anthology, Berkeley, 1981, p. 305..

Cornelius Castoriadis (19221997).

22.3 Texts

Various reprints, Union Gnerale d'ditions,

10/18 series, 7 Vols., 3 in 2 books, Paris, 1973
to 1979; Political and Social Writings, David No complete reprint of Socialisme ou barbarie exists, but
Ames Curtis (editor, transl.), 3 Vols., Min- the rst ten issues of the magazine have been digitalized
and there have been numerous reprints of SouB articles
neapolis, 1988, 1993.
under the name of their authors, especially of Castoriadis
texts.
Hubert Damisch, b. 1928. SouB: 1953- 1958.
Guy Debord (19311994). SouB: One year from
1960 to 1961. Programatic statement, with Daniel
Blanchard
Vincent Descombes, b. 1943.

22.4 See also

196061 Winter General Strike

22.7. EXTERNAL LINKS

22.5 Notes
[1] Luxemburg, Rosa. The Junius Pamphlet. 1916.
[2] Howard, Howard (1975). Introduction to Castoriadis.
Telos (23): 118.
[3] Castoriadis, Cornelius (1975). An Interview. Telos
(23)., p. 133
[4] Castoriadis, Cornelius (1975). An Interview. Telos
(23)., p. 134
[5] Fletcher, John; Osborn, Peter (2000). The other within:
Rethinking psychoanalysis. Radical Philosophy (102).
[6] Cardan, Paul (1965). Modern Capitalism and Revolution.
London: Solidarity. p. 16.

22.6 References
Gottraux, Philippe: Socialisme ou Barbarie, un engagement politique et intellectuel dans la France de
l'aprs guerre. ditions Payot Lausanne, s.l., 1997.
Cornelius Castoriadis (translated by Bart Grahl and
David Pugh) (1975). An Interview. Telos (23).
Claude Lefort (translated by Dorothy Gehrke and
Brian Singer) (1977). An Interview. Telos (30).
Peter Starr, Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory
After May '68, Stanford University Press, 1995, p.
24. ISBN 0-8047-2445-8.

22.7 External links

Socialisme ou Barbarie review scanning project
Exchange of letters between Cornelius Castoriadis
and Anton Pannekoek, originally published in Socialisme ou Barbarie, translated and introduced by
Viewpoint Magazine.
Socialisme ou Barbarie: A French Revolutionary
Group (1949-65) by Marcel van der Linden, Left
History 5.1, 1997. Dead GeoCities link, now at the
La Bataille socialiste site.
From the German Left to Socialisme ou Barbarie
from La Banquise No. 2: le roman de nos origines,
1983.
Libertarian Communist Library Socialisme ou Barbarie holdings
Socialisme ou Barbarie Journal index of articles by
issue
La Bataille socialiste, many interesting SouB links,
PO link, biographies: Souyri (1925-1979), Mas dit
Vega (1918-2001)

221

Chapter 23

JohnsonForest Tendency
The JohnsonForest Tendency, sometimes called the
Johnsonites, refers to a radical left tendency in the United
States associated with Marxist theorists C.L.R. James
and Raya Dunayevskaya, who used the pseudonyms J.R.
Johnson and Freddie Forest respectively. They were
joined by Grace Lee Boggs, a Chinese-American woman
who was considered the third founder.

23.1 History

JohnsonForest remained in the Socialist Workers Party

until 1950, exiting the party once again with a book coauthored by James and Dunayevskaya, State Capitalism
and World Revolution. In the three years JohnsonForest
remained in the Socialist Workers Party, James also participated in party discussions on the American Negro
question (as it was then called), arguing for support for
separate struggles of blacks as having the potential to ignite the entire U.S. political situation. This arguably happened in the 1950s and 1960s.
Finally leaving the Socialist Workers Party, Johnson
Forest founded their own organization for the rst time,
called Correspondence. This group changed its named to
the Correspondence Publishing Committee the next year.
However, tensions that had surfaced earlier presaged a
split, which took place in 1955. Through his theoretical
and political work of the late 1940s, James had concluded
that a vanguard party was no longer necessary, because
its teachings had been absorbed in the masses. In 1956,
James would see the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 as
conrmation of this.

Much of the story of the JohnsonForest Tendency relates

to disputes between various factions of the Trotskyist parties in the USA. James and Dunayevskaya rst met in
the Socialist Workers Party. From 19391940, there
was a bitter ght amongst the members of the Socialist
Workers Party, and in 1940, James, Dunayevskaya, and
Max Shachtman, among others, split to form the Workers
Party. James and Dunayevskaya set up a study group
within the Workers Party to work on the idea of State
Capitalism, and were soon joined by Lee.
Dunayevskaya had agreed that the Leninist vanguard
While this new group rapidly cohered around politics party was outmoded, but, in contrast to James, felt the
which were very similar to those of the Socialist Work- need for some kind of revolutionary organization. In
ers Party, there were certain dierences which eventu- 1953, James was deported from the U.S. to Britain for
ally led to the formation of the JohnsonForest Tendency. the lack of a visa, and the polemic continued. The split
The majority of the Workers Party members believed, as was completed in 1955, when Dunayevskaya and her facdid Shachtman, that the class nature of the Soviet Union tion founded the group News and Letters Committees.
was such that it should be designated a bureaucratic col- Grace Lee remained with the Johnsonites who founded
lectivist society. The minority opinion, held by James, Facing Reality, as well as a newsletter based in Detroit of
Dunayevskaya, and Lee, held that it was state capitalist. the same name. When Lee moved away from the group in
Further, James was unhappy with the WPs lack of in- the early 1960s, the continuity of the Johnsonite tradition
terest in Black activism. This resulted in their secession was maintained by Martin Glaberman until Glabermans
death in 2001.
from the Workers Party.
Their disgruntlement with the Shachtmanite majority
within the Workers Party led JohnsonForest in 1947 to
rejoin the Socialist Workers Party. It was during this
time that the JohnsonForest Tendency reached the conclusion that, as there was no true socialist society existing
anywhere in the world, a return to the fundamentals of
Marxism was in order. Their emphasis on Hegel's philosophy as being the foundation of Marxism was largely
due to Dunayevskaya, who was deeply immersed in both
Marxs and Lenin's writings.

23.2 See also

222

Autonomist Marxism
Marxist humanism

23.5. EXTERNAL LINKS

23.3 References
Loren Goldner (2004).
Introduction to the
Johnson-Forest Tendency and the Background to
Facing Reality"". Retrieved January 20, 2006.
Loren Goldner (2002). "Facing Reality 45 Years
Later: Critical Dialogue with James/Lee/Chaulieu.
Retrieved January 8, 2008.

23.4 Publications
The Invading Socialist Society a pamphlet published
by the JFT in 1947.
Trotskyism in the United States, 1940-1947 BALANCE SHEET The Workers Party and the Johnson
Forest Tendency a pamphlet published by the JFT in
1947.

23.5 External links

Marxist Humanism, subject index
Raya Dunayevskaya Archive
C L R James Archive
Boggs Center
News & Letters, the Newspaper
Libertarian Communist Library Raya Dunayevskaya
holdings
Libertarian Communist Library CLR James holdings

223

Chapter 24

Autonomism
For other uses, see Autonomism (disambiguation).
break free of political structures and behavior patterns
Not to be confused with antinomianism.
imposed from the outside.[4] As such this has involved
Autonomism or Autonomist Marxism is a set of a call for the independence of social movements from
political parties[5] in a revolutionary perspective which
seeks to create a practical political alternative to both
authoritarian socialism and contemporary parliamentary
democracy.[6]
Autonomism inuenced the German and Dutch Autonomen, the worldwide social centre movement, and today is inuential in Italy, France, and to a lesser extent the
English-speaking countries. Those who describe themselves as autonomists now vary from Marxists to poststructuralists and anarchists.

24.1 Etymology
The term autonomia/Autonome was rst used in 1620,
having been composed out of two Greek words, auto
nomos, referring to someone or something which lives
by his/her own rule. Autonomy, in this sense, is not
independence. While independence refers to an autarchic
kind of life, separated from the community, autonomy
refers to life in society but by ones own rule. Though the
notion of autonomism was alien to the ancient Greeks,
Raised st, stenciled protest symbol of Autonome at the Ernst- whose society was not an all-inclusive one, the conKirchweger-Haus in Vienna, Austria
cept is indirectly endorsed by Aristotle, who stated that
only beasts or gods could be independent and live apart
anti-authoritarian left-wing political and social move- from the polis (community), while Kant dened the
ments and theories[1][2][3] As a theoretical system, it rst Enlightenment by autonomy of thought and the famous
emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerist (operaismo) "Sapere aude" (dare to know).
communism. Later, post-Marxist and anarchist tendencies became signicant after inuence from the
Situationists, the failure of Italian far-left movements in
24.2 The Marxist Autonomist thethe 1970s, and the emergence of a number of important
theorists including Antonio Negri, who had contributed
ory
to the 1969 founding of Potere Operaio, as well as Mario
Tronti, Paolo Virno, Franco Bifo Berardi, etc.
Unlike other forms of Marxism, autonomist Marxism
Georgy Katsiacas summarizes the forms of autonomous
movements saying that In contrast to the centralized decisions and hierarchical authority structures of modern
institutions, autonomous social movements involve people directly in decisions aecting their everyday lives.
They seek to expand democracy and to help individuals

emphasises the ability of the working class to force

changes to the organization of the capitalist system independent of the state, trade unions or political parties.
Autonomists are less concerned with party political organization than are other Marxists, focusing instead on
self-organized action outside of traditional organizational

224

24.3. ITALIAN AUTONOMISM

225

structures. Autonomist Marxism is thus a bottom-up

theory: it draws attention to activities that autonomists
see as everyday working-class resistance to capitalism,
for example absenteeism, slow working, and socialization
in the workplace.
Like other Marxists, autonomists see class struggle as being of central importance. However, autonomists have
a broader denition of the working class than do other
Marxists: as well as wage-earning workers (both white
collar and blue collar), autonomists also include in this
category the unwaged (students, the unemployed, homemakers, etc.), who are traditionally deprived of any form
of union representation.
Early theorists (such as Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri,
Sergio Bologna, and Paolo Virno) developed notions of
immaterial and social labour that extended the Marxist concept of labour to all society. They suggested that
modern societys wealth was produced by unaccountable
collective work, and that only a little of this was redistributed to the workers in the form of wages. Other Italian Antonio Negri, main theorist of Italian autonomism
autonomistsparticularly feminists, such as Mariarosa
Dalla Costa and Silvia Federiciemphasised the importance of feminism and the value of unpaid female labour two dierent groups: Lotta Continua, led by Adriano
Sofri (which had a very signicant Roman Catholic culto capitalist society.
tural matrix), and Potere Operaio, led by Antonio Negri,
A scholar of the movement, Michael Ryan, writes that
Franco Piperno, Oreste Scalzone, and Valerio Morucci.
Mario Capanna was the charismatic leader of the Milan
Autonomy, as a movement and as a thestudent movement, which had a more classical Marxistory, opposes the notion that capitalism is an
Leninist approach.
irrational system which can be made rational through planning. Instead, it assumes the
workers viewpoint, privileging their activity as
24.3.1 Inuences
the lever of revolutionary passage as that which
alone can construct a communist society. Economics is seen as being entirely political; ecoThrough translations made available by Danilo Montaldi
nomic relations are direct political relations of
and others, the Italian autonomists drew upon previous
force between class subjects. And it is in the
activist research in the United States by the Johnson
economic category of the social worker, not in
Forest Tendency and in France by the group Socialisme
an alienated political form like the party, that
ou Barbarie. The Johnson-Forest Tendency had studthe initiative for political change resides.[7]
ied working-class life and struggles within the US auto
industry, publishing pamphlets such as The American
Worker (1947), Punching Out (1952), and Union
Committeemen and Wildcat Strikes (1955). That work
24.3 Italian autonomism
was translated into French by Socialisme ou Barbarie and
Autonomist Marxismreferred to in Italy as operaismo, published, serially, in their journal. They too began inwhich translates literally as labourismrst appeared vestigating and writing about what was going on inside
in Italy in the early 1960s. Arguably, the emergence workplaces, in their case inside both auto factories and
of early autonomism can be traced to the dissatisfaction insurance oces.
of automotive workers in Turin with their union, which
reached an agreement with FIAT. The disillusionment of
these workers with their organised representation, along
with the resultant riots (in particular the 1962 riots by
FIAT workers in Turin, fatti di Piazza Statuto), were
critical factors in the development of a theory of selforganised labour representation outside the scope of traditional representatives such as trade unions.

The journal Quaderni Rossi (Red Notebooks), produced between 1961 and 1965, and its successor Classe
Operaia (Working Class), produced between 1963 and
1966, were also inuential in the development of early
autonomism. Both were founded by Antonio Negri and
Mario Tronti.

Pirate radio stations also were a factor in spreading autonomist ideas. Bologna's Radio Alice was an example
In 1969, the operaismo approach was active mainly in of such a station.

226

24.3.2

CHAPTER 24. AUTONOMISM

Direct action

estimated 10,000 protesters in a single padded block,

ironically after a collective decision to go without the
white overalls. Shortly after Genoa the Ya Basta Association disbanded, with certain segments reforming into the
Disobbedienti which literally means Disobedients.
This philosophy includes the occupation and creation of
squatted self-managed social centers, anti-sexist activism,
support for immigrants rights and refugees seeking political asylum, as well as the process of walking together
in large formations during demonstrations held in the
streets, by force if necessary in case of clashes with police.

The Italian student movement, including the Indiani

Metropolitani, starting from 1966 with the murder of student Paolo Rossi by neo-fascists at Rome University, engaged in various direct action operations, including riots
and occupations, along with more peaceful activities such
as self-reduction, in which individuals refused to pay for
such services and goods as public transport, electricity,
gas, rent, and food. Several clashes occurred between
students and the police during the occupations of universities in the winter of 196768, during the Fiat occupations, and in March 1968 in Rome during the Battle of Central to the tute bianche movement was the Italian Ya
Valle Giulia.
Basta Association, a network of groups throughout Italy
Indiani Metropolitani (Metropolitan Indians) were a that was inspired by the Zapatista Army of National Libsmall faction active in the Italian far-left protest move- eration uprising in Chiapas in 1994. Ya Basta primarment during 1976 and 1977, in the so-called "Years of ily originated in the autonomist social centers of MiLead". The Indiani Metropolitani were the so-called cre- lan, particularly Centro Sociale Leoncavallo. These soative wing of the movement. Its adherents wore face- cial centers grew out of the Italian Autonomia movement
paint like the war-paint of Native Americans and dressed of the 1970 and 80s. The tute bianches have had internalike hippies. The emphasis was on stare insieme (be to- tional variations of one sort or another. For instance, in
gether), spontaneity and the arts, especially music. The Britain a group calling itself WOMBLES adopted the tacgroup was active in Rome, during the occupation of the tics, even though the political orientation of WOMBLES
diered from the Italian movement. In Spain, Mono
university La Sapienza in 1977.
Blanco was the preferred identier. The rst North
On March 11, 1977, riots took place in Bologna following
American variant of the tute bianche, the NYC Ya Basta
the killing of student Francesco Lorusso by police.
Collective (based in NYC) wore yellow overalls, rather
Beginning in 1979, the state eectively prosecuted the than white.
autonomist movement, accusing it of protecting the Red
Further information: Years of Lead (Italy)
Brigades, which had kidnapped and assassinated Aldo
Moro. 12,000 far-left activists were detained; 600 ed
the country, including 300 to France and 200 to South
America.[8]

24.4 The French autonome movement

In France, the Marxist group Socialisme ou Barbarie, led
by philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, could be said to be
one of the rst autonomist groups. Socialisme ou Barbarie drew upon the activist research of the American
Johnson-Forest Tendency inside US auto plants and carried out their own investigations into rank-and-le workers struggles, struggles that were autonomous of union or
party leadership.
Also parallel to the work of the Johnson-Forest Tendency,
Socialisme ou Barbarie harshly criticised the Communist
regime in the USSR, which it considered a form of
"bureaucratic capitalism" and not at all the socialism it
Member of the Italian Social Movement Tute Bianche
claimed to be. Philosopher Jean-Franois Lyotard was
Tute Bianche was a militant Italian social movement, ac- also part of this movement.
tive from 1994 to 2001. Activists covered their bodies However, the Italian inuence of the operaismo movewith padding so as to resist the blows of police, to push ment was more directly felt in the creation of the rethrough police lines, and to march together in large blocks view Matriaux pour l'intervention (197273) by Yann
for mutual protection during demonstrations. The tute Moulier-Boutang, a French economist close to Toni Nebianche movement reached its apex during the anti-G8 gri. This led in turn to the creation of the Camarades
protests in Genoa, in July 2001, with a turn-out of an group (197478). Along with others, Moulier-Boutang

24.5. THE GERMAN AUTONOME MOVEMENT IN THE 1970S AND 1980S

joined the Centre International pour des Nouveaux Espaces de Libert (CINEL), founded three years earlier
by Flix Guattari, and assisted Italian activists accused of
terrorism, of whom at least 300 ed to France.
The French autonome mouvement organised itself in the
AGPA (Assemble Parisienne des Groupes Autonomes,
Parisian Assembly of Autonome Groups"; 197778).
Many tendencies were present in it, including the Camarades group led by Moulier-Boutang, members of
the Organisation communiste libertaire, some people referring themselves to the Desiring Autonomy of Bob
Nadoulek, but also squatters and street-wise people (including the groupe Marge). French autonomes supported
captured Red Army Faction former members. Jean-Paul
Sartre also intervened on the conditions for the detention
of RAF detainees.

227

In 2003, autonomists came into conict with the French

Socialist Party (PS) during a demonstration that took
place in the frame of the European Social Forum in SaintDenis (Paris). At the end of December, hundreds of unemployed people helped themselves in the Bon March
supermarket to be able to celebrate Christmas (an action
called "autorduction" (of prices) in French). French riot
police (CRS) physically opposed the unemployed people
inside the shop. Autonomes rioted during the spring 2006
protests against the CPE, and again after the 2007 presidential election when Nicolas Sarkozy was elected.

On November 11, 2008, the French police arrested ten

people, including ve living in a farmhouse on a hill overlooking Tarnac, and accused them of associating with a
terrorist enterprise by sabotaging TGVs overhead lines.
Nine out of ten were let go and only Julien Coupat, the alleged
leader, remains in custody, charged with directing
The militant group Action directe appeared in 1979 and
a
terrorist
group by the Paris Prosecutors oce.
carried out several violent direct actions. Action Directe
claimed responsibility for the murders of Renault's CEO
Georges Besse and General Audran. George Besse had
been CEO of nuclear company Eurodif. Action Directe
was dissolved in 1987.
In the 1980s, the autonomist movement underwent a deep
crisis in Italy because of eective prosecution by the
State, and was stronger in Germany than in France. It
remained present in Parisian squats and in some riots (for
example in 1980 near the Jussieu Campus in Paris, or
in 1982 in the Ardennes department during anti-nuclear
demonstrations).From 1986 to 1994 the French group
Comit des mal logs occupied several buildings of the
French national social housing authority to denounce the
cruel lack of lodging for workers, they were several hundred and took their decisions in democratic assembly,
with support from all autonomous groups of Paris, many
of them were worked on the anti prison . In the 1980s, the
French autonomists published the periodicals CAT Pages
(198182), Rebelles (198193), Tout ! (198285), Molotov et Confetti (1984), Les Fossoyeurs du Vieux Monde, La
Chme (198485), and Contre (198789).
In the 1990s, the French autonomist movement was
present in struggles led by unemployed people, with Travailleurs, Chmeurs, et Prcaires en colre (TCP, Angry
Workers, Unemployed, and Marginalised people) and
l'Assemble gnrale des chmeurs de Jussieu (General
Assembly of Jussieus unemployed people). It was also
involved in the alter-globalisation movement and above
all in the solidarity with illegal foreigners (Collective Des
Papiers pour tous (Permits for all, 1996) and Collectif
Anti-Expulsion (19982005)). Several autonomist journals date from this time: Quilombo (198893), Apache
(199098), Tic-Tac (199597), Karoshi (199899), and
Tiqqun (19992001).

24.5 The German Autonome movement in the 1970s and 1980s

In Germany, Autonome was used during the late 1970s to
depict the most radical part of the political left.[9] These
individuals participated in practically all actions of the social movements at the time, especially in demonstrations
against nuclear energy plants (Brokdorf 1981, Wackersdorf 1986) and in actions against the construction of airport runways (Frankfurt 197686). The defense of squats
against the police such as in Hamburg's Hafenstrae was
also a major task for the autonome movement. The
Dutch anarchist Autonomen movement from the 1960s
also concentrated on squatting.
Tactics of the Autonome were usually militant, including the construction of barricades or throwing stones or
molotov cocktails at the police. During their most powerful times in the early 1980s, on at least one occasion the
police had to take ight.
Because of their outt (heavy black clothing, ski masks,
helmets), the Autonome were dubbed der schwarze
Block by the German media, and in these tactics were
similar to modern black blocs. In 1989, laws regarding
demonstrations in Germany were changed, prohibiting
the use of so-called passive weaponry such as helmets
or padding and covering your face.

Today, the autonome scene in Germany is greatly reFrom July 19 to July 28, 2002, a No borders camp was
duced and concentrates mainly on anti-fascist actions,
made in Strasbourg to protest against anti-immigration
ecology, solidarity with refugees, and feminism. There
policies, in particular inside the Schengen European
are larger and more militant groups still in operation, such
space.
as in Switzerland or Italy.

228

24.6 The
Greek
autonomoi

CHAPTER 24. AUTONOMISM

Anarcho- 24.7 Inuence

In Greece, the anarcho-autonomoi (Greek : anarchist-autonomists) emerged as an important trend in the youth and student movement, rst
during the 1973 Athens Polytechnic uprising against
the military dictatorship that ruled the country at the
time. After the collapse of the dictatorship in 1974,
the anarcho-autonomoi became considerably inuential, rstly as a social trend within the youth and then as
a (very loose and diverse) political trend. The denition
anarcho-autonomoi, itself, is much debated. One reason for this is that it was originally coined by opponents.
However, it was also quite quickly adopted by many adherents, used as a generic term.

The Autonomist Marxist and Autonomen movements

provided inspiration to some on the revolutionary left
in English-speaking countries, particularly among anarchists, many of whom have adopted autonomist tactics.
Some English-speaking anarchists even describe themselves as Autonomists. The Italian operaismo movement
also inuenced Marxist academics such as Harry Cleaver,
John Holloway, Steve Wright, and Nick Dyer-Witheford.
In Denmark and Sweden, the word is used as a catch-all
phrase for anarchists and the extra-parliamentary left in
general, as was seen in the media coverage of the eviction of the Ungdomshuset squat in Copenhagen in March
2007.

Before 1973, in Greece, there was very little tradition in 24.8 See also
anarchism or libertarian socialism in general. An exception to this was Agis Stinas, an early comrade of Cornelius
Castoriadis. Castoriadis belonged to Stinass small Coun- 24.8.1 Autonomist thinkers
cil Communist group (before he emigrated to France) and
Franco Bifo Berardi
was inuenced by it; later these roles were turned around.
The small groups that existed were almost (physically)
George Caentzis
eliminated by the Nazis, the local establishment, and the
Stalinist communist party during the Nazi occupation and
Silvia Federici
the Greek Civil War that followed, with Castoriadis and
Michael Hardt
Stinas, themselves, being two of the few survivors.
Thus, the radical Greek youth in the 1970s, having very
John Holloway
little relative background to refer to, resided to an ex Antonio Negri
tensive syncretism of multiple trends originating in
the respective movements in other European countries.
Mario Tronti
Anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist trends converged with
situationist, workerist, or other autonomist trends and
Paolo Virno
even with radical (non-autonomist) Marxist trends. The
anarcho-autonomoi made a very strong stand during
the 197880 student movement, coming into violent con- 24.8.2 Movements and organizations
frontation with the police and the (also, of considerable inuence) Stalinist communist youth (K.N.E). Such
Blitz (movement) (Norway)
stands were repeated whenever the student, worker, and
Disobbedienti (ex Tute Bianche)
youth movements were rising (in 1987, 199091, 1998
99, and 20067). However, their intensity has been
Homeless Workers Movement MTST
falling since 199091.
Kmpa tillsammans! Kmpa tillsammans!
Parallel to such participation in social movements, a large
number of social centres (many of them squatted) exist
London Autonomists
to this day around Greece, and many of them participate
in social struggles on a local level. These social centres,
Swedish Anarcho-syndicalist Youth Federation
whether they now identify as Autonomist or not (most
use more generic terms such as anti-authoritarian, while
Ungdomshuset, Danish autonomist squat
some identify as anarchist ), function in the ways that
historically emerged through Autonomia. There is also
a multitude of small political groups which identify as 24.8.3 Autonomist Publications
Autonomist, ranging from workerist to post-modernist.
Aufheben
Most of them are still connected to the respective groups
that identify as Anarchist.
Multitudes magazine
See also: Squatting Greece
ROAR Magazine

24.10. BIBLIOGRAPHY

24.8.4

Others

Autonomy
Aective labor
Direct democracy
Horizontalidad
Kommune 1
Popular assembly
Spontaneism
Sui iuris
Open Marxism
Hakim Bey on autonomous zones

24.9 References
[1] Autonomism as a global social movement by Patrick
Cuninghame The Journal of Labor and Society 10897011 Volume 13 December 2010 pp. 451464

229
FIRE AND FLAMES: A History of the German Autonomist Movement by Geronimo. AK Press. 2012.
ISBN 978-1-60486-097-9
(French) LAutonomie. Le mouvement autonome en
France et en Italie, ditions Spartacus 1978
(French) Autonomes, Jan Bucquoy and Jacques
Santi, ANSALDI 1985
(French) Action Directe. Du terrorisme franais
l'euroterrorisme, Alain Hamon and Jean-Charles
Marchand, SEUIL 1986
(French) Paroles Directes. Lgitimit, rvolte et rvolution : autour d'Action Directe, Loc Debray, JeanPierre Duteuil, Philippe Godard, Henri Lefebvre,
Catherine Rgulier, Anne Sveva, Jacques Wajnsztejn, ACRATIE 1990
(French) Un Tratre chez les totos, Guy Dardel,
ACTES SUD 1999 (novel)
(French) Bac + 2 + crime : l'aaire Florence Rey,
Frdric Couderc, CASTELLS 1998
(French) Italie 77. Le Mouvement , les intellectuels, Fabrizio Calvi, SEUIL 1977

[2] Georgy Katsiacas. The Subversion of Politics: European

Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of
Everyday Life, AK Press 2006

(Italian) L'operaismo degli anni Sessanta. Da

'Quaderni rossi' a 'classe operaia', Giuseppe Trotta
e Fabio Milana edd., DERIVEAPPRODI 2008

[3] Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, ed. Sylvere Lotringer

& Christian Marazzi. New York: Semiotext(e), 1980,
2007. ISBN 1-58435-053-9, ISBN 978-1-58435-053-8.

(Italian) Una sparatoria tranquilla. Per una storia

orale del '77, ODRADEK 1997

[4] Georgy Katsiacas. The Subversion of Politics: European

Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of
Everyday Life. AK Press. 2006. pg. 6
[5] Georgy Katsiacas. The Subversion of Politics: European
Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of
Everyday Life. AK Press. 2006. pg. 7
[6] Georgy Katsiacas. The Subversion of Politics: European
Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of
Everyday Life. AK Press. 2006. pg. 8
[7] Michael Ryan, Translators Introductions Part II, Antonio Negri, Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, New York: Autonomedia, 1991, p. xxx.
[8] (French)On the Autonomist movement
[9] FIRE AND FLAMES: A History of the German Autonomist
Movement by Geronimo. AK Press. 2012

24.10 Bibliography
Autonomism as a global social movement by
Patrick Cuninghame The Journal of Labor and Society 1089-7011 Volume 13 December 2010
pp. 451464

(German) Die Autonomen, Thomas Schultze et Almut Gross, KONKRET LITERATUR 1997
(German) Autonome in Bewegung, AG Grauwacke
aus den ersten 23 Jahren, ASSOCIATION A 2003
(English) The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization
of Everyday Life Georgy Katsiacas, AK Press 2006
(English) Negativity and Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism London: Pluto Press, 2009 John Holloway ed. with Fernando Matamoros & Sergio Tischler ISBN 978-0-7453-2836-2
(English) Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, ed. Sylvere Lotringer & Christian Marazzi. New York:
Semiotext(e), 1980, 2007. ISBN 1-58435-053-9,
ISBN 978-1-58435-053-8.
(English) Os Cangaceiros A Crime Called Freedom:
The Writings of Os Cangaceiros (Volume One) Eberhardt Press 2006
(English) Storming Heaven: Class composition
and struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, Steve
Wright, University of Michigan Press ISBN 0-74531607-7

230

CHAPTER 24. AUTONOMISM

(Greek) 73.

,
,

, ed.

. Athens 1983.
(Greek), , , ,
1985
(Greek), ,
, , 2000

24.11 External links

24.11.1

Archives

Libertarian Communist Library Mario Tronti

Archive
Libertarian Communist Library Sergio Bolognia
Archive
Libertarian Communist Library Mariarosa Dalla
Costa Archive
Libertarian Communist Library Nick DyerWitheford Archive
Libertarian Communist Library Antonio Negri
Archive
Libertarian Communist Library Raniero Panzieri
Archive
Libertarian Communist Library Harry Cleaver
Archive

24.11.2

Others

Articles by members of the operaismo movement

Aut-op-sy - Autonomist forum and texts
Rekombinant - Autonomist forum and mailing list
Texas Archives of Autonomist Marxism
Anity Project directory and chronology of Autonomous Marxism
Libertarian Communist Library, texts on autonomism
Wildcat
A critique of autonomism, published by a Trotskyist
group
TIQQUN Introduction to Civil War [fragments]"

Chapter 25

Georgism
Georgist redirects here. For the Romanian political nerability that economies face from credit and property
group, see National Liberal Party-Brtianu.
bubbles.[11][12]
Georgism is an economic philosophy holding that the
economic value derived from natural resources and
natural opportunities should belong equally to all residents of a community, but that people own the value
they create.[1][2][3] The Georgist paradigm can be described as a model of political economy that oers solutions to social and ecological problems, relying on principles of land rights and public nance which attempt
to integrate economic eciency with social justice.[4][5]
The philosophical basis of Georgism dates back to several early proponents such as John Locke[6] and Baruch
Spinoza,[7] but the concept of gaining public revenues
from natural resource privileges was widely popularized
by the economist and social reformer Henry George and
his rst book, Progress and Poverty.[8]

Georgist ideas were popular and inuential in the earlier

part of the 20th century.[13] Political parties, institutions
and communities were founded based on Georgist principles during that time. Early followers of Georges philosophy called themselves Single Taxers, associated with
the idea gaining public revenue exclusively from natural
and articial commons. The term Georgism was coined
later, and some prefer the term geoism instead.[14]

25.1 Main tenets

Price

Georgism is concerned with just and ecient distribution of economic rent caused by natural monopolies,
pollution, and the control of commons, including title
over natural resources and other contrived privileges (e.g.,
intellectual property). Any natural resource, which is inherently limited in supply, can generate economic rent,
but the classical and most signicant example of 'land
monopoly' involves the extraction of common ground rent
from the value of urban and agricultural locations.

Consumer
surplus

Supply
Market price

Tax revenue

Producer

Tax rate

Demand

surplus
Georgists argue that taxing economic rent derived from
land and natural resources is ecient, fair, and equitable.
The main Georgist policy tool is a fee assessed on location
value, commonly called a land value tax (LVT). Georgists
Quantity
argue that socially captured rents can reduce or eliminate
existing taxes on labor and investment that are unfair or
inecient. Some Georgists also advocate for the return of A supply and demand diagram showing the eects of land value
taxation. Note that the burden of the tax is entirely on the land
surplus public revenue collected from economic rent back
owner, and there is no deadweight loss.
to the people through a basic income or citizens dividend.

Economists since Adam Smith have argued thatunlike

other taxesa land value tax would not cause any
economic ineciency.[9] A land value tax would also
have characteristics of a progressive tax,[10] since it would
be paid primarily by the wealthy and would reduce
economic inequality. It would also increase wages, remove incentives to misuse real estate, and reduce the vul-

See also: Land value tax

Henry George is best known for his argument that the
economic rent of land should be shared equally by the
people of a society rather than being owned privately.
George held that people own what they create, but that
natural resources, most importantly land, belong equally

231

232

CHAPTER 25. GEORGISM

to all.[2] George believed that although scientic exper- Wealth of Nations:[9]

iments could not be carried out in political economy,
theories could be tested by comparing dierent sociGround-rents are a still more proper subeties with dierent conditions and through thought experject of taxation than the rent of houses. A tax
iments about the eects of various factors.[15] Applying
upon ground-rents would not raise the rents of
this method, George concluded that many of the probhouses. It would fall altogether upon the owner
lems that beset society, such as poverty, inequality, and
of the ground-rent, who acts always as a moeconomic booms and busts, could be attributed to the prinopolist, and exacts the greatest rent which can
vate ownership of the necessary resource, land.
be got for the use of his ground. More or less
can be got for it according as the competitors
In Progress and Poverty George argued: We must
[16]
happen to be richer or poorer, or can aord
make land common property. He believed there was
to gratify their fancy for a particular spot of
an important distinction between common and collec[17]
ground at a greater or smaller expense. In evtive property.
Although equal rights to land could be
ery country the greatest number of rich comachieved by nationalizing land and then leasing it to pripetitors is in the capital, and it is there accordvate parties, George preferred taxing unimproved land
ingly that the highest ground-rents are always
value. A land value tax would not overly penalize those
to be found. As the wealth of those competiwho had already bought and improved land, and would
tors would in no respect be increased by a tax
also be less disruptive and controversial in a country
upon ground-rents, they would not probably be
where land titles have already been granted.
disposed to pay more for the use of the ground.
Some Georgists have observed that in modern states,
Whether the tax was to be advanced by the inprivately created wealth is socialized via the tax system
habitant, or by the owner of the ground, would
(through income tax, etc.), but socially created wealth
be of little importance. The more the inhabifrom community created land values are privatized and
tant was obliged to pay for the tax, the less he
owned by private individuals and corporations. They arwould incline to pay for the ground; so that the
gue that the opposite would be the case when a single
nal payment of the tax would fall altogether
tax on land value is implemented; that socially created
upon the owner of the ground-rent.
wealth is taxed and used by the community, while priBoth ground-rents and the ordinary rent of
vately created wealth remains private as no other taxes
land
are a species of revenue which the owner,
are levied.[18]
in many cases, enjoys without any care or attention of his own. Though a part of this revIn Georgism, a land value tax is seen as tting the defenue should be taken from him in order to deinition of a user fee instead of a tax, since it is tied to
fray the expenses of the state, no discouragethe market value of socially created locational advanment will thereby be given to any sort of intage, the privilege to exclude others from locations. Asdustry. The annual produce of the land and
sets consisting of commodied privilege can be viewed
labour of the society, the real wealth and revas wealth since they have exchange value, similar to taxi
enue of the great body of the people, might be
medallions, so charging fees for exclusive use of land as
the same after such a tax as before. Grounda means of raising public revenue is considered a form of
rents and the ordinary rent of land are, thereprogressive taxation tending to reduce economic inequalfore, perhaps, the species of revenue which can
ity.[19]
best bear to have a peculiar tax imposed upon
them.

25.1.1

Economic properties

See also: Optimal tax and Tax incidence

Standard economic theory suggests that a land value tax
would be extremely ecient unlike other taxes, it
does not reduce economic productivity.[12] Nobel laureate Milton Friedman described Henry Georges tax on
unimproved value of land as the least bad tax, since unlike other taxes, it would not impose an excess burden on
economic activity (leading to "deadweight loss"); hence, a
replacement of other more distortionary taxes with a land
value tax would improve economic welfare.[20]

25.1.2 Sources of economic rent and related policy interventions

See also: Pigovian tax and Severance tax

Income ow resulting from payments for restricted access to natural opportunities or for contrived privileges
over geographic regions is called economic rent. Georgists argue that economic rent of land, legal privileges,
and natural monopolies should accrue to the community,
rather than private owners. In economics, "land" is everything that exists in nature independent of human activity.
It was Adam Smith who rst noted the eciency and dis- While the philosophy of Georgism does not say anything
tributional properties of a land value tax in his book, The denitive about specic policy interventions needed to

25.1. MAIN TENETS

233

address problems posed by various sources of economic 25.1.3 Georgism and environmental ecorent, the common goal among modern georgists is to capnomics
ture and share (or reduce) rent from all sources of natural
monopoly and legal privilege.[21][22]
The early conservationist movement of the Progressive
Henry George shared the goal of modern Georgists to so- Era was inspired by Henry George and his inuence
[39]
Some ecological
cialize or dismantle rent from all forms of land monopoly extended for decades afterward.
and legal privilege. However, George focused mainly on economists still support the Georgist policy of land value
his preferred policy tool known as land value tax, which tax as a means of freeing or rewilding unused land and
[40][41][42]
targeted a particular form of unearned income called conserving nature by reducing urban sprawl.
ground rent. George focused on ground-rent because Pollution degrades the value of what Georgists consider
basic locations were more valuable than other monop- to be commons. Because pollution is a negative contriolies and everybody needed locations to survive, which bution, a taking from the commons or a cost imposed on
he contrasted with the less signicant streetcar and tele- others, its value is economic rent, even when the polluter
graph monopolies that George also spoke out against at is not receiving an explicit income. Therefore, to the exthat time. George likened the problem to a laborer trav- tent that society determines pollution to be harmful, most
eling home who is waylaid by a series of highway rob- Georgists propose to limit pollution and then capture the
bers along the way, each who demand a small portion of resulting rents for public use, restoration, or a citizens divthe travelers wages, and nally at the very end of the idend.[21][43][44]
road waits a robber who demands all that the traveler
has left. George reasoned that it made little dierence Georgism is related to the school of ecological ecoboth propose market based restrictions on
to challenge the series of small robbers when the nal nomics, since
[40][45]
pollution.
The schools are compatible in that they
robber remained to demand all that the common laborer
[23]
advocate
using
similar
tools as part of a conservation
had left.
George predicted that over time technologistrategy,
but
they
emphasize
dierent aspects. Consercal advancements would increase the frequency and imvation
is
the
central
issue
of
ecology,
whereas economic
portance of lesser monopolies but that ground rent would
[24]
rent
is
the
central
issue
of
geoism.
Ecological
economists
remain dominant. George even predicted that groundmight
price
pollution
nes
more
conservatively
to prerents would rise faster than wages and income to capital,
vent
inherently
unquantiable
damage
to
the
environa prediction that modern analysis has shown to be plausiment, whereas Georgists might emphasize mediation
ble, since the supply of land is xed.[25]
between conicting interests and human rights.[22][46]
Common ground rent is still the primary focus of Geor- Geolibertarianism, a market oriented branch of geoism,
gists because of its large value and the known disec- tends to take a direct stance against what it perceives as
onomies of misused land. However, there are other burdensome regulation and would like to see auctioned
sources of rent that are theoretically analogous to ground- pollution quotas or taxes replace most command and conrent and are highly debated topics within Georgism. The trol regulation.[47]
following are some sources of economic rent.[26][27][28]
Since ecologists are primarily concerned with conservation, they tend to put less emphasis on the issue of equi extractable
resources
(minerals
and tably distributing scarcity/pollution rents, whereas Georhydrocarbons)[29][30]
gists insist that unearned income not be captured by those
who hold title to natural assets and pollution privilege. To
[22][31][32]
severables (forests and stocks of sh)
the extent that geoists recognize the impact of pollution
extraterrestrial domains (geosynchronous orbits and or share conservationist values, they will agree with ecological economists about the need to limit pollution, but
airway corridor use)[27][28]
geoists will also crucially insist that pollution rents gen legal privileges tied to location (taxi medallions, bill- erated from those conservation eorts are not captured
board and development permits, or the monopoly of by polluters and are instead used for public purposes or
electromagnetic frequencies)[27][28]
to compensate those who suer the negative eects of
pollution. Ecological economists advocate similar pollu restrictions/taxes on pollution or severance (tradable tion restrictions but, placing conservation rst, might be
emission permits and shing quotas)[21][27][28]
willing to grant private polluters the privilege to capture
pollution rents. To the extent that ecological economists
Right-of-way (transportation) used by railroads,
share the geoist view of social justice, they would advoutilities, and internet service providers[33][34][35]
cate auctioning pollution quotas instead of giving them
[21][36]
away for free.[40] This distinction can be seen clearly in
issuance of legal tender (see seigniorage)
the dierence between basic cap and trade and the geoist
privileges that are less location dependent but variation, cap and share, a proposal to auction temporary
that still exclude others from natural opportunities pollution permits, with rents going to the public, instead
(intellectual property)[37][38]
of giving pollution privilege away for free to existing pol-

234

CHAPTER 25. GEORGISM

luters or selling perpetual permits.[48]

25.1.4

Revenue uses

Georgists suggest two uses for the revenue from a land

value tax. The revenue can be used to fund the state
(allowing the reduction or elimination of other taxes),
or it can be redistributed to citizens as a pension or
basic income (or it can be divided between these two
options).[49][50][51]
In practice, the elimination of all other taxes implies a
very high land value tax, higher than any currently existing land tax. Introducing a high land value tax would
cause the price of land titles to decrease correspondingly, but George did not believe landowners should be
compensated, and described the issue as being analogous
to compensation for former slave owners. Many other
geoists disagree on the question of compensation, ranging from complete compensation to only the compensation required to achieve Georgist reform.

essary for achieving reform.[62][63] For similar reasons,

others propose capturing future land value increases
instead of all land rent.[64] Though Georgism has historically been viewed as a radically progressive or socialist
ideology, some libertarians and minarchists who have
been inuenced by geoism take the position that limited
social spending should be nanced with using georgist
concepts of value capture, but that not all land rent
should to be captured. This conservative adaptation is
considered incompatible with true geolibertarianism,
which requires that excess rents be gathered and then
distributed back to residents. (See Milton Friedman in
Critical reception)

25.3 Inuence

25.2 Synonyms and variants

Most early advocacy groups described themselves as Single Taxers, and George reluctantly accepted single tax
as an accurate label for the movements main political
goalthe replacement of all unjust or inecient taxes
with the capture of land-rents, primarily using a land
value tax (LVT). In the modern era, some groups inspired by Georgism emphasize environmentalism, while
others emphasize its egalitarian free market philosophy;
utilitarians and urbanists emphasize the economic and social benets of eciently utilizing land.
Some modern proponents are dissatised with the name
Georgist. While Henry George was well known throughout his life, he has been largely forgotten by the public
and the idea of a single tax of land predates him. Some
now prefer the term geoism,[14][52] with the meaning of
geo (earth, in Greek) deliberately ambiguous. The terms
Earth Sharing,[53] geonomics,[54] and geolibertarianism[55]
(see Libertarianism) are also used by some Georgists.
These terms represent a dierence of emphasis, and
sometimes real dierences about how land rent should
be spent (citizens dividend or just replacing other taxes);
but all agree that land rent should be recovered from its
private recipients.

Henry George, whose writings and advocacy form the basis for
Georgism

Georgist ideas heavily inuenced the politics of the early

20th century. Political parties that were formed based on
Georgist ideas include the Commonwealth Land Party,
the Justice Party of Denmark, the Henry George Justice
Compulsory nes and fees related to land rents are the Party, and the Single Tax League.
most common Georgist policies, but some geoists pre- In the UK in 1909, the Liberal Government included a
fer voluntary value capture systems that rely on methods land tax as part of several taxes in the Peoples Budget
such as non-compulsory or self-assessed location value aimed at redistributing wealth (including a progressively
fees, community land trusts,[56] and purchasing land value graded income tax and an increase of inheritance tax).
covenants.[57][58][59][60][61]
This caused a crisis which resulted indirectly in reform of
Some geoists believe that partially compensating the House of Lords. The budget was passed eventually
landowners is a politically expedient compromise nec- but without the land tax. In 1931, the minority Labour

25.4. CRITICAL RECEPTION

235

Government passed a land value tax as part III of the 1931 erally include the value of buildings and other improveFinance act. However, this was repealed in 1934 by the ments, one exception being the town of Altoona, PennNational Government before it could be implemented.
sylvania, which only taxes land value.
In Denmark, the Georgist Justice Party has previously
been represented in Folketinget. It formed part of a
centre-left government 195760 and was also represented
in the European Parliament 197879. The inuence of
Henry George has waned over time, but Georgist ideas
still occasionally emerge in politics. In the 2004 Presidential campaign, Ralph Nader mentioned Henry George
in his policy statements.[65]

25.3.1

Communities

Several communities were also initiated with Georgist

principles during the height of the philosophys popularity. Two such communities that still exist are Arden,
Delaware, which was founded in 1900 by Frank Stephens
and Will Price, and Fairhope, Alabama, which was
founded in 1894 by the auspices of the Fairhope Single
Tax Corporation.[66]
The German protectorate of Jiaozhou Bay (also known
as Kiaochow) in China fully implemented Georgist policy. Its sole source of government revenue was the land
value tax of six percent which it levied on its territory.
The German government had previously had economic
problems with its African colonies caused by land speculation. One of the main aims in using the land value tax in
Jiaozhou Bay was to eliminate such speculation, an aim
which was entirely achieved.[67] The colony existed as a
German protectorate from 1898 until 1914, when seized
by Japanese and British troops. In 1922 the territory was
returned to China.

Henry George School of Social Science in New York.

25.3.2 Institutes and organizations

Various organizations still exist that continue to promote
the ideas of Henry George. According to the The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, the periodical Land&Liberty, established in 1894, is the longestlived Georgist project in history.[69] Also in the U.S.,
the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy was established in
1974 founded based on the writings of Henry George, and
seeks to improve the dialogue about urban development,
the built environment, and tax policy in the United States
and abroad.[70] The Henry George Foundation continues
to promote the ideas of Henry George in the UK.[71] The
IU is an international umbrella organisation that brings
together organizations worldwide that seek land value tax
reform.[72]

25.4 Critical reception

Richard T. Ely, known as the Father of Land Economics, agreed with the economic arguments for Georgism but believed that correcting the problem the way
Henry George wanted (without compensation) was unjust to existing landowners. In explaining his position,
Ely wrote that If we have all made a mistake, should one
party to the transaction alone bear the cost of the common
blunder?"[73]
Karl Marx viewed the Single Tax platform as a step backwards from the transition to communism and referred to
Georgism as Capitalisms last ditch.[74] Marx argued
that, The whole thing is... simply an attempt, decked
out with socialism, to save capitalist domination and indeed to establish it afresh on an even wider basis than
its present one.[75] Marx also criticized the way land
value tax theory emphasizes the value of land, arguing
that, His fundamental dogma is that everything would
be all right if ground rent were paid to the state.[75] Fred
Harrison replies to these Marxist objections in Gronlund
and other Marxists Part III: nineteenth-century Americas critics, American Journal of Economics and Sociology.[76]
George has also been accused of exaggerating the importance of his all-devouring rent thesis in claiming
that it is the primary cause of poverty and injustice in
society.[77] George argued that the rent of land increased
faster than wages for labor because the supply of land is
xed. Modern economists, including Ottmar Edenhofer
have demonstrated that Georges assertion is more relevant to Georges time than today.[25]

Georgist ideas were also adopted to some degree in

Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Africa, South
Korea, and Taiwan. In these countries, governments
still levy some type of land value tax, albeit with
exemptions.[68] Many municipal governments of the USA
depend on real property tax as their main source of rev- Contemporaries such as Frank Fetter and John Bates
enue, although such taxes are not Georgist as they gen- Clark argued that it was impractical to distinguish land

236

CHAPTER 25. GEORGISM

from capital, and used this as a basis to attack Georgism. Mark Blaug, a specialist in the history of economic
thought, credits Fetter and Clark with inuencing mainstream economists to abandon the idea that land is a
unique factor of production and hence that there is any
special need for a special theory of ground rent claiming that this is in fact the basis of all the attacks on
Henry George by contemporary economists and certainly
the fundamental reason why professional economists increasingly ignored him.[78]
Some recent critics, such as Keynesian economist Paul
Krugman, agree that land value taxation is the best
means of raising public revenue but assert that increased
spending has rendered land rent insucient to fully
fund government.[79] Georgists have responded by citing studies showing that land values of nations like the
US, UK, and Australia are more than sucient to fund
government.[80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87]

Mason Ganey[103][104]
Robert J. Gordon[105]
John Kenneth Galbraith [106]
Max Hirsch[107]
Wolf Ladejinsky[108]
Philippe Legrain[109]
Donald Shoup[110][111][112]
Herbert A. Simon[113][114]
Robert Solow[115]
Joseph Stiglitz[116][117]
Nicolaus Tideman[118]

William Vickrey[119]
Anarcho-capitalist political philosopher and economist
Lon Walras[120]
Murray Rothbard criticized Georgism in Man, Economy, and State as being philosophically incongruent with
Philip Wicksteed[121]
subjective value theory, and further stating that land is
irrelevant in the factors of production, trade, and price
systems.[88] Rothbards economic critique is well recog- 25.5.2 Heads of state
nized as relying on false assumptions and awed reasoning, even by people who ultimately agree with Rothbard
John Ballance[122]
in opposing Georgism.[89]
Winston Churchill[123][124]
Chicago school libertarian economist Milton Friedman
agreed with the Henry George argument as being the
Alfred Deakin[125]
least bad means of raising whatever public revenue was
Andrew Fisher[126]
needed.[90] Georgists agree with Friedman that land titles
should remain private and not be socialized. However,
George Grey[127]
Friedman viewed Georgism as partially immoral, due to
a dierence of opinion about the validity of vested prop Rutherford B. Hayes[128]
erty rights in land. Georgists believe that the private cap William Morris Hughes[129]
ture of unimproved land-rents is inherently unjust, draw[91]
ing comparisons to slavery.
Robert Stout[130]
Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek credited early enthusiasm for Henry George with developing his interest in economics. Later, Hayek said that the theory of
Georgism would be very strong if assessment challenges
didn't lead to unfair outcomes, but he believed that they
would.[92]

25.5 Notable Georgists

25.5.1

Economists

Woodrow Wilson[131]
Sun Yat-sen[132]
H. H. Asquith & David Lloyd George gave speeches
and private statements supporting geoism but later
publicly distanced themselves.[133][134]

25.5.3 Other political gures

Warren Worth Bailey[135][136]

Harry Gunnison Brown[93]

Newton D. Baker[137]

John R. Commons[94][95][96]

Willie Brown[138]

Raymond Crotty[97][98]

J. Frank Colbert[139][140]

Ottmar Edenhofer[99][100][101]

George F. Cotterill[141]

Fred Foldvary[102]

John W. Davis[142]

25.5. NOTABLE GEORGISTS

237

Fred Dixon[143]

Robert Swann (land trust pioneer)[192]

Seymour J. Farmer[144]

Helen Taylor (feminist)[193]

William Jay Gaynor[145]

William Simon U'Ren[194]

Keir Hardie[146]

William Bauchop Wilson[137]

Frederic C. Howe

[147]

Blas Infante[148]

25.5.5 Authors

Tom L. Johnson

[149]

Frank Chodorov[195][196]

Samuel M. Jones

[150]

Ernest Howard Crosby[197]

Frank de Jong[151]
Franklin Knight Lane[137]

Charles Eisenstein[198]

Andrew MacLaren[152][153]

Hamlin Garland[199]

Raymond Moley[154]

Fred Harrison[200][201]

Hazen S. Pingree[155][156][157]
George Lawrence Record

Ebenezer Howard[202][203][204]

[158]

Stephen R. Reed

[159]

Philip Snowden[160][161]
Lewis St. George Stubbs[162]
Linda D. Thompson[163]

Aldous Huxley[205]
James Howard Kunstler[206]
William D. McCrackan[199]
Albert Jay Nock[207]
Kathleen Norris[208]

25.5.4

Activists

Upton Sinclair[209][210]

Jane Addams

[164][165]

Louis Brandeis

[166][167]

Clarence Darrow[168][169][170]
Michael Davitt

Leo Tolstoy[211][212]

25.5.6 Journalists

[171]

Samuel Gompers[172][173]

Samuel Brittan[213]
William F. Buckley, Jr.[214]

Bolton Hall[174]
John Haynes Holmes[175][176]

Michael Kinsley[215][216][217]

Benjamin C. Marsh[177][178]

Suzanne La Follette[218]

Mumia Abu-Jamal[179][180]

Dylan Matthews[219][220]

Ralph Nader[65][181]

Reihan Salam[221]

Thomas Mott Osborne

[182][183][184]

Amos Pinchot

[185][186]

Louis Freeland Post[187]

Terence V. Powderly[188]

Martin Wolf[222]
Merryn Somerset Webb[223][224]
Brand Whitlock[225][226][227]

Samuel Seabury[189]

Tim Worstall[228]

Nicholas Shaxson[190][191]

Matthew Yglesias[229][230]

238

25.5.7

CHAPTER 25. GEORGISM

Artists

Margrit Kennedy[272]

John Wilson Bengough[231]

John C. Lincoln[273]

Daniel Carter Beard[232]

Elizabeth Magie[274][275]

Matthew Bellamy[233]

Edward McGlynn[276]

Walter Burley Grin[234][235]

Buckey O'Neill[277]

James A. Herne[236]

George Foster Peabody[183][184]

John Hutchinson[199][237]

Raymond A. Spruance[278]

George Inness[238]

Silvanus P. Thompson[279]

Emma Lazarus[239]

Fiske Warren[280][281]

Agnes de Mille[240]

Alfred Russel Wallace[282]

Henry Churchill de Mille[241][242]

Joseph Fels[283]

William C. deMille[243][244]

25.6 See also

Francis Neilson[245][246]
Banjo Paterson[247]

Cap and Share

Will Price[248]

Economic rent

Frank Stephens (sculptor)[249]

Enclosure

Frank Lloyd Wright[250]

Excess burden of taxation/Deadweight loss

25.5.8

Community land trust

Philosophers

Freiwirtschaft

Ralph Borsodi

[251]

Geo-libertarianism

Nicholas Murray Butler

Land value tax

John B. Cobb

Law of rent

[252][253]

[254]

John Dewey

[255]

Optimal tax

Leon MacLaren

[256][257]

Pigovian tax

Franz Oppenheimer[258]

Progress and Poverty

Philippe Van Parijs

Prosper Australia
League)

[259][260]

Bertrand Russell

[261][262][263]

Hillel Steiner[264]

25.5.9

(formerly

Henry

George

Tragedy of the commons/anticommons

25.7 References

Other

Roger Babson[265]
Albert Einstein

[266][267]

Henry Ford[268]
Silvio Gesell

[269]

Theodor Herzl[258]
Spencer Heath[270][271]

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2014.

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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 61.

244

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Two Papers on Public Sanitation and the Single Tax.
New York: Single Tax Information Bureau, 1914. http: [202] Steuer, Max (June 2000). REVIEW ARTICLE A hundred years of town planning and the inuence of Ebenezer
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[187] Post, Louis F. The Prophet of San Francisco: Personal
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Conservative Press in Twentieth-century America. Greenwood Publishing, Inc. p. 310. Thus, the Freeman was to
speak for the great tradition of classical liberalism, which
[Albert Jay Nock and Francis Nielson] were afraid was being lost, and for the economics of Henry George, which
both men shared.

[191] Shaxson, Nicholas (19 September 2011). Vince Cables

conference speech: panel verdict. The Guardian. Retrieved 2 December 2013.|Shaxon wrote, An LVT would
be a massive, revolutionary opportunity [...]. It is one of
the most ecient, fair, clever and progressive taxes that [208] Norris, Kathleen. The Errors of Marxism. Retrieved
21 November 2013.
exists.
[192] Mills, Stephanie. Bob Swanns Positively Dazzling Re- [209] Sinclair, Upton. The Consequences of Land Speculation
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advocating the reform because, Our opponents, the great
[193] Wenzer, Kenneth (1997). An Anthology of Henry
rich bankers and land speculators of California, persuaded
Georges Thought (Volume 1). University Rochester Press.
the poor man that we were going to put all taxes on this
pp. 87, 243.
poor mans lot.

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[211] A Great Iniquity.. Leo Tolstoy once said of George, "People do not argue with the teaching of George, they simply [229] Matthew, Yglesias. My Five-Point Plan for Fixing Everything. Retrieved 7 November 2013.
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I am one.
[232] Smith, Carl (2008). Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and
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[216] Kinsley, Michael. The Capital-Gains Tax: A Tragedy [233] Muse return with new album The Resistance "Sure, he has
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[220] https://twitter.com/dylanmatt/status/
414149160775204864 Dylan Matthewss veried
[239] Schor, Esther (2006). Emma Lazarus. Random House.
account states, I think we've both been Georgists for a
Author of The New Colossus, on the Statue of Libwhile now.
erty, and the poem Progress and Poverty, named after
Georges book, of which she said, The life and thought of
[221] Salam, Reihan (July 15, 2010). The Agenda. Retrieved
no one capable of understanding it can be quite the same
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after reading it.
[222] Martin Wolf (2010-07-08). Why we must halt the land
[240] Schwartzman, Jack. A Remembrance of Anna George
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de Mille and Agnes de Mille. Retrieved 17 November
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[223] Merryn Somerset Webb (2013-09-27). How a levy based
on location values could be the perfect tax. The Financial
[241] Eyman, Scott (2010). Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life
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[224] https://twitter.com/iddqkfa/status/
468204465057566720

[242] Easton, Carol (1996). No Intermissions The Life of Agnes

de Mille. Da Capo Press.

[225] Smith, Charles Joseph (JanuaryFebruary 1941). Forty [243] Louvish, Simon (2008). Cecil B. DeMille: A Life in Art.
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XLI (1). Retrieved 30 October 2014.
[244] Eyman, Scott (2010). Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life
[226] Filler, Louis (1993). The muckrakers. Stanford, Calif:
of Cecil B. DeMille. Simon and Schuster. p. 314.
Stanford University Press.
[245] Henry George, The Scholar A Commencement Ad[227] Miller, Joseph Dana (ed.), 1917. Single Tax Year Book.
dress Delivered by Francis Neilson at the Henry George
NY: Single Tax Review Publishing Company
School of Social Science, June 3, 1940.

246

CHAPTER 25. GEORGISM

[246] Neilson, Francis (September 1939). Albert Jay Nock on [265] Babson, Roger (Aug 20, 1943). Roger Babson Sees
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Many Changes To Come After the War Has Ended. The
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[247] McQueen, Humphrey. A New Britannia. St. Lucia, Qld.: [266] Two lettrs written in 1934 to Henry Georges daughter,
U of Queensland, 2004.
Anna George De Mille. In one letter Einstein writes, The
spreading of these works is a really deserving cause, for
[248] Taylor, Mark (2010). Arden. Arcadia Publishing. p. 8.
our generation especially has many and important things
to learn from Henry George.
[249] Shields, Jerry. Forgotten Writings of Ardens Frank
Stephens. Collecting Delaware Books.
[267] Elazar, Daniel (February 4, 1955). Earth Is the Lords.
[250] Frank Lloyd Wright on Henry Georges Remedy.
http://www.newspapers.com/. The Wisconsin Jewish
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Chronicle. Retrieved 23 November 2014.
[251] Carlson, Allan. The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement [268] Wilhelm, Donald (September 5, 1942). Henry Ford
Toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century AmerTalks About War and Your Future. Liberty Magazine.
ica Transaction Publishers, 2004 (p. 51).
Retrieved 23 November 2014. Henry Ford says, "[. . .]every American family can have a piece of land. We ought
[252] Buttenheim, Harold S. (March 1934). The Relation of
to tax all idle land the way Henry George said tax it
Housing to Taxation. Law and Contemporary Problems.
heavily, so that its owners would have to make it produc1, No. 2 (Low-Cost Housing and Slum Clearance: A
tive
Symposium): pp. 198205. Retrieved 23 October 2013.
[253] Butler, Nicholas. Progress and Poverty. Commencement [269] Onken, Werner. The Political Economy of Silvio Gesell:
A Century of Activism. American Journal of Economics
Speech, Columbia University (1931). Retrieved 23 Octoand Sociology 59.4 (2000): 609-22. Web. 16 Aug. 2014.
ber 2013.
[254] Daly, Herman (1994). For the Common Good: Redirecting [270] MacCallum, Spencer H. (SummerFall 1997). The Alternative Georgist Tradition. FRAGMENTS 35. Rethe Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a
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Sustainable Future. Beacon Press. pp. 258259, 328
329.
[271] Foldvary, Fred E. (April 2004). Heath: Estranged Geor[255] http://www.wealthandwant.com/HG/PP/Dewey_
gist. American Journal of Economics and Sociology 63
Appreciation_HG.html
(2): pages 411431. Retrieved 30 October 2014.
[256] The Life of Leon MacLaren. Retrieved 25 January [272] Kennedy, Margrit. Money & The Land Grab. YouTube.
2014.
Share the Rents. Retrieved 12 December 2013.
[257] The School of Economic Science. Retrieved 25 January
[273] Lincoln, John. Fighting For Fundamentals. Retrieved 5
2014.
December 2013.
[258] Sklar, Dusty. Henry George and Zionism. Retrieved 28
[274] Magie invented The Landlords Game, predecessor to
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Monopoly
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[275] Dodson, Edward J. How Henry Georges Principles Were
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[260] Sterba, James P. (2013). From Rationality to Equality.
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[276] Ganey, Mason. Henry George Dr. Edward McGlynn
[261] Bertrand Russell (1992). The Basic Writings of Bertrand
& Pope Leo XIII. Retrieved 25 January 2014.
Russell, 19031959. Psychology Press. p. 492.
[262] Bertrand Russell (1962). Freedom versus Organization. [277] OFFERS $250,000 FOR SINGLE TAX CAMPAIGN;
Joseph Fels Pledges That Sum for Five Years Here and in
W. W. Norton & Company.
England. IF THERE IS AN EQUAL FUND Commission
of Single Taxers Formed to Raise the Fund -- Roosevelt,
[263] http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/
Taft, and Hughes Said to be Friendly.. New York Times.
russell-bertrand_admiration-for-henry-george-1960.jpg
May 8, 1909. Retrieved 30 October 2014.
Letter addressed to a Mr. Krumreig
[264] Vallentyne, Peter. Left-libertarianism: A Primer. In Val- [278] Thomas B. Buell (1974). The Quiet Warrior. Boston: Litlentyne, Peter; Steiner, Hillel (2000). "Left-libertarianism
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and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate". Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Publishers Ltd. [279] Mills, Allen.
Single Tax, Socialism and the In"Georgist libertarianssuch as eponymous George (1879,
dependent Labour Party of Manitoba: The Political
1892), Steiner (1977, 1980, 1981, 1992, 1994), and TideIdeas of F.J. Dixon and S.J. Farmer. Labour / Le
man (1991, 1997, 1998)hold that agents may appropriTravail 5 (1980): 33-56. JSTOR. Web. 04 Dec.
ate unappropriated natural resources as long as they pay
2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/25139947?
ref=no-x-route:ace15c2e1d6b230b7bafc46e82f39f89>
for the competitive value of the rights they claim.

25.8. EXTERNAL LINKS

[280] American Single Taxers Invade Tiny Andorra; Fiske

Warren Carries Their Gospel to the Republic Hidden for
Twelve Centuries in the Pyrenees Between France and
Spain. New York Times. April 16, 1916. Retrieved 9
December 2013.
[281] Sinclair, Upton. The Consequences of Land Speculation
are Tenantry and Debt on the Farms, and Slums and Luxury in the Cities. Retrieved 29 July 2014.
[282] Stanley, Buder (1990). Visionaries and Planners: The
Garden City Movement and the Modern Community. Oxford University Press. Wallace described Progress and
Poverty as Undoubtedly the most remarkable and important book of the present century.
[283] Dudden, Arthur (1971). Joseph Fels and the single tax
movement. Temple University Press.

25.8 External links

Robert Schalkenbach Foundation

247

Chapter 26

Henry George
For other uses, see Henry George (disambiguation).
Henry George (September 2, 1839 October 29,
1897) was an American writer, politician and political
economist, who was the most inuential proponent of the
land value tax and the value capture of land/natural resource rents, an idea known at the time as Single-Tax.
His immensely popular writing is credited with sparking
several reform movements of the Progressive Era and ultimately inspiring the broad economic philosophy often
referred to today as Georgism, the main tenet of which is
that people legitimately own value they fairly create, but
that resources and common opportunities, most importantly the value of land, belongs equally to all humanity.
His most famous work, Progress and Poverty (1879), sold
millions of copies worldwide, probably more than any
other American book before that time. It is a treatise on
inequality, the cyclic nature of industrialized economies,
and the use of the land value tax as a remedy.

26.1 Biography
26.1.1

Birthplace in Philadelphia

Life and career

George was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a

lower-middle-class family, the second of ten children of
Richard S. H. George and Catharine Pratt (Vallance)
George. His father was a publisher of religious texts and
a devout Episcopalian, and sent George to the Episcopal
Academy in Philadelphia. George chafed at his religious
upbringing and left the academy without graduating.[1][2]
Instead he convinced his father to hire a tutor and supplemented this with avid reading and attending lectures
at the Franklin institute.[3] His formal education ended at
age 14 and he went to sea as a foremast boy at age 15
in April 1855 on the Hindoo, bound for Melbourne and
Calcutta. He ended up in the West in 1858 and briey
considered prospecting for gold but instead started work
the same year in San Francisco as a type setter.[3]

perous, strong-minded man, was opposed to his nieces

impoverished suitor. But the couple, defying him, eloped
and married in late 1861, with Henry dressed in a borrowed suit and Annie bringing only a packet of books.
The marriage was a happy one and four children were
born to them. Foxs mother was Irish Catholic, and while
George remained an Evangelical Protestant, the children
were raised Catholic. On November 3, 1862 Annie gave
birth to future United States Representative from New
York, Henry George, Jr. (18621916). Early on, even
with the birth of future sculptor, Richard F. George (1865
September 28, 1912),[4][5][6] the family was near starvation.

After deciding against gold mining in British Columbia,

In California George fell in love with Annie Corsina Fox, George was hired as a printer for the newly created San
an eighteen-year-old girl from Sydney who had been or- Francisco Times,[7] and was able to immediately submit
phaned and was living with an uncle. The uncle, a pros- editorials for publication, including the popular What the
248

26.1. BIOGRAPHY

249

Railroads Will Bring Us., which remained required reading in California schools for decades. George climbed
the ranks of the Times, eventually becoming managing
editor in the summer of 1867.[8][9] George worked for
several papers, including four years (18711875) as editor of his own newspaper San Francisco Daily Evening
Post and time running the Reporter, a Democratic antimonopoly publication.[10][11][12] The George family struggled but Georges increasing reputation and involvement
in the newspaper industry lifted them from poverty.

owners and monopolists via economic rents, and that this

concentration of unearned wealth is the main cause of
poverty. George considered it a great injustice that private prot was being earned from restricting access to
natural resources while productive activity was burdened
with heavy taxes, and indicated that such a system was
equivalent to slavery a concept somewhat similar to
wage slavery. This is also the work in which he made
the case for a land value tax in which governments would
tax the value of the land itself, thus preventing private
interests from proting upon its mere possession, but alGeorges other two children were both daughters. The
made to that land
rst was Jennie George, (c. 18671897), later to be- lowing the value of all improvements
to remain with investors.[20][21]
[13]
come Jennie George Atkinson. Georges other daughter was Anna Angela George (b. 1879), who would become mother of both future dancer and choreographer,
Agnes de Mille[14] and future actress Peggy George (who
was born Margaret George de Mille).[15][16]

26.1.2

Economic and political philosophy

George began as a Lincoln Republican, but then became

a Democrat. He was a strong critic of railroad and mining
interests, corrupt politicians, land speculators, and labor
contractors. He rst articulated his views in an 1868 article entitled What the Railroad Will Bring Us. George
argued that the boom in railroad construction would benet only the lucky few who owned interests in the railroads and other related enterprises, while throwing the
greater part of the population into abject poverty. This
had led to him earning the enmity of the Central Pacic
Railroad's executives, who helped defeat his bid for election to the California State Assembly.[12][17][18]
One day in 1871 George went for a horseback ride and
stopped to rest while overlooking San Francisco Bay. He
later wrote of the revelation that he had:
I asked a passing teamster, for want of
something better to say, what land was worth
there. He pointed to some cows grazing so far
o that they looked like mice, and said, 'I don't
know exactly, but there is a man over there who
will sell some land for a thousand dollars an
acre.' Like a ash it came over me that there
was the reason of advancing poverty with advancing wealth. With the growth of population, land grows in value, and the men who
work it must pay more for the privilege.[19]
Furthermore, on a visit to New York City, he was struck
by the apparent paradox that the poor in that longestablished city were much worse o than the poor in less
developed California. These observations supplied the
theme and title for his 1879 book Progress and Poverty,
which was a great success, selling over 3 million copies.
In it George made the argument that a sizeable portion
of the wealth created by social and technological advances in a free market economy is possessed by land

Henry George later in life

George was in a position to discover this pattern, having experienced poverty himself, knowing many dierent societies from his travels, and living in California at
a time of rapid growth. In particular he had noticed that
the construction of railroads in California was increasing
land values and rents as fast as or faster than wages were
rising.[17][22]
In 1880, now a popular writer and speaker,[23] George
moved to New York City, becoming closely allied with
the Irish nationalist community despite being of English
ancestry. From there he made several speaking journeys abroad to places such as Ireland and Scotland where
access to land was (and still is) a major political issue.
In 1886 George campaigned for mayor of New York
City as the candidate of the United Labor Party, the
short-lived political society of the Central Labor Union.
He polled second, more than the Republican candidate

250

CHAPTER 26. HENRY GEORGE

Theodore Roosevelt. The election was won by Tammany

Hall candidate Abram Stevens Hewitt by what many of
Georges supporters believed was fraud. In the 1887 New
York state elections George came in a distant third in the
election for Secretary of State of New York.[12][24] The
United Labor Party was soon weakened by internal divisions: the management was essentially Georgist, but as
a party of organized labor it also included some Marxist
members who did not want to distinguish between land
and capital, many Catholic members who were discouraged by the excommunication of Father Edward McGlynn, and many who disagreed with Georges free trade
policy. George had particular trouble with Terrence
V. Powderly, president of the Knights of Labor, a key
member of the United Labor coalition. While initially
friendly with Powderly, George vigorously opposed the
tari policies which Powderly and many other labor leaders thought vital to the protection of American workers.
Georges strident criticism of the tari set him against
Powderly and others in the labor movement.[25]

26.1.3

Death

Georges rst stroke occurred in 1890, after a global

speaking tour concerning land rights and the relationship between rent and poverty. This stroke greatly weakened him, and he never truly recovered. Despite this,
George tried to remain active in politics. Against the advice of his doctors, George campaigned for New York
City mayor again in 1897, this time as an Independent
Democrat. The strain of the campaign precipitated a
second stroke, leading to his death four days before the
election.[26][27][28] An estimated 100,000 people attended
his funeral at Grand Central Palace, with countless more
crowding outside and lining the streets of the funeral
procession. On Sunday, October 30, 1897, the Reverend Lyman Abbott delivered an address,[29] Henry
George: A Remembrance.[30] Commentators disagreed
on whether it was the largest funeral in New York history
or the largest since the death of Abraham Lincoln.

and eliminate the need for taxes on productive activity.

George believed that this would provide disincentives toward land speculation, but would continue to incentivize
development, as landlords would not suer tax penalties
for any industry or edice constructed on their land.[32]
Broadly applying this principle is now commonly known
as 'Georgism'.
Many environmentalists, such as Bolton Hall and Ralph
Borsodi, have agreed with the idea of the earth as the
common property of humanity. The US Green Party platform has endorsed the idea of ecological tax reform, including land value taxation and substantial taxes or fees
on pollution as a replacement for command and control
regulation.[33]

26.2.2 Free trade

George was opposed to taris, which were at the time
both the major method of protectionist trade policy and
an important source of federal revenue (the federal income tax having not yet been introduced). He believed
that taris kept prices high for consumers, while failing to
produce any increase in wages. He also thought that taris protected monopolistic companies from competition,
thus augmenting their power. Later in his life, free trade
became a major issue in federal politics and his book
Protection or Free Trade was read into the Congressional
Record by ve Democratic congressmen.[34][35]
Spencer MacCallum wrote that Henry George was Undeniably the greatest writer and orator on free trade who
ever lived.[36] Tyler Cowen wrote that Georges 1886
book, Protection or Free Trade remains perhaps the bestargued tract on free trade to this day.[37]

26.2.3 Secret ballot

George was one of the earliest, strongest and most prominent advocates for adoption of the secret ballot in the
United States.[38] Georges rst article in support of the
secret ballot was entitled Bribery in Elections and pub
lished in the Overland Review of December 1871. His
second
article was Money in Elections, published in the
The grave of Henry George, Green-Wood Cemetery
North American Review of March 1883. The rst state to
adopt the secret ballot, also called The Australian Ballot, was Massachusetts in 1888 under the leadership of
26.2 Policy proposals
Richard Henry Dana III. By 1891, more than half the
states had adopted it also. For a more complete discus26.2.1 Tax on land and natural resource sion of the adoption of the Australian Ballot, see Saltman,
monopoly
Roy G., (2006), The History and Politics of Voting Technology, Palgrave Macmillan, NY, pp. 96103.
Henry George is best known for his argument that the
economic rent of land should be shared by society rather
than being owned privately. The clearest statement of this 26.2.4 Currency and national debt
view is found in Progress and Poverty: We must make
land common property.[31] By taxing land values, soci- George supported the use of government issued paper
ety could recapture the value of its common inheritance, currency such as the greenback. He opposed the use of

26.3. LEGACY

251

metallic currency (such as gold or silver), and money is- Georges impact on turn of the century reform movesued by private commercial banks.[39]
ments and intellectual culture. Georges self-published
Progress and Poverty was the rst popular economics
text and one of the most widely printed books ever writ26.2.5 Other proposals
ten. The books explosive world-wide popularity is often marked as the beginning of the Progressive Era and
Henry George also proposed the following reforms:
various political parties, clubs, and charitable organizations around the world were founded on Georges ideas.
Georges message appeals broadly across the political
to end or restrict the use of intellectual property,
spectrum and has attracted strong support from labor
to create a pension and disability system, as well as movements, socialists, anarchists, abolitionists, suraga variation of unconditional basic income known as ists, middle-class reformers, wealthy industrialists and
citizens dividend,
investors. As a result, Henry George is still claimed
as a primary intellectual inuence by both the classical
to have government own and manage all right-of- libertarian and socialist movements. Edwin Markham
way and natural monopolies, such as utility com- expressed a common sentiment when he said, Henry
panies and mass transportation,
George has always been to me one of the supreme heroes
of humanity.[40]
to dramatically reduce the size of the military,
A large number of famous individuals, particularly
to replace contract patronage with the direct em- Progressive Era gures, claim inspiration from Georges
ployment of government workers, with civil-service idea, now known as Georgism.
protections,
Franklin D. Roosevelt praised George as one of the
to make urban public transportation free,
really great thinkers produced by our country and bemoaned the fact that Georges writings were not better
to extend surage to women, and even to have one known and understood.[41]
house of Congress entirely male and the other enJohn Dewey wrote, It would require less than the ntirely female.
gers of the two hands to enumerate those who from Plato
down rank with him, and that No man, no graduate of a
higher educational institution, has a right to regard him26.3 Legacy
self as an educated man in social thought unless he has
some rst-hand acquaintance with the theoretical contriSee also: Georgism
bution of this great American thinker.[42]
Henry Georges idea known as Georgism had enormous
In 1892, Alfred Russel Wallace stated that Georges
Progress and Poverty was undoubtedly the most remarkable and important book of the present century.[43]
Albert Jay Nock wrote that anyone who rediscovers
Henry George will nd that George was one of the rst
half-dozen [greatest] minds of the nineteenth century,
in all the world.[44] The ant-war activist John Haynes
Holmes said nearly same thing: Henry George, one of
the helf-dozen great Americans of the nineteenth century, and one of the outstanding social reformers of all
time.[45]
The social scientist and economist John A. Hobson observed in 1897 that Henry George may be considered
to have exercised a more directly powerful formative and
educative inuence over English radicalism of the last fteen years than any other man.[46] Many others agree
with Hobson. George Bernard Shaw asserts with rst
hand knowledge that George was responsible for inspiring
5 out of 6 progressives of the 1880s who would also form
[47]
The
Landlords Game board, based on Magies 1924 US patent (no. socialist organizations such as the Fabian Society.
controversial Peoples Budget and the Land Values (Scot1,509,312).
land) Bill were inspired by Henry George and resulted in
inuence in his time but slowly waned throughout the the Parliament Act 1911 to reform of the House of Lords,
1900s. Nonetheless, it would be dicult to overstate which had blocked Georgist land reform. In Denmark,

252

CHAPTER 26. HENRY GEORGE

the Danmarks Retsforbund (known in English as the Justice Party or Single-Tax Party) was founded in 1919. The
partys platform is based upon the land tax principles of
Henry George. The party was elected to parliament for
the rst time in 1926, and they were moderately successful in the post-war period and managed to join a governing coalition with the Social Democrats and the Social
Liberal Party from the years 195760, with diminishing
success afterwards.

Although both advocated workers rights, Henry George

and Karl Marx were antagonists. Marx saw the Single
Tax platform as a step backwards from the transition to
communism.[53] On his part, Henry George predicted that
if Marxs ideas were tried, the likely result would be a
dictatorship.[54]

Non-political means have also been attempted to further

the cause. A number of Single Tax Colonies were
started, such as Arden, Delaware and Fairhope, Alabama.
A follower of George, Lizzie Magie, created a board
game called The Landlords Game in 1904 to demonstrate
his theories, which later turned into the popular board
game Monopoly.

Main article: Henry George Theorem

26.3.1 Henry George Theorem

In 1977, Joseph Stiglitz showed that under certain conditions, spending by the government on public goods will
increase aggregate land rents by at least an equal amount.
This result has been dubbed by economists the Henry
George Theorem, as it characterizes a situation where
Henry Georges popularity waned gradually during the Henry Georges single tax is not only ecient, it is also
20th century. However, there are still Georgist orga- the only tax necessary to nance public expenditures.[55]
nizations. Many inuential people who remain famous,
such as George Bernard Shaw, were inuenced inspired
by George or identify as Georgists. In his last book,
26.4 Economic contributions
Where do we go from here: Chaos or Community?, Martin
Luther King, Jr referenced Henry George in support of a
guaranteed minimum income. Bill Moyers quoted Henry George developed what he saw as a crucial feature of his
George in a speech and identied George as a great own theory of economics in a critique of an illustration
personal hero.[48] Albert Einstein wrote that Men like used by Frdric Bastiat in order to explain the nature
Henry George are rare unfortunately. One cannot imag- of interest and prot. Bastiat had asked his readers to
ine a more beautiful combination of intellectual keenness, consider James and William, both carpenters. James has
artistic form and fervent love of justice. Every line is built himself a plane, and has lent it to William for a year.
written as if for our generation. The spreading of these Would James be satised with the return of an equally
works is a really deserving cause, for our generation espe- good plane a year later? Surely not! He'd expect a board
cially has many and important things to learn from Henry along with it, as interest. The basic idea of a theory of
interest is to understand why. Bastiat said that James had
George.[49]
given William over that year the power, inherent in the
Before reading Progress and Poverty, Helen Keller was instrument, to increase the productivity of his labor, and
a socialist who believed that Georgism was a good step wants compensation for that increased productivity.[56]
in the right direction.[50] She later wrote of nding in
Henry Georges philosophy a rare beauty and power of George did not accept this explanation. He wrote, I am
inspiration, and a splendid faith in the essential nobility inclined to think that if all wealth consisted of such things
as planes, and all production was such as that of carpenof human nature.[51]
ters that is to say, if wealth consisted but of the inert
The Robert Schalkenbach Foundation publishes copies matter of the universe, and production of working up this
of Georges works and related texts on economic reform inert matter into dierent shapes that interest would be
and sponsors academic research into his policy propos- but the robbery of industry, and could not long exist.[57]
als. The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy was founded But some wealth is inherently fruitful, like a pair of breedto promote the ideas of Henry George but now focuses ing cattle, or a vat of grape juice soon to ferment into
more generally on land economics and policy. The Henry wine. Planes and other sorts of inert matter (and the most
George School of Social Science of New York and its lent item of all money itself) earn interest indirectly, by
satellite schools teach classes and conduct outreach.
being part of the same circle of exchange with fruitful
Mason Ganey, an American economist and a major forms of wealth such as those, so that tying up these forms
Georgist critic of neoclassical economics, argued that of wealth over time incurs an opportunity cost.
neoclassical economics was designed and promoted by Georges theory had its share of critiques. Austrian school
landowners and their hired economists to divert attention economist Eugen von Bhm-Bawerk, for example, exfrom Georges extremely popular philosophy that since pressed a negative judgment of Georges discussion of the
land and resources are provided by nature, and their value carpenters plane. In his treatise, Capital and Interest, he
is given by society, land value rather than labor or capi- wrote:
tal should provide the tax base to fund government and
its expenditures.[52]
(T)he separation of production into two

26.6. REFERENCES
groups, in one of which the vital forces of
nature form a distinct element in addition to
labour, while in the other they do not, is entirely untenable[...] The natural sciences have
long ago told us that the cooperation of nature is universal. [...] The muscular movement
of the man who planes would be of very little use, if the natural powers and properties of
the steel edge of the plane did not come to his
assistance.[58]

253
Left-libertarianism
New York City mayoral elections
Spaceship Earth
Tammany Hall#1870-1900
Charles Hall An early precursor to Henry George
History of the board game Monopoly
Andrew Bisset (barrister)

Later, George argued that the role of time in production is

pervasive. In The Science of Political Economy, he writes:
[I]f I go to a builder and say to him, In
what time and at what price will you build me
such and such a house?" he would, after thinking, name a time, and a price based on it. This
specication of time would be essential.... This
I would soon nd if, not quarreling with the
price, I ask him largely to lessen the time.... I
might get the builder somewhat to lessen the
time... ; but only by greatly increasing the
price, until nally a point would be reached
where he would not consent to build the house
in less time no matter at what price. He would
say [that the house just could not be built any
faster]....
The importance ... of this principle that
all production of wealth requires time as well as
labor we shall see later on; but the principle
that time is a necessary element in all production we must take into account from the very
rst.[59]
According to Oscar B. Johannsen, Since the very basis
of the Austrian concept of value is subjective, it is apparent that Georges understanding of value paralleled theirs.
However, he either did not understand or did not appreciate the importance of marginal utility.[60]
Another spirited response came from British biologist
T.H. Huxley in his article Capital the Mother of
Labour, published in 1890 in the journal The Nineteenth
Century. Huxley used the principles of energy science
to undermine Georges theory, arguing that, energetically
speaking, labor is unproductive.[61]

26.5 See also

Henry George Birthplace

Thomas Piketty

26.6 References
Notes
[1] Dictionary of American Biography, 1st. ed., s.v. George,
Henry, edited by Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, Vol.
VII (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1931), pp. 211
212.
[2] David Montgomery, American National Biography Online, s.v. George, Henry, Feb. 2000, http://www.
anb.org/articles/15/15-00261.html Accessed September
3, 2011
[3] American National Biography Online.
[4] Obituary, New York Times
[5] Richard F. George The Artist at Work
[6] SINGLE TAXERS DINE JOHNSON; Medallion Made
by Son of Henry George Presented to Clevelands Former
Mayor, The New York Times May 31, 1910
[7] Formaini, Robert L. Henry George Antiprotectionist Giant of American Economics. Economic Insights of the
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas 10 (2). Retrieved 28 October 2014.
[8] Henry, George, JR. The Life of Henry George, chap.
11.
[9] George, Henry. http://www.encyclopedia.com/. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Retrieved
28 October 2014.
[10] Charles A. Barker, Henry George and the California
Background of Progress and Poverty, California Historical Society Quartery 24, no. 2 (Jun. 1945), 103104.
[11] Dictionary of American Biography, s.v. George, Henry,
pp. 211212.

Georgism

[12] Montgomery, American National Biography Online,

s.v. George, Henry, http://www.anb.org/articles/15/
15-00261.html Accessed September 3, 2011.

Henry George Theorem

[13] Obituary The New York Times, May 4, 1897

Land Value Tax

[14] Agnes de Mille Biography

Geolibertarianism

254

CHAPTER 26. HENRY GEORGE

[15] Peggy George (I) Biography

[16] Agnes de Mille Papers, 19801993 : Biographical and
Historical Note
[17] Henry George, What the Railroad Will Bring Us,
Overland Monthly 1, no. 4 (Oct. 1868), http://
www.grundskyld.dk/1-railway.html Accessed September
3, 2011.
[18] Dictionary of American Biography, s.v. George, Henry,
213.

[33] The Green Party 2010 Platform : Economic Justice &

Sustainability
[34] Weir, A Fragile Alliance, 425425
[35] Henry George, Protection or Free Trade: An Examination
of the Tari Question, with Especial Regard to the Interests
of Labor(New York: 1887).
[36] MacCallum, Spencer H. (SummerFall 1997). The Alternative Georgist Tradition. FRAGMENTS 35. Retrieved 30 October 2014.

[19] Quoted in Nock, Albert Jay. "Henry George: Unorthodox

American, Part IV".

[37] Cowen, Tyler (May 1, 2009). Anti-Capitalist Rerun.

The American Interest. Volume 4 (Number 5). Retrieved
15 November 2014.

[20] Jurgen G. Backhaus, Henry Georges Ingenious Tax: A

Contemporary Restatement, American Journal of Economics and Sociology 56, no. 4 (Oct. 1997), 453458

[38] 'Jill Lepore' (October 13, 2008). "'Rock, Paper, Scissors:

How we used to vote'". New Yorker. New Yorker.

[21] Henry George, Progress and Poverty, (1879; reprinted,

London: Kegan Paul, Tench & Co., 1886), 283284.
[22] Charles A. Barker, Henry George and the California
Background of Progress and Poverty, California Historical Society Quartery 24, no. 2 (Jun. 1945), 97115.
[23] According to his granddaughter Agnes de Mille, Progress
and Poverty and its successors made Henry George the
third most famous man in the USA, behind only Mark
Twain and Thomas Edison.
[24] Dictionary of American Biography, s.v. George, Henry,
214215.
[25] Robert E. Weir, A Fragile Alliance: Henry George and
the Knights of Labor, American Journal of Economics
and Sociology 56, no. 4 (Oct. 1997), 423426.
[26] Dictionary of American Biography, s.
Henry, 215.

V. George,

[27] Montgomery, American National Biography, s.v.

George,
Henry,
http://www.anb.org/articles/15/
15-00261.html
[28] Henry Georges Death Abroad. London Papers Publish
Long Sketches and Comment on His Career. New York
Times. October 30, 1897. Retrieved March 7, 2010.
The newspapers today are devoting much attention to the
death of Henry George, the candidate of the Jeersonian
Democracy for the oce of Mayor of Greater New York,
publishing long sketches of his career and philosophical
and economical theories.
[29] School of Cooperative Individualism / Biographical History of the Georgist Movement UNITED STATES A
[30] http://cooperativeindividualism.org/abbott-lyman_
on-henry-george.html
[31] George, Henry (1879). 2. Progress and Poverty: An
Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth VI. New York:
Robert Schalkenbach Foundation. ISBN 0-914016-60-1.
Retrieved May 12, 2008.
[32] Backhaus, Henry Georges Ingenious Tax, 453458.

[39] To illustrate: It is not the business of government to interfere with the views which any one may hold of the Creator or with the worship he may choose to pay him, so long
as the exercise of these individual rights does not conict
with the equal liberty of others; and the result of governmental interference in this domain has been hypocrisy,
corruption, persecution and religious war. It is not the
business of government to direct the employment of labor
and capital, and to foster certain industries at the expense
of other industries; and the attempt to do so leads to all
the waste, loss and corruption due to protective taris.
On the other hand it is the business of government to issue money. This is perceived as soon as the great labor
saving invention of money supplants barter. To leave it
to every one who chose to do so to issue money would
be to entail general inconvenience and loss, to oer many
temptations to roguery, and to put the poorer classes of
society at a great disadvantage. These obvious considerations have everywhere, as society became well organized,
led to the recognition of the coinage of money as an exclusive function of government. When in the progress of
society, a further labor-saving improvement becomes possible by the substitution of paper for the precious metals
as the material for money, the reasons why the issuance
of this money should be made a government function become still stronger. The evils entailed by wildcat banking
in the United States are too well remembered to need reference. The loss and inconvenience, the swindling and
corruption that owed from the assumption by each State
of the Union of the power to license banks of issue ended
with the war, and no -one would now go back to them. Yet
instead of doing what every public consideration impels us
to, and assuming wholly and fully as the exclusive function
of the General Government the power to issue money, the
private interests of bankers have, up to this, compelled
us to the use of a hybrid currency, of which a large part,
though guaranteed by the General Government, is issued
and made protable to corporations. The legitimate business of banking the safekeeping and loaning of money,
and the making and exchange of credits, is properly left to
individuals and associations; but by leaving to them, even
in part and under restrictions and guarantees, the issuance
of money, the people of the United States suer an annual loss of millions of dollars, and sensibly increase the
inuences which exert a corrupting eect upon their government. The Complete Works of Henry George. Social

26.7. EXTERNAL LINKS

Problems, p. 178, Doubleday Page & Co, New York,

1904
[40] The Single Tax Review Volume 15. New York: Publ.
O., 1915
[41] Fox, Stephen R. The Amateur Tradition: People and Politics. The American Conservation Movement: John Muir
and His Legacy. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin, 1985.
353.
[42] http://www.wealthandwant.com/HG/PP/Dewey_
Appreciation_HG.html
[43] Buder, Stanley. Visionaries and Planners: The Garden
City Movement and the Modern Community. New York:
Oxford UP, 1990.
[44] http://www.wealthandwant.com/docs/Nock_HGUA.htm
[45] A sermon that rst appeared as No.
VIII, Series 1944-45 of the Community Pulpit, published
by The Community Church, New York, New York.
Reprinted as a pamphlet by the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation <http://www.cooperativeindividualism.
org/holmes-john_henry-george-1945.html>
[46] http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Henry_George.aspx
[47] Henderson, Archibald. George Bernard Shaw, His Life
and Works. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1911.
[48] Bill Moyers at the Howard Zinn Lecture. YouTube.
2010-11-12. Retrieved 2012-07-26.
[49] http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/
einstein-albert_letters-to-anna-george-demille-1934.
html
[50] Wonder Woman at Massey Hall: Helen Keller Spoke to
Large Audience Who Were Spellbound.. Toronto Star
Weekly. January 1914. Retrieved 31 October 2014.
[51] Progress & Poverty. Robert Schalkenbach Fdn..
[52] Ganey, Mason and Harrison, Fred. The Corruption of
Economics. (London: Shepheard-Walwyn (Publishers)
Ltd., 1994) ISBN 0-85638-162-X (hardback), ISBN 085638-153-0 (paperback).
[53] Karl Marx Letter to Friedrich Adolph Sorge in Hoboken
[54] Henry Georges Thought
[55] Arnott, Richard J.; Joseph E. Stiglitz (Nov 1979). Aggregate Land Rents, Expenditure on Public Goods, and
Optimal City Size. Quarterly Journal of Economics 93
(4): 471500. doi:10.2307/1884466. JSTOR 1884466.

255

[60] Johannsen, Oscar B. Henry George and the Austrian

economists. The American Journal of Economics and Sociology (Am. j. econ. sociol.) ISSN 0002-9246. Abstract.
[61] T.H. Huxley, Capital the Mother of Labour: An Economical Problem Discussed from a Physiological Point of
View, The Nineteenth Century (Mar. 1890).

Bibliography
s:Progress and Poverty 1879
Progress and Poverty (1912, rst published 1879.
Denitive, free, searchable on Econlib.)
The Land Question 1881
Social Problems 1883
Protection or Free Trade 1886
George, Henry (July 1887). The New Party.
The North American Review (University of Northern Iowa) 145 (368): 18. ISBN 0-85315-726-X.
Protection or Free Trade (1905, rst published 1886.
Denitive, free, searchable on Econlib.)
A Perplexed Philosopher 1892
The Science of Political Economy 1898
Our Land and Land Policy" 1871
The Condition of Labor" 1891
Further reading
Barker, Charles Albro Henry George. Oxford University Press 1955 and Greenwood Press 1974.
ISBN 0-8371-7775-8
George, Henry. (1881). Progress and Poverty: An
Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and
of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth; The
Remedy. Kegan Paul (reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2009; ISBN 978-1-108-00361-2)

26.7 External links

The Henry George Foundation (United Kingdom)

[56] Frdric Bastiat, That Which is Seen, and That Which is

Not Seen, 1850.

Land Value Taxation Campaign UK

[57] Henry George, Progress and Poverty,, 161.

The Henry George Foundation of Australia

[58] Eugen von Bhm-Bawerk, Capital and Interest: A Critical

History of Economic Theory transl. William Smart (London: Macmillan and Co., 1890), 417.
[59] Henry George, The Science of Political Economy (New
York: Doubleday & McClure Co., 1898), 369370.

The Life of Henry George, by Henry George Jr,

1904
Henry George (18391897). The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. Library of Economics and Liberty (2nd ed.) (Liberty Fund). 2008.

256
The Center for the Study of Economics
The Henry George Institute Understanding Economics
The Henry George School, founded 1932.
Online Works of Henry George
Wealth and Want
Prosper Australia
Henry George at Find a Grave
Henry George Foundation OnlyMelbourne
The Complete Works of Henry George. Publisher:
New York, Doubleday, Page & company, 1904. Description: 10 v. fronts (v. 19) ports. 21 cm..
(searchable facsimile at the University of Georgia
Libraries; DjVu & layered PDF format)
The Crime of Poverty by Henry George
Centro Educativo Internacional Henry George
(Managua, Nicaragua), in Spanish
The Economics of Henry Georges Progress and
Poverty, by Edgar H. Johnson, 1910.

CHAPTER 26. HENRY GEORGE

Chapter 27

Guild socialism
Guild socialism is a political movement advocating
workers control of industry through the medium of traderelated guilds in an implied contractual relationship with
the public.[1] It originated in the United Kingdom and
was at its most inuential in the rst quarter of the 20th
century. It was strongly associated with G. D. H. Cole
and inuenced by the ideas of William Morris.

27.1 History and development

Guild socialism was partly inspired by the guilds of
craftsmen and other skilled workers which had existed in
England during the Middle Ages. In 1906, Arthur Penty
published Restoration of the Gild System in which he opposed factory production and advocated a return to an
earlier period of artisanal production organised through
guilds. The following year, the journal The New Age became an advocate of guild socialism, although in the context of modern industry rather than the mediaeval setting
favoured by Penty.
In 1914, S. G. Hobson, a leading contributor to The New
Age, published National Guilds: An Inquiry into the Wage
System and the Way Out. In this work, guilds were presented as an alternative to state control of industry or conventional trade union activity. Guilds, unlike the existing
trade unions, would not conne their demands to matters
of wages and conditions but would seek to obtain control of industry for the workers whom they represented.
Ultimately, industrial guilds would serve as the organs
through which industry would be organised in a future
socialist society.
The guild socialists stood for state ownership of industry, combined with workers control through delegation
of authority to national guilds organized internally on
democratic lines. About the state itself they diered,
some believing it would remain more or less in its existing form and others that it would be transformed into a
federal body representing the workers guilds, consumers
organizations, local government bodies, and other social
structures.[2]

ideologically close to the ideas of Fabian Society and the

guild socialism inspired by people like R. H. Tawney,
L.T. Hobhouse and J. A. Hobson. He made contributions in his early writings about industrial democracy and
workers self-management.
The theory of guild socialism was developed and popularised by G. D. H. Cole who formed the National Guilds
League in 1915 and published several books on guild
socialism, including Self-Government in Industry (1917)
and Guild Socialism Restated (1920). A National Building Guild was established after World War I but collapsed
in 1922.

27.2 See also

Mutualism
Anarcho-syndicalism
Distributism
Libertarian socialism
Alfred Richard Orage
Bertrand Russell
Christopher Lasch
Workplace democracy

27.3 Footnotes
[1] Guild Socialism. Encyclopdia Britannica. Encyclopdia Britannica Online. Encyclopdia Britannica
Inc., 2012. Web. 31 May. 2012
[2] Guild Socialism. Encyclopdia Britannica. Encyclopdia Britannica Online. Encyclopdia Britannica
Inc., 2012. Web. 31 May. 2012

27.4 External links

Ernst Wigforssa leading theorist of the Social Democratic Party of Swedenwas also inspired by and stood
257

G. D. H. Cole (1922).
"Guild Socialism".
Encyclopdia Britannica (12th ed.).

Chapter 28

Gandhism
Gandhism is a body of ideas and principles that describes the inspiration, vision and the life work of
Mahatma Gandhi. It is particularly associated with his
contributions to the idea of nonviolent resistance, sometimes also called civil resistance.
The term Gandhism also encompasses what Gandhis
ideas, words and actions mean to people around the
world, and how they used them for guidance in building
their own future. Gandhism also permeates into the realm
of the individual human being, non-political and nonsocial. A Gandhian can mean either an individual who
follows, or a specic philosophy which is attributed to,
Gandhism. Eminent scholar, Professor Ramjee Singh has
called Gandhi the Bodhisattva of the twentieth century.[1]

the root verb as meaning 'to be'). The principle of Satya

as espoused by Gandhi needed that Truth must pervade
all considerations of politics, e the pure, existing facts of
life to make his decisions.
Gandhis commitments to non-violence, human freedom,
equality and justice arose from his personal examination.

Truth is interpreted subjectively. Gandhism does not demand that its adherents agree to Gandhis own principles
to the letter, but in spirit. If one honestly believes that violence is sometimes necessary, it is truthful to believe in
it. When Gandhi returned to India in the middle of World
War I, he said he would have supported the British in the
war. It would have been wrong, according to Gandhi, to
demand equal rights for Indians in the Empire, and not
However Gandhi did not approve of 'Gandhism', as contribute to its defence. On the other hand, by the time
Gandhi explained:
of the advance of the Japanese in World War II, Gandhi
had given up notions of ghting alongside the British and
argued for nonviolence instead. Gandhi was a proponent
There is no such thing as Gandhism, and
of Ahimsa.
I do not want to leave any sect after me. I do
not claim to have originated any new principle
Gandhi developed an way of life by his constant experor doctrine. I have simply tried in my own way
imenting with truth a phrase that formed the subtitle
to apply the eternal truths to our daily life and
to his autobiography. He was prepared to learn through
problems...The opinions I have formed and the
trial and error, often admitting to mistakes and changing
conclusions I have arrived at are not nal. I may
his behaviour accordingly. This was particularly notable
change them tomorrow. I have nothing new to
when Gandhi stopped all nationwide civil resistance in
teach the world. Truth and non-violence are as
1922 after the Chauri Chaura incident. He would forsake
old as the hills.[2]
political independence for truth believing that Indians

28.1 Satyagraha

should not become murderers and commit the very evils

they were accusing the British of perpetrating in India.

Gandhism is more about the spirit of Gandhis journey to

discover the truth, than what he nally considered to be
Main article: Satyagraha
the truth. It is the foundation of Gandhis teachings, and
the spirit of his whole life to examine and understand for
Satyagraha is formed by two Sanskrit words Satya (truth) oneself, and not take anybody or any ideology for granted.
and Agraha (holding rmly to). The term was popularised Gandhi said: The Truth is far more powerful than any
during the Indian Independence Movement, and is used weapon of mass destruction.[3]
in many Indian languages including Hindi.
Gandhis philosophy encompassed ontology and its association with truth. For Gandhi, to be did not mean to
exist within the realm of time, as it has in the past with the
28.1.1 Satya
Greek philosophers. But rather, to exist meant to exist
The pivotal and dening element of Gandhism is satya, within the realm of truth, or to use the term Gandhi did,
a Sanskrit word usually translated into English as truth, satya. Gandhi summarised his beliefs rst when he said
whose literal meaning is 'what actually is (deriving from God is Truth, which his experimenting later prompted
258

28.3. ECONOMICS
him to change to Truth is God. The rst statement
seemed insucient to Gandhi, as the mistake could be
made that Gandhi was using truth as a description of God,
as opposed to God as an aspect of satya. Satya (truth) in
Gandhis philosophy is God. It shares all the characteristics of the Hindu concept of God, or Brahman, and is
believed by Gandhians to live within each person as their
conscience while at the same time guiding the universe.

28.2 Brahmacharya and ahimsa

See also: Brahmacharya, Ahinsa, Henry David Thoreau,
Leo Tolstoy
The concept of nonviolence (ahinsa) and nonresistance
has a long history in Indian religious thought and has
had many revivals in Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Muslim and
Christian contexts. Gandhi explains his philosophy and
way of life in his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth. He was quoted saying:
What dierence does it make to the dead, the
orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad
destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and
democracy?"[4]
It has always been easier to destroy than to
create.[5]
There are many causes that I am prepared to
die for but no causes that I am prepared to kill
for.[6]

259
I appeal to every Briton, wherever he may be
now, to accept the method of non-violence instead of that of war, for the adjustment of relations between nations and other matters [...]
I do not want Britain to be defeated, nor do
I want her to be victorious in a trial of brute
strength [...] I venture to present you with a nobler and braver way worthier of the bravest soldier. I want you to ght Nazism without arms,
or, if I am to maintain military terminology,
with non-violent arms. I would like you to lay
down the arms you have as being useless for
saving you or humanity. You will invite our
great leader and Signor Mussolini to take what
they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings.
You will give all these but neither your souls,
nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to
occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If
they do not give you free passage out, you will
allow yourself, man, woman, and child, to be
slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them [...] my non-violence demands
universal love, and you are not a small part of
it. It is that love which has prompted my appeal
to you.[8]

28.3 Economics
Main articles: Gandhian economics and Swadeshi

Gandhi espoused an economic theory of simple living

and self-suciency/import substitution, rather than generating exports like Japan and South Korea did. He enAt the age of 36, Gandhi adopted the vow of
visioned a more agrarian India upon independence that
brahmacharya, or celibacy. He committed himself to the
would focus on meeting the material needs of its citizenry
control of the senses, thoughts and actions. Celibacy was
prior to generating wealth and industrialising.
important to Gandhi for not only purifying himself of any
lust and sexual urges, but also to purify his love for his
wife as genuine and not an outlet for any turmoil or ag- 28.3.1 Khadi
gression within his mind.
Ahimsa, or non-violence, was another key tenet of
Gandhis beliefs. He held that total non-violence would
rid a person of anger, obsession and destructive impulses.
While his vegetarianism was inspired by his rearing in the
Hindu-Jain culture of Gujarat, it was also an extension of
ahimsa.

Gandhi also adopted the clothing style of most Indians in

the early 20th century. His adoption of khadi, or homespun cloth, was intended to help eradicate the evils of
poverty, social and economic discrimination. It was also
aimed as a challenge to the contrast that he saw between
most Indians, who were poor and traditional, and the
On 6 July 1940, Gandhi published an article in Harijan richer classes of educated, liberal-minded Indians who
which applied these philosophies to the question of had adopted Western mannerisms, clothing and practices.
British involvement in World War II. Homer Jack notes in The clothing policy was designed to protest against British
his reprint of this article, To Every Briton (The Gandhi economic policies in India. Millions of poor Indian workReader) that, to Gandhi, all war was wrong, and sud- ers were unemployed and entrenched in poverty, which
denly it 'came to him like a ash' to appeal to the British Gandhi linked to the industrialisation of cotton processto adopt the method of non-violence.[7] In this article, ing in Britain. Gandhi promoted khadi as a direct boycott
Gandhi stated,
of the Lancashire cotton industry, linking British impe-

260
rialism to Indian poverty. He focused on persuading all
members of the Indian National Congress to spend some
time each day hand-spinning on the charkha (spinning
wheel). In addition to its point as an economic campaign,
the drive for hand-spinning was an attempt to connect the
privileged Indian brahmins and lawyers of Congress to
connect with the mass of Indian peasantry.
Many prominent gures of the Indian independence
movement, including Motilal Nehru, were persuaded by
Gandhi to renounce their smart London-made clothes in
favour of khadi.

28.4 Fasting
To Gandhi, fasting was an important method of exerting
mental control over base desires. In his autobiography,
Gandhi analyses the need to fast to eradicate his desire for
delicious, spicy food. He believed that abstention would
diminish his sensual faculties, bringing the body increasingly under the minds absolute control. Gandhi was opposed to the partaking of meat, alcohol, stimulants, salt
and most spices, and also eliminated dierent types of
cooking from the food he ate.
Fasting would also put the body through unusual hardship,
which Gandhi believed would cleanse the spirit by stimulating the courage to withstand all impulses and pain.
Gandhi undertook a Fast Unto Death on three notable
occasions:
when he wanted to stop all revolutionary activities
after the Chauri Chaura incident of 1922;

CHAPTER 28. GANDHISM

28.5 Religion
See also: Bhagavad Gita, Dharma, Hinduism, Jainism,
Buddhism
Gandhi described his religious beliefs as being rooted in
Hinduism and, in particular, the Bhagavad Gita:
Hinduism as I know it entirely satises my
soul, lls my whole being. When doubts haunt
me, when disappointments stare me in the face,
and when I see not one ray of light on the horizon, I turn to the Bhagavad Gita, and nd a
verse to comfort me; and I immediately begin
to smile in the midst of overwhelming sorrow.
My life has been full of tragedies and if they
have not left any visible and indelible eect on
me, I owe it to the teachings of the Bhagavad
Gita.[9]
He professed the philosophy of Hindu Universalism (also
see Universalism), which maintains that all religions contain truth and therefore worthy of toleration and respect.
It was articulated by Gandhi:
After long study and experience, I have come
to the conclusion that [1] all religions are true;
[2] all religions have some error in them; [3]
all religions are almost as dear to me as my
own Hinduism, in as much as all human beings
should be as dear to one as ones own close relatives. My own veneration for other faiths is
the same as that for my own faith; therefore no
thought of conversion is possible.[10]

when he feared that the 1934 Communal Award Gandhi believed that at the core of every religion was
giving separate electorates to Untouchable Hindus truth (satya), non-violence (ahimsa) and the Golden Rule.
would politically divide the Hindu people;
Despite his belief in Hinduism, Gandhi was also critical
and in 1947, when he wanted to stop the bloodshed of many of the social practices of Hindus and sought to
between Hindus and Muslims in Bengal and Delhi. reform the religion.
In all three cases, Gandhi was able to abandon his fast
before death. There was some controversy over the 1934
fast, which brought him into conict with the Untouchable leader B.R. Ambedkar. In the end, Gandhi and
Ambedkar both made some concessions to negotiate the
Poona Pact, which abandoned the call for separate electorates in turn for voluntary representation and a commitment to abolish untouchability.
Gandhi also used the fasts as a penance, blaming himself
for inciting Chauri Chaura and the divisive communal
politics of both 1934 and 1947, especially the Partition
of India. Gandhi sought to purify his soul and expiate
his sins, in what he saw as his role in allowing terrible
tragedies to happen. It took a heavy toll on his physical
health and often brought him close to death.

Thus if I could not accept Christianity either

as a perfect, or the greatest religion, neither
was I then convinced of Hinduism being such.
Hindu defects were pressingly visible to me. If
untouchability could be a part of Hinduism, it
could but be a rotten part or an excrescence. I
could not understand the raison d'etre of a multitude of sects and castes. What was the meaning of saying that the Vedas were the inspired
Word of God? If they were inspired, why not
also the Bible and the Koran? As Christian
friends were endeavouring to convert me, so
were Muslim friends. Abdullah Sheth had kept
on inducing me to study Islam, and of course
he had always something to say regarding its
beauty.[11]

28.6. NEHRUS INDIA

261

He then went on to say:

1960s. Many groups descended from these networks continue to function locally in India today.

As soon as we lose the moral basis, we cease to

be religious. There is no such thing as religion
over-riding morality. Man, for instance, cannot
be untruthful, cruel or incontinent and claim to
have God on his side.[12]

While the problem of the desperate poverty of tens of

millions of landless farmers across the country had to be
addressed, Gandhi did not believe that class warfare was
inevitable, as Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong and Joseph
Stalin did. Bhave and other Gandhi disciples organised
the Bhoodan campaign encouraging landlords across the
Gandhi was critical of the hypocrisy in organised religion, country to award land to their farmers. They were encouraged to acknowledge the desperate poverty and misrather than the principles on which they were based.
treatment of these farmers, to accept them as fellow Indians and their brethren. This peaceful land distribution
program was frowned upon by supporters of free-market
economics, the Communists and socialists alike, but did
The concept of Islamic jihad can also be taken to mean enjoy good successes.
a nonviolent struggle or satyagraha, in the way Gandhi
The Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, was ofpractised it. On Islam he said:
ten considered Gandhis successor, although he was not
religious and often disagreed with Gandhi. He was, howThe sayings of Muhammad are a treasure of
ever, deeply inuenced by Gandhi personally as well as
wisdom, not only for Muslims but for all of
politically, and used his premiership to pursue ideologimankind.
cal policies based on Gandhis principles.
Later in his life when he was asked whether he was a Nehrus foreign policy was staunch anti-colonialism and
neutrality in the Cold War. Nehru backed the indepenHindu, he replied:
dence movement in Tanzania and other African nations,
as well as the American Civil Rights Movement led by
Yes I am. I am also a Christian, a Muslim, a
Martin Luther King Jr. and the anti-apartheid struggle
Buddhist and a Jew.[13]
of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress
in South Africa. Nehru refused to align with either the
Gandhis religious views are reected in the hymns his United States or the Soviet Union, and helped found the
group often sang:
Non-Aligned Movement.
Nehru also pushed through major legislation that granted
Vaishnav jan to Call them Vishnava, those who un- legal rights and freedoms to Indian women, and outlawed
derstand the suerings of others...
untouchability and many dierent kinds of social discrimination, in the face of strong opposition from ortho Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram Call him Rama or
dox Hindus.
God or Allah...
Not all of Nehrus policies were Gandhian. Nehru refused to condemn the USSR's 195657 invasion of Hungary to put down an anti-communist, popular revolt.
28.6 Nehrus India
Some of his economic policies were criticised for removing the right of property and freedoms from the landownSee also: Sarvodaya
ing peasants of Gujarat for whom Gandhi had fought in
the early 1920s. Indias economic policies under Nehru
Gandhi was assassinated in 1948, but his teachings and were highly dierent from Gandhis with Nehru followphilosophy would play a major role in Indias economic ing a socialist model. Nehru also brought Goa and Hyand social development and foreign relations for decades derabad into the Indian union through military invasion.
to come.
Nehrus biggest failure is often considered to be the 1962
Sarvodaya is a term meaning 'universal uplift' or 'progress
of all'. It was coined by Gandhi in 1908 as a title for his
translation of John Ruskin's Unto This Last. Later, nonviolence leader Vinoba Bhave used the term to refer to
the struggle of post-independence Gandhians to ensure
that self-determination and equality reached the masses
and the downtrodden. Sarvodaya workers associated
with Vinoba, including Jaya Prakash Narayan and Dada
Dharmadhikari, undertook various projects aimed at encouraging popular self-organisation during the 1950s and

Sino-Indian War, though his policy is said to have been

inspired by Gandhian pacism. In this instance, it led to
the defeat of the Indian Army against a surprise Chinese
invasion. Nehru had neglected the defence budget and
disallowed the Army to prepare, which caught the soldiers in Indias north eastern frontier o-guard with lack
of supplies and reinforcements.

262

28.7 Freedom

CHAPTER 28. GANDHISM

28.8 Without truth, nothing

See also: Apartheid, Tienanmen Square protests of 1989, Mohandas Gandhis early life was a series of personal
struggles to decipher the truth about lifes important isAmerican Civil Rights Movement
sues and discover the true way of living. He admitted
Gandhis deep commitment and disciplined belief in non- in his autobiography to hitting his wife when he was
violent civil disobedience as a way to oppose forms of young,[14] and indulging in carnal pleasures out of lust,
oppression or injustice has inspired many subsequent po- jealousy and possessiveness, not genuine love. He had
litical gures, including Martin Luther King Jr. of the eaten meat, smoked a cigarette, and almost visited a prosUnited States, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Nelson Man- titute. It was only after much personal turmoil and redela and Steve Biko of South Africa, Lech Wasa of peated failures that Gandhi developed his philosophy.
Poland and Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar.
Gandhi disliked having a cult following, and was averse
Gandhis early life work in South Africa between the to being addressed as Mahatma, claiming that he was not
years 1910 and 1915, for the improved rights of Indian a perfect human being.
residents living under the white minority South African
government inspired the later work of the African Na- In 1942, while he had already condemned Adolf Hitler,
tional Congress (ANC). From the 1950s, the ANC or- Benito Mussolini and the Japanese militarists, Gandhi
ganised non-violent civil disobedience akin to the cam- took on an oensive in civil resistance, called the Quit
paign advanced by the Indian National Congress under India Movement, which was even more dangerous and
the inspiration of Gandhi between the 1920s and 1940s. denitive owing to its direct call for Indian independence.
ANC activists braved the harsh tactics of the police to Gandhi did not perceive the British as defenders of freeprotest against the oppressive South African government. dom due their rule in India. He did not feel a need to take
Many, especially Mandela, languished for decades in jail, sides with world powers.
while the world outside was divided in its eort to remove apartheid. Steve Biko, perhaps the most vocal adherent to non-violent civil resistance, was allegedly mur- 28.9 Gandhians
dered in 1977 by agents of the government. When the
rst universal, free elections were held in South Africa in There have been Muslim Gandhians, such as Khan Ab1994, the ANC was elected and Mandela became presi- dul Ghaar Khan, known as the Frontier Gandhi"; under
dent. Mandela made a special visit to India and publicly the inuence of Gandhi, he organised the Pathans of the
honoured Gandhi as the man who inspired the freedom Northwest Frontier as early as 1919.[15] Christian Gandstruggle of black South Africans. Statues of Gandhi have hians include Horace Alexander[16] and Martin Luther
been erected in Natal, Pretoria and Johannesburg.
King.[17] Jewish Gandhians include Gandhis close asMartin Luther King Jr., a young Christian minister and
leader of the American Civil Rights Movement seeking
the emancipation of African Americans from racial segregation in the American South, and also from economic
and social injustice and political disenfranchisement,
travelled to India in 1962 to meet Jawaharlal Nehru. The
two discussed Gandhis teachings, and the methodology
of organising peaceful resistance. The graphic imagery
of black protesters being hounded by police, beaten and
brutalised, evoked admiration for King and the protesters
across America and the world, and precipitated the 1964
Civil Rights Act.
The non-violent Solidarity movement of Lech Wasa
of Poland overthrew a Soviet-backed communist government after two decades of peaceful resistance and strikes
in 1989, precipitating the downfall of the Soviet Union.

sociate Herman Kallenbach. Atheist Gandhians include

Jawaharlal Nehru and Anna Hazare.[18]

28.10 Promotion
Ideas

of

Gandhian

Several journals have also been published to promote

Gandhian ideas. One of most well-known is Gandhi
Marg, an English-language journal published since 1957
by the Gandhi Peace Foundation.[19]

Harold Dwight Lasswell, a political scientist and communications theorist, dened propaganda as the management of eclectic attitudes by manipulation of signicant
symbols. Based on this denition of Propaganda, Gandhi
Myanmars Aung San Suu Kyi was put under house ar- made use of signicant symbols[20]to drive his ideal of a
rest, and her National League for Democracy suppressed united India free of British rule.
in their non-violent quest for democracy and freedom in His ideas symbolized in propaganda stated that India was
military-controlled Myanmar. This struggle was inaugu- a nation capable of economic self-suciency without the
rated when the military dismissed the results of the 1991 British, a unity transcending religion would make for a
democratic elections and imposed military rule. She was stronger nation, and that the most eective method of
released in November 2010, when free elections were to protest was through passive resistance, including nonbe held.
violence and the principle of satyagraha. In the Quit

28.11. CRITICISM AND CONTROVERSY

India speeches, Gandhi says the proposal for the withdrawal of British power is to enable India to play its due
part at the present critical juncture. It is not a happy position for a big country like India to be merely helping with
money and material obtained willy-nilly from her while
the United Nations are conducting the war. We cannot
evoke the true spirit of sacrice and velour, so long as we
are not free. On his ideas towards a unied India he said:
Thousands of Mussalmans have told me, that if HinduMuslim question was to be solved satisfactorily, it must
be done in my lifetime. I should feel attered at this; but
how can I agree to proposal which does not appeal to my
reason? Hindu-Muslim unity is not a new thing. Millions of Hindus and Mussalmans have sought after it. I
consciously strove for its achievement from my boyhood.
While at school, I made it a point to cultivate the friendship of Muslims and Parsi co-students. I believed even
at that tender age that the Hindus in India, if they wished
to live in peace and amity with the other communities,
should assiduously cultivate the virtue of neighbourliness.
It did not matter, I felt, if I made no special eort to cultivate the friendship with Hindus, but I must make friends
with at least a few Mussalmans. In India too I continued my eorts and left no stone unturned to achieve that
unity. It was my life-long aspiration for it that made me
oer my fullest co-operation to the Mussalmans in the
Khilafat movement. Muslims throughout the country accepted me as their true friend. [21] Gandhis belief in the
eectiveness of passive, non-violent resistance has been
quoted as being the belief that non-violence alone will
lead men to do right under all circumstances.
These ideas were symbolized by Gandhi through the use
of signicant symbols, an important proponent in the acceptance of propaganda, in his speeches and movements.
On November 3, 1930, there was the speech given before
the Dandi March which possibly could have been one of
Gandhis last speeches, in which the signicant symbol
of the march itself demonstrates the exclusively nonviolent struggle to empower a self-sucient India. Beginning in Ahmedabad and concluding in Dandi, Gujarat,
the march saw Gandhi and his supporters directly disobey
the Rowlatt Act which imposed heavy taxation and enforced British monopoly on the salt market.[22] The Khadi
movement, part of the larger swadeshi movement, employed the signicant symbol of the burning of British
cloth in order to manipulate attitudes towards boycotting
British goods and rejecting Western culture and urging
the return to ancient, precolonial culture. Gandhi obtained a wheel and engaged his disciples in spinning their
own cloth called Khadi; this commitment to hand spinning was an essential element to Gandhis philosophy and
politics.[23] On December 1, 1948, Gandhi dictated his
speech on the eve of the last fast. Using the fast as a form
of signicant symbolism, he justies it as a fast which
a votary of non-violence sometimes feels impelled to undertake by way of protest against some wrong done by society, and this he does when as a votary of Ahimsa has no
other remedy left. Such an occasion has come my way.

263
This fast was conducted in line with his idea of a nations
communities and religions brought together. Gandhis
fast was only to end when he was satised with the reunion of hearts of all the communities brought about
without any outside pressure, but from an awakened sense
of duty.[24]

28.11 Criticism and controversy

See also: Partition of India, Assassination of Mahatma
Gandhi
Gandhis rigid ahimsa implies pacism, and is thus a
source of criticism from across the political spectrum.

28.11.1 Concept of partition

As a rule, Gandhi was opposed to the concept of partition
as it contradicted his vision of religious unity.[25] Of the
partition of India to create Pakistan, he wrote in Harijan
on 6 October 1946:
[The demand for Pakistan] as put forth by the
Moslem League is un-Islamic and I have not
hesitated to call it sinful. Islam stands for
unity and the brotherhood of mankind, not for
disrupting the oneness of the human family.
Therefore, those who want to divide India into
possibly warring groups are enemies alike of
India and Islam. They may cut me into pieces
but they cannot make me subscribe to something which I consider to be wrong [...] we
must not cease to aspire, in spite of [the] wild
talk, to befriend all Moslems and hold them fast
as prisoners of our love.[26]
However, as Homer Jack notes of Gandhis long correspondence with Jinnah on the topic of Pakistan: Although Gandhi was personally opposed to the partition of
India, he proposed an agreement [...] which provided that
the Congress and the Moslem League would cooperate to
attain independence under a provisional government, after which the question of partition would be decided by a
plebiscite in the districts having a Moslem majority.[27]
These dual positions on the topic of the partition of India opened Gandhi up to criticism from both Hindus and
Muslims. Muhammad Ali Jinnah and contemporary Pakistanis condemned Gandhi for undermining Muslim political rights. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and his allies
condemned Gandhi, accusing him of politically appeasing Muslims while turning a blind eye to their atrocities
against Hindus, and for allowing the creation of Pakistan
(despite having publicly declared that before partitioning
India, my body will have to be cut into two pieces[28] ). In
contemporary times, Marxist academicians like Ayesha
Jalal blame Gandhi and the Congress for being unwilling

264
to share power with Muslims and thus hastening partition. Hindus such as Pravin Togadia and Narendra Modi
have also criticised Gandhis leadership and actions on
this topic, although it is quite apparently politically motivated due to paradox with Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(RSS) ideologies. Gandhi also came under some political
re for his criticism of those who attempted to achieve
independence through more violent means. His refusal
to protest against the hanging of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev,
Udham Singh and Rajguru were sources of condemnation
among some parties.[29][30] Economists, such as Jagdish
Bhagwati, have criticized Gandhis ideas of swadeshi.

CHAPTER 28. GANDHISM

[10] M. K. Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers: Life and Thoughts

of Mahatma Gandhi as told in his own words, Paris, UNESCO 1958, p 60.
[11] Encyclopaedia of Indian philosophy by Vraj Kumar
Pandey History 2007
[12] Mahatma Gandhi and comparative religion Page 54 , by
K.L. Seshagiri Rao Biography & Autobiography 1990
[13] A Man Called Bapu, Subhadra Sen Gupta, Pratham
Books, 2008. P.5
[14] Mohatma Gandhi, (1957) An autobiography: The story of
my experiments with truth (M. H. Desai Trans.). Beacon
Press. pp. 2425

Of this criticism, Gandhi stated, There was a time when

people listened to me because I showed them how to give
ght to the British without arms when they had no arms [15] Ronald M. McCarthy and Gene Sharp, Nonviolent action:
a research guide (1997) p. 317
[...] but today I am told that my non-violence can be of
no avail against the [Hindu-Moslem riots] and, therefore,
[16] Horace Alexander, Consider India: An Essay in Values
people should arm themselves for self-defense.[31]
(London: Asia, 1961), p. 73

28.12 See also

Civil resistance
Gandhigiri
Jesuism
Nonviolent resistance
Satyagraha
Tolstoyan movement
Trusteeship

28.13 Notes
[1] Nicholas F. Gier (2004). The Virtue of Nonviolence: From
Gautama to Gandhi. SUNY Press. p. 222. ISBN 978-07914-5949-2.
[2] Gwilym Beckerlegge, World religions reader, 2001
[3] Nonviolence By Senthil Ram, Ralph Summy, 2007
[4] page 388, The collected works of Mahatma Gandhi, by
Gandhi (Mahatma), India. Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting. Publications Division
[5] Trustworthiness by Bruce Glassman Juvenile Nonction
2008
[6] Trustworthiness, by Bruce Glassman Juvenile Nonction 2008
[7] Jack, Homer. Gandhi Reader, p.344
[8] Jack, Homer. Gandhi Reader, pp.3456
[9] Encyclopaedia of Indian philosophy by Vraj Kumar
Pandey History 2007

[17] Mary Elizabeth King, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin

Luther King Jr: the power of nonviolent action (UNESCO
Publishing, 1999), p. 183
[18] Pradeep Thakur, Anna Hazare The Face of Indias Fight
against Corruption (2011) p 11
[19] Ananda M. Pandiri, A Comprehensive, Annotated Bibliography on Mahatma Gandhi:Biographies, Works by
Gandhi, and Bibliographical Sources Greenwood Publishing Group, 1995 ISBN 0313253374 (p. 349).
[20] Barlow, David M., and Brett Mills. Harold D. Lasswell.
Reading media theory: thinkers, approaches and contexts.
Second Edition ed. Harlow, England: Pearson Longman,
2012. 103. Print.
[21] Bandopadhaya, Sailesh Kumar. The Quit India Resolution. My non-violence. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Pub.
House, 1960. 183-205. Print.
[22] Gandhi, M. K., and Mahadev Desai. On The Eve Of
Historic Dandi March. The selected works of Mahatma
Gandhi. Ahmedabad, India: Navajivan Publ. House,
1968. 28-30. Print.
[23] Brown, Theodore, and Elizabeth Fee. Spinning for Indias Independence. National Center for Biotechnology
Information. U.S. National Library of Medicine, 5 June
1928. Web. 16 Mar. 2014. <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.
gov/pmc/articles/PMC2156064/
[24] Speech on the Eve of the Last Fast. Famous Speeches
by Mahatma Gandhi. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Mar. 2014.
<http://www.mkgandhi.org/speeches/evelast.htm
[25] reprinted in The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His
Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas., Louis Fischer, ed.,
2002 (reprint edition) pp. 106108.
[26] reprinted in The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His
Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas.Louis Fischer, ed.,
2002 (reprint edition) pp. 3089.
[27] Jack, Homer. The Gandhi Reader, p. 418.

28.15. EXTERNAL LINKS

[28] The life and death of Mahatma Gandhi, on BBC News

, see section Independence and partition.
[29] Mahatama Gandhi on Bhagat Singh.
[30] Gandhi 'Mahatma' or Flawed Genius?.
[31] reprinted in The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His
Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas., Louis Fischer, ed.,
2002 (reprint edition) p. 311.

Gandhi today: a report on Mahatma Gandhis successors, by Mark Shepard. Published by Shepard Publications, 1987. ISBN 0-938497-04-9.
Excerpts

28.14 References
Fischer, Louis. The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas.
Vintage: New York, 2002. (reprint edition) ISBN
1-4000-3050-1
Jack, Homer (1956). The Gandhi Reader: A
Sourcebook of His Life and Writings.. Grove Press.
ISBN 0-8021-3161-1.
Hardiman, David. Gandhi in His Time and Ours:
The Global Legacy of His Ideas (2004) ISBN 0-23113114-3
Narayan, Shriman (1970). Relevance of Gandhian
economics. Navajivan Publishing House. ASIN
B0006CDLA8.
Pani, Narendar (2002). Inclusive Economics: Gandhian Method and Contemporary Policy. Sage Publications Pvt. Ltd. ISBN 978-0-7619-9580-7.
Sharma, R. (1997). Gandhian economics. Deep and
Deep Publications Pvt. Ltd. ISBN 978-81-7100986-2.
Weber, Thomas (2006). Gandhi, Gandhism and the
Gandhians. Roli Books Pvt. Ltd. ISBN 81-7436468-4.
Mashelkar, Ramesh (2010). Timeless InspiratorReliving Gandhi . Sakal Papers Ltd. ISBN 978-938057-148-5.

28.15 External links

Gandhian Philosophy in Short
Gandhian ideals
Relevance of Gandhism in Modern Polity
Gandhian Trusteeship as an Instrument of Human
Dignity

265
Review of Gandhian economics
Gandhian economics is relevant
Gandhism and Buddhism PDF
Studies in Gandhism

Chapter 29

Gandhian economics
Gandhian economics is a school of economic thought
based on the socio-economic principles expounded by
Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi. It is largely characterised by protectionism, nationalism, an anity to
the principles and objectives of nonviolent humanistic
socialism, but with a rejection of violent class war and
promotion of socio-economic harmony. Gandhis economic ideas also aim to promote spiritual development
and harmony with a rejection of materialism. The term
Gandhian economics was coined by J. C. Kumarappa,
a close supporter of Gandhi.[1]

29.1 Gandhis economic ideas

Gandhi and his followers also founded numerous ashrams

in India (Gandhi had pioneered the ashram settlement
in South Africa). The concept of an ashram has been
compared with the commune, where its inhabitants would
seek to produce their own food, clothing and means of living, while promoting a lifestyle of self-suciency, personal and spiritual development and working for wider
social development. The ashrams included small farms
and houses constructed by the inhabitants themselves. All
inhabitants were expected to help in any task necessary,
promoting the values of equality. Gandhi also espoused
the notion of trusteeship, which centred on denying material pursuits and coveting of wealth, with practitioners acting as trustees of other individuals and the community in their management of economic resources and
property.[3]

Gandhis thinking on socia-secular issues was greatly inuenced by the American writer Henry David Thoreau.
Throughout his life, Gandhi sought to develop ways to
ght Indias extreme poverty, backwardness and socioeconomic challenges as a part of his wider involvement
in the Indian independence movement. Gandhis championing of Swadeshi and non-cooperation were centred
on the principles of economic self-suciency. Gandhi
sought to target European-made clothing and other products as not only a symbol of British colonialism but also
the source of mass unemployment and poverty, as European industrial goods had left many millions of Indias workers, craftsmen and women without a means of
living.[2]

Contrary to many Indian socialists and communists,

Gandhi was averse to all notions of class warfare and concepts of class-based revolution, which he saw as causes
of social violence and disharmony. Gandhis concept
of egalitarianism was centred on the preservation of human dignity rather than material development. Some of
Gandhis closest supporters and admirers included industrialists such as Ghanshyamdas Birla, Ambalal Sarabhai,
Jamnalal Bajaj and J. R. D. Tata, who adopted several of
Gandhis progressive ideas in managing labour relations
while also personally participating in Gandhis ashrams
and socio-political work.[4]

By championing homespun khadi clothing and Indianmade goods, Gandhi sought to incorporate peaceful
civil resistance as a means of promoting national selfsuciency. Gandhi led farmers of Champaran and
Kheda in a satyagraha (civil disobedience and tax resistance) against the mill owners and landlords supported
by the British government in an eort to end oppressive taxation and other policies that forced the farmers and workers into poverty and defend their economic
rights. A major part of this rebellion was a commitment from the farmers to end caste discrimination and oppressive social practices against women while launching
a co-operative eort to promote education, health care
and self-suciency by producing their own clothes and
food.[2]

29.2 Swaraj, self-rule

Main article: Swaraj
Rudolph argues that after a false start in trying to emulate the English in an attempt to overcome his timidity, Gandhi discovered the inner courage he was seeking by helping his countrymen in South Africa. The new
courage consisted of observing the traditional Bengali
way of self-suering and, in nding his own courage,
he was enabled also to point out the way of 'Satyagraha'
and 'ahimsa' to the whole of India.[5] Gandhis writings
expressed four meanings of freedom: as Indias national
independence; as individual political freedom; as group

266

29.4. SOCIAL JUSTICE AND EQUALITY

267

freedom from poverty; and as the capacity for personal creasing consumer appetite is likened to animal appetite
self-rule.[6]
which goes the end of earth in search of their satisfac[7] tion. Thus a distinction is to be made between 'Standard
Gandhi was a self-described philosophical anarchist,
and his vision of India meant an India without an under- of Living' and 'Standard of Life', where the former merely
lying government.[8] He once said that the ideally non- states the material and physical standard of food, cloth
violent state would be an ordered anarchy.[9] While po- and housing. A higher standard of life, on the other hand
litical systems are largely hierarchical, with each layer of could be attained only if, along with material advanceauthority from the individual to the central government ment, there was a serious attempt to imbibe cultural and
spiritual values and qualities.
have increasing levels of authority over the layer below,
Gandhi believed that society should be the exact opposite, where nothing is done without the consent of anyone,
down to the individual. His idea was that true self-rule 29.4 Social justice and equality
in a country means that every person rules his or herself
and that there is no state which enforces laws upon the
Gandhi has often quoted that if mankind was to progress
people.[10]
and to realize the ideals of equality and brotherhood, it
This would be achieved over time with nonviolent conict must act on the principle of paying the highest attention
mediation, as power is divested from layers of hierarchi- to the prime needs of the weakest sections of the populacal authorities, ultimately to the individual, which would tion. Therefore any exercise on economic planning on a
come to embody the ethic of nonviolence. Rather than national scale would be futile without uplifting these most
a system where rights are enforced by a higher authority, vulnerable sections of the society in a direct manner.
people are self-governed by mutual responsibilities. On
In the ultimate analysis, it is the quality of the human bereturning from South Africa, when Gandhi received a leting that has to be raised, rened and consolidated. In
ter asking for his participation in writing a world charter
other words, economic planning is for the citizen, and
for human rights, he responded saying, in my experinot the citizen for national planning. Everybody should
ence, it is far more important to have a charter for human
be given the right to earn according to his capacity using
[11]
duties.
just means.
An independent India did not mean merely transferring
the established British administrative structure into Indian hands. He warned, you would make India English.
And when it becomes English, it will be called not Hin- 29.5 Non-violent rural economy
dustan but Englishtan. This is not the Swaraj I want.[12]
Tewari argues that Gandhi saw democracy as more than a Gandhian economics places importance to means of
system of government; it meant promoting both individ- achieving the aim of development and this means must be
uality and the self-discipline of the community. Democ- non-violent, ethical and truthful in all economic spheres.
racy was a moral system that distributed power and as- In order to achieve this means he advocated trusteeship,
sisted the development of every social class, especially decentralization of economic activities, labour-intensive
the lowest. It meant settling disputes in a nonviolent man- technology and priority to weaker sections. Gandhi
ner; it required freedom of thought and expression. For claims that to be non-violent an Individual needs to have
a rural mindedness. It also helps in thinking of our neGandhi, democracy was a way of life.[13]
cessities of our household in terms of rural mindedness.
The revival of the economy is made possible only when
is free from exploitation, so according to Gandhi
29.3 Gandhian economics and itindustrialization
on a mass-scale will lead to passive or
active
exploitation
of the people as the problem of comethics
petition and marketing comes in. Gandhi believes that
for an economy to be self-contained, it should manufacGandhian economics do not draw a distinction between
ture mainly for its use even if that necessitates the use of
economics and ethics. Economics that hurts the moral
modern machines and tools, provided it is not used as a
well-being of an individual or a nation is immoral, and
means of exploitation of others.
therefore sinful. The value of an industry should be
gauged less by the dividends it pays to shareholders than
by its eect on the bodies, soul and spirits of the people
employed in it. In essence, supreme consideration is to 29.6 Environmentalism
be given to man rather than to money.
The rst basic principle of Gandhis economic thought is Several of Gandhis followers developed a theory of ena special emphasis on plain living which helps in cutting vironmentalism. J. C. Kumarappa was the rst, writdown your wants and being self-reliant. Accordingly, in- ing a number of relevant books in the 1930s and 1940s.

268
He and Mira Behan argued against large-scale dam-andirrigation projects, saying that small projects were more
ecacious, that organic manure was better and less dangerous than man-made chemicals, and that forests should
be managed with the goal of water conservation rather
than revenue maximization. The Raj and the Nehru
governments paid them little attention. Guha calls Kumarappa, The Green Gandhian, portraying him as the
founder of modern environmentalism in India.[14]

CHAPTER 29. GANDHIAN ECONOMICS

ing Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh.
Bhave would become a major exponent of discipline
and productivity amongst Indias farmers, labourers and
working classes, which was a major reason for his support of the controversial Indian Emergency (19751977).
Jayaprakash Narayan also sought to use Gandhian methods to combat organised crime, alcoholism and other social problems.

29.9 Modern interpretations

29.7 Concept of socialism
Gandhian economics brings a socialist perspective of
overall development and tries to redene the outlook of
socialism. Gandhi espoused the notion of trusteeship
which centered on denying material pursuits and coveting of wealth, with practitioners acting as trustees of
other individuals and the community in their management of economic resources and property. Under the
Gandhian economic order, the character of production
will be determined by social necessity and not by personal greed. The path of socialism should only be through
non-violence and democratic method and any recourse to
class-war and mutual hatred would prove to be suicidal.

29.8 Implementation in India

During Indias independence struggle as well as after Indias independence in 1947, Gandhis advocacy of homespun khadi clothing, the khadi attire (which included
the Gandhi cap) developed into popular symbols of
nationalism and patriotism. Indias rst prime minister,
Jawaharlal Nehru totally diered with Gandhi, even before independence and partition of India. Gandhi did not
participate in celebration of Indian independence, he was
busy controlling the post partition communal violence.
Gandhian activists such as Vinoba Bhave and Jayaprakash
Narayan were involved in the Sarvodaya movement,
which sought to promote self-suciency amidst Indias rural population by encouraging land redistribution,
socio-economic reforms and promoting cottage industries. The movement sought to combat the problems of
class conict, unemployment and poverty while attempting to preserve the lifestyle and values of rural Indians,
which were eroding with industrialisation and modernisation. Sarvodaya also included Bhoodan, or the gifting
of land and agricultural resources by the landlords (called
zamindars) to their tenant farmers in a bid to end the medieval system of zamindari.
Bhave and others promoted Bhoodan as a just and peaceful method of land redistribution in order to create economic equality, land ownership and opportunity without
creating class-based conicts. Bhoodan and Sarvodaya
enjoyed notable successes in many parts of India, includ-

The proximity of Gandhian economic thought to socialism has also evoked criticism from the advocates of freemarket economics. To many, Gandhian economics represent an alternative to mainstream economic ideologies
as a way to promote economic self-suciency without an
emphasis on material pursuits or compromising human
development. Gandhis emphasis on peace, trusteeship
and co-operation has been touted as an alternative to competition as well as conict between dierent economic
and income classes in societies. Gandhian focus on human development is also seen as an eective emphasis on
the eradication of poverty, social conict and backwardness in developing nations.

29.10 Notes
[1] Kumarappa, Joseph Cornelius (1951). Gandhian economic thought. Library of Indian economics (1st ed.).
Bombay, India: Vora. OCLC 3529600. Retrieved 7 August 2009.
[2] B. N. Ghosh, Gandhian political economy: principles,
practice and policy (2007) p. 17
[3] Jagannath Swaroop Mathur, Industrial civilization &
Gandhian economics (1971) p 165
[4] Romesh K. Diwan and Mark A. Lutz, Essays in Gandhian
economics (1987) p. 25
[5] Susanne Hoeber, Rudolph (1963). The New Courage:
An Essay on Gandhis Psychology. World Politics 16 (1):
98117. JSTOR 2009253.
[6] Anthony Parel, ed., Gandhi, Freedom, and Self-Rule
(2000) p 166
[7] Snow, Edgar. The Message of Gandhi. 27 September
March 1948. Like Marx, Gandhi hated the state and
wished to eliminate it, and he told me he considered himself 'a philosophical anarchist.'"
[8] Jesudasan, Ignatius. A Gandhian theology of liberation.
Gujarat Sahitya Prakash: Ananda India, 1987, pp. 236
237
[9] Bidyut Chakrabarty (2006). Social and political thought
of Mahatma Gandhi. Routledge. p. 138. ISBN 978-0415-36096-8. Retrieved 25 January 2012.

29.12. EXTERNAL LINKS

[10] Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand; Tolstoy, Leo (September 1987). B. Srinivasa Murthy, ed. Mahatma Gandhi
and Leo Tolstoy letters. Long Beach Publications.
[11] Easwaran, Eknath. Gandhi the Man. Nilgiri Press, 2011.
p. 49.
[12] Paul Gillen; Devleena Ghosh (2007). Colonialism and
Modernity. UNSW Press. p. 130.
[13] Tewari, S. M. (1971). The Concept of Democracy in the
Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi. Indian Political
Science Review 6 (2): 225251.
[14] Ramachndra Guha (2004). Anthropologist Among the
Marxists: And Other Essays. Orient Blackswan. pp. 816.

29.11 References
Gonsalves, Peter (2012). Khadi: Gandhis Mega
Symbol of Subversion. SAGE Publications. ISBN
978-81-321-0735-4.
Narayan, Shriman (1970). Relevance of Gandhian
economics. Navajivan Publishing House. ASIN
B0006CDLA8.
Narayan, Shriman (1978). Towards the Gandhian
Plan. S. Chand and Company Limited.
Pani, Narendar (2002). Inclusive Economics: Gandhian Method and Contemporary Policy. Sage Publications Pvt. Ltd. ISBN 978-0-7619-9580-7.
Schroyer, Trent (2009). Beyond Western Economics:
Remembering Other Economic Culture. Routledge.
Sharma, Rashmi (1997). Gandhian economics: a
humane approach. Deep and Deep Publications Pvt.
Ltd. ISBN 978-81-7100-986-2.

29.12 External links

Gandhian Trusteeship as an Instrument of Human
Dignity
Review of Gandhian economics
Gandhian economics is relevant
Abhay Ghiaras Gandhian Economics blog

269

Chapter 30

Platformism
Platformism is a tendency (or organized school of
thought) within the anarchist movement. It stresses the
need for tightly organized anarchist organizations that are
able to inuence working class and peasant movements.
Platformist groups reject the model of Leninist vanguardism. They aim, instead, to make anarchist ideas
the leading ideas within the class struggle".[1] The four
main principles by which an anarchist organisation should
operate, according to Platformists, are ideological unity,
tactical unity, collective responsibility, and federalism.

Anarkismo.net project, including groups from Africa,

Latin America, North America and Europe.[2] At least in
terms of the number of aliated organisations (if not in
actual membership in some countries),[5] the Anarkismo
network is larger than other anarchist international bodies, like the synthesist[6] International of Anarchist Federations and the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers
Association. It is not, however, a formal international
and has no intention of competing with these other formations.

In general, platformist groups aim to win the widest possible inuence for anarchist ideas and methods in the work- 30.1 Organisational ideas
ing class and peasantrylike especismo groups, platformists orient towards ordinary people, rather than to
the extreme left milieu. This usually entailing a willing- The Platform describes four key organisational features
ness to work in single-issue campaigns, trade unionism which distinguish platformism:
and community groups, and to ght for immediate re Tactical unity A common tactical line in the
forms while linking this to a project of building popumovement is of decisive importance for the exislar consciousness and organisation. They therefore retence of the organisation and the whole movement:
ject approaches that they believe will prevent this, such
it avoids the disastrous eect of several tactics opas insurrectionist anarchism, as well as views that disposing each other; it concentrates the forces of the
miss activity in the unions or that dismiss anti-imperialist
[2]
movement; and gives them a common direction
movements.
leading to a xed objective.[7]
The name Platformist derives from the 1926 Organisational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists
Theoretical unity Theory represents the force
(Draft).[3] This was published by the Group of Russian
which directs the activity of persons and organiAnarchists Abroad, in their journal Dielo Truda (Worksations along a dened path towards a determined
ers Cause in Russian).
goal. Naturally it should be common to all the
persons and organisations adhering to the General
The group, which consisted of exiled Russian anarchist
Union. All activity by the General Union, both
veterans of the 1917 October Revolution (notably Nestor
overall and in its details, should be in perfect conMakhno who played a leading role in the anarchist revcord with the theoretical principles professed by the
olution in the Ukraine of 19181921), based the Platunion.[8]
form on their experiences of the revolution, and the
eventual victory of the Bolsheviks over the anarchists
and other groups. The Platform attempted to address
and explain the anarchist movements failures during the
Russian Revolution outside of the Ukraine.
The document drew both praise and criticism from anarchists worldwide and sparked a major debate within the
anarchist movement.[4]
Today Platformism is an important current in international anarchism. Around thirty platformist and
especista organisations are linked together in the
270

Collective Responsibility The practice of acting on ones personal responsibility should be decisively condemned and rejected in the ranks of the
anarchist movement. The areas of revolutionary
life, social and political, are above all profoundly
collective by nature. Social revolutionary activity in
these areas cannot be based on the personal responsibility of individual militants.[9]
Federalism Against centralism, anarchism has
always professed and defended the principle of fed-

30.5. OTHER TERMS

271

eralism, which reconciles the independence and ini- Later translations to French have corrected some of the
tiative of individuals and the organisation with ser- mistranslations and the latest English translation, made
vice to the common cause.[10]
directly from the Russian original, reects this.
The Platform argues that "[w]e have vital need of an organisation which, having attracted most of the participants in the anarchist movement, would establish a common tactical and political line for anarchism and thereby 30.5 Other terms
serve as a guide for the whole movement. Unity, in short,
meant unity of ideas and actions, as opposed to unity on
the basis of the anarchist label.
Some platformist organisations today are unhappy with
the designation, often preferring to use descriptions such
as anarchist communist, social anarchist, libertarian
communist/socialist or even especist. Most agree that
30.2 Publication history
the 1926 Platform was sorely lacking in certain areas, and
The Organisational Platform of the General Union of An- point out that it was a draft document, never intended to
archists (Draft) was written in 1926 by the Group of Rus- be adopted in its original form. The Italian FdCA, for
sian Anarchists Abroad, a group of exiled Russian and example, do not insist on the principle of tactical unity,
a
Ukrainian anarchists in France who published the Dielo which according to them is impossible to achieve over
[12]
large
area,
preferring
instead
tactical
homogeneity.
Truda journal. The pamphlet is an analysis of basic anarchist beliefs, a vision of an anarchist society, and recommendations as to how an anarchist organisation should be
structured.

30.3 Antecedents of the Platform

The authors of the Platform insisted that its basic ideas
were not new, but had a long anarchist pedigree. Platformism is not, therefore, a revision away from classical
anarchism, or a new approach, but a restatement of existing positions.[4]
They cited Peter Kropotkin arguing that the formation of
an anarchist organisation in Russia, far from being prejudicial to the common revolutionary task, on the contrary
it is desirable and useful to the very greatest degree and
argued that Bakunin's aspirations concerning organisations, as well as his activity in the First International,
give us every right to view him as an active partisan of
just such an organisation. Indeed, practically all active
anarchist militants fought against all dispersed activity,
and desired an anarchist movement welded by unity of
ends and means. [11]

30.4 Problems caused by poor

translations
Until recently, the Platform was known in English as the
Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists, a
result of its having been translated from the French edition popularized in the early 1970s. Alexandre Skirda, in
his book Facing the Enemy: A history of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968 (p. 131), attributes
much of the controversy about the Platform to the original 1926 French translation made by its opponent Voline.

30.6 The Platform today

Today there are organisations inspired by the Platform in many countries, including the Workers Solidarity Movement in Ireland, Common Struggle/Lucha
Comn in the United States, the Union Communiste
Libertaire in Quebec, Common Cause[13] in Ontario,
the Prairie Struggle Organization[14] in the Canadian
Prairies, the Federacin Comunista Libertaria (FCL)
and Organizacin Comunista Libertaria (OCL) in Chile,
the Federacin Anarco-Comunista de Argentina (FACA)
and Lnea Anarco-Comunista (LAC) in Argentina, the
Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici (FdCA) in Italy,
the Coordenao Anarquista Brasileira (CAB) in Brazil,
Unin Socialista Libertaria in Peru, the Organisation
Communiste Libertaire and Alternative Libertaire in
France, the Alianza de los Comunistas Libertarios (ACL)
in Mexico, the Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group
(MACG) and Sydney Anarchist Communist Trajectory
(SACT) in Australia, Motmakt[15] in Norway, Libertre
Socialister[16] in Denmark, Collective Action in the UK,
the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front[17] (ZACF)
in South Africa, and the Revolutionary Confederation
of Anarcho-Syndicalists by the name of N. I. Makhno
(RKAS), which is an international anarcho-syndicalist,
platformist confederation with sections and individual
members in Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Germany, Latvia,
Bulgaria and Israel. Organisations inspired by the Platform were also among the founders of the now-defunct
International Libertarian Solidarity network and its successor, the Anarkismo network; which is run collaboratively by roughly 30 platformist and especista organisations around the world.

272

CHAPTER 30. PLATFORMISM

30.7 Criticisms
The Platform attracted strong criticism from some sectors
on the anarchist movement of the time, including some
of the most inuential anarchists such as Voline, Errico
Malatesta, Luigi Fabbri, Camillo Berneri, Max Nettlau,
and Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, and Gregori
Maximo.[18]

18e say, I nd myself more or less in agreement with their way of conceiving the anarchist organisation (being very far from the authoritarian spirit which the Platform seemed
to reveal) and I conrm my belief that behind the linguistic dierences really lie identical positions.[22]

30.10 Further reading

30.8 The synthesist alternative
As an alternative to platformism Voline and Sbastien
Faure proposed synthesist anarchist federations,[19] which
they envisioned to form under the principles of anarchism
without adjectives.[20]
In place of the Platforms stress on tight political and organisational unity, the synthesist approach argued for a
far looser organization that would maximise numbers i.e.
a big tent approach. Platformists view such organisations
as weak despite their numbers, as the lack of common
views means an inability to undertake common actions
defeating the purpose of a common organisation.[4]

Lucien van der Walt; Michael Schmidt (2009),

Black Flame. the revolutionary class politics of
anarchism and syndicalism, Counterpower, Volume 1, Oakland: AK Press, pp. 247263, ISBN
9781904859161

30.11 See also

Synthesis anarchism, Voline's and Sbastien Faures
response to platformism

30.12 References
30.9 Malatestas shift to agreement with collective responsibility

[1] Workers Solidarity Movement, 2012, Why You Should

Join the Workers Solidarity Movement |url=http://flag.
blackened.net/revolt/once/join.html |accessdate=5 January 2012|

While such criticisms indicated a direct rejection of the

Platforms proposals, others seem to have arisen from
misunderstandings.

[2] Anarkismo,
2012,
About
Us
|url=http:
//www.anarkismo.net/about_us
|accessdate=5
January 2012|

Notably, Malatesta initially believed that the Platform was

typically authoritarian, and far from helping to bring
about the victory of anarchist communism, to which they
aspire, could only falsify the anarchist spirit and lead to
consequences that go against their intentions.[21]

[3] Dielo Truda group (2006) [1926]. Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft). Ireland:
Nestor Makhno Archive. Retrieved 5 January 2012.

However, after further correspondence with Makhno

and after seeing a platformist group in formation
Malatesta concluded that he was actually in agreement
with the positions of the Platform, but had been confused
by the language they had used:
But all this is perhaps only a question of
words.
In my reply to Makhno I already said: It may
be that, by the term collective responsibility,
you mean the agreement and solidarity that
must exist among the members of an association. And if that is so, your expression would,
in my opinion, amount to an improper use of
language, and therefore, being only a question
of words, we would be closer to understanding
each other.
And now, reading what the comrades of the

[4] Schmidt, M. and van der Walt, L. 2009. Black Flame:

The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (Counter-Power vol. 1). Edinburgh: AK Press.
pp. 252-255
[5] In reply to the Platform, supporters of the synthesis counter by pointing to the fact that Platformist
groups are usually very small, far smaller than synthesis federations (for example, compare the size of the
French Anarchist Federation with, say, the Irish Workers
Solidarity Movement or the French-language Alternative
Libertaire)"J.3.2 What are synthesis federations?" in
An Anarchist FAQ
[6] Most national sections of the International Anarchist
Federation (IFA) are good examples of successful federations which are heavily inuenced by synthesis ideas
(such as the French and Italian federations).J.3.2 What
are synthesis federations?" in An Anarchist FAQ
[7] From section on Tactical Unity in The Platform
[8] From section on theoretical unity in The Platform

30.13. EXTERNAL LINKS

[9] From section on Collective responsibility in The Platform

[10] All sourced from the From section Federalism within the
Organizational Section of the original document
[11] From section on Tactical Unity in The Platform
[12] FdCA positions and theoretical documents, retrieved 2
January 2012
[13] Common Cause/Linchpin
[14] Prairie Struggle Organization
[15] Motmakt
[16] Libertre Socialister
[17] Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front
[18] Why do many anarchists oppose the Platform"?". An
Anarchist FAQ. Retrieved Aug 12, 2013.
[19] Especismo and Synthesis/ Synthesism by Felipe Corra
[20] J.3.2 What are synthesis federations?" in An Anarchist
FAQ
[21] A Project of Anarchist Organisation by Errico Malatesta
(1927)
[22] Malatesta, On Collective Responsibility, http://www.
nestormakhno.info/english/mal_rep3.htm

30.13 External links

Organizational Platform of the General Union of
Anarchists (Draft) The most accurate translation of
the platform in English
Anarchism and the Platformist Tradition An
Archive of Writings on the Platformist Tradition
within Anarchism, including relevant material by
Bakunin.
Manifesto of The Libertarian Communists Written in 1953 by Georges Fontenis for the Federation
Communiste Libertaire of France. It is one of the
key texts of this current.
A Guide to the Platform based on the older translation
Towards a Fresh Revolution Written by the Friends
of Durruti group following the Spanish Civil War,
this text is arguably one of the most important Platformist texts ever written. It rearms the early calls
from the Russian comrades for tactical and theoretical unity, and better organizational practices, and
sheds light on the errors in organization during the
Spanish Civil War.
Anarkismo.net - Multilingual anarchist news site run
by over 30 platformist and especist organisations
on ve continents

273
About the Platform by Errico Malatesta and Nestor
Makhno

Chapter 31

New Left
For other uses, see New Left (disambiguation).
thoritarian politics of the pre-war leftist parties. Those
The New Left was a political movement in the 1960s and Communists who became disillusioned with the Communist Parties due to their authoritarian character eventually
formed the new left, rst among dissenting Communist
Party intellectuals and campus groups in the United Kingdom, and later alongside campus radicalism in the United
States and elsewhere.[6] The term nouvelle gauche was
already current in France in the 1950s, associated with
France Observateur, and its editor Claude Bourdet, who
attempted to form a third position, between the dominant
Stalinist and social democratic tendencies of the left, and
the two Cold War blocs. It was from this French new
left that the First New Left of Britain borrowed the
term.[7]

Herbert Marcuse, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical

theory, is celebrated as the Father of the New Left.[1]

1970s consisting of educators, agitators and others who

sought to implement a broad range of reforms on issues
such as gay rights, abortion, gender roles, and drugs,[2]
in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that
had taken a more vanguardist approach to social justice
and focused mostly on labor unionization and questions
of social class.[3][4] The New Left rejected involvement
with the labor movement and Marxisms historical theory
of class struggle.[5] In the United States, the movement
was associated with the Hippie movement and anti-war
college-campus protest movements including the Free
Speech Movement. While formed in opposition to the
Old Left Democratic Party, groups composing the New
Left gradually became central players in the Democratic
coalition.[2]

31.1 Historical origins

The confused response of the Communist Party of the
USA and the Communist Party of Great Britain to the
Hungarian Revolution of 1956 led some Marxist intellectuals to develop a more democratic approach to politics, opposed to what they saw as the centralised and au-

The German-Jewish critical theorist Herbert Marcuse is

referred to as the Father of the New Left. He rejected
the theory of class struggle and the Marxist concern with
labor, instead claiming, according to Leszek Koakowski,
that since all questions of material existence have been
solved, moral commands and prohibitions are no longer
relevant. He regarded the realization of mans erotic nature as the true liberation of humanity, which inspired the
utopias of Jerry Rubin and others.[8] Another prominent
New Left thinker, Ernst Bloch, believed that socialism
would prove the means for all human beings to become
immortal and eventually create God.[9]

31.1.1 Britain
As a result of Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech denouncing Joseph Stalin many abandoned the Communist
Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and began to rethink
its orthodox Marxism. Some joined various Trotskyist
groupings or the Labour Party.[10]
The Marxist historians E. P. Thompson and John Saville of the Communist Party Historians Group published
a dissenting journal within the CPGB called Reasoner.
Once they left the party, they began the New Reasoner
from 1957. In 1960, this journal merged with the
Universities and Left Review to form the New Left Review. These journals attempted to synthesise a theoretical position of a revisionist, humanist, socialist Marxism, departing from orthodox Marxist theory. This publishing eort made the ideas of culturally oriented theo-

274

31.1. HISTORICAL ORIGINS

275

rists available to an undergraduate reading audience. In

this early period, many on the New Left were involved in
the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, formed in 1957.
According to Robin Blackburn, The decline of CND by
late 1961, however, deprived the New Left of much of
its momentum as a movement, and uncertainties and divisions within the Board of the journal led to the transfer
of the Review to a younger and less experienced group in
1962.[11]

31.1.2 United States

As the campus orientation of the American New Left

became clear in the mid to late 1960s, the student sections of the British New Left began taking action. The
London School of Economics became a key site of
British student militancy.[13] The inuence of protests
against the Vietnam War and of the May 1968 events
in France were also felt strongly throughout the British
New Left. Some within the British New Left joined
the International Socialists, which later became Socialist
Workers Party while others became involved with groups
such as the International Marxist Group.[14] The politics of the British New Left can be contrasted with
Solidarity, which continued to focus primarily on industrial issues.[15]

wards issues such as opposing alienation, anomie, and

authoritarianism. Mills argued for a shift from traditional leftism, toward the values of the counterculture,
and emphasized an international perspective on the
movement.[23] According to David Burner, C. Wright
Mills claimed that the proletariat were no longer the revolutionary force; the new agents of revolutionary change
were young intellectuals around the world.[24]

In the United States, the New Left was the name loosely
associated with liberal, radical, marxist political movements that took place during the 1960s, primarily among
college students. At the core of this was the Students for a
Democratic Society (SDS).[20] The New Left can be dened as a loosely organized, mostly white student movement that advocated for democracy, civil rights, and variUnder the long-standing editorial leadership of Perry An- ous types of university reforms, and protested against the
[21]
derson, the New Left Review popularised the Frankfurt Vietnam war.
School, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser and other The term New Left was popularised in the United States
forms of Marxism.[12] Other periodicals like Socialist in an open letter written in 1960 by sociologist C. Wright
Register, started in 1964, and Radical Philosophy, started Mills (191662) entitled Letter to the New Left.[22] Mills
in 1972, have also been associated with the New Left, and argued for a new leftist ideology, moving away from
published a range of important writings in this eld.
the traditional ("Old Left") focus on labor issues, to-

Another signicant gure in the British New Left was

Stuart Hall, a black cultural theorist in Britain. He was
the founding editor of the New Left Review in 1960.
The New Left Review, in an obituary following Halls
death in February 2014, wrote His exemplary investigations came close to inventing a new eld of study, cultural
studies; in his vision, the new discipline was profoundly
political in inspiration and radically interdisciplinary in
character.[16]
Numerous Black British scholars attributed their interest
in cultural studies to Hall, including Paul Gilroy, Angela
McRobbie, Isaac Julien, and John Akomfrah.In the words
of Indian literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
Academics worldwide could not think Black Britain before Stuart Hall. And in Britain the impact of Cultural
Studies went beyond the connes of the academy.[17]
Among Halls New Left works were the May Day Manifesto, which reected a growing disillusionment on the
left with what the authors argued to be the surrendering of
socialist principles by the Labour Party.[18] and Policing
the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order, which
contemporary book reviewer John Horton described as
nothing less than an analysis of how the British state is
managing the current crisis of hegemony'[19]

A student protest called the Free Speech Movement took

place during the 19641965 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley under the informal leadership of students Mario Savio, Brian Turner,
Bettina Aptheker, Steve Weissman, Art Goldberg, Jackie
Goldberg, and others. In protests unprecedented in this
scope at the time, students insisted that the university administration lift the ban of on-campus political activities
and acknowledge the students right to free speech and
academic freedom. In particular, on 2 December 1964
on the steps of Sproul Hall Mario Savio gave a famous
speech: But we're a bunch of raw materials that don't
mean to behave any process upon us. Don't mean to
be made into any product! Don't meanDon't mean to
end up being bought by some clients of the University, be
they the government, be they industry, be they organized
labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!...Theres
a time when the operation of the machine becomes so
odiousmakes you so sick at heartthat you can't take
part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got
to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels,
upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to
make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who
run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free,
the machine will be prevented from working at all.[25]
The New Left opposed what it saw as the prevailing authority structures in society, which it termed "The Establishment", and those who rejected this authority became
known as "anti-Establishment". The New Left did not
seek to recruit industrial workers, but rather concentrated
on a social activist approach to organization, convinced
that they could be the source for a better kind of social
revolution.

276
The New Left in the United States also included anarchist,
countercultural, and hippie-related radical groups such
as the Yippies (who were led by Abbie Homan), The
Diggers,[26] Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, and the
White Panther Party. By late 1966, the Diggers opened
free stores which simply gave away their stock, provided
free food, distributed free drugs, gave away money, organized free music concerts, and performed works of political art.[27] The Diggers took their name from the original
English Diggers led by Gerrard Winstanley[28] and sought
to create a mini-society free of money and capitalism.[29]
On the other hand the Yippies employed theatrical gestures, such as advancing a pig ("Pigasus the Immortal)
as a candidate for President in 1968, to mock the social
status quo.[30] They have been described as a highly theatrical, anti-authoritarian, and anarchist[31] youth movement of symbolic politics.[32] According to ABC News,
The group was known for street theater pranks and was
once referred to as the 'Groucho Marxists'.[33] Many of
the old school political left either ignored or denounced
them.

CHAPTER 31. NEW LEFT

(SNCC). Students immersed themselves into poor communities building up support with the locals.[40] The New
Left sought to be a broad based, grass roots movement.[41]
The Vietnam war conducted by liberal President Lyndon
B. Johnson was a special target across the worldwide New
Left. Johnson and his top ocials became unwelcome on
American campuses. The anti-war movement escalated
the rhetorical heat, as violence broke out on both sides.
The climax came at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

It could be argued that the New Lefts most successful

legacy was the rebirth of feminism.[42] As the original
leaders of the New Left were largely white men, women
reacted to the lack of progressive gender politics with
their own social intellectual movement.[43] The New Left
was also marked by the invention of the modern environmentalist movement, which clashed with the Old Lefts
disregard for the environment in favor of preserving the
jobs of union workers. Environmentalism also gave rise
to various other social justice movements such as the environmental justice movement, which aims to prevent the
Many New Left thinkers in the United States were in- toxication of the environment of minority and disadvanuenced by the Vietnam War and the Chinese Cultural taged communities.[44]
Revolution. Some in the U.S. New Left argued that since
the Soviet Union could no longer be considered the world By 1968, however, the New Left coalition began to split.
center for proletarian revolution, new revolutionary Com- The anti-war Democratic presidential nomination cammunist thinkers had to be substituted in its place, such as paign of Kennedy and McCarthy brought the central isMao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro.[34] Todd sue of the New Left into the mainstream liberal estabGitlin in The Whole World Is Watching in describing the lishment. The 1972 nomination of George McGovern
movements inuences stated, The New Left, again, re- further highlighted the new inuence of Liberal protest
fused the self-discipline of explicit programmatic state- movements within the Democratic establishment. Inment until too lateuntil, that is, the Marxist-Leninist creasingly, feminist and gay rights groups became imsects lled the vacuum with dogmas, with clarity on the portant parts of the Democratic coalition, thus satisfying many of the same constituencies that were previously
cheap. [35]
unserved by the mainstream parties.[2] This institutionalIsserman (2001) reports that the New Left came to ization took away all but the most radical members of the
use the word 'liberal' as a political epithet.[36] Historian New Left. The remaining radical core of the SDS, dissatRichard Ellis (1998) says that the SDSs search for their ised with the pace of change, incorporated violent tenown identity increasingly meant rejecting, even demo- dencies towards social transformation. After 1969, the
nizing, liberalism.[37] As Wolfe (2010) notes, no one Weathermen, a surviving faction of SDS, attempted to
hated liberals more than leftists.[38]
launch a guerrilla war in an incident known as the Days
Other elements of the U.S. New Left were anarchist of Rage. Finally, in 1970 three members of the Weathand looked to libertarian socialist traditions of Ameri- ermen blew themselves up in a Greenwich Village browncan radicalism, the Industrial Workers of the World and stone trying to make a bomb out of a stick of dynamite
union militancy. This group coalesced around the his- and an alarm clock.[45] In contrast, the more moderate
torical journal Radical America. American Autonomist groups associated with the New Left increasingly became
Marxism was also a child of this stream, for instance in central players in the Democratic Party and thus in mainthe thought of Harry Cleaver. Murray Bookchin was also stream American politics.
part of the anarchist stream of the New Left, as were the
Yippies.[39]

31.1.3 Aliated groups

The U.S. New Left drew inspiration from black radicalism, particularly the Black Power movement and the
more explicitly Maoist and militant Black Panther Party. 31.1.4 1960s counterculture and the hippie
movement
The Panthers in turn inuenced other similar militant
groups, like the Young Lords, the Brown Berets and the
American Indian Movement. The New Left was also in- Main articles: Counterculture of the 1960s and Hippies
spired by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee The hippie subculture was originally a youth movement
that arose in the United States during the mid-1960s and

31.1. HISTORICAL ORIGINS

277
Chicago in August, including nominating their own candidate, "Lyndon Pigasus Pig" (an actual pig), was also
widely publicized in the media at this time.[50] In Cambridge, hippies congregated each Sunday for a large bein at Cambridge Park with swarms of drummers and
those beginning the Womens Movement. In the United
States the Hippie movement started to be seen as part of
the New Left which was associated with anti-war college campus protest movements.[2]
Students for a Democratic Society
Main article: Students for a Democratic Society (1960
organization)

Abbie Homan, leader of the countercultural protest group the

Yippies

The organization that really came to symbolize the core

of the New Left was the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). By 1962, the SDS had emerged as the most
important of the new campus radical groups; soon it
would be regarded as virtually synonymous with the New
Left.[51] In 1962, Tom Hayden wrote its founding document, the Port Huron Statement,[52] which issued a call
for participatory democracy based on non-violent civil
disobedience. This was the idea that individual citizens
could help make 'those social decisions determining the
quality and direction' of their lives.[40] The SDS marshalled anti-war, pro-civil rights and free speech concerns
on campuses, and brought together liberals and more revolutionary leftists.

spread to other countries around the world. The word

'hippie' came from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into New York Citys
Greenwich Village and San Franciscos Haight-Ashbury
district. The origins of the terms hip and hep are uncertain, though by the 1940s both had become part of
African American jive slang and meant sophisticated;
currently fashionable; fully up-to-date.[46][47][48][49] The
Beats adopted the term hip, and early hippies inherited
the language and countercultural values of the Beat Generation and mimicked some of the then current values
of the British Mod scene. Hippies created their own
communities, listened to psychedelic rock, embraced the
A demonstrator oers a ower to military police at an antisexual revolution, and some used drugs such as cannabis, Vietnam War protest in Arlington, Virginia, 21 October 1967
LSD, and psilocybin mushrooms to explore altered states
of consciousness.
The SDS became the leading organization of the anti-war
The Yippies, who were seen as an oshoot of the hip- movement on college campuses during the Vietnam War.
pie movements parodying as a political party, came to As the war escalated the membership of the SDS also innational attention during their celebration of the 1968 creased greatly as more people were willing to scrutinise
spring equinox, when some 3,000 of them took over political decisions in moral terms.[53] During the course
Grand Central Terminal in New York, resulting in 61 ar- of the war, the people became increasingly militant. As
rests. The Yippies, especially their leaders Abbie Ho- opposition to the war grew stronger, the SDS became
man and Jerry Rubin, became notorious for their the- a nationally prominent political organization, with opatrics, such as trying to levitate the Pentagon at the Octo- posing the war an overriding concern that overshadowed
ber 1967 war protest, and such slogans as Rise up and many of the original issues that had inspired SDS. In
abandon the creeping meatball!" Their stated intention 1967, the old statement in Port Huron was abandoned for
to protest the 1968 Democratic National Convention in a new call for action,[54] which would inevitably lead to

278
the destruction of the SDS.
In 1968 and 1969, as its radicalism reached a fever pitch,
the SDS began to split under the strain of internal dissension and increasing turn towards Maoism. Along with
adherents known as the New Communist Movement,
some extremist illegal factions also emerged, such as the
Weather Underground organization.

CHAPTER 31. NEW LEFT

drugs. All of a sudden, the commune was receiving visitors from all over the world, among them Jimi Hendrix,
who turned up one morning in the bedroom of Kommune
1.[60] The underground was a countercultural movement
in the United Kingdom linked to the underground culture in the United States and associated with the hippie
phenomenon. Its primary focus was around Ladbroke
Grove and Notting Hill in London. It generated its own
magazines and newspapers, bands, clubs and alternative
lifestyle, associated with cannabis and LSD use and a
strong socio-political revolutionary agenda to create an
alternative society. The counterculture movement took
hold in Western Europe, with London, Amsterdam, Paris,
Rome and West Berlin rivaling San Francisco and New
York as counterculture centers.

The SDS suered the diculty of wanting to change

the world while 'freeing life in the here and now.' This
caused confusion between short term and long term goals.
The sudden growth due to the successful rallies against
the Vietnam War meant there were more people wanting action to end the Vietnam war, whereas the original
New Left had wanted to focus on critical reection.[55] In
the end, it was the anti-war sentiment that dominated the
The Prague Spring was legitimised by the CzechosloSDS.[56]
vak government as a socialist reform movement. The
1968 events in the Czechoslovakia were driven forward
by industrial workers, and were explicitly theorized by ac31.1.5 Continental European New Left
tive Czechoslovak unionists as a revolution for workers
control.
Main article: Protests of 1968
The European New Left appeared rst in West Germany, which became a prototype for European student
radicals.[57] German students protesting against the Vietnam war often wore discarded US military uniforms,
and they made inuential contacts with dissident GIs
draftees who did not like the war either.[58]
In Europe Provo was a Dutch counterculture movement
in the mid-1960s that focused on provoking violent responses from authorities using non-violent bait.One manifestation of this was the French general strike that took
place in Paris in May 1968, which nearly toppled the
French government. In France the Situationist International reached the apex of its creative output and inuence
in 1967 and 1968, with the former marking the publication of the two most signicant texts of the situationist
movement, The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
and The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem.
The expressed writing and political theory of the two
aforementioned texts, along with other situationist publications, proved greatly inuential in shaping the ideas
behind the May 1968 insurrections in France; quotes,
phrases, and slogans from situationist texts and publications were ubiquitous on posters and grati throughout
France during the uprisings.[59] Another was the German
student movement of the 1960s. Kommune 1 or K1 was
the rst politically motivated commune in Germany. It
was created on January 12, 1967, in West Berlin and nally dissolved in November 1969. During its entire existence, Kommune 1 was infamous for its bizarre staged
events that uctuated between satire and provocation.
These events served as inspiration for the "Sponti" movement and other leftist groups. In the late summer of
1968, the commune moved into a deserted factory on
Stephanstrae in order to reorient. This second phase
of Kommune 1 was characterized by sex, music, and

The student activism of the New Left came to a head

around the world in 1968. The May 1968 protests in
France temporarily shut down the city of Paris, while the
German student movement did the same in Bonn. Universities were simultaneously occupied in May in Paris,
in the Columbia University protests of 1968, and in
Japanese student strikes. Shortly thereafter, Swedish students occupied a building at Stockholm University. However, all of these protests were shut down by police authorities without achieving their goals, which caused the
inuence of the student movement to lapse in the 1970s.
The driving force of near-revolution in France in
May 1968 were students inspired by the ideas of the
Situationist International, which in turn had been inspired
by Socialisme ou Barbarie. Both of these groups emphasised culture as a form of production.

May 1968 slogan. Paris. It is forbidden to forbid.

While the Autonomia in Italy have been called New Left,

it is more appropriate to see them as the result of traditional, industrially oriented, communism re-theorising its

31.3. KEY FIGURES

279

ideas and methods. Unlike most of the New Left, Autonomia had a strong blue-collar arm, active in regularly
occupying factories.

Jean-Paul Sartre

The Provos were a Dutch countercultural movement of

mostly young people with anarchist inuences.

Malcolm X

The New Left in Japan began by occupying college

campuses for several years in the 1960s. After 1970,
they splintered into several freedom ghter groups including the United Red Army and the Japanese Red
Army. They also developed the political ideology of
Anti-Japaneseism.
The Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores PT)
is considered the main organization to emerge from the
New Left in Brazil. According to Manuel Larrabure,
rather than taking the path of the old Latin American
left, in the form of the guerrilla movement, or the Stalinist
party, PT decided to try something new, while being
aided by CUT and other social movements. Its challenge
was to combine the institutions of liberal democracy
with popular participation by communities and movements. PT, however, has been criticized for its strategic alliances with the right-wing after Luiz Incio Lula
da Silva was elected president of Brazil. The party has
distanced itself from social movements and youth organizations and for many it seems the PTs model of a new
left is reaching its limits.[61]

31.2 Inspirations and inuences

Leon Trotsky

31.3 Key gures

Stew Albert
Bill Ayers
Rudolf Bahro
Charles Bettelheim
Stokely Carmichael
Daniel Cohn-Bendit
Angela Davis
Rgis Debray
Rudi Dutschke
Deniz Gezmi
Tom Hayden
Abbie Homan
Tom Nairn
Huey Newton

Theodor Adorno

Carl Oglesby

Albert Camus

Ronald Radosh

Guy Debord

Jerry Rubin

Frantz Fanon

Mark Rudd

Allen Ginsberg

Mario Savio

Emma Goldman

Matthew Steen

Paul Goodman

Raymond Williams

Che Guevara

Peter Worsley

Aldous Huxley
Peter Kropotkin

31.4 Other associated people

R. D. Laing

Tariq Ali

Henri Lefebvre

Csar Chvez

Claude Levi-Strauss

Noam Chomsky

Rosa Luxemburg

David Dellinger

Herbert Marcuse

Joschka Fischer[62]

Bertrand Russell

Michel Foucault

280

CHAPTER 31. NEW LEFT

Norman Fruchter

[9] Koakowski, Leszek (1981). Main Currents Of Marxism:

Volume III, The Breakdown. Oxford University Press.
pp. 436440. ISBN 0192851098., quoting Dans Prinzip
Honung pp. 13801628.

Karl Hess
Gabriel Kolko[63]

[10] Dennis L. Dworkin 1997 Cultural Marxism in postwar

Britain: history, the new left, and the origins of cultural
studies (1997) p. 46

William Mandel
A. J. Muste

[11] ROBIN BLACKBURN A BRIEF HISTORY OF NEW

LEFT REVIEW

Nicos Poulantzas
Charles A. Reich

[12] ROBIN BLACKBURN A BRIEF HISTORY OF NEW

LEFT REVIEW. Anderson took over as editor in 1962.

Richard Sennett

[13] Hoch and Schoenbach, 1969

Charles Taylor

[14] Ian Adams, Ideology and politics in Britain today (1998)

p, 191

31.5 See also

[15] Tariq Ali Street-Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the

Sixties (2005)

Chinese New Left

[16] New Left Review - Robin Blackburn: Stuart Hall,

19322014. New Left Review - Robin Blackburn:
Stuart Hall, 19322014.
1 Mar.
2014.
Web.
5 Dec.
2014.
<http://newleftreview.org/II/86/
robin-blackburn-stuart-hall-1932-2014>.

New Left 95
New Right
Hippies
Counterculture of the 1960s

31.6 References

[17] Chakravorty Spivak, Gayatri. Stuart Hall, 19322014 |

Radical Philosophy. Radical Philosophy. 1 May 2014.
Web. 5 Dec. 2014. <http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/
obituary/stuart-hall-1932-2014>.

<http://www.uta.edu/huma/

[18] The May Day Manifesto. An Emotional Involvement.

Web. 5 Dec. 2014. <http://senatehouseoccupation.
wordpress.com/reflections-and-recollections/
the-may-day-manifesto/>.

[2] Carmines, Edward G., and Georey C. Layman. 1997.

Issue Evolution in Postwar American Politics. In Byron
Shafer, ed., Present Discontents. NJ:Chatham House
Publishers.

[19] Horton, John. Stuart Hall, Et Al.: Policing the Crisis:

Mugging, the State, and Law and Order"" JSTOR. Web.
5 Dec. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/29766074>.

[1] Douglas Kellner.

illuminations/kell12.htm>

[3] Cynthia Kaufman Ideas For Action: Relevant Theory For

Radical Change
[4] Todd Gitlin, The Lefts Lost Universalism. In Arthur M.
Melzer, Jerry Weinberger and M. Richard Zinman, eds.,
Politics at the Turn of the Century, pp. 326 (Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littleeld, 2001).
Grant Farred (2000). Endgame Identity? Mapping the
New Left Roots of Identity Politics. New Literary History
31 (4): 627648. doi:10.1353/nlh.2000.0045. JSTOR
20057628.
[5] Jerey W. Coker. Confronting American Labor: The New
Left Dilemma. Univ of Missouri Press, 2002.
[6] Michael Kenny The First New Left: British Intellectuals After Stalin London: Lawrence & Wishart
[7] Hall, Stuart Life and Times of the First New Left, New
Left Review, 61, JanuaryFebruary 2010.
[8] Koakowski, Leszek (1981). Main Currents Of Marxism:
Volume III, The Breakdown. Oxford University Press. p.
416. ISBN 0192851098.

[20] David Burner, Making Peace with the 60s, (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1996), 151.
[21] Edited by John McMillian & Paul Buhle, The New Left
Revisited, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003),
5.
[22] http://www.marxists.org/subject/humanism/
mills-c-wright/letter-new-left.htm
[23] Daniel Geary, "'Becoming International Again': C.
Wright Mills and the Emergence of a Global New Left,
19561962, Journal of American History, Dec 2008,
Vol. 95 Issue 3, pp. 710736
[24] David Burner, Making Peace with the 60s, (Princeton University Press, 1996), 155
[25] American Rhetoric Mario Savio
[26] John Campbell McMillian; Paul Buhle (2003). The new
left revisited. Temple University Press. pp. 112. ISBN
978-1-56639-976-0. Retrieved 28 December 2011.
[27] Lytle 2006, pp. 213, 215.

31.7. FURTHER READING

281

[28] Overview: who were (are) the Diggers?". The Digger

Archives. Retrieved 2007-06-17.
[29] Gail Dolgin; Vicente Franco (2007). American Experience: The Summer of Love. PBS. Retrieved 2007-04-23.
[30] Holloway, David (2002). Yippies. St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture.
[31] Abbie Homan, Soon to be a Major Motion Picture, page
128. Perigee Books, 1980.
[32] Gitlin, Todd (1993). The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of
Rage. New York. p. 286.
[33] 1969: Height of the Hippies - ABC News.
news.go.com. Retrieved 2013-10-11.

Abc-

[34] Edward J. Bacciocco, The New Left in America: reform to

revolution, 1956 to 1970 (1974) p. 21
[35] Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media
in the Making & Unmaking of the New Left, University of
California Press, 2003, p. 179
[36] Maurice Isserman, The other American: the life of Michael
Harrington (2001) p. 276
[37] Richard J. Ellis, The dark side of the Left: illiberal Egalitarianism in America (1998) p. 129
[38] Alan Wolfe, Jeremiah, American-style, New Republic,
May 13, 2010, P. 31
[39] Paul Avrich, Anarchist voices: an oral history of anarchism in America (2005) p. 527
[40] Maurice Isserman & Michael Kazin, America Divided:
The Civil War of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000) 169.
[41] Edited by John McMillian & Paul Buhle, The New Left
Revisited, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003),
4

[50] The Politics of Yip, TIME Magazine, Apr. 5, 1968

[51] Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the
Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic
Books Inc Publishers, 1987) 174.
[52] Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic
Society, 1962. Coursesa.matrix.msu.edu. Retrieved
2012-11-07.
[53] Maurice Isserman & Michael Kazin, America Divided:
The Civil War of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000) 170.
[54] Maurice Isserman & Michael Kazin, America Divided:
The Civil War of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000) 172.
[55] Edited by John McMillian & Paul Buhle, The New Left
Revisited, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003),
3.
[56] Maurice Isserman & Michael Kazin, America Divided:
The Civil War of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000) 183.
[57] Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Roots of radicalism: Jews, Christians, and the Left (1996) p. 354
[58] Maria Hohn and Seungsook Moon, Over There: Living
with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the
Present (2010) p. 275
[59] Plant, Sadie (1992). The Most Radical Gesture. New
York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-06222-0.
[60] Keith Richards: The Biography, by Victor Bockris
[61] Larrabure, Manuel. "'No nos representam!' A left beyond the Workers Party?". The Bullet. July 18, 2013.
Retrieved 30 March 2014.
[62] Michael Scott Moore (2005-10-18). So, Farewell Then,
Joschka Fischer. Retrieved 2009-11-24.

[42] Maurice Isserman & Michael Kazin, America Divided:

The Civil War of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000) 295.

[63] Richard H. Immerman (1987). Revisionism Revisited:

The New Left Lives. Reviews in American History 15
(1): 134139. JSTOR 2702232.

[43] Edited by John McMillian & Paul Buhle, The New Left
Revisited, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003),
6.

31.7 Further reading

[44] Cynthia Kaufman Ideas For Action: Relevant Theory For

Radical Change

31.7.1 General

[45] America in Ferment: The Tumultuous 1960s, The New

Left, Digital History University of Houston, updated 30Jun-12.
[46] To say I'm hip to the situation means I am aware of the
situation. See: Sheidlower, Jesse (2004-12-08), Crying
Wolof: Does the word hip really hail from a West African
language?, Slate Magazine, retrieved 2007-05-07
[47] http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=hep
[48] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hep
[49] http://www.britannica.com/bps/dictionary?query=hep

Interview with Andr Gorz, about The New Left

Teodori, Massimo, ed., The New Left: A documentary History. London: Jonathan Cape (1970).
Oglesby, Carl (ed.) The New Left Reader Grove
Press (1969). ISBN 83-456-1536-8. Inuential collection of texts by Mills, Marcuse, Fanon, CohnBendit, Castro, Hall, Althusser, Kolakowski, Malcolm X, Gorz & others.
Michael R. Krtke,Otto Bauer and the early Third
Way to Socialism

282

CHAPTER 31. NEW LEFT

Detlev Albers u.a. (Hg.), Otto Bauer und der 31.7.5 Japan
dritte Weg. Die Wiederentdeckung des Austromarxismus durch Linkssozialisten und Eurokom Miyazaki, Manabu (2005). Toppamono: Outlaw,
munisten, Frankfurt/M 1979
Radical, Suspect: My Life in Japans Underworld.
Tky: Kotan Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9701716 Andrews, Geo; Cockett, Richard; Hooper, Alan;
2-7. Includes an account of the authors days as a
Williams, Michael, New Left, New Right and Bestudent activist and street ghter for the Japanese
yond. Taking the Sixties Seriously. Palgrave MacmilCommunist Party, 19641969.
lan, 1999. ISBN 9780333741474

31.7.2

Australia

Armstrong, Mick, 1,2,3, What Are We Fighting For?

The Australian Student Movement From Its Origins
To The 1970s, Melbourne; Socialist Alternative,
2001. ISBN 0957952708
Cahill, Rowan, Notes on the New Left in Australia,
Sydney: Australian Marxist Research Foundation,
1969.
Hyde, Michael (editor), It is Right to Rebel, Canberra: The Diplomat, 1972.
Gordon, Richard (editor), The Australian New Left:
Critical Essays and Strategy, Melbourne: Heinnemann Australia,1970. ISBN 0855610093

31.7.6 United Kingdom

Ali, Tariq. Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography
of the Sixties London: Collins, 1987. ISBN 0-00217779-X.
Hock, Paul and Vic Schoenbach. LSE: the natives
are restless, a report on student power in action London: Sheed and Ward, 1969. ISBN 0-7220-0596-2.
Scruton, Roger Thinkers of the New Left (Claridge
Press, 1985).
The New Lefts renewal of Marxism an account by
Paul Blackledge from International Socialism

Symons, Beverley and Rowan Cahill (editors), A British New Left periodicals
Turbulent Decade: Social Protest Movements and the
Labour Movement, 19651975, Newtown: Sydney
The New Reasoner. indexed articles online.
ASSLH, 2005. ISBN 0909944091
19571959. Retrieved 2006-10-16.

31.7.3

Canada

Anastakis, Dimitry, ed (2008). The sixties: Passion,

politics, style (McGill Queens University Press).
Cleveland, John. (2004) New Left, not new liberal: 1960s movements in English Canada and Quebec, Canadian Journal of Sociology and Anthropology 41, no. 4: 6784.
Kostash, Myma. (1980) Long way from home: The
story of the sixties generation in Canada. Toronto:
Lorimer.
Levitt, Cyril. (1984). Children of privilege: Student
revolt in the sixties. University of Toronto Press.

Marxism Today.
indexed articles online.
Communist Party of Great Britain and Marxism
Today. 19801991 & 1998 special issue. Retrieved
2006-10-16. Check date values in: |date= (help)
New Left Review. indexed articles online. Retrieved 2007-03-24.
Socialist Register. indexed articles online. 1964
1999. Archived from the original on 2006-07-18.
Retrieved 2006-10-16.
Universities & Left Review. indexed articles online. 19571959. Retrieved 2006-10-16.

Sangster, Joan. Radical Ruptures: Feminism, La- British New Left articles
bor, and the Left in the Long Sixties in Canada,
Mills, C. Wright (SeptemberOctober 1960).
American Review of Canadian Studies, Spring 2010,
Letter to the New Left. New Left Review (5).
Vol. 40 Issue 1, pp. 121
Retrieved 2006-10-16.

31.7.4

Germany

Timothy Scott Brown. West Germany and the

Global Sixties: The Anti-Authoritarian Revolt, 1962
1978. Cambridge University Press. 2013

Placating Mr. Jenkins. Article discussing online

archiving of four British New Left publications Universities & Left Review, Marxism Today, The New
Reasoner and Socialist Register. October 16, 2006.
Retrieved 2006-10-16.

31.7. FURTHER READING

31.7.7

United States

Jae, Harold, and John Tytell, jt. compilers. The

American Experience: a Radical Reader. New York:
Harper & Row, 1970. xiii, 480 p.
Archives
New Left Movement: 19641973. Archive # 88020. Title: New Left Movement fonds. 19641973.
51 cm of textual records. Trent University Archives.
Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. Online guide retrieved April 12, 2005.
Russ Gilbert New Left Pamphlet Collection: An inventory of the collection at the University of Illinois
at Chicago. Online guide retrieved October 8, 2005
References

283
Novack, George; writing as William F. Warde
(1961). Who Will Change The World? The New
left and the Views of C. Wright Mills. International Socialist Review (USFI) 22 (3): pp. 6779.
Retrieved 2006-10-16.
Rand, Ayn. The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1993, 1975).
ISBN 0-452-01125-6.
Rossinow, Doug. The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America
(Columbia University Press, 1998). ISBN 0-23111057-X.
Rubenstein, Richard E. Left Turn: Origins of the
Next American Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown,
1973).
Young, C. A. Culture, Radicalism, and the Making
of a US Third World Left (Duke University Press,
2006).

Albert, Judith Clavir, and Albert, Stewart Edward. The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious
Decade (New York: Praeger, 1984). ISBN 0-275- Publications
91781-9
Munk, Michael. The New Left: What It Is ... Where
Breines, Wini. Community Organization in the New
Its Going ... What Makes it Move. 22pp. A NaLeft, 19621968: The Great Refusal, reissue edition
tional Guardian Pamphlet. New York. n.d. [1965].
(Rutgers University Press, 1989). ISBN 0-8135Stapled softcover. Photos.
1403-7.
Cohen, Mitchell, and Hale, Dennis, eds. The New
Student Left (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966).
Evans, Sara. Personal Politics: The Roots of
Womens Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement &
the New Left (Vintage, 1980). ISBN 0-394-742281.
Frost, Jennifer. An Interracial Movement of the
Poor": Community Organizing & the New Left in the
1960s (New York University Press, 2001). ISBN
0-8147-2697-6.
Gosse, Van. The Movements of the New Left, 1950
1975: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St.
Martins, 2004). ISBN 0-312-13397-9.
Isserman, Maurice. If I had a Hammer: the Death
of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left, reprint
edition (University of Illinois Press, 1993). ISBN
0-252-06338-4.
Long, Priscilla, ed. The New Left: A Collection of
Essays (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1969).
Mattson, Kevin, Intellectuals in Action: The Origins
of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 19451970
(Penn State Press, 2002). ISBN 0-271-02206-X
McMillian, John and Buhle, Paul (eds.). The
New Left Revisited (Temple University Press, 2003).
ISBN 1-56639-976-9.

Chapter 32

Social ecology
This article is about the social philosophy. For the
academic discipline, see human ecology. For a model
of integrated social and ecological system, see Social
ecological model.

resolved, without resolutely dealing with problems within

society.[2]
Social ecology is associated with the ideas and works of
Murray Bookchin, who had written on such matters from
the 1950s until his death, and, from the 1960s, had combined these issues with revolutionary social anarchism.
His works include Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Toward an
Ecological Society, The Ecology of Freedom, and a host
of others.

Social ecology is a critical social theory founded by

Green author and activist Murray Bookchin. Conceptualized as a critique of current social, political, and antiecological trends, it espouses a reconstructive, ecological,
communitarian, and ethical approach to society.
Social ecology locates the roots of the ecological crisis
Social ecology advocates a reconstructive and transfor- rmly in relations of hierarchy and domination between
mative outlook on social and environmental issues, and people. In the framework of social ecology, the very
promotes a directly democratic, confederal politics. As notion of the domination of nature by man stems from
a body of ideas, social ecology envisions a moral econ- the very real domination of human by human.[3] While
omy that moves beyond scarcity and hierarchy, toward the domination of nature is seen as a product of domia world that reharmonizes human communities with the nation within society, this domination only reaches crisis
natural world, while celebrating diversity, creativity and proportions under capitalism. In the words of Bookchin:
freedom.
The notion that man must dominate nature
Social ecology suggests that the roots of current ecologemerges directly from the domination of man
ical and social problems can be traced to hierarchical
by man But it was not until organic com(or more specically kyriarchical) modes of social ormunity relation dissolved into market relaganization. Social ecologists claim that the systemic istionships that the planet itself was reduced to a
sue of hierarchy cannot be resisted by individual actions
resource for exploitation. This centuries-long
alone such as ethical consumerism but must be addressed
tendency nds its most exacerbating developby more nuanced ethical thinking and collective activment in modern capitalism. Owing to its inherity grounded in radically democratic ideals. The comently competitive nature, bourgeois society not
plexity of relationships between people and nature is emonly pits humans against each other, it also pits
phasized, along with the importance of establishing more
the mass of humanity against the natural world.
mutualistic social structures that take account of this.[1]
Just as men are converted into commodities,
so every aspect of nature is converted into a
commodity, a resource to be manufactured and
32.1 Overview
merchandised wantonly. The plundering of
the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital[4]
Social ecologys social component comes from its position that nearly all of the worlds ecological problems stem
from social problems; with these social problems in turn While identifying himself within the anarchist tradition
arising from structures and relationships of dominating for most of his career, beginning in 1995, Bookchin behierarchy. They argue that apart from those produced by came increasingly critical of anarchism, and in 1999 took
natural catastrophes, the most serious ecological disloca- a decisive stand against anarchist ideology. He had come
tions of the 20th and 21st centuries have as their cause to recognize social ecology as a genuinely new form of
economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conicts, among libertarian socialism, and positioned its politics rmly in
many others. Present ecological problems, social ecol- the framework of a political ideology which he called
ogists maintain, cannot be clearly understood, much less Communalism.[5]
284

32.5. EXTERNAL LINKS

32.2 See also

285

32.5 External links

Biodiversity

The Institute for Social Ecology

Conservation movement

Libertarian Communist Library Murray Bookchin

holdings

Conservation ethic
Earth Science
Ecology
Environmental movement
Global warming
Natural environment
Nature
Panarchy
Polytely
Recycling
School of Social Ecology
Sustainability
Transition design

32.3 References
[1] Bookchin, Murray. The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy. Oakland: AK Press,
2005, p. 85-7.
[2] Bookchin, Murray. The Ecology of Freedom, p. 16.
[3] Bookchin, Murray. The Ecology of Freedom, p. 65.
[4] Bookchin, Murray. Post-Scarcity Anarchism. Oakland:
AK Press, 2004, p. 24-5.
[5] Biehl, Janet, "Bookchin Breaks With Anarchism", Communalism, October 2007.

32.4 Further reading

Bookchin, Murray (2004). Post-Scarcity Anarchism.
Stirling: AK Press. ISBN 1-904859-06-2. OCLC
232006054.
Bookchin, Murray (2005). The Ecology of Freedom.
Stirling: AK Press. ISBN 1-904859-26-7.
Light, Andrew (ed.) (1998). Social Ecology After
Bookchin. New York: Guilford Press. ISBN 978-157230-379-9.

Social Ecology London English study/action group

exploring the philosophy of social ecology.

Chapter 33

Communalism (political philosophy)

Communalism (spelled with a capital C to dierentiate
it from other forms) is a libertarian socialist political philosophy coined by author and activist Murray Bookchin as
a political system to complement his environmental philosophy of social ecology. Communalism proposes that
markets and money be abolished and that land and enterprises - i.e., private property - be placed increasingly in
the custody of the community more precisely, the custody of citizens in free assemblies and their delegates in
confederal councils. (However, Communalists retain respect for personal property.) The planning of work, the
choice of technologies, the management and distribution
of goods are seen as questions that can only be resolved
in practice. The maxim from each according to ability,
to each according to need is taken as a bedrock guide
for an economically rational society, where all goods are
designed and manufactured to have the highest durability
and quality, a society where needs are guided by rational
and ecological standards, and where the ancient notions
of limit and balance replace the capitalist imperative of
grow or die.

While originally conceived as being within the existing

framework of social anarchism, he developed Communalism into a separate ideology which incorporates what
he saw as the most benecial elements of left anarchism,
Marxism, syndicalism, and radical ecology.

33.2 Politics
33.2.1 Libertarian municipalism
Main article: libertarian municipalism
Starting in the 1970s, Bookchin argued that the arena for
libertarian social change should be the municipal level. In
a 2001 interview he summarized his views this way: The
overriding problem is to change the structure of society
so that people gain power. The best arena to do that is the
municipality the city, town, and village where we
have an opportunity to create a face-to-face democracy.
In 1980 Bookchin used the term libertarian municipalism, to describe a system in which libertarian institutions
of directly democratic assemblies would oppose and replace the state with a confederation of free municipalities.
Libertarian municipalism intends to create a situation in
which the two powers the municipal confederations
and the nation-state cannot coexist. Communalists
hold that this is a method to achieve a liberated society.

In such a municipal economy confederal, interdependent, and rational by ecological, not only technological,
standards Communalists hold that the special interests that divide people today into workers, professionals,
managers, capitalist owners and so on would be melded
into a general interest (a social interest) in which people
see themselves as citizens guided strictly by the needs of
their community and region rather than by personal proclivities and vocational concerns.[1][2] Here, it is hoped,
Libertarian municipalism is seen not merely as an eort
citizenship would come into its own, and rational as well
to take over city and municipal councils to construct a
as ecological interpretations of the public good would
more environmentally friendly government, but rather
supplant class and hierarchical interests.
an eort to transform and democratize these structures,
to root them in popular assemblies and to knit them together along confederal lines to appropriate a regional
economy. Bookchin summarized this process in the say33.1 Overview
ing democratize the republic, then radicalize the democWhile renowned as an inuential thinker of social anar- racy.
chism for much of his life, beginning in 1995, Bookchin
became increasingly critical of political anarchism, and in
1999 took a decisive stand against anarchist ideology. He
had come to recognize his political beliefs as a genuinely
new form of libertarian socialism, and positioned its politics rmly in the framework of a new political ideology.

It is a dual power that contests the legitimacy of the existing state power. Communalists hold that such a movement should be expected to begin slowly, perhaps sporadically, in communities here and there that initially may
demand only the ability to alter the structuring of society before enough interlinked confederations exist to de-

286

33.3. ECONOMICS
mand the outright institutional power to replace the centralized state. The growing tension created by the emergence of municipal confederations would represent a confrontation between the state and the political realms. It
is believed this confrontation can be resolved only after
Communalism forms the new politics of a popular movement and ultimately captures the imagination of society
at large.

33.2.2

Confederalism

Communalists see as equally important the need for

confederation the interlining of communities with one
another through recallable delegates mandated by municipal citizens assemblies and whose sole functions are coordinative and administrative. This is similar to the system of nested councils found in participatory politics.
According to Bookchin, "Confederation has a long history of its own that dates back to antiquity and that surfaced as a major alternative to the nation-state. From the
American Revolution through the French Revolution and
the Spanish Revolution of 1936, confederalism constituted a major challenge to state centralism. Communalism is seen to add a radically democratic dimension
to the contemporary discussions of confederation (e.g.
Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia) by calling for confederations not of nation-states but of municipalities and of the
neighborhoods of large cities as well as towns and villages.

287

33.2.4 Participation in currently existing

political systems
One of the core distinctions between left anarchism and
Communalism is that Communalists are not opposed in
principle to taking part in currently existing political institutions until such a time as it is deemed unnecessary.
Communalists see no issues with supporting candidates
or political parties in mainstream electoral politics
especially municipal electionsas long as prospective
candidates are libertarian socialist and anti-statist in policy. The particular goal of this process is to elevate Communalists (or those sympathetic to Communalism) to a
position of power so as to construct face-to-face municipal assemblies to maximize direct democracy and make
existing forms of representative democracy increasingly
irrelevant.

33.3 Economics

Communalism proposes a radically dierent form

of economy one that is neither nationalized nor
collectivized according to syndicalist precepts. It proposes that markets and money be abolished and that land
and enterprises be placed increasingly in the custody of
the community more precisely, the custody of citizens
in free assemblies and their delegates in confederal councils. How work should be planned, what technologies
should be used, how goods should be distributed are seen
as questions that can only be resolved in practice. The
maxim from each according to ability, to each according to need is taken as a bedrock guide for an economi33.2.3 Policy and administration
cally rational society, provided to be sure that goods are
of the highest durability and quality, that needs are guided
Communalists make a clear distinction between the con- by rational and ecological standards, and that the ancient
cepts of policy and administration. This distinction is seen notions of limit and balance replace the capitalist imperative of grow or die.
as fundamental to Communalist principles.
Policy is dened by being made by a community or neighborhood assembly of free citizens; administration on the
other hand, is performed by confederal councils a level up
from the local assemblies which are composed of mandated, recallable delegates of wards, towns, and villages.
If particular communities or neighborhoods or a minority grouping of them choose to go their own way to a
point where human rights are violated or where ecological destruction is permitted, the majority in a local or regional confederation would have the right to prevent such
practices through its confederal council. This is explained
not as a denial of democracy but the assertion of a shared
agreement by all to recognize civil rights and maintain the
ecological integrity of a region.
Policy-making remains local, but its administration is
vested in the confederal network as a whole. The
confederation is intended to be a community of communities based on distinct human rights and ecological imperatives.

In such a municipal economy confederal, interdependent, and rational by ecological, not simply technological,
standards Communalists hold that the special interests
that divide people today into workers, professionals, managers, and so on would be melded into a general interest
in which people see themselves as citizens guided strictly
by the needs of their community and region rather than
by personal proclivities and vocational concerns. Here, it
is hoped, citizenship would come into its own, and rational as well as ecological interpretations of the public good
would supplant class and hierarchical interests.

33.4 See also

Direct democracy
Eco-communalism
Inclusive democracy

288

CHAPTER 33. COMMUNALISM (POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY)

Libertarian socialism
Monthly Review
Participatory politics
Social ecology
The Law of Peoples

33.5 Notes
[1] Brown, L. Susan. 'The Politics of Individualism,' Black
Rose Books (2002)
[2] Brown, L. Susan. Does Work Really Work?

33.6 References and external links

The Institute for Social Ecology
Murray Bookchins overview of Libertarian Municipalism
New Compass.net Communalism political activist
group.
The politics of social ecology: libertarian municipalism, by Janet Biehl and Murray Bookchin,
Black Rose Books Ltd., 1998, ISBN 551641003,
9781551641003
Paul F. Downton, Ecopolis: architecture and cities
for a changing climate: Volume 1 of Future City,
Springer, 2008, p. 157, ISBN 1-4020-8495-1,
ISBN 978-1-4020-8495-9

Chapter 34

Participism
Participism is a libertarian socialist political philosophy consisting of two independently created economic
and political systems: participatory economics or parecon and participatory politics or parpolity. Participism is intended as an alternative to both capitalism and
centrally-planned state socialism. Participism has significantly informed the interim International Organization
for a Participatory Society.

34.1 Overview
Advocates of participism envision remaking all of human
society from the bottom up according to principles of
direct participatory democracy and replacing economic
and social competition with cooperation. Supporters of
what is termed a participatory society support the eventual dissolution of the centralized state, markets, and
money (in its current form) placing it in the tradition of
anti-authoritarian libertarian socialism. To elucidate their
vision for a new society, advocates of participism categorize their aspirations into what they term a liberating
theory.

Within each sphere there are two components. The rst

component is the Human Centre, the collection of people living within a society. Each person has needs, desires, personalities, characteristics, skills, capacities, and
consciousness. The second component is the Institutional
Boundary, all of societys social institutions that come
together to form interconnected roles, relationships, and
commonly held expectations and patterns of behaviour,
that produce and reproduce societal outcomes. Through
theses institutions come together to help shape who people are as individuals.

34.1.1 Participatory politics

Main article: Participatory politics

Parpolity is the political system rst proposed by Stephen

R. Shalom, professor of political science at William Paterson University in New Jersey. Shalom has stated that
Parpolity is meant as a long range vision of where social
justice should reach its apex within the eld of politics
and should complement the level of participation in the
economy with an equal degree of participation in policy
Liberating theory is a holistic framework for understand- and administrative matters.
ing society that looks at the whole of society and the
interrelations among dierent parts of peoples social
lives. Participism groups human society into four primary
spheres, all of which are set within an international and
ecological context, and each of which has a set of dening
functions:
A diagram of the nested council structure.

The political sphere: policy-making, administration,

The values on which parpolity is based are:
and collective implementation.
The economic sphere: production, consumption,
and allocation of the material means of life.
The kinship sphere: procreation, nurturance, socialisation, gender, sexuality, and organisation of daily
home life.

freedom
self-management
justice
solidarity

and tolerance.
The community sphere: development of collectively
shared historical identities, culture, religion, spirituality, linguistic relations, lifestyles, and social cele- The goal, according to Shalom, is to create a political
brations.
system that will allow people to participate, as much
289

290

CHAPTER 34. PARTICIPISM

as possible in a direct and face to face manner. The participatory economy.

proposed decision-making principle is that every person
should have say in a decision proportionate to the degree
34.1.2 Participatory economics
to which she or he is aected by that decision.
The vision is critical of aspects of modern representative
democracies arguing that the level of political control by Main article: Participatory economics
the people isn't sucient. To address this problem parpolity suggests a system of Nested Councils, which would Parecon is an economic system proposed primarily by
include every adult member of a given society.
activist and political theorist Michael Albert and radIn a country or society run according to participism, there ical economist Robin Hahnel, among others. It uses
would be local councils of voting citizens consisting of participatory decision making as an economic mecha25-50 members. These local councils would be able to nism to guide the production, consumption and allocation
pass any law that aected only the local council. No of resources in a given society. Proposed as an alhigher council would be able to override the decisions of a ternative to contemporary capitalist market economies
lower council, only a council court would be able to chal- and also an alternative to centrally planned socialism or
lenge a local law on human rights grounds. The councils coordinatorism, it is described as an anarchistic ecowould be based on consensus, though majority votes are nomic vision, and a form of socialism as under parecon,
the means of production are owned in common.
allowed when issues cannot be agreed upon.
Each local council would send a delegate to a higher
level council, until that council lls with 25-50 members.
These second level councils would pass laws on matters
that eect the 625 to 2500 citizens that it represents. A
delegate to a higher level council is bound to communicate the views of her or his sending council, but is not
bound to vote as the sending council might wish. Otherwise, Shalom points out that there is no point in having
nested councils, and everyone might as well vote on everything. A delegate is recallable at any time by her or his
sending council. Rotation of delegates would be mandatory, and delegates would be required to return to their
sending councils frequently.
The second level council sends a delegate to a third level
council, the third level councils send delegates to a fourth
level and so on until all citizens are represented. Five
levels with 50 people on every council would represent
312,500,000 voters (around the population of the United
States). However, the actual number of people represented would be even higher, given that young children
would not be voting. Thus, with a further sixth level
nested council, the entire human population could be represented. This would not however be equatable to a global
world state, but rather would involve the dissolution of all
existing nation-states and their replacement with a worldwide confederal coordinating body made of delegates
immediately recallable by the nested council below them.
Lower level councils have the opportunity to hold referendums at any time to challenge the decisions of a higher
level council. This would theoretically be an easy procedure, as when a threshold of lower level councils call for
a referendum, one would then be held. Shalom points out
that sending every issue to lower level councils is a waste
of time, as it is equivalent to referendum democracy.
There would be sta employed to help manage council
aairs. Their duties would perhaps include minute taking and researching issues for the council. These council
sta would work in a balanced job complex dened by a

The underlying values that parecon seeks to implement are equity, solidarity, diversity, workers selfmanagement and eciency. (Eciency here means accomplishing goals without wasting valued assets.) It proposes to attain these ends mainly through the following
principles and institutions:
workers and consumers councils utilizing selfmanagerial methods for making decisions,
balanced job complexes,
remuneration according to eort and sacrice, and
participatory planning.
In place of money parecon would have a form of currency in which personal vouchers or credits would be
awarded for work done to purchase goods and services.
Unlike money, credits would disappear upon purchase,
and would be non-transferable between individuals, making bribery and monetary theft impossible. Also, the only
items or services with a price attached would most likely
be those considered wants or non-essentials and anything
deemed a need would be completely free of charge (e.g.:
health care, public transportation).
Albert and Hahnel have stressed that parecon is only
meant to address an alternative economic theory and must
be accompanied by equally important alternative visions
in the elds of politics, culture and kinship. The authors
have also discussed elements of Social anarchism in the
eld of politics, polyculturalism in the eld of culture, and
feminism in the eld of family/kinship and gender relations as being possible foundations for future alternative
visions in these other spheres of society. Since the publication of Alberts book Parecon, other thinkers have
come forward and incorporated these concepts which
have rounded Participism into a more fully formed political and social ideology.

34.2. CRITICISMS

34.1.3

Feminist kinship

See also Nurture kinship and Free love

Outside of both political and economic relations there
still exists the sphere of human kinship. Participism sees
this as a vital component in a liberated society and applies feminist principles to this aspect of human relations.
Feminist kinship relations are seen to seek to free people
from oppressive denitions that have been socially imposed and to abolish all sexual divisions of labour and
sexist and heterosexist demarcation of individuals according to gender and sexuality.
Participism holds that a participatory society must be
respectful on an individuals nature, inclinations, and
choices and all people must be provided with the means
to pursue the lives they want regardless of their gender,
sexual orientation, or age. Feminist kinship relations
are dependent on the liberation of women, LGBTQ persons, youth, the elderly, and intersex (hermaphroditic and
pseudohermaphroditic) individuals.
To extend liberation into daily home life, a participatory
society aims to provide the means for traditional couples, single parents, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual,
transgender, and intersex parents, communal parenting,
polygamy (especially polyandry), polyamorous and multiple parenting arrangements to develop and ourish. It
is believed that within the home and the community,
the task of raising children must be elevated in status. Highly personalised interaction between children
and adults should be encouraged, and responsibilities for
these interactions must be distributed equitably throughout society without segregating tasks by gender. A participatory society would provide parents with access to high
quality day-care, exible work hours, and parental leave
options allowing them to play a more active role in the
lives of their children.

291

34.1.4 Polycultural community

Human society is held to have long and brutal history of
conquest, colonisation, genocide, and slavery which cannot be transcended easily. To begin the step-by-step process of building a new historical legacy and set of behavioural expectations between communities, a participatory society would construct intercommunalist institutions to provide communities with the means to assure
the preservation of their diverse cultural traditions and to
allow for their continual development. With polycultural
intercommunalism, all material and psychological privileges that are currently granted to a section of the population at the expense of the dignity and standards of living for oppressed communities, as well as the division of
communities into subservient positions according to culture, ethnicity, nationality, and religion, will be dissolved.
The multiplicity of cultural communities and the historical contributions of dierent communities would be respected, valued, and preserved by guaranteeing each sufcient material and communicative means to reproduce,
self-dene, develop their own cultural traditions, and represent their culture to all other communities. Through
construction of intercommunalist relations and institutions that guarantee each community the means necessary
to carry on and develop their traditions, a pariticipatory
society assists eliminating negative inter-community relations and encourages positive interaction between communities that can enhance the internal characteristics of
each.

In a participatory society, individuals would be free to

choose the cultural communities they prefer and members of every community would have the right of dissent
and to leave. Intervention would not be permitted except
to preserve this right for all. Those outside a community
would also be free to criticize cultural practices that they
believe violate acceptable social norms, but the majority
would not have the power to impose its will on a vulnerThe liberation of women and society from patriarchal and able minority.
heteronormative oppression, according to participism, requires total reproductive freedom. Society must provide
all members with the right to family planning, without 34.2 Criticisms
shame or guilt for performing or soliciting an abortion or
for engaging in alternative sexual behavior and without
34.2.1 Anarchism
fear of sterilization or economic deprivation; the right to
have or not to have children and to terminate undesired Certain anarchists of the libcom community (an interpregnancies through unhindered access to birth control net community of libertarian communists) have criticized
and unregulated abortion, respectively; and the right to the parpolity aspect of participism for deciding beforecomprehensive sexual education and healthcare that pro- hand the scale and scope of the councils whilst only pracvide every citizen with information and resources to live tice, they argue, can accurately indicate the size and scale
a healthy and fullling sex life.
of anarchist confederations and other organizational platIn such sex-positive participatory societies the full exploration of human sexuality, with the possible exception of
child sexuality, would be accepted and embraced as normative. Participism encourages the exercise of and experimentation of dierent forms of sexuality by consenting partners.

forms, especially since each region is unique with unique

residents and unique solutions and unique wants. Anarchists argue that such blueprints containing detailed information are either dangerous or pointless. Furthermore,
some anarchists have criticized the potential use of referendums to challenge decisions taken by higher councils as

292

CHAPTER 34. PARTICIPISM

this implies both a top-down structure and an absence of

vis--vis democracy as they argue that referendums are
not participatory.[1]
They have also criticized the enforcement of laws passed
by councils rather than the use of supposed voluntary
custom or customary law which develops through mutual
recognition rather than being enforced by an external authority, as they argue the laws passed by such councils
would need to be.[1]

34.2.2

Capitalism

The criticism of socialism could be applied to participism as well, as advocates of capitalism object to the absence of a market and private property in a hypothetical
participatory society. However, in a debate with David
Horowitz,[2] Michael Albert argued that those criticisms
could not apply to parecon, as it was especially designed
to take them into account. New specic criticisms should
then be formulated. For instance, in an answer to the
comments of David Kotz and John O'Neill about one of
their articles on the subject, Albert and Hahnel assert that
they designed parecon understanding that knowledge is
distributed unequally throughout society,[3] hypothetically answering to the famous criticisms of Friedrich Von
Hayek on the possibility of planning.

34.3 References
[1] Parecon or libertarian communism?. libcom.org. Retrieved on 2013-07-12.
[2] ZNet | Zdebatehorowitz.
trieved on 2013-07-12.

Zcommunications.org.

Re-

[3] Albert, Michael and Robin Hahnel. 2002. Reply. In

Science and Society, vol. 66, no. 1, p. 26, [online]. http:
//gesd.free.fr/albert.pdf

34.4 External links

Participatory economics website
Vancouver Participatory Economics Collective
Old Market Autonomous Zone (Winnipeg)
Article about Parpolity: Political Vision for a Good
Society by Stephen R. Shalom
Stephen Shalom interviewed about Parpolity by
Vancouver COOP Radio
MP3 Audio of above interview with Stephen Shalom
Projects for a Participatory Society web site

Chapter 35

Inclusive Democracy
Inclusive Democracy is a project that aims for direct
democracy; economic democracy in a stateless, moneyless and marketless economy; self-management (democracy in the social realm); and ecological democracy.

democracy. In short, inclusive democracy is a form of

social organisation which re-integrates society with economy, polity and nature. The concept of inclusive democracy is derived from a synthesis of two major historical
The theoretical project of Inclusive Democracy (ID) as traditions, the classical democratic and the socialist, although it also encompasses radical green, feminist, and
distinguished from the political project on which the ID
[4]
movement is based emerged from the work of politi- liberation movements in the South.
cal philosopher, former academic and activist Takis Fo- The starting point of the ID project is that the world,
topoulos, in the book Towards An Inclusive Democracy, at the beginning of the new millennium, faces a multiand was further developed by him and other writers in the dimensional crisis (economic, ecological, social, cultural
journal Democracy & Nature and its successor The In- and political), which is shown to be caused by the conternational Journal of Inclusive Democracy, an electronic centration of power in the hands of various elites. This is
journal published by the International Network for Inclu- interpreted to be the outcome of the establishment, in the
sive Democracy.[1] In other words, the theoretical project last few centuries, of the system of market economy (in
of ID is a project emerging in Political Philosophy and the the Polanyian sense),[5] Representative democracy, and
History of ideas about social change (see e.g. Marxism, the related forms of hierarchical structure. Therefore, an
Social Ecology project, the autonomy project, the Inclu- inclusive democracy is seen not simply as a utopia, but
sive Democracy project, etc.). On the other hand the perhaps as the only way out of the crisis, based on the
political project of ID (as any political project for social equal distribution of power at all levels.
emancipation) is a project emerging in the History of so- In this conception of democracy, the public realm incial struggle (e.g. along socialist movement, autonomist cludes not just the political realm, as is usual the practice
movement, classical (direct) democracy movement, etc.). in the republican or democratic project (Hannah Arendt,
According to Arran Gare, Towards an Inclusive Democracy oers a powerful new interpretation of the history and destructive dynamics of the market and provides
an inspiring new vision of the future in place of both
neo-liberalism and existing forms of socialism".[2] David
Freeman argues that Fotopoulos approach in that book
is not openly anarchism, yet anarchism seems the formal category within which he works, given his commitment to direct democracy, municipalism and abolition of
state, money and market economy.[3]

35.1 Conception
Democracy

of

Inclusive

Fotopoulos describes Inclusive Democracy as a new conception of democracy, which, using as a starting point the
classical denition of it, expresses democracy in terms of
direct political democracy, economic democracy (beyond
the connes of the market economy and state planning),
as well as democracy in the social realm and ecological

Cornelius Castoriadis, Murray Bookchin et al.),[6][7] but

also the economic, 'social' and ecological realms. The
political realm is the sphere of political decision-making,
the area in which political power is exercised. The economic realm is the sphere of economic decision-making,
the area in which economic power is exercised with respect to the broad economic choices that any scarcity
society has to make. The social realm is the sphere of
decision-making in the workplace, the education place
and any other economic or cultural institution which is
a constituent element of a democratic society. The public realm could be extended to include the ecological
realm, which may be dened as the sphere of the relations between society and nature. Therefore, the public
realm, in contrast to the private realm, includes any area
of human activity in which decisions can be made collectively and democratically.
According to these four realms, we may distinguish between four main constituent elements of an inclusive
democracy: the political, the economic, 'democracy in
the social realm' and the ecological. The rst three elements form the institutional framework, which aims at the

293

294
equal distribution of political, economic and social power
respectively. In this sense, these elements dene a system,
which aims at the eective elimination of the domination
of human being over human being. Similarly, ecological democracy is dened as the institutional framework,
which aims to eliminate any human attempt to dominate
the natural world, in other words, the system, which aims
to reintegrate humans and nature.

CHAPTER 35. INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY

fore, an inclusive democracy today can only take the form
of a confederal democracy that is based on a network of
administrative councils whose members or delegates are
elected from popular face-to-face democratic assemblies
in the various demoi. Thus, their role is purely administrative and practical, not one of policy-making like that
of representatives in representative democracy.

The citizen body is advised by experts but it is the citizen body which functions as the ultimate decision-taker
. Authority can be delegated to a segment of the citizen
35.2 Institutional framework
body to carry out specic duties, for example to serve as
members of popular courts, or of regional and confederal councils. Such delegation is made, in principle, by
35.2.1 Political or direct democracy
lot, on a rotation basis, and is always recallable by the citThe necessary condition for the establishment of a po- izen body. Delegates to regional and confederal bodies
litical democracy involves the creation of appropriate in- should have specic mandates.
stitutions, which secure an equal distribution of political Finally, political or direct democracy implies a very difpower among all citizens. All political decisions (includ- ferent conception of citizenship than the usual liberal and
ing those relating to the formation and execution of laws) socialist conceptions. In this conception, political activare taken by the citizen body collectively and without rep- ity is not a means to an end, but an end in itself so that
resentation.The citizen body of a particular geographical one does not engage in political action simply to promote
area consists of all residents beyond a certain age of ma- ones welfare but to realize the principles intrinsic to poturity and irrespective of their gender, race, ethnic or cul- litical life, such as freedom, equality and solidarity. This,
tural identity. The age of maturity is to be dened by the in contrast to the liberal and social-democratic concepcitizen body itself.
tions which adopt an 'instrumentalist' view of citizenship,
The sucient condition for the reproduction of a politi- i.e. a view which implies that citizenship entitles citizens
cal democracy refers to the citizens level of democratic with certain rights that they can exercise as means to the
consciousness and, as David Gabbard & Karen Appleton end of individual welfare.
point out, the responsibility of cultivating the democratic
consciousness requisite to this conception of citizenship
falls to paideia"[8] which involves not simply education
but character development and a well-rounded knowledge and skills, i.e. the education of the individual as
citizen, which alone can give substantive content to the
public space. This is particularly so because democracy
can only be grounded on the conscious choice of citizens
for individual and collective autonomy. Thus it cannot be
the outcome of any social, economic or natural laws or
tendencies dialectically leading to it, let alone any divine
or mystical dogmas and preconceptions. In this sense,
neither representative democracy nor soviet democracy
meet the conditions for political democracy, and are simply forms of political oligarchy, where political power is
concentrated in the hands of various elites, i.e. professional politicians, and party bureaucrats respectively.

35.2.2 Economic democracy and the role of

an articial market

The ID project introduced a very dierent conception

from the usual one of economic democracy. According to the ID project, economic democracy is the authority of demos (community) in the economic sphere
which requires equal distribution of economic power.
Therefore, all 'macro' economic decisions, namely, decisions concerning the running of the economy as a whole
(overall level of production, consumption and investment,
amounts of work and leisure implied, technologies to be
used, etc.) are made by the citizen body collectively and
without representation. However, micro economic decisions at the workplace or the household levels are made
The basic unit of decision making in an inclusive democ- by the individual production or consumption unit through
racy is the demotic assembly, i.e. the assembly of demos, a proposed system of vouchers.
the citizen body in a given geographical area which may As with the case of direct democracy, economic democencompass a town and the surrounding villages, or even racy today is only feasible at the level of the confederneighbourhoods of large cities. This is very close to the ated demoi. It involves the ownership and control of the
concept of the 'urban village' proposed today by support- means of production by the demos. This is radically difers of de-growth economics.[9] However, apart from lo- ferent from the two main forms of concentration of ecocal decisions, many important decisions are to be made nomic power : capitalist and 'socialist' growth economy.
at the regional or confederal level. This is why, as Serge It is also dierent from the various types of collectivist
Latouche observes, the aim of Inclusive Democracy pre- capitalism, such as workers control and milder versions
supposes a confederation of demoi made up of small, suggested by post-Keynesian social democrats. The dehomogenous units of around 30,000 people.[10] There- mos, therefore, becomes the authentic unit of economic

35.2. INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK

life.

295
his/her own life (what work to do, what to consume
etc.).

For economic democracy to be feasible, three preconditions must be satised: Demotic self-reliance, demotic
ownership of the means of production, and confederal al- Therefore, the system consists of two basic elements:
location of resources.
Demotic self-reliance is meant in terms of radical
decentralisation and collective self-reliance (in the
sense of relying on the demos resources), rather
than of self-suciency (in the sense of autarky).
Demotic ownership of productive resources is a kind
of ownership which leads to the politicisation of the
economy, the real synthesis of economy and polity.
This is so because economic decision making is carried out by the entire community, through the demotic assemblies, where people make the fundamental macro-economic decisions which aect the
whole community, as citizens, rather than as vocationally oriented groups (e.g. workers, as e.g.
in Parecon).[11] At the same time, workers, apart
from participating in the demotic decisions about
the overall planning targets, would also participate
(in the above broad sense of vocationally oriented
groups) in their respective workplace assemblies,
in a process of modifying/implementing the Democratic Plan and in running their own workplace.
Confederal allocation of resources is required because, although self-reliance allows many decisions
to be made at the community level, much remains
to be decided at the regional/national/supra-national
level. However, it is delegates (rather than representatives) with specic mandates from the demotic
assemblies who are involved in a confederal demotic
planning process which, in combination with the
proposed system of vouchers, eects the allocation
of resources in a confederal inclusive democracy.
A model of economic democracy, as an integral part of
an inclusive democracy, is described in Towards An Inclusive Democracy (ch 6), the rst book-length description of inclusive democracy. The main characteristic of
the proposed model, which also dierentiates it from socialist planning models like Parecon, is that it explicitly
presupposes a stateless, money-less and market-less economy that precludes private accumulation of wealth and
the institutionalisation of privileges for some sections of
society, without relying on a mythical post-scarcity state
of abundance, or sacricing freedom of choice. The proposed system aims at satisfying the double aim of:
(a) meeting the basic needs of all citizenswhich
requires that basic macro-economic decisions have
to be made democratically, and
(b) securing freedom of choicewhich requires the
individual to make important decisions aecting

(1) democratic planning, which involves a feedback

process between workplace assemblies, demotic assemblies and the confederal assembly, and
(2) an articial market using personal vouchers,
which ensures freedom of choice but avoids the adverse eects of real markets. Although some have
called this system a form of money based on the
labour theory of value",[12] it is not a money model
since vouchers cannot be used as a general medium
of exchange and store of wealth.
Another distinguishing feature of ID is its distinction between basic and non-basic needs. Remuneration is according to need for basic needs, and according to eort
for non-basic needs. ID is based on the principle that
meeting basic needs is a fundamental human right which
is guaranteed to all who are in a physical condition to offer a minimal amount of work. By contrast,Fotopoulos
argues, Parecon follows the socialdemocratic rather than
the anarcho-communist tradition and instead of proposing satisfaction according to need (as the ID project does)
declares, rst, that particular consumption needs such as
health care or public parks will be free to all and, second, that as regards special needs, people will be able to
make particular requests for need based consumption to
be addressed case by case by others in the economy.[13]
In fact, Michael Albert explicitly states that what he calls
'norm four', i.e. 'remuneration according to each persons
need' should be applied only in exceptional cases of basic
needs and not to all needs dened as such by the citizens
assemblies, as the Inclusive Democracy project declares.
Thus, as Albert stresses: beyond economic justice, we
have our compassion, to be applied via norm four where
appropriate such as in cases of illness, catastrophe, incapacity and so on.[14]

Articial market
Proposed within Inclusive Democracy as a solution to the
problem of maintaining freedom of choice for the consumer within a marketless and moneyless economy, an
articial market operates in much the same way as traditional markets, but uses labour vouchers or personal
credit in place of traditional money. Because of the use of
a labour voucher system in consumption of goods and services, an economy using an articial market would have
no actual ow of money and thus the only kind of market
that could exist would be a market for commercial goods
and services, eliminating capital markets and labour markets.

296

CHAPTER 35. INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY

According to Takis Fotopoulos, an articial market se- same time, securing consumer sovereignty and freedom
cures real freedom of choice, without incurring the ad- of choice. Instead, the model proposed here is, in fact, a
verse eects associated with real markets.[15]
system of rationing, which is based on the revealed conon the one hand, and resource availThe idea of an articial market was rst proposed by the sumers preferences[19]
ability
on
the
other.
anarchist theorists Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail
Bakunin with their respective systems of Mutualism and
collectivist anarchism. who suggested replacing traditional currency with a system of labour-cheques while
still retaining basic market relations for goods and services.

Advocates of Participism and parecon in particular reject

markets in all forms in favour of democratic participatory planning. While parecon also uses personal credit
in place of money, prices are set according to the direct
requests of consumers in democratic consumer councils whose demands are relayed to economic facilitation
boards who determine and set nal prices based on a
combination of marginal utility and opportunity cost. On
the other hand, as Fotopoulos argues, no kind of economic organisation based on planning alone, however
democratic and decentralized it is, can secure real selfmanagement and freedom of choice.[20]

The articial market however is rarely advocated as the

only element for the allocation of goods and services by
its proponents, as most also support a form of directly
democratic planning for non-commercial goods and vital
resources, and in some cases regulation of the articial
market through planning also. In the IDs system of allocation of resources, the articial market complements
the envisaged direct democratic planning mechanism in
the allocation of all goods and services on the basis of the
crucial distinction introduced in this model between basic 35.2.3 Democracy in the social realm
and nonbasic goods and services.[16]
An inclusive democracy is inconceivable unless it exAccording to Fotopoulos, the allocation of economic retends to the broader social realm to embrace the worksources is made rst, on the basis of the citizens collecplace, the household, the educational institution and intive decisions, as expressed through the community and
deed any economic or cultural institution, which consticonfederal plans, and second, on the basis of the cititutes an element of this realm. The equal distribution
zens individual choices, as expressed through a voucher
of power in these institutions and self-management are
system.[17]
secured through the creation of assemblies of the peoThe proposed system of the articial market aims at:
ple involved in each place of work or education (workers assemblies, student and teachers assemblies respectively) who make all important decisions about the func (A) meeting the basic needs of all citizens, and
tioning of these places, within the framework of the de (B) securing freedom of choice in a marketless, cisions taken by citizens demotic assemblies as regards
moneyless and stateless scarcitysociety which the general aims of production, education and culture rehas not yet achieved universal autarky (self- spectively. The assemblies are federated at the regional
and confederal levels so that the confederal assemblies of
suciency).[15]
workers, teachers, students and so on could be involved
The former requires that basic macroeconomic deci- in a process of constant interaction with the citizens confederal assemblies to dene societys general interest.
sions have to be taken democratically, whereas the latter requires the individual to take important decisions af- A crucial issue with respect to democracy in the social
fecting his/her own life (what work to do, what to con- realm is democratisation of the household. One possible
sume, etc.). Both the macroeconomic decisions and the solution is the removal of the divide between the houseindividual citizens decisions are envisaged as being im- hold and the public realm. Thus, some feminist writers,
plemented through a combination of democratic planning particularly eco-feminists, glorify the oikos and its values
and an articial market. But, while in the macro deci- as a substitute for the polis and its politics. This can be
sions the emphasis will be on planning, the opposite will understood as an attempt to dissolve the public into the
be true as regards the individual decisions, where the em- private. At the other extreme, some Marxist feminists
attempt to remove the public/private divide by dissolvphasis will be on the articial market.[18]
Most articial market proponents reject the traditional ing all private space into a singular public, a socialised or
socialist adoption of the labour theory of value as they fraternal state sphere. Another possible solution is, takbelieve it cannot be used as the basis for allocating scarce ing for granted that the household belongs to the private
resources. The reason given is that even if the labour the- realm, to 'democratise' it in the sense that household relaory of value can give a (partial) indication of availability tionships should take on the characteristics of democratic
of resources, it certainly cannot be used as a means to relationships, and that the household should take a form
express consumers preferences. Thus they feel that the which is consistent with the freedom of all its members.
labour theory of value cannot serve as the basis for an al- But for the ID project, the issue is not the dissolution
locative system that aims at both meeting needs and, at the of the private/public realm divide. The real issue is

35.2. INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK

how, maintaining and enhancing the autonomy of the
two realms, such institutional arrangements are adopted
that introduce democracy at the household and the social
realm in general (workplace, educational establishment
etcetera) and at the same time enhance the institutional
arrangements of political and economic democracy. In
this sense, an eective democracy is only conceivable if
free time is equally distributed among all citizens, which
requires ending the present hierarchical relations in the
household, the workplace and elsewhere. Furthermore,
democracy in the social realm, particularly in the household, requires institutional arrangements which recognise
the character of the household as a need-satiser and integrate the care and services that the household provides
into the general scheme of needs satisfaction.[21]

35.2.4

Ecological democracy

Steven Best writes,

297
democracy constitutes only the necessary condition for a harmonious relation between the
natural and social worlds. The sucient condition refers to the citizens level of ecological consciousness. Still, the radical change in
the dominant social paradigm that would follow the institution of an inclusive democracy,
combined with the decisive role that paedeia
will play in an environmentally-friendly institutional framework, could reasonably be expected to lead to a radical change in the human
attitude towards Nature.[21]

Supporters also claim that IDs institutional framework

oers the best hope for a better human relationship to
nature than could ever be achieved in a market economy,
or one based on socialist statism. The factors supporting this view refer to all three elements of an inclusive
democracy: political, economic and social.

Some critics of inclusive democracy ask what guarantees an inclusive democracy may oer in ensuring a better relationship of society to nature than the alternative systems of the market economy, or socialist statism.
For example, David Pepper, an eco-socialist, pointed
out the 'required' ecological consensus among ecotopias
inhabitants might not be ensured merely by establishing an Athenian democracy where all are educated and
rational.[23] However, ID supporters counter-argue that
this criticism represents a clear misconception of what
democracy is about because,

Political democracy presupposes a radical decentralisation (physical or administrative) within a confederal society, which, by itself, should enhance its environmentally friendly character. Furthermore, political democracy would create a public space, a fact which would signicantly reduce the appeal of materialism by providing
a new meaning of life to ll the existential void that the
present consumer society creates. Economic democracy
replaces the dynamics of the capitalist market economy
leading to growth per se with a new social dynamic aiming
at the satisfaction of demos' needs. If the satisfaction of
demotic needs does not depend, as at present, on the continuous expansion of production to cover the 'needs that
the market system itself creates and if society is reintegrated with the economy, then there is no reason why the
present instrumentalist view of nature will continue conditioning human behaviour. Particularly so, since unlike
socialist models which are 'centralist', the aim of production in an Inclusive Democracy is not economic growth,
but the satisfaction of the basic needs of the community and those non-basic needs for which members of the
community express a desire and are willing to work extra
for. This implies a new denition of economic eciency,
based not on narrow techno-economic criteria of input
minimisation/output maximisation as in socialist models
like Parecon, but on criteria securing full coverage of the
democratically dened basic needs of all citizens as well
as of the non-basic needs they decide to meet, even if this
involves a certain amount of ineciency according to the
orthodox economics criteria.

if we see it as a process of social selfinstitution where there is no divinely or 'objectively' dened code of human conduct, such
guarantees are by denition ruled out. Therefore, the replacement of the market economy
by a new institutional framework of inclusive

According to ID supporters, democracy in the social

realm should be a decisive step in the creation of the
sucient condition for a harmonious nature-society relationship, as the phasing out of patriarchal relations in
the household and hierarchical relations in general should
create a new ethos of non-domination which would engulf
both nature and society.

in bold contrast to the limitations of the animal advocacy movement (AAM) and all other
reformist causes, Takis Fotopoulos advances a
broad view of human dynamics and social institutions, their impact on the earth, and the resulting consequences for society itself. Combining anti-capitalist, radical democracy, and
ecological concerns in the concept of ecological democracy, Fotopoulos denes this notion
as the institutional framework which aims at
the elimination of any human attempt to dominate the natural world, in other words, as the
system which aims to reintegrate humans and
Nature. This implies transcending the present
'instrumentalist' view of Nature, in which Nature is seen as an instrument for growth, within
a process of endless concentration of power.[22]

298

35.3 See also

Anarchism
Anarchist economics
Anarcho-syndicalism
Autonomy
Communization
Cornelius Castoriadis
Direct democracy

CHAPTER 35. INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY

[6] Ingerid S. Straume, A Common World? Arendt, Castoriadis and Political Creation, European Journal of Social
Theory, Vol. 15, No. 3 (August 2012), pp. 367-383.
[7] Murray Bookchin, Urbanization without Cities (Monteal:
Black Rose, 1992), p. 11.
[8] David Gabbard & Karen Appleton, The Democratic
Paideia Project: Beginnings of an Emancipatory Paideia
for Today, The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 2, No. 1 (September 2005).
[9] Clement Homs, Localism and the city: the example of
urban villages, The International Journal of Inclusive
Democracy, Vol. 3, No. 1 (January 2007). Retrieved
21 April 2014.

Democracy & Nature, Journal for Inclusive Democ- [10] Serge Latouche, How do we learn to want less? The globe
downshifted, Le Monde diplomatique (January 2006).
racy (19922003).
Economic democracy
Economic system
Feminism

[11] Takis Fotopoulos, Inclusive Democracy and Participatory Economics, Democracy & Nature, Vol. 9, No. 3
(November 2003).
[12] David Pepper, Modern Environmentalism (Routledge,
1996), p. 321.

Greens

[13] Parecon: Life After Capitalism, Verso Books, 2003, p.

117.

Libertarian municipalism

[14] Parecon: Life After Capitalism, Verso Books, 2003, p.38.

Libertarian socialism
Parecon
Socialism
Socialization
Social justice
Takis Fotopoulos

35.4 References
[1] International Journal of Inclusive Democracy The Alternative Press Center
[2] Arran Gare, Beyond Social Democracy? Takis Fotopoulos Vision of an Inclusive Democracy as a New Liberatory
Project Democracy & Nature, Vol. 9, No. 3 (November
2003), pp. 345-358(14)
[3] Freeman, David, Inclusive democracy and its prospects
review of book Towards An Inclusive Democracy: The
Crisis of the Growth Economy and the Need For a New Liberatory Project, published in Thesis Eleven no. 69 (Sage
Publications, May 2002), pp. 103-106.
[4] Inclusive Democracy entry in Routledge Encyclopedia of
International Political Economy, ed. by R.J. Barry Jones,
2001, pp. 732-733.
[5] Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, the Political
and Economic Origins of Our Time, (Beacon Press,
1944/1957), pp. 43-44 & 55-56.

[15] Takis Fotopoulos, Towards an Inclusive Democracy: the

crisis of the growth economy and the need for a new liberatory project, (London & NY: Cassell, 1997), p. 255.
[16] Takis Fotopoulos, Beyond the Market Economy and
Statist Planning: Towards Democratic Planning as part
of a Confederal Inclusive Democracy, The International
Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 6, No. 2/3
(Spring/Summer 2010).
[17] Takis Fotopoulos, Towards an Inclusive Democracy: the
crisis of the growth economy and the need for a new liberatory project, (London & NY: Cassell, 1997), p. 256.
[18] Takis Fotopoulos, Outline of an Economic Model for an
Inclusive Democracy, Democracy & Nature, Vol.3, No.3,
(1997), pp.27-38.
[19] Takis Fotopoulos, Towards an Inclusive Democracy: the
crisis of the growth economy and the need for a new liberatory project, (London & NY: Cassell, 1997), p. 261.
[20] Steven Best, Ed.,Recent Theoretical Developments on
the Inclusive Democracy Project in Global Capitalism and the Demise of the Left:Renewing Radicalism
Through Inclusive Democracy, The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 5, No. 1, special issue
(winter 2009), p. 302.
[21] Takis Fotopoulos, The Multidimensional Crisis and Inclusive Democracy, (English translation of a book under the
same title published in Greek, Gordios, 2005), ch. 15.
[22] Steven Best,Rethinking Revolution: Animal Liberation,
Human Liberation, and the Future of the Left, The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 2, No. 3
(June 2006).
[23] David Pepper, Modern Environmentalism, p. 324.

35.5. FURTHER READING

35.5 Further reading

35.5.1

Books

Takis Fotopoulos, Towards An Inclusive Democracy

(London/New York: Cassell/Continuum, 1997),
401 pp. (translated in French, German, Spanish,
Italian, Greek, Chinese).
The Multidimensional Crisis and Inclusive Democracy (English translation of a book under the same
title published in Greek, Athens: Gordios, 2005).
Steve Best (editor), Global Capitalism and the
Demise of the Left: Renewing Radicalism through
Inclusive Democracy (Athens, Greece: Koukkida,
2008) ISBN 978-960-98038-5-4; and as a Special Issue of The International Journal of Inclusive
Democracy (Winter 2009), in English.
Takis Fotopoulos, The pink revolution in Iran and
the Left," (E-Book), The International Journal of
Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 5, No. 3/4 (Summer/Fall
2009); PDF Version. Retrieved 3 January 2014.

35.5.2

Essays

Introductory Essays
Inclusive Democracy entry in Routledge Encyclopedia of International Political Economy, ed. by R.J.
Barry Jones (Routledge, 2001), pp. 732740. Retrieved 4 January 2014.
An Interview with T.Fotopoulos, Indymedia Hungary (29 April 2005). Retrieved 3 January 2014.
Takis Fotopoulos interview, Inclusive Democracy,
Transcription of a video by O. Ressler, recorded
in London, Great Britain, 37 min. (2003), www.
republicart.net. Retrieved 3 January 2014.

299
Debate on the Inclusive Democracy project
The Inclusive Democracy project six years on,
essays on the ID project by Michael Levin, Arran
Gare, David Freeman, Serge Latouche, Jean-Claude
Richard, Takis Nikolopoulos, Rafael Spsito, Guido
Galafassi, Takis Fotopoulos and others (Democracy
& Nature, Vol. 9, No. 3 (November 2003).
Rafael Spsito, Guido Galafassi, Jorge Camil, JeanClaude Richard, Takis Nikolopoulos, Takis Fotopoulos, Michael Levin, Arran Gare, David Freeman, Serge Latouche, Debate on the Inclusive
Democracy project (Parts I & II)", The International
Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 1, No. 2 (January 2005) and Vol. 1, No. 3 (May 2005). Retrieved 3 January 2014.
Inclusive Democracy and Education
Takis Fotopoulos, The State, the market &
(Mis)education in Defending Public Schools, ed. by
D. Gabbard & W. Ross, ISBN 978-0-275-98295-9
(London: Praeger, 2004), ch. 2.
Critical Pedagogy in the new dark ages: challenges and possibilities, ed by Maria Nikolakaki
(Peter Lang Publishing, 2012).
ISBN 9781433114274 (Takis Fotopoulos contribution:
From (mis)education to Paedeia, pp. 81119.)
Academic Repression: Reections from the Academic Industrial Complex ed. by A.J.Nocella, Steven
Best, Peter McLaren (AK Press, Oakland, CA &
Edinburgh, 2010), 590 p, paperback, ISBN 978-1904859-98-7 (Takis Fotopoulos contribution: Systemic Aspects of Academic Repression in the New
World Order. A full version of this essay is
published in The International Journal of Inclusive
Democracy, Vol. 4, No. 4 (October 2008). Retrieved 4 January 2014.

(English) (Polish) Takis Fotopoulos, Inclusive

Democracy in Alternative Economies, Alternative Inclusive Democracy and the New World Order
Societies ed. by Oliver Ressler & Aneta Szylak, 240
Takis Fotopoulos, Globalisation and the multipages (20 pages in color). ISBN 978-83-924665-0dimensional crisis: The Inclusive Democracy ap5 (Gdansk: Wyspa Institute of Art, Poland, 2007).
proach, Theomai journal, No. 4 (2nd semester
Retrieved 4 January 2014.
2001). Retrieved 4 January 2014.
(German) (Hungarian) Takis Fotopoulos, Um Takis Fotopoulos, New World Order and NATOs
fassende Demokratie in: Oliver Ressler (ed.):
war against Yugoslavia, New Political Science, Vol.
Alternative konomien, Alternative Gesellschaften
24, Issue 1 (March 2002), pp. 73104. Retrieved 4
(Promedia Verlag, Vienna, 2008). ISBN 978-3January 2014.
85371-291-7.
Steven Best, Crisis Culture and the Waning of Revolutionary Politics, The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 3, No. 2 (April 2007). Retrieved 3 January 2014.

John Sargis, A Dialogue on globalization between

The Reformist Left and Inclusive Democracy, The
International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol.
1, No. 4 (July 2005).

300

CHAPTER 35. INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY

Takis Fotopoulos, The Global 'War' of the Inclusive Democracy and Feminism
Transnational Elite, in Critical Perspectives on
Omer Caha, The Death of Feminism as an AntiGlobalisation, ed. by Marina Della Giusta et al.
systemic Movement or the Success of Feminism to
(Chelthenham, UK & Norrhampton, MA, USA:
Change the System from Within?"; Takis FotopouEdward Elgar publishing, 2006), ch. 28. ISBN 978los, Takis Fotopoulos reply to Omer Cahas Dia1-84542-176-2.
logue Article, Democracy & Nature, Vol.9, No.2,
Takis Fotopoulos, The myths about the economic
(July 2003).
crisis, the reformist Left and economic democracy,
The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy,
Vol. 4, No. 4 (October 2008). Retrieved 3 January Inclusive Democracy on Marxism and Anarchism
2014.
Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, ed by Fred Sharon Beder, The Corporate Assault on Democeric L. Bender (Second revised edition), (W.W.
racy; Takis Fotopoulos, Values, The Dominant
Norton & Co: New York, 2013). ISBN 978Social Paradigm and Neoliberal Globalisation The
0393935608 (Takis Fotopoulos & A. Gezerlis conInternational Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol.
tribution: Hardt & Negris Empire: A new Com4, No. 1 (January 2008).
munist Manifesto or a reformist Welcome to Neolib Takis Fotopoulos, The Crime of the Zionists and
eral Globalization?, (extract), pp. 23234.)
the Transnational Elite and the Stand of the Left,
Tom Crumpacker, Democracy and the multiparty
The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy,
political system ; Takis Fotopoulos, Liberal and
Vol. 5, No. 2 (Spring 2009). Retrieved 3 January
socialist
Democracies versus Inclusive Democ2014.
racy, The International Journal of Inclusive Democ Takis Fotopoulos, A systemic crisis in Greece,
racy, Vol. 2, No. 2 (January 2006).
The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy,
Lutz Roemheld, Marx-Proudhon: Their Exchange
Vol. 5, No. 2 (Spring 2009). Retrieved 3 January
of Letters in 1846 On an episode of world-historical
2014.
importance; Johannes Hilmer, Two views about
Takis Fotopoulos, Greece: The implosion of the
socialism: why Karl Marx shunned an academic desystemic crisis, The International Journal of Inclubate with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; Takis Fotopousive Democracy, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Winter 2010). Relos, Beyond Marx and Proudhon, Democracy &
trieved 21 April 2014.
Nature, Vol. 6, No. 1 (March 2000).
Takis Fotopoulos, The Latin-Americanization of
Greece and the lessons for the European South, The
International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol. Inclusive Democracy on irrationalism
6, No. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2010). Retrieved 21
Takis Fotopoulos, The Rise of New Irrationalism
April 2014.
and its Incompatibility with Inclusive Democracy,
Takis Fotopoulos, The pseudo-revolution in Libya
Democracy & Nature, Vol. 4, No. 2/3 (1998);
and the Degenerate 'Left', Part 1, The International
Thomas Martin Response to Democracy & NaJournal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 1
ture Editorial on Violent Myths"; Takis Fotopou(Winter/Spring 2011). Retrieved 21 April 2014.
los, The incompatibility of myths and democracy Takis Fotopoulos reply Democracy & Nature, Vol.
Takis Fotopoulos, The Insurrection of the English
8, No. 1 (March 2000).
Underclass, The International Journal of Inclusive
Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn
2011). Retrieved 21 April 2014.
35.5.3 Dialogues on Inclusive Democracy
Takis Fotopoulos, The Muslim Brotherhood and
Islamic democracy in Egypt as part of the New Dialogue with Ecologists
World Order, Part I: The Muslim Brotherhoods
Dialogue on Socialism and Ecology. A debate by
Rise to Power & Part II: Towards a New Form of a
James O' Connor and Takis Fotopoulos, Democracy
Client Regime, The International Journal of Inclu& Nature, Vol. 2, No. 3 (November 1991-January
sive Democracy, Vol. 8, Nos. 1/2 (Winter/Summer
1993)
2012). Retrieved 21 April 2014.
Takis Fotopoulos, Globalization and the End of the
Left-Right Divide (Part I), The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 9 (2013). Retrieved 21 April 2014.

Ted Trainer, On eco-villages and the transition,

The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy,
Vol. 2, No. 3 (June 2006); and reply in: Takis Fotopoulos, Is the eco-village movement a solution or

35.7. EXTERNAL LINKS

part of the problem?", The International Journal of
Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 2, No. 3 (June 2006).
Steve Best, Rethinking Revolution: Animal Liberation, Human Liberation, and the Future of the
Left; Takis Fotopoulos & John Sargis, Human liberation vs. animal liberation, The International
Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 2, No. 3 (June
2006).
Serge Latouche, De-growth: an electoral stake?";
Takis Fotopoulos, Is de-growth compatible with a
market economy?", The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 3, No. 1 (January 2007).
Dialogue with Pareconists
Takis Fotopoulos, Inclusive Democracy and Participatory Economics, Democracy & Nature: The
International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol.
9, No. 3 (November 2003); and also: Michael Albert, Reply to Democracy and Nature Comments,
ZMag (9 April 2004). Retrieved 4 January 2014.
Dialogue with Castoriadians
David Ames Curtis, On the Bookchin/Biehl Resignations and the Creation of a New Liberatory
Project, Cornelius Castoriadis Agora International
Website (AprilAugust 1997); reply by Takis Fotopoulos, On a distorted view of the Inclusive
Democracy project, Democracy & Nature: The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy vol. 5,
no. 1 (March 1999); and The Autonomy and Inclusive Democracy Projects and Agoras Defamatory Delirium - includes a brief history of all the
exchanges with a constantly updated, complete webography. The Autonomy and Inclusive Democracy
Projects and Agoras Defamatory Delirium (October, 2006); Addendum (November, 2006); P.S.
(December, 2006); Appendix: A brief history of the
exchanges with complete webography (July 2007).

35.6 Videos
Takis Fotopoulos Interview to Oliver Ressler about
Inclusive Democracy. This is an interview with
Takis Fotopoulos taken by Oliver Ressler for his
video series Alternative Economics, Alternative
Societies on July 19, 2003, about the Inclusive
Democracy project. English and Greek subtitles are
available. In this video, Fotopoulos discusses the
constituents of Inclusive Democracy: Political, Economic, democracy at the Social level and Ecological democracy. He is also oering an introductory
analysis of the ID' s proposed economic model for

301
a state-less, market-less and money-less economy.
Finally, he refers to the transitional strategy for the
transformation to an autonomous society, for an Inclusive Democracy. Retrieved 4 January 2014.
Takis Fotopoulos talk on the Multidimensional Crisis and Inclusive Democracy, Oxford University,
November 2008. Video in 3 parts. Part 1 (talk), part
2 (talk/discussion), part 3 (discussion). Retrieved 4
January 2014.
A talk by Takis Fotopoulos about the Internationalization of the Capitalist Market Economy and
the project of Inclusive Democracy. A talk given
by Takis Fotopoulos at the University of Vermont
(USA) in 1996, followed by a discussion in which
Murray Bookchin, Dan Chodorko and others take
part. Video in 3 parts. Retrieved 4 January 2014.
Inclusive Democracy as a political project for a new
libertarian synthesis : rationale, proposed social
structure and transition. Talk at the CNT centenary
conference on self-management, Barcelona, (April
10, 2010).
On Neoliberalism: An Interview with Takis Fotopoulos. This 13-parts video deals with the rise
of the neoliberal phase of modernity (mid 70s now) and the consequent emergence of Neoliberal
Globalisation, which was established formally in UK
with the rise of Thatcherism and in US with the rise
of Reaganomics, although the systemic structural
trends for it took o much earlier, with the opening
of markets and the huge expansion of multinational
corporations. (8 May 2009)

35.7 External links

Inclusive Democracy website
The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy
website ISSN: 1753-240X, an electronic journal
freely available and published by the International
Network for Inclusive Democracy.
Democracy & Nature website
(Greek) Greek Inclusive Democracy Journal website
( )
Takis Fotopoulos Archive website
International Journal of Inclusive Democracy @
DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals, ISSN
1753-240X. Search term International Journal of
Inclusive Democracy.

Chapter 36

Insurrectionary anarchism
Insurrectionary anarchism is a revolutionary theory, practice, and tendency within the anarchist movement which emphasizes insurrection within anarchist
practice.[1][2] It is critical of formal organizations such
as labor unions and federations that are based on a political programme and periodic congresses.[1] Instead, insurrectionary anarchists advocate informal organization
and small anity group based organization.[1][2] Insurrectionary anarchists put value in attack, permanent class
conict, and a refusal to negotiate or compromise with
class enemies.[1][2]

is the most ecacious means of propaganda.[9] "

As anarcho-communism emerged in the mid 19th century it had an intense debate with Bakuninist collectivism
and as such within the anarchist movement over participation in syndicalism and the workers movement as well
as on other issues.[3] So In the theory of the revolution
of anarcho-communism as elaborated by Peter Kropotkin
and others it is the risen people who are the real agent
and not the working class organised in the enterprise (the
cells of the capitalist mode of production) and seeking to
assert itself as labour power, as a more 'rational' industrial
Contemporary insurrectionary anarchism inherits body or social brain (manager) than the employers..[3]
the views and tactics of anti-organizational anarcho- So between 1880 and 1890[3] with the perspective of
communism[3][4] and illegalism.[2][5]
an immanent revolution,[3] who was opposed to the of-

36.1 Origins and evolution

36.1.1

19th century

Platformist anarchist Joe Black says that There is a long

tradition within anarchism of constructing ideologies out
of a tactic. The long and deep involvement of anarchists
in insurrections has, not surprisingly, given rise to an anarchist ideology of insurrectionalism.[2] An inuential individualist concept of insurrection[6] appears in the book
of Max Stirner The Ego and Its Own from 1845. There
he manifests:
Mikhail Bakunin was historically important to the development of an anarchism that focused its force in insurrection. Unlike Marx, who built his support in the First International, mostly within the central executive structure,
Bakunin worked to build support for co-ordinated action
though autonomous insurrections at the base, especially
in Southern Europe. And since Bakunins time insurrectionary anarchists have been concentrated in Southern
Europe.[8] Later in 1876, at the Berne conference of the
First International, the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta
argued that the revolution consists more of deeds than
words, and that action was the most eective form of
propaganda. In the bulletin of the Jura Federation he declared the Italian federation believes that the insurrectional fact, destined to arm socialist principles by deed,

cial workers movement, which was then in the process of formation (general Social Democratisation). They
were opposed not only to political (statist) struggles but
also to strikes which put forward wage or other claims,
or which were organised by trade unions.[3] But While
they were not opposed to strikes as such, they were opposed to trade unions and the struggle for the eighthour day. This anti-reformist tendency was accompanied
by an anti-organisational tendency, and its partisans declared themselves in favour of agitation amongst the unemployed for the expropriation of foodstus and other
articles, for the expropriatory strike and, in some cases,
for 'individual recuperation' or acts of terrorism..[3]

36.1.2 Illegalism and propaganda by the

deed
But after Peter Kropotkin along with others decided to
enter labor unions after their initial reservations,[3] there
remained the anti-syndicalist anarchist-communists,
who in France were grouped around Sebastien Faure's
Le Libertaire. From 1905 onwards, the Russian counterparts of these anti-syndicalist anarchist-communists
become partisans of economic terrorism and illegal
'expropriations'.[3] Illegalism as a practice emerged and
within it The acts of the anarchist bombers and assassins ("propaganda by the deed") and the anarchist burglars ("individual reappropriation") expressed their desperation and their personal, violent rejection of an intol-

302

36.1. ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION

303
ers movement this was a desperate, though heroic, of a
decadent movement.[11]

The Italian Giuseppe Ciancabilla (18721904) wrote in

Against organization that we don't want tactical programs, and consequently we don't want organization.
Having established the aim, the goal to which we hold,
we leave every anarchist free to choose from the means
that his sense, his education, his temperament, his ghting spirit suggest to him as best. We don't form xed
programs and we don't form small or great parties. But
we come together spontaneously, and not with permanent
criteria, according to momentary anities for a specic
purpose, and we constantly change these groups as soon
as the purpose for which we had associated ceases to be,
and other aims and needs arise and develop in us and push
us to seek new collaborators, people who think as we do in
the specic circumstance.[12] Nevertheless he also says
We do not oppose the organizers. They will continue, if
Caricature of the Bonnot gang. The most famous of the French
they like, in their tactic. If, as I think, it will not do any
illegalist groups
great good, it will not do any great harm either. But it
seems to me that they have writhed throwing their cry of
erable society. Moreover, they were clearly meant to be alarm and blacklisting us either as savages or as theoretical dreamers.[12]
exemplary , invitations to revolt.[10]
An article by eco-anarchist magazine Do or Die manifests
that This is a debate that has gone on and still goes on
within the insurrectionary anarchist circles; Renzo Novatore stood for individual revolt, Errico Malatesta for social struggle, whilst Luigi Galleani believed there was no
contradiction between the two.[8]

36.1.3 Contemporary approaches

A resurgence of such ideas for Joe Black happened in
the peculiar conditions of post war Italy and Greece.[2]
Towards the end of World War II there was a real possibility of revolution in both countries.[2] Greece was
to suer decades of military dictatorship while in Italy
the Communist Party continued to hold back struggles.
Insurrectionalism was one of a number of new socialist ideologies which arose to address these particular
circumstances.[2] In Italy a tendency which didn't identify either with the more classical Italian Anarchist Federation or with the platformist inclined (GAAP - Anarchist
Groups of Proletarian Action) started to emerge as local
groups. These groups emphasized direct action, informal
anity groups and expropriation for nancing anarchist
activity.[13] From within these groups the inuential ItalLuigi Galleani
ian insurrectionary anarchist Alfredo Maria Bonanno will
of the Spanish exiled
[10]
Such acts of rebellion which could be individual were emerge inuenced by the practice
[13]
Josep
Llus
i
Facerias.
anarchist
in the long run seen as act of rebellion which could ignite en masse insurrection leading to revolution. Propo- One insurrectionalist has described how the ideas spread
nents and activists of these tactics among others included from Italy: Insurrectionary anarchism has been developJohann Most, Luigi Galleani, Victor Serge, and Severino ing in the English language anarchist movement since the
Di Giovanni. In Argentina, these tendencies ourished 1980s, thanks to translations and writings by Jean Weir in
at the end of the 20s and during the 30s, years of acute her Elephant Editions and her magazine Insurrection.
repression and of inching of the once powerful work- .. In Vancouver, Canada, local comrades involved in the

304

Protester facing riot police in the "Battle of Seattle"

Anarchist Black Cross, the local anarchist social center,

and the magazines No Picnic and Endless Struggle
were inuenced by Jeans projects, and this carried over
into the always developing practice of insurrectionary anarchists in this region today ... The anarchist magazine
Demolition Derby in Montreal also covered some insurrectionary anarchist news back in the day"".[2]

CHAPTER 36. INSURRECTIONARY ANARCHISM

Also Wol Lanstreicher has translated works by Alfredo
Maria Bonnanno and other similar writers such as the
early 20th century Italian illegalist anarchists Renzo Novatore[16] and Bruno Filippi[17] as well as other insurrectionist texts.[18] This shows how more recent theories have
taken relevance within insurrectionary anarchist theory
along the egoist anarchism of Max Stirner. This contemporary approach has relevance in other place such
as Chile where in 2008 after a few incidents of bombs
claimed by anarchist groups a group called Frente Anarquista Revolucionario (Anarchist Revolutionary Front)
after correcting what they see as misunderstandings of
their position they wrote in the same pamphlet how they
have been inuenced by the "postmodernists texts of Alfredo Bonnano, Wol Landstreicher, etc, as well as other
insurrectionary anonymous texts.[19]
The contemporary imprisoned Italian insurrectionary anarchist philosopher Michele Fabiani writes from an explicit individualist anarchist perspective in such essays as
Critica individualista anarchica alla modernit" (Individualist anarchist critique of modernity)[20]

Magazine Do or Die reports that Much of the Italian insurrectionary anarchist critique of the movements of the
'70s focused on the forms of organisation that shaped the
forces of struggle and out of this a more developed idea
of informal organisation grew. A critique of the authoritarian organisations of the '70s, whose members often
believed they were in a privileged position to struggle as
compared to the proletariat as a whole, was further rened in the struggles of the '80s, such as the early 1980s
struggle against a military base that was to house nuclear
weapons in Comiso, Sicily. Anarchists were very active
in that struggle, which was organised into self-managed
leagues.[8] Later in 1993 the Italian insurrectionary anarchist Alfredo Bonanno writes For An Anti-authoritarian
Insurrectionalist International in which he proposes coor- Anarchist grati during the 2008 Greek riots
dination between mediterranean insurrectionists after the
period of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and civil war As was mentioned before, insurrectionary anarchist disin the ex-Yugoslavia.[14]
course also had relevance in Greece. In the 2008 Greek
For Joe Black That insurrectionalism should emerge as a riots the old disputes between organizationalist and insurmore distinct trend in English language anarchism at this rectionary anarchists reappeared when there was a conpoint in time should be no surprise. The massive boost ict between insurrectionary anarchists associated with
anarchism received from the summit protest movement the Black Bloc, and the heavily organized Antiauthoriwas in part due to the high visibility of black bloc style tarian Movement (AK, in Greek)...the schism between
tactics.[2] In the USA Feral Faun (later writing as Wol insurrectionists and the Antiauthoritarian Movement has
Landstreicher) gained notoriety as he wrote articles that even led to physical ghting...People with AK bullied and
appeared in the post-left anarchy magazine Anarchy: A beat up anarchists whom they suspected of stealing some
Journal of Desire Armed. Feral Faun wrote in 1995 that computers from the university during an event AK orIn the game of insurgencea lived guerilla war game ganized, getting them in trouble. In response, some inAntiauthoritarian Moveit is strategically necessary to use identities and roles. Un- surrectionists burned down the[21]
Thessaloniki.
ments
oces
in
fortunately, the context of social relationships gives these
roles and identities the power to dene the individual who
attempts to use them. So I, Feral Faun, became...an anarchist...a writer...a Stirner-inuenced, post-situationist,
anti-civilization theorist...if not in my own eyes, at least
in the eyes of most people who've read my writings.[15]

The Informal Anarchist Federation (not to be confused

with the synthesist Italian Anarchist Federation also FAI
) is an Italian insurrectionary anarchist organization.[22]
It has been described by Italian intelligence sources as
a horizontal structure of various anarchist terrorist

36.2. THEORY
groups, united in their beliefs in revolutionary armed
action. In 2003, the group claimed responsibility for
a bomb campaign targeting several European Union
institutions.[23][24] In 2010, Italys postal service intercepted a threatening letter containing a bullet addressed
to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.[25] A large envelope
containing a letter addressed to Berlusconi with the threat
you will end up like a rat was discovered on Friday in a
post oce in the Libate suburb of the northern city of Milan. On 23 December 2010, credit for exploding parcels
delivered to the Swiss and Chilean embassies in Rome
was claimed by the Informal Anarchist Federation,.[26]
During the rst years of the 2000s, the Iberian Federation
of Libertarian Youth in Spain started to evolve towards
insurrectionary anarchist positions and its dierences
with anarcho-syndicalism became more evident due to
the inuence of the Black block in alterglobalization
protests and the examples of developments from Italy
and Greece. Afterwards it will receive some important repression from the state which leads it towards
inactivity[27] A new generation of anarchist youth decides
to establish a new FIJL since 2006. It starts trying to establish a clear dierence with the other insurrectionist
FIJL while defending anarcho-syndicalism critically.[28]
In the year 2007 it re-establishes itself as the FIJL since
it did not have news from the other insurrectionist organization, but after nding out of a communique by
the insurrectionist organization[27] it decides to name itself Iberian Youth of Anarchist Youth (spa: Federacin
Ibrica de Juventudes Anarquistas or FIJA) but knwing
that they are the continuing organization to the previous
FIJL from the 1990s to the past.[29] They publish a newspaper called El Fuelle. In march of 2012 the FIJL of insurrectionist tendencies decides to not continue[30] and so
the FIJA goes to call itself again FIJL.[31]

36.2 Theory
A few main points can be identied within contemporary insurrectionary anarchism that go back to tactics employed by illegalism and propaganda by the deed anarchists:
1. "The concept of 'attack' is at the heart of the insurrectionist ideology.[2] As such it is viewed that It is
through acting and learning to act, not propaganda, that
we will open the path to insurrection.[1] although propaganda has a role in clarifying how to act.[1] In the state
of action is in the state that one learns.[1] The Italian text
Ai ferri corti says: An individual with a passion for social
upheaval and a 'personal' vision of the class clash wants
to do something immediately. If he or she analyses the
transformation of capital and the State it is in order to
attack them, certainly not so as to be able to go to sleep
with clearer ideas.[32] Attack is the refusal of mediation,
pacication, sacrice, accommodation, and compromise
in struggle.[2]

305
2. Insurrection(s) and Revolution: Revolution is seen
as a concrete event, it must be built daily through more
modest attempts which do not have all the liberating characteristics of the social revolution in the true sense. These
more modest attempts are insurrections. In them the uprising of the most exploited and excluded of society and
the most politically sensitized minority opens the way
to the possible involvement of increasingly wider strata
of exploited on a ux of rebellion which could lead to
revolution.[1]
3. "The self-management of struggle"[1] as those that
struggle are autonomous in their decisions and actions;
this is the opposite of an organization of synthesis which
always attempts to take control of struggle. Struggles that
are synthesized within a single controlling organization
are easily integrated into the power structure of present
society. Self-organized struggles are by nature uncontrollable when they are spread across the social terrain.[1]
It is seen that the system and its institutions are afraid
of rebellious acts becoming propaganda by the deed and
thus making rebellion extend itself.[1] Small actions,
therefore, easily reproducible, requiring unsophisticated
means that are available to all, are by their very simplicity
and spontaneity uncontrollable.[1] This also means that
insurrectionary anarchists should not see themselves as a
vanguard or as the conscious ones but just as part of the
exploited and excluded.[1]
4. Temporary anity groups instead of permanent
organizations: This means rejection of ": thus we are
against the party, syndicate and permanent organization,
all of which act to synthesize struggle and become elements of integration for capital and the state.[1] Instead
the view that organization is for concrete tasks.[1] The
informal anarchist organization is therefore a specic organization which gathers around a common anity.[1]
5. The transcendence of the dichotomy between the
individual and the rest of society and of individualism
and communism: Insurrection begins with the desire of
individuals to break out of constrained and controlled circumstances, the desire to reappropriate the capacity to
create ones own life as one sees t.[1] But the view that
Individuality can only ourish where equality of access
to the conditions of existence is the social reality. This
equality of access is communism; what individuals do
with that access is up to them and those around them.
Thus there is no equality or identity of individuals implied in true communism.[1]
Insurrectionary anarchists are generally interested in class
struggle. Many also identify with related theoretical positions such as anarchist communism, Situationist theory,
autonomism, post-left anarchy, anarcho-primitivism, and
green anarchism.

306

36.3 See also

Illegalism the main precedent of this form of anarchism
Direct action
Propaganda of the deed
Expropriative anarchism

CHAPTER 36. INSURRECTIONARY ANARCHISM

[11] http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=
20061228140637965 Notes on the article Anarchism, Insurrections and Insurrectionalism"" by: Collin
Sick
[12] Against organization by Giuseppe Ciancabilla.
trieved 2010-06-10.

Re-

[13] Vivir la Anarqua .Artculo en solidaridad con Alfredo

Bonanno y Christos Stratigopoulos

Black Bloc

[14] For An Anti-authoritarian Insurrectionalist International

by Alfredo Bonanno

Anarchism in Greece

[15] The Last Word by Feral Faun

Errico Malatesta's speech during the International

Anarchist Congress of Amsterdam (1907)

[16] Towards the creative nothing and other writings by Renzo

Novatore

The Coming Insurrection

[17] The rebels dark laughter: the writings of Bruno Filippi

Tiqqun

36.4 References
[1] Some Notes on Insurrectionary Anarchism from Venomous Buttery and Willful Disobedience
[2] Anarchism, insurrections and insurrectionalism by Joe
Black
[3] This inability to break denitively with collectivism in
all its forms also exhibited itself over the question of the
workers movement, which divided anarchist-communism
into a number of tendencies.Anarchist-Communism by
Alain Pengam
[4] Say you want an insurrection by Crimethinc
[5] Some insurrectionists see precedents in the propaganda
of the deed carried out by Nineteenth-century assassins
and the illegalism associated with Jules Bonnot and his
fellow bank robbers. We can trace the lineage of current
insurrectionist theory from Errico Malatesta and Luigi
GalleaniSay you want an insurrection by Crimethinc
[6] The insurgent, wrote Stirner, strives to be constitutionless, a formulation that the program of the
Moscow Federation put into practice (ibid.) Autonomous
self-governance, voluntary federation, the spread of
power horizontally these were the features of its
insurgency.Allan Antli. Anarchy, Power, and Poststructuralism
[7] Max Stirner. The Ego and its Own. pg. 420-421
[8] Insurrectionary Anarchy: Organising for Attack! " by Do
or Die Issue 10. page(s) 258-266.

[18] Venomous Buttery Publications

[19] nuestra teora no la basamos de manera alguna en
lo odo o ledo por ah", ya que hemos pasado gran
parte de nuestro tiempo leyendo y discutiendo los textos postmodernistas de Alfredo Bonnano, Wol Landstreicher, etctera, como tambin adems una caterva de textos insurreccionalistas annimos.Aclaracin del Frente
Anarquista Revolucionario by Frente Anarquista Revolucionario
[20] Critica individualista anarchica alla modernit" by
Michele Fabiani
[21] Insurrection vs. Organization. Reections from Greece
on a Pointless Schism by Peter Gelderloos
[22] MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base
[23] Bologna mail blocked after bombs. BBC News. 31 December 2003.
[24] Italy acts over EU letter bombs. CNN. 31 December
2003.
[25] http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010%
5C03%5C28%5Cstory_28-3-2010_pg4_6
[26] Associated Press. Rome Embassy Blasts Wound 2; Anarchists Suspected. National Public Radio. Retrieved 23
December 2010.
[27] Comunicado de la FIJL
[28] Juventudes Anarquistas de Len, La Teora de
Cuerdas
del
Sindicalismo
http://www.nodo50.
org/juventudeslibertarias/?e=5
o
Grupo
Bandera Negra Lo que es y no es el 19 de julio
http://grupobanderanegra.blogspot.com.es/2011/07/
lo-que-es-y-no-es-el-19-de-julio_19.html

[9] Propaganda by the deed by Workers Solidarity No 55

published in October 1998

[29] Nace la Federacin Ibrica de Juventudes Anarquistas.

alasbarricadas.org. 11 August 2007. Retrieved 3 February 2014.

[10] The illegalists by Doug Imrie. From Anarchy: a Journal Of Desire Armed , Fall-Winter, 1994-95

[30] Comunicado de disolucin de la Federacin Ibrica de Juventudes Libertarias (FIJL)

36.5. EXTERNAL LINKS

307

[31] Federacin Ibrica de Juventudes Libertarias F.I.J.L.

nodo50.org. 5 April 2012. Retrieved 3 February 2014.

Killing King Abacus An insurrectionary anarchist

publication from the USA

[32] At Daggers Drawn with the Existent, its Defenders and its
False Critics by anonymous

At Daggers Drawn Insurrectionary anarchist publication translated from Italian by Jean Weir. A poetic
overview of the insurrectionary perspective.

36.5 External links

A Murder of Crows an insurrectionary anarchist

magazine out of Seattle.

A collection of several insurrectionary anarchist

texts at the anarchist library
Attack Is The Best Form Of Defense by Johann
Most an old school insurrectionary anarchist text
Insurrection v.s. Organization: Reections from
Greece on a Pointless Schism, essay from Peter
Gelderloos, author of How Non-violence Protects the
State
Anarchism, insurrections and insurrectionalism, article from Anarkismo.net critical of insurrectionary
anarchism
Notes on the article Anarchism, Insurrections and
Insurrectionalism"" by Collin Sick a response to the
previous article
Some Notes on Insurrectionary Anarchism by Sasha
K, originally published in Killing King Abacus in
Santa Cruz, California.
Talk and Tactics and Bloody Revolution: Insurrectionary Anarchism in Seattle, audio stream interview from A-Infos Radio Project

36.5.1

Insurrectionary groups and publications

Act for freedom now!

325 Magazine
War on Society
Inter Arma Greek insurrectionary portal
Edizioni Anarchismo, Italian insurrectionary publisher
Non Fides, French insurrectionary publication (in
multiple languages)
Material Anarquista
Viva la Anarquia!
Hommodolars, insurrectionary website
Insurrectionary Anarchists of the Coast Salish Territories, Canadian insurrectionary anarchists
Fire to the Prisons Magazine Consistent insurrectionary periodical out of the United States

Chapter 37

Zapatista Army of National Liberation

See also: Chiapas conict

the areas of gender equality and public health, although

they remain unable to establish political autonomy for the
[5]
The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejrcito province.
Zapatista de Liberacin Nacional, EZLN), often referred
to as the Zapatistas, is a revolutionary leftist political and
militant group based in Chiapas, the southernmost state 37.1 History
of Mexico.
Since 1994, the group has been in a declared war against See also: Chiapas conict and History of the Zapatista
the Mexican state, although this war has been primar- Army of National Liberation
ily defensive, against military, paramilitary and corporate
incursions into Chiapas. In recent years, it has focused
on a strategy of civil resistance. The Zapatistas physiWe dont want to impose our solutions by
cal base is made up of mostly rural indigenous people but
force, we want to create a democratic space.
includes some supporters in urban areas and internationWe dont see armed struggle in the classic
ally. Their main spokesperson is Subcomandante Marcos
sense of previous guerrilla wars, that is as
(currently a.k.a. Delegate Zero in relation to "the Other
the only way and the only all-powerful truth
Campaign"). Unlike other Zapatista spokespeople, Mararound which everything is organized. In
cos is not an indigenous Maya.
a war, the decisive thing is not the military
confrontation but the politics at stake in the
The group takes its name from Emiliano Zapata, the
confrontation. We didn't go to war to kill or be
[1]
agrarian reformer and commander of the Liberation
killed. We went to war in order to be heard.
Army of the South during the Mexican Revolution, and
Subcomandante Marcos[6]
sees itself as his ideological heir. In reference to inspirational gures, nearly all EZLN villages contain murals
with images of Zapata, Ernesto Che Guevara, and Subcomandante Marcos.[2]
Although the ideology of the EZLN reects libertarian
socialism, paralleling both anarchist and libertarian
Marxist thought in many respects, the EZLN has
rejected[3] and deed[4] political classication, retaining its distinctiveness due in part to the importance of
indigenous Mayan beliefs in Zapatismo thought. The
EZLN aligns itself with the wider alter-globalization,
anti-neoliberal social movement, seeking indigenous control over their local resources, especially land.

37.1.1 1990s

The Zapatista went public on January 1, 1994, the

day when the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) came into eect. On that day, they issued their
First Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle and their
Revolutionary Laws. The declaration amounted to a declaration of war on the Mexican government, which they
considered so out of touch with the will of the people as to
make it illegitimate. The EZLN stressed that it opted for
Since their 1994 uprising was countered by the Mexi- armed struggle due to the lack of results achieved through
[7]
can army, the EZLN has abstained from military oen- peaceful means of protest (such as sit-ins and marches).
sives and adopted a new strategy that attempts to garner Their initial goal was to instigate a revolution throughout
Mexican and international support. Through an Internet Mexico, but as this did not happen, they used their upcampaign, the EZLN was successful in disseminating an rising as a platform to call the worlds attention to their
understanding of their plight and intentions to the pub- movement to protest the signing of NAFTA, which the
lic. With this change in tactics, the EZLN has received EZLN believed would increase the gap between rich and
greater support from a variety of NGOs. The Zapatistas poor people in Chiapasa prediction that has been vinhave achieved documented improvements in Chiapas in dicated by subsequent developments.[8] The EZLN also
308

37.1. HISTORY

309
exemplied by the convention in the jungle; by
the Zapatistas national consulta, in which they
asked people around the nation to comment
and vote; by Marcoss communiqus; and by
the accords on Indian autonomy hammered out
with government negotiators in 1996. The new
leftist vision also includes a communication
and public debate deeply rooted in popular
cultural idiomsindeed, in the language of
rock and roll and its progeny.
Dissent magazine[10]

A black-masked Zapatista playing a three string Mexican bass

guitar.

called for greater democratization of the Mexican government, which had been controlled by the Institutional
Revolutionary Party (PRI) for 65 years, and for land reform mandated by the 1917 Constitution of Mexico but
largely ignored by the PRI.[9] The EZLN did not demand
independence from Mexico, but rather autonomy, and
(among other things) that the natural resources extracted
from Chiapas benet more directly the people of Chiapas.
On the morning of January 1, 1994, an estimated 3,000
armed Zapatista insurgents seized towns and cities in
Chiapas, including Ocosingo, Las Margaritas, Huixtn,
Oxchuc, Rancho Nuevo, Altamirano, and Chanal. They
freed the prisoners in the jail of San Cristbal de las Casas
and set re to several police buildings and military barracks in the area. The guerrillas enjoyed brief success,
but the next day Mexican army forces counterattacked,
and erce ghting broke out in and around the market of
Ocosingo. The Zapatista forces took heavy casualties and
retreated from the city into the surrounding jungle.
Armed clashes in Chiapas ended on January 12, with
a ceasere brokered by the Catholic diocese in San
Cristbal de las Casas under Bishop Samuel Ruiz, a well
known liberation theologian who took up the cause of the
indigenous of Chiapas. The Zapatistas retained some of
the land for a little over a year. But in February 1995
the Mexican army overran that territory in a surprise
breach of ceasere. Following this oensive, the Zapatista villages were mostly abandoned and the rebels ed
to the mountains after breaking out of the Mexican army
perimeter.
The extraordinarily complex and rich
history of political discussion and organizing
in Chiapas from the 1970s to the 1990s
produced something genuinely original, a
new leftist language and vision. This includes
negotiation about what it means to be Indian
within a larger Mexican nation. It includes
discussion about new forms of democracy
and an inventiveness regarding civil society

Army camps set up along all major thoroughfares failed to

capture the guerrilla movements commanders. Instead,
the Mexican government pursued a policy of negotiation,
while the Zapatistas developed a mobilization and media
campaign through numerous newspaper communiqus.
After the First Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle,
subsequent declarations have focused on non-violent solutions, both through political channels and through the
assumption of many of the functions of government in
the state of Chiapas. After the Sixth Declaration of the
Lacandon Jungle, the Zapatistas have not engaged in further military actions. Other groups in Chiapas, such as
the pacist Las Abejas, support many of the goals of the
Zapatista Revolution without condoning the use of violence to achieve those goals. A strong international Internet presence prompted numerous international left-wing
groups to support the Zapatista movement.

37.1.2 2000s
With the coming to power of the new government of President Vicente Fox (the rst non-PRI president of Mexico in over 70 years) in 2001, the Zapatistas marched
on Mexico City to present their case to the Mexican
Congress. Although Fox had stated earlier that he could
end the conict in fteen minutes,[11] the EZLN rejected watered-down agreements and created 32 autonomous municipalities" in Chiapas, thus partially implementing their demands without government support
but with some funding from international organizations.
On June 28, 2005, the Zapatistas presented the Sixth
Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle[12] declaring their
principles and vision for Mexico and the world. This declaration reiterates the support for the indigenous peoples,
who make up roughly one-third of the population of Chiapas, and extends the cause to include all the exploited
and dispossessed of Mexico. It also expresses the movements sympathy to the international alter-globalization
movement and oers to provide material aid to those
in Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, and elsewhere, with whom
they make common cause. The declaration ends with an
exhortation for all who have more respect for humanity
than for money to join with the Zapatistas in the struggle for social justice both in Mexico and abroad. The

310

CHAPTER 37. ZAPATISTA ARMY OF NATIONAL LIBERATION

Subcomandante Marcos in 1996

declaration calls for an alternative national campaign (the

"Other Campaign") as an alternative to the presidential
campaign. In preparation for this campaign, the Zapatistas invited to their territory over 600 national leftist
organizations, indigenous groups, and non-governmental
organizations in order to listen to their claims for human
rights in a series of biweekly meetings that culminated
in a plenary meeting on September 16, the day Mexico
celebrates its independence from Spain. In this meeting,
Subcomandante Marcos requested ocial adherence of
the organizations to the Sixth Declaration, and detailed a
six-month tour of the Zapatistas through all 31 Mexican
states to occur concurrently with the electoral campaign
starting January 2006.

Federal Highway 307, Chiapas. The top sign reads, in Spanish,

You are in Zapatista rebel territory. Here the people command
and the government obeys. Bottom sign: North Zone. Council
of Good Government. Tracking in weapons, planting of drugs,
drug use, alcoholic beverages, and illegal selling of wood are
strictly prohibited. No to the destruction of nature.

opposes is the North American Free Trade Agreement

(NAFTA). Apart from opening the Mexican market to
cheap, mass-produced US agricultural products, NAFTA
spells an end to Mexican crop subsidies without a corresponding end to US subsidies and drastically reduces the
income and living standards of many southern Mexican
farmers who cannot compete with the subsidized, articially fertilized, mechanically harvested and genetically
modied imports from the United States. The signing of
NAFTA also resulted in the removal of Article 27, Sec37.2 Ideology
tion VII, from the Mexican Constitution, which had guaranteed land reparations to indigenous groups throughout
The ideology of the Zapatista movement, Zapatismo, Mexico.
synthesizes traditional Mayan practices with elements of Another key element of the Zapatistas ideology is their
libertarian socialism, anarchism,[13][14] and Marxism.[15] aspiration to do politics in a new, participatory way, from
The historical inuence of Mexican Anarchists and the bottom up instead of top down. The Zapatistas
various Latin American socialists is apparent in Zap- consider the contemporary political system of Mexico inatismo. The positions of Subcomandante Marcos add a herently awed due to what they consider its purely repMarxist[16] element to the movement. A Zapatista slogan resentative nature and its disconnection from the people
is in harmony with the concept of mutual aid: For every- and their needs. In contrast, the EZLN claims to reinforce
one, everything. For us, nothing (Para todos todo, para the idea of participatory democracy or radical democnosotros nada).
racy by limiting public servants terms to only two weeks,
The EZLN opposes economic globalization, arguing that
it severely and negatively aects the peasant life of its
indigenous support base and oppressed people worldwide. An example of the neoliberal policy that the EZLN

not using visible organization leaders, and constantly referring to the people they are governing for major decisions, strategies, and conceptual visions. Marcos has
reiterated, my real commander is the people. In accor-

37.3. POLITICAL EXPRESSIONS

dance with this principle, the Zapatistas are not a political
party: they do not seek oce throughout the state, because that would perpetuate the political system by attempting to gain power within its ranks. Instead, they
wish to reconceptualize the entire system.
In an unusual move for any revolutionary organization,
documents released by the EZLN[17] (in Spanish) before
the initial uprising in 1994 explicitly dened a right of the
people to resist any unjust actions of the EZLN. They also
dened a right of the people to:
demand that the revolutionary armed
forces not intervene in matters of civil order
or the disposition of capital relating to agriculture, commerce, nances, and industry, as
these are the exclusive domain of the civil authorities, elected freely and democratically.
It added that the people should acquire and possess arms
to defend their persons, families and property, according
to the laws of disposition of capital of farms, commerce,
nance and industry, against the armed attacks committed by the revolutionary forces or those of the government.

37.2.1

Womens Revolutionary Law

From the First Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle, the

Zapatistas presented to the people of Mexico, the government, and the world their Revolutionary Laws on January
1, 1994. One of the laws was the Womens Revolutionary
Law,[18] which states:
1. Women, regardless of their race, creed, color or political aliation, have the right to participate in the
revolutionary struggle in any way that their desire
and capacity determine.
2. Women have the right to work and receive a fair
salary.

311

37.2.2 Postcolonial gaze

The Zapatistas response to the introduction of NAFTA
in 1994 reects the shift in perception taking place in
societies that have experienced colonialism.[19] The theory of postcolonial gaze studies the cultural and political impacts of colonization on formerly colonized societies and how these societies overcome centuries of discrimination and marginalization by colonialists and their
descendents.[20] In Mexico, the theory of the postcolonial gaze is being fostered predominantly in areas of large
indigenous populations and marginalization, like Chiapas. Over the last 20 years, Chiapas has emerged as a
formidable force against the Mexican government, ghting against structural violence and social and economic
marginalization brought on by globalization.[21] The Zapatista rebellion not only raised many questions about
the consequences of globalization and free trade; it also
questioned the long-standing ideas created by the Spanish colonial system. Postcolonialism is the antithesis of
imperialism because it attempts to explain how the prejudices and restrictions created by colonialism are being
overcome.[20] This is especially obvious in countries that
have large social and economic inequalities, where colonial ideas are deeply entrenched in the minds of the colonials descendents.
An early example of the Zapatistas eective use of
the postcolonial gaze was their use of organizations
like the United Nations Economic and Social Council
(ECOSOC) to raise of awareness for their rebellion and
indigenous rights, the Mexican governments lack of respect for the countrys impoverished and marginalized
populations.[22] Appealing to the ECOSOC and other traditionally Western-inuenced non-governmental bodies
allowed the Zapatistas to establish a sense of autonomy
by using the postcolonial gaze to redene their identities
both as indigenous people and as citizens of Mexico.[23]

37.3 Political expressions

3. Women have the right to decide the number of chil- Since December 1994, the Zapatistas had been gradually forming several autonomous municipalities, called
dren they have and care for.
Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (MAREZ).
4. Women have the right to participate in the matters In these municipalities, an assembly of local representaof the community and hold oce if they are free and tives forms the Juntas de Buen Gobierno or Councils of
Good Government (JBGs). These are not recognized by
democratically elected.
the federal or state governments; they oversee local com5. Women and their children have the right to Primary munity programs on food, health, education, and taxaAttention in their health and nutrition.
tion. The EZLN political formations have occurred in
two phases generally called Aguascalientes and Caracoles.
6. Women have the right to an education.
7. Women have the right to choose their partner and
37.3.1
are not obliged to enter into marriage.

Aguascalientes

8. Women have the right to be free of violence from After the cessation of ghting in mid-1994, the EZLN
both relatives and strangers.
called for a Democratic National Convention. As part

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CHAPTER 37. ZAPATISTA ARMY OF NATIONAL LIBERATION

of the call, they began the practice of setting up cultural

spaces for exchanges and meetings between the EZLN
and Zapatistas, on the one hand, and political and cultural sectors of civil society in the Mexico and the international community, on the other. These spaces were called
Aguascalientes, in memory of the city of Aguascalientes
that had harbored the Supreme Revolutionary Convention of Aguascalientes which brought together, among
others, the most progressive forces of the Mexican revolution (such as the Magonistas, the Villa, and the Zapatistas). This Aguascalientes was created in the Lacandon
Jungle, near the community of Guadalupe Tepeyac Tojolabal, in the municipality of Las Margaritas, from August
6 to August 9, 1994.
At the end of 1995, the EZLN again proposed to
build new Aguascalientes, as a symbol of resistance
and rebellion. In 1996, the Aguascalientes I (Reality),
Aguascalientes II (Oventic), Aguascalientes III (La Garrucha), Aguascalientes IV (Morelia), and Aguascalientes
V (Roberto Barrios) became headquarters of the political and cultural initiatives of the Zapatistas in the form of
the National Indigenous Forum, National Civil Committees Meeting for National Dialogue, Special Forum for
State Reform, First American against Neoliberalism and
for Humanity, and First Intergalactic. These cultural centers, which had auditoriums, health clinics, toilets, baths,
libraries, stairs, and bedrooms were always surrounded by
army camps and federal databases.
Outside Chiapas, other Aguascalientes were opened as
expressions of Zapatista civil society. The rst one was
in the UNAM in the House of Lake, formed by CLETA, a
cultural organization that understands the work in the performing arts as a necessarily left political space. Later the
Francisco Villa Independent Popular Front, in a dwelling
unit also built on appropriated land, opened the Aguascalientes El Molino, where in September 1997 it hosted
the 1,111 Zapatistas who attended the foundation of
FZLN in Mexico City.

37.3.2 Caracoles
Caracoles and the Councils of Good Government (JBG)
of the Zapatistas were formed in summer 2003. A feast
was held to mark the founding from 8 to 10 August
2003, in Aguascalientes Oventic. This was a the culmination of a series of changes in the EZLN and the 27
Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (MAREZ).
The changes came after a long analysis of MAREZ and
Aguascalientes, the problems they had faced, and their
relationship to Mexican and international civil society.
The new organizations were meant to represent a major advance in the autonomy of communities and indigenous peoples of Mexico.[12] The EZLN declared that the
Councils of Good Government also marked a transition
where the EZLN military would no longer give orders in
civil matters in the autonomous communities. The Caracoles is an attempt to unilaterally implement San Andres
expression and culture and rights of Indigenous people in
Mexico.
Carcoles replaced the old Aguascalientes, respecting to a
greater or lesser extent areas comprising (about four, and
up to eight, municipalities each). The Good Government
Councils were arranged and persist in what is called the
center of Caracol, where there are also oces of governance monitoring, reporting, in some clinical cases, in
cases secondary regions, etc.

37.4 Communications
From the beginning, the EZLN has made communication
with the rest of Mexico and the world a high priority. The
EZLN has used technology, including cellular phones and
the Internet, to generate international solidarity with sympathetic people and organizations. Rap-rock band Rage
Against the Machine is well known for its support of the
EZLN, using the red star symbol as a backdrop to their
live shows and often informing concert crowds of the ongoing situation. As a result, on trips abroad, the president
of Mexico is routinely confronted by small activist groups
about the Chiapas situation. The Zapatistas are featured prominently in Rage Against the Machines songs,
in particular "People of the Sun", "Wind Below", Zapatas Blood, and "War Within a Breath".[24]

In January 1996, the governor insurgent Chiapas,

Amado Avendao Figueroa, inaugurated another Aguascalientes in Tijuana, Baja California. In the heart of University City, built by students who had participated in
the 19992000 strike at UNAM, would the Water Mirror Aguascalientes, where the Zapatistas sent a message
to young people and students in the country under The
March of the Color of the Earth. The same happened in
Xochimilco, where a group of indigenous organizations Before 2001, Marcos writings were often published in
some Mexican and a few international newspapers. Then
founded another Aguascalientes.
Marcos fell silent, and his relationship with the media deMore ephemeral and symbolic was the Aguascalientes in
clined. When he resumed writing in 2002, he assumed a
Cuernavaca, Genaro, opened by one of the delegates who
more aggressive tone, and his attacks on former allies anvisited Zapatista lands Morelos in March 1999 in connecgered some of the EZLNs supporters. Except for these
tion with that years consultation, and Aguascalientes El
letters and occasional critical communiqus about the poAngel in Mexico City. Both spaces worked as statements
litical climate, the EZLN was largely silent until August
about the Lacandon Jungle and the San Andrs Accords,
2003, when Radio Insurgente was launched from an unand voting, then disappeared.
known location.
In mid-2004, COCOPA head Luis H. lvarez stated that

37.5. 20052013 ACTIVITIES

Marcos had not been seen in Chiapas for some time. The
EZLN received little press coverage during this time, although it continued to develop the local governments it
had created earlier. In August, Marcos sent eight brief
communiqus to the Mexican press, published from August 20 through 28. The series was entitled Reading a
Video (possibly mocking political video scandals that occurred earlier that year). It began and ended as a kind of
written description of an imaginary low-budget Zapatista
video, with the rest being Marcos comments on political events of the year and the EZLNs current stance and
development.
In 2005, Marcos made headlines again by comparing
the then presidential candidate Andrs Manuel Lpez
Obrador to Carlos Salinas de Gortari (as part of a broad
criticism of the three main political parties in Mexico, the
PAN, PRI, and PRD), and publicly declaring the EZLN
in Red Alert. Shortly thereafter, communiqus announced that the EZLN had undergone a restructuring
that enabled them to withstand the loss of their public
leadership (Marcos and the CCRI). After consulting with
their support base, the Zapatistas issued the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle.

313
vador Atenco and the surrounding communities. A local
organization called the Peoples Front in Defense of the
Land (FPDT), which adheres to the Sixth Declaration,
called in support from other regional and national adherent organizations. "Delegate Zero" and his "Other Campaign" were at the time in nearby Mexico City, having just
organized May Day events there, and quickly arrived at
the scene. The following days were marked by violence,
with some 216 arrests, over 30 rape and sexual abuse accusations against the police, ve deportations, and one
casualty, a 14-year-old boy named Javier Cortes shot by
a policeman. A 20-year-old UNAM economics student,
Alexis Benhumea, died on the morning of June 7, 2006,
after being in a coma caused by a blow to the head from
a tear-gas grenade launched by police.[25] Most of the
resistance organizing was done by the EZLN and Sixth
Declaration adherents, and Delegate Zero stated that the
Other Campaign tour would be temporarily halted until
all prisoners were released.

The independent media organization Indymedia also covers and prints Zapatista developments and communications.

In late 2006 and early 2007, the Zapatistas (through

Subcomandante Marcos), along with other indigenous
peoples of the Americas, announced the Intercontinental
Indigenous Encounter. They invited indigenous people
from throughout the Americas and the rest of the world to
gather on October 1114, 2007, near Guaymas, Sonora.
The declaration for the conference designated this date
because of 515 years since the invasion of ancient Indigenous territories and the onslaught of the war of conquest,
spoils and capitalist exploitation. Comandante David said
in an interview, The object of this meeting is to meet one
another and to come to know one anothers pains and sufferings. It is to share our experiences, because each tribe
is dierent. [26]

37.5 20052013 activities

The Third Encuentro of the Zapatistas People with the

People of the World was held from December 28, 2007,
through January 1, 2008.[27]

Since the Zapatistas rst uprising, the newspaper La

Jornada has continuously covered them. Most communiqus and many of Marcoss letters are delivered to and
only published by La Jornada, and the online edition of
the newspaper has a section dedicated to The Other Campaign.

On June 28, 2005, the EZLN released an installment of

what it called the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle. According to the communiqu, the EZLN had reected on its history and decided that it must change in
order to continue its struggle. Accordingly, the EZLN
had decided to unite with the workers, farmers, students,
teachers, and employees ... the workers of the city and
the countryside. They proposed to do so through a nonelectoral front to talk and collectively write a new constitution to establish a new political culture.

In mid-January 2009, Marcos made a speech on behalf of

the Zapatistas in which he supported the resistance of the
Palestinians as the Israeli governments heavily trained
and armed military continues its march of death and destruction. He described the actions of the Israeli government as a classic military war of conquest. He said, The
Palestinian people will also resist and survive and continue
struggling and will continue to have sympathy from below
for their cause. [28]

On August 8, 2013, the Zapatistas invited the world to

a three-day esta to celebrate ten years of Zapatista auOn January 1, 2006, the EZLN began a massive tour,
tonomy, in the ve caracoles in Chiapas. 1,500 activists
"The Other Campaign", encompassing all 31 Mexican
from all over the world will join the event, named the Litstates in the buildup to that years presidential election,
tle School of Liberty according to the Zapatistas.[29][30]
which the EZLN made clear they would not participate
in directly.
On May 34, 2006, a series of demonstrations protested
the forcible removal of irregular ower vendors from a lot
in Texcoco for the construction of a Walmart branch. The
protests turned violent when state police and the Federal
Preventive Police bussed in some 5,000 agents to San Sal-

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CHAPTER 37. ZAPATISTA ARMY OF NATIONAL LIBERATION

37.6 Horizontal Autonomy and Indigenous Leadership

new channels and providing a powerful forum for political participation by citizens (see e-democracy) on an unprecedented scale. Digital, networked media allow for
faster, diverse, two-way communications between users
Recently, the Zapatistas have been steadfast in resisting who have both more control and more choice[35] as they
the violence of neoliberalism by practicing horizontal au- become simultaneously users, producers, and agents of
tonomy and mutual aid. Zapatista communities continue social change.
to build and maintain their own anti-systemic health, education, and sustainable agro-ecological systems, promote equitable gender relations via Womens Revolution- 37.9 See also
ary Law, and build international solidarity through humble outreach and non-imposing political communication.
Chiapas conict
In addition to their focus on building 'a world where
many worlds t', the Zapatistas continue to resist neo A Place Called Chiapas, a documentary on the Zapcolonial state-sanctioned low-intensity warfare. The Zaatistas and Subcomandante Marcos.
patista struggle re-gained international attention in May
Zapatista (1999), a documentary on the Zapatistas,
2014 with the death of teacher and education promoter
starring Noam Chomsky, Daryl Hannah, Mumia
Galeano who was murdered in an attack on a Zapatista
Abu-Jamal, Edward James Olmos, Geronimo Pratt.
school and health clinic led by 15 local paramilitaries.[31]
In the weeks that followed, thousands of Zapatistas and
Himno Zapatista - anthem of the Zapatistas
national and international sympathizers, mobilized and
gathered to honor Galeano. This event also saw the famed
Indigenous movements in the Americas
and enigmatic unocial spokesperson of the Zapatistas,
Indigenous peoples of Mexico
Subcomandante Marcos, entomb himself, which symbolized a shift in the EZLN to completely Indigenous leader Councils of Good Government
ship. It was also a welcoming re-emphasis to the international community to focus on organizing collectively, and
Zapatista coee cooperatives
through listening, which are key principles and practices
San Andrs Accords
of the Zapatistas.[32]
Women in the EZLN

37.7 Notable members

Subcomandante Marcos
Comandante Ramona
Subcomandante Elisa
Subcomandante Moiss

37.10 References
37.10.1 Footnotes
[1] Zapata, Emiliano, 1879-1919. libcom.org. Retrieved
2013-10-29.
[2] Baspineiro, Alex Contreras. "The Mysterious Silence of
the Mexican Zapatistas. Narco News (May 7, 2004).

37.8 New media technologies and

the Zapatista idea

[3] "The EZLN is NOT Anarchist - A Zapatista Response"

The Zapatista idea is the use of tactical media to draw

public attention to a political cause. Used as a form of
political activism, the Zapatista idea is the notion that the
important thing is the spectacle that you make out of an
event in the media, as opposed to the event itself.[33] The
concept derives from the Zapatistas ability through new
media to communicate and generate universal solidarity
in Mexico and worldwide. An example of the use of new
media technology is through the Chiapas Media Project.

[5] Chris Arsenault, Zapatistas: The War Without Breath?"

Al Jazeera English, Jan 1, 2001

The communications revolution has generally shifted the

'balance of power' from the media to the audience.[34]
This has allowed the Zapatista idea to ourish, opening up

[4] "A Commune in Chiapas? Mexico and the Zapatista Rebellion"

[6] The Dream of a Better World Is Back by Alain Gresh, Le

Monde Diplomatique, May 8, 2009
[7] SIPAZ, International Service for Peace webisite, 1994
[8] Rising Inequality in Mexico: Returns to Household
Characteristics and the 'Chiapas Eect' by Csar P.
Bouillon, Arianna Legovini, Nora Lustig :: SSRN.
Papers.ssrn.com. doi:10.2139/ssrn.182178. Retrieved
2013-10-29.
[9] O'Neil et al. 2006, p. 377.

37.11. FURTHER READING

315

[10] From Che to Marcos by Jerey W. Rubin, Dissent magazine, Summer 2002
[11] O'Neil et al. 2006, p. 378.
[12] Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle on Wikisource
[13] Morgan Rodgers Gibson (2009) 'The Role of Anarchism in Contemporary Anti-Systemic Social Movements, Website of Abahlali Mjondolo, December, 2009.
Abahlali.org. Retrieved 2013-10-29.

[30] the Little School of Liberty according to the Zapatistas http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2013/08/04/

votan-iv-dia-menos-7/
[31] Gahman,
Levi
Death
of
a
Zapatista
http://rabble.ca/news/2014/06/
death-zapatista-neoliberalisms-assault-on-indigenous-autonomy/
[32] Gahman, Levi: Zapatistas Begin a New Cycle of Building Indigenous Autonomy http://www.cipamericas.org/
archives/12372/

[14] Morgan Rodgers Gibson (2010) 'Anarchism, the State

and the Praxis of Contemporary Antisystemic Social
Movements, December, 2010. Abahlali.org. Retrieved
2013-10-29.

[33] Meikle, G: Networks of Inuence: Internet Activism in

Australia and Beyond in Gerard Goggin (ed.) Virtual nation: the Internet in Australia, University of New South
Wales Press, page 83, 2004.

[15] "The Zapatista Eect: Information Communication

Technology Activism and Marginalized Communities"

[34] McQuail, D: McQails Mass Communication Theory

(fourth edition), page 28, Sage, London, 2000.

[16] "The Zapatistas Return: A Masked Marxist on the

Stump"

[35] Croteau, D and Hoynes, W: Media Society: Industries, Images and Audiences, page 313, Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks, 2003.

[17] Editorial. Nodo50.org. Retrieved 2013-10-29.

[18] EZLNWomens
Revolutionary
Flag.blackened.net. Retrieved 2013-10-29.

Law.

37.10.2 Bibliography

[19] Beardsell, Peter (2000). Europe and Latin America: Returning the Gaze. Manchester, UK: Manchester University
Press.

Collier, George A. (2008). Basta!: Land and the

Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas (3rd. ed.). Food First
Books. ISBN 978-0-935028-97-3.

[20] Lunga, Victoria (2008). Postcolonial Theory: A Language for a Critique of Globalization. Perspectives on
Global Development and Technology 7 (3/4): 191199.
doi:10.1163/156914908x371349.

Harvey, Neil (1998). The Chiapas Rebellion: The

Struggle for Land and Democracy. Duke University
Press. ISBN 0-8223-2238-2.

[21] Collier, George (2003). A Generation of Crisis in the Central Highlands of Chiapas. Rowmand and Littleeld Publishers Inc. p. 33.

O'Neil, Patrick H.; Fields, Karl; Share, Don (2006).

Cases in Comparative Politics (2nd ed.). New York:
W. W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-92943-4.

[22] Jung, Courtney (2003). The Politics of Indigenous Identity, Neoliberalism, Cultural Rights, and the Mexican Zapatistas. Retrieved November 24, 2013.
[23] Hiddleston, Jane (2009). Understanding Movements
in Modern Thought: Understanding Postcolonialism.
Durham, UK: Acumen.
[24] Rosalva Bermudez-Ballin, Interview with Zach la Rocha
(Rage Against The Machine), Nuevo Amanecer Press (via
spunk.org), 8 Jul 1998

37.11 Further reading

Castellanos, L. (2007). Mxico Armado: 19431981. Epilogue and chronology by Alejandro
Jimnez Martn del Campo. Mxico: Biblioteca
ERA. 383 pp. ISBN 968-411-695-0 ISBN 978968-411-695-5

[25] Alcntara, Liliana. Dan el ltimo adis a Alexis Benhumea. El Universal. Retrieved 3 March 2011.

Patrick & Ballesteros Corona, Carolina (1998).

Cuninghame, The Zapatistas and Autonomy, Capital & Class, No. 66, Autumn, pp 1222.

[26] Norrell, Brenda. "Zapatistas Select Yaqui to Host Intercontinental Summit in Mexico. Narco News (May 7,
2007).

The Zapatista Reader edited by Tom Hayden 2002

A wide sampling of notable writing on the subject.
ISBN 9781560253358

[27] http://zeztainternazional.ezln.org.mx/ 2008.

[28] Zapatista Commander: Gaza Will Survive Palestine
Chronicle

37.12 External links

[29] Leonidas Oikonomakis on August 6,

2013
Zapatistas celebrate 10 years of autonomy
http://roarmag.org/2013/08/
with
escuelita
escuelita-zapatista-10-year-autonomy/

Ocial website (Spanish)

EZLN Communiques (19942004) translated into
English

316

CHAPTER 37. ZAPATISTA ARMY OF NATIONAL LIBERATION

Our Word Is Our Weapon by Subcomandante Marcos Chapter 1

What is it that is Dierent About the Zapatistas?"
Zapatista by Blake Bailey
A Celebration of the Struggle of the Zapatista
Women
Occupy Movement, the Zapatistas and the General
Assemblies
The Narco News Bulletin - Articles on the Zapatistas
A Commune in Chiapas? Mexico and the Zapatista
Rebellion (19942000)" by LibCom.org
Visiting the Zapatistas by Nick Rider, New Statesman, March 12, 2009
Commodifying the Revolution: Zapatista Villages
Become Hot Tourist Destinations by John Ross
A Glimpse Into the Zapatista Movement, Two
Decades Later by Laura Gottesdiener. The Nation,
January 23, 2014.
We All Must Become Zapatistas (2014.06.02),
Chris Hedges, Truthdig

37.12.1

Multimedia

Documentary: Zapatista
Documentary: A Place Called Chiapas
NPR Audio Stories: Zapatista March Zapatistas
In Mexico City
Short lm: Storm From The Mountain
BBC News In Pictures: Mexicos Zapatistas
DeviantArt: Zapatistas ---- EZLN
Schools for Chiapas: Murals, Signs, & Art
Democracy Now: Zapatista Uprising 20 Years
Later: How Indigenous Mexicans Stood Up Against
NAFTA Death Sentence

Chapter 38

Emiliano Zapata
For other uses, see Emiliano Zapata (disambiguation).
This name uses Spanish naming customs: the rst
or paternal family name is Zapata and the second or
maternal family name is Salazar.
Emiliano Zapata Salazar (Spanish pronunciation:
[emiljano sapata]; 8 August 1879 10 April 1919)
was a leading gure in the Mexican Revolution, the
main leader of the peasant revolution in the state of
Morelos, and the founder of the agrarian movement
called Zapatismo.
Zapata was born in the rural town of Anenecuilco in
Morelos. In Morelos peasant communities were under
increasing pressure from the small landowning class who
monopolized land and water resources for sugar cane production with the support of dictator Porrio Daz. Zapata early on participated in political movements against
Diaz and the landowning hacendados, and when the Revolution broke out in 1910 he was positioned as a central leader of the peasant revolt in Morelos. Cooperating with a number of other peasant leaders he formed the
Liberation Army of the South of which he soon became
the undisputed leader. Zapatas forces contributed to the
fall of Daz, but when the revolutionary leader Francisco
I. Madero became president he disavowed the role of
the Zapatistas, denouncing them as simple bandits. Zapata promulgated the Plan de Ayala which called for substantial land reforms, redistributing lands to the peasants.
Madero sent forces to root out the Zapatistas in Morelos. Maderos generals employed a scorched earth policy,
burning villages and forcibly removing their inhabitants,
and drafting many men into the Army or sending them to
forced labor camps in Southern Mexico. This strengthened Zapatas standing among the peasants and Zapata
was able to drive the forces of Madero and Victoriano
Huerta out of Morelos. Huerta executed Madero and
took control of the capital, but a coalition of constitutionalist forces led by Venustiano Carranza, lvaro Obregn
and Francisco Villa ousted him with the support of Zapatas troops. Carranza, also hostile to Zapata, constituted
himself as the leader of Mexico, but Villa allied with Zapata against Carranza and Obregn. Dismayed with the
alliance with Villa, Zapata focused his energies on rebuilding society in Morelos which he now controlled, in-

stituting the land reforms of the Plan de Ayala. As Carranza consolidated his power and won over Villa, Zapata
initiated guerrilla warfare against the Carrancistas, who
in turn invaded Morelos, employing once again scorched
earth tactics to oust the Zapatista rebels. Zapata once
again retook Morelos in 1917 and held most of the state
against Carranzas troops until he was killed in an ambush
in 1919. After his death Zapatista generals aligned with
Obregn against Carranza and managed to obtain powerful posts in the governance of Morelos after Carranzas
fall. They instituted many of the land reforms planned by
Zapata in the state of Morelos.
Zapata remains an iconic gure in Mexico, used both
as a nationalist symbol as well as a symbol of the neoZapatista movement.

38.1 Biography
Emiliano Zapata was born to Gabriel Zapata and Cleofas Jertrudiz Salazar of Anenecuilco, Morelos. Zapatas
family were Mexicans of Nahua and Spanish ancestry;[1]
Emiliano was the ninth of ten children. As a peasant, he had insight into the severe diculties of the
countryside.[2] He received a limited education from his
teacher, Emilio Vara. He had to care for his family
because his father died when Zapata was 17. Around
the turn of the 20th century Anenecuilco was an indigenous Nahuatl speaking community; there are eyewitness accounts stating that Emiliano Zapata spoke Nahuatl
uently.[3]
After Porrio Daz rose to power in 1876, the Mexican
social and economic system was essentially a feudal system, with large estates (haciendas) controlling much of
the land and squeezing out the independent communities of the people who were subsequently forced into debt
slavery (peonaje) on the haciendas. Daz ran local elections to pacify the people; however, his close condants
and associates were given oces in districts throughout
Mexico. These ocials became enforcers of "land reforms" that drove the haciendas into the hands of progressively fewer and wealthier landowners.
In 1909 an important meeting was called by the elders

317

318

CHAPTER 38. EMILIANO ZAPATA

the overt bias towards the wealthy plantation owners, Zapata began making use of armed force, simply taking over
the land in dispute.

38.1.1 The 1910 Revolution

Birthplace of Emiliano Zapata in Anenecuilco, today a house

museum

of Anenecuilco, whose chief elder was Jos Merino, in

which he announced my intention to resign from my position due to my old age and limited abilities to continue
the ght for the land rights of the village. The meeting was used as a time for discussion and nomination of
individuals as a replacement for Merino as the president
of the village council. The elders on the council were
so well respected by the village men that no one would
dare to override their nominations or vote for an individual against the advice of the current council at that
time. The nominations made were: Modesto Gonzales,
Bartolo Parral, and Emiliano Zapata. After the completion of nominations, a vote was taken and Zapata became
the new council president without contest.[4]

Emiliano Zapata enters Cuernavaca in April 1911, Federal General Manuel Asnsolo turns the city over to the Zapatistas.

At this time, Porrio Daz was being threatened by the

candidacy of Francisco I. Madero. Zapata, seeing an
opportunity to promote land reform in Mexico,[5] made
quiet alliances with Madero, whom he perceived to be
the best chance for genuine change in the country.[6] Although he was wary about Madero,[6] Zapata cooperated
with him when Madero made vague promises about land
reform.[6] Land reform would be the only issue which Zapata cared about.[6]

Although Zapata had turned 30 only a month before, the

voters knew that it was necessary to elect an individual
who would be responsible for the village and who was
well respected by the village people. Even though he was
young, the village was ready to hand over the controlling
force to him without any worry of failure. Before he was
elected he had shown the village his nature by helping
to head up a campaign in opposition to a candidate for
governor. Even though his eorts and his cause failed, he
was able to create and cultivate relationships with political
authority gures that would prove useful for him.[4]

Zapata joined Maderos campaign against President

Diaz.[7] When Zapatas army captured Cuautla after a
six-day battle on May 19, 1911,[6] it became clear that
Diaz would not hold on to power for long.[7] With the support of Pancho Villa, Pascual Orozco, Emiliano Zapata,
and rebellious peasants, Madero overthrew Daz in May
1911 at the Battle of Ciudad Jurez. A provisional government was formed under Francisco Len de la Barra.
Under Madero, some new land reforms were carried out
and elections were to be ensured. However, Zapata was
dissatised with Maderos stance on land reform, which
Zapata became a leading gure in the village of Madero did not really believe in,[7] and was unable, deAnenecuilco, where his family had lived for many genera- spite repeated eorts, to make him understand the imtions, and he became involved in struggles for the rights of portance of the issue or to get him to act on it.
the campesinos of Morelos. He was able to oversee the redistribution of the land from some haciendas peacefully,
but had problems with others. He observed numerous 38.2 Revolutionary general
conicts between villagers and hacendados, or landowners, over the constant theft of village land, and in one in- Madero was not ready to create a radical change in the
stance, saw the hacendados torch an entire village.
manner that agrarian relations operated during this time.
For many years, he campaigned steadfastly for the rights
of the villagers, rst establishing via ancient title deeds
their claims to disputed land, and then pressing the recalcitrant governor of Morelos into action. Finally, disgusted with the slow response from the government and

Some other individuals, called anarcho-syndicalist agitators, had made promises to take things back to the way
that they had been done previously. The major method
of agrarian relations had been that of communal lands,
called ejidos. Although some believed that this could

38.2. REVOLUTIONARY GENERAL

319
by a single person or family should have one-third of their
land nationalized and would then be required to give it to
poor farmers.[9] It also argued that if any large plantation
owner resisted this action,[9] they should have the other
two-thirds conscated as well.[9] The Plan of Ayala also
invoked the name of Benito Jurez,[9] one of Mexicos
great leaders,[9] and compared the taking of land from
the wealthy to Juarezs actions when he took land from
the church in the 1860s.[9]

Zapata and his sta

Zapata was partly inuenced by an anarchist from Oaxaca

named Ricardo Flores Magn. The inuence of Flores
Magn on Zapata can be seen in the Zapatistas Plan de
Ayala, but even more noticeably in their slogan (this slogan was never used by Zapata) "Tierra y libertad" or land
and liberty, the title and maxim of Flores Magns most
famous work. Zapatas introduction to anarchism came
via Montao Snchez later a general in Zapatas army,
executed on May 17, 1917 (by order of Zapata) who
exposed Zapata to the works of Peter Kropotkin and Flores Magn at the same time as Zapata was observing and
beginning to participate in the struggles of the peasants
for the land.

be the best course of action, Madero simply demanded

that Public servants act 'morally' in enforcing the law
.... Upon seeing the response by villagers, Madero offered formal justice in courts to individuals who had been
wronged by others with regard to agrarian politics. Zapata decided that on the surface it seemed as though
Madero was doing good things for the people of Mexico,
but Zapata did not know the level of sincerity in Maderos The plan proclaimed the Zapatista demands for Reactions and thus did not know if he should support him forma, Libertad, Ley y Justicia (Reform, Freedom,
Law and Justice). Zapata also declared the Maderistas
completely.[8]
as a counter-revolution and denounced Madero. Zapata mobilized his Liberation Army and allied with former Maderistas Pascual Orozco and Emiliano Vzquez
Gmez. Orozco was from Chihuahua, near the U.S. border, and thus was able to aid the Zapatistas with a supply
of arms.

Francisco Villa (left), Eulalio Gutirrez (center), and Emiliano

Zapata (right) at the Mexican National Palace (1914)

Madero and Zapatas relations worsened during the summer of 1911 as Madero appointed a governor who supported plantation owners and refused to meet Zapatas
agrarian goals. Compromises between the two failed in
November 1911, days after Madero appointed himself
President, and Zapata and Otilio Montao Snchez, a former school teacher, ed to the mountains of southwest
Puebla. There they formed the most radical reform plan
in Mexico; the Plan de Ayala (Plan of Ayala). The plan
declared Madero a traitor,[7] named Pascual Orozco head
of the Revolution,[7] and outlined a plan for true land
reform.[7]

In the following weeks, the development of military operations betray(ed) good evidence of clear and intelligent
planning.[10] During Orozcos rebellion, Zapata fought
Mexican troops in the south near Mexico City.[7] In the
original design of the armed force, Zapata was a mere
colonel among several others; however, the true plan that
came about through this organization lent itself to Zapata. Zapata believed that the best route of attack would
be to center the ghting and action in Cuautla. If this political location could be overthrown, the army would have
enough power to veto anyone elses control of the state,
negotiate for Cuernavaca or attack it directly, and maintain independent access to Mexico City as well as escape
routes to the southern hills.[11] However, in order to gain
this great success, Zapata realized that his men needed to
be better armed and trained.

The rst line of action demanded that Zapata and his

men control the area behind and below a line from Jojutla to Yecapixtla.[11] When this was accomplished it
gave the army the ability to complete raids as well as
wait. As the opposition of the federal army and police
detachments slowly dissipated, the army would be able
The Plan of Ayala called for all lands stolen under Daz to to eventually gain powerful control over key locations in
be immediately returned:[9] there was considerable land the Interoceanic Railway from Puebla City to Cuautla.
fraud under the old dictator, so a great deal of territory If these feats could be completed, it would gain access
was involved.[9] It also stated that large plantations owned

320

Emiliano Zapata

CHAPTER 38. EMILIANO ZAPATA

Zapata needed a strong nancial backing for the battles
to come. This came in the form of 10,000 pesos delivered by Rodolfo from the Tacubayans.[13] Due to this
amazing sum of money Zapatas group of rebels became
one of the strongest in the state nancially.[4] After some
time Zapata became the leader of his strategic zone.[4]
This gave him tremendous power and control over the actions of many more individual rebel groups and thus increased his margin of success greatly. Among revolutionaries in other districts of the state, however, Zapatas
authority was more tenuous.[14] After a meeting with Zapata and Ambrosio Figueroa in Jolalpan, it was decided
that Zapata would have joint power with Figueroa with
regard to operations in Morelos.[4] This was a turning
point in the level of authority and inuence that Zapata
had gained and proved useful in the direct overthrow of
Morelos.[4] Zapata immediately began to use his newly
found power and began to overthrow city after city with
gaining momentum. Madero, alarmed, asked Zapata to
disarm and demobilize. Zapata responded that, if the
people could not win their rights now, when they were
armed, they would have no chance once they were unarmed and helpless. Madero sent several generals in an
attempt to deal with Zapata, but these eorts had little success. It seemed as though Zapata would shortly
be able to overthrow Madero. Before he could overthrow Madero,[7] General Victoriano Huerta beat him
to it in February 1913,[7] ordering Madero arrested and
executed.[7] This ocially and formally ended the civil
war.[4] Although this may have caused individuals to believe that the revolution was over, it was not. The battle continued for years to come over the fact that Mexican individuals did not have agrarian rights that were
fair, nor did they have the protection necessary to ght
against those who pushed such exploitation upon them.[4]
If there was anyone that Zapata hated more than Daz and
Madero,[7] it was Victoriano Huerta, the bitter, violent
alcoholic who had been responsible for many atrocities
in southern Mexico while trying to end the rebellion.[7]
Zapata was not alone: in the north, Pancho Villa, who
had supported Madero,[7] immediately took to the eld
against Huerta.[7] Zapata revised the Plan of Ayala and
named himself the leader of his revolution.[9] He was
joined by two newcomers to the Revolution, Venustiano
Carranza and Alvaro Obregn,[7] who raised large armies
in Coahuila and Sonora respectively.[7] Together they
made short work of Huerta, who resigned and ed in June
1914 after repeated military losses to the Big Four.[7]

to Cuautla directly and the city would fall.[4] The plan

of action was carried out successfully in Jojutla. However, Pablo Torres Burgos, the commander of the operation, was disappointed that the army disobeyed his orders
against looting and ransacking. The army took complete
control of the area and it seemed as though Torres Burgos lost any type of control that he believed he had over
his forces prior to this event. Shortly after, Burgos called
a meeting and resigned from his position. Upon leaving
Jojutla with his two sons, Burgos was surprised by a federal police patrol who subsequently shot all three of the
men on the spot.[4] This seemed to some to be an ending
blow to the movement, because Burgos had not selected a
successor for his position; however, Zapata was ready to
take up where Burgos had left o.[4] Shortly after Burgos
death, a party of rebels elected Zapata as Supreme Chief
of the Revolutionary Movement of the South (Womack,
p. 78). This seemed to be the x to all of the problems
that had just arisen, but other individuals wanted to replace Zapata as well. Due to this new conict, the indi- 38.3 The Villa-Zapata alliance
vidual who would come out on top would have to do so
by convincing his peers he deserved their backing.[12] On April 21, 1914 U.S. President Woodrow Wilson sent
Zapata nally did gain the support necessary by his peers a contingent of troops to occupy the port city of Veracruz.
and was considered a singularly qualied candidate.[12] This sudden threat caused Huerta to withdraw his troops
This decision to make Zapata the true leader of the rev- from Morelos and Puebla leaving only Jojutla and Cuerolution did not occur all at once, nor did it ever reach a navaca under federal control. Zapatistas quickly assumed
true denitive level of recognition. In order to succeed, control of Eastern Morelos, taking Cuautla and Jonacate-

38.4. ZAPATA REBUILDS MORELOS

Zapata and Villa with their joint forces enter Mexico city on December 6, 1914.

pec with no resistance. In spite of being faced with a possible foreign invasion Zapata refused to unite with Huerta
in defense of the nation. He stated that if need be he
would defend Mexico alone as chief of the Ayalan forces
[15]
). In May the Zapatistas took Jojutla from the federales, many of whom joined the rebels, and captured
guns and ammunition. They also laid siege to Cuernavaca
where a small contingent of federal troops were holed
up (Womack 187). Over the summer of 1915 Zapatas
forces had by then taken the southern edge of the federal
district, occupying Milpa Alta and Xochimilco, poised to
move into the capital. Nonetheless in mid July, Huerta
was forced to ee as a Constitutionalist force under Carranza, Obregn and Villa took the Federal District.[16]
The constitutionalists established a peace treaty inserting Carranza as First Authority of the nation. In spite
of having contributed decisively to the fall of Huerta, the
Zapatistas were left out of the peace treaties, probably
because of Carranzas intense dislike for the Zapatistas
whom he saw as uncultured savages.[17] Through 1915
there was a tentative peace in Morelos and the rest of the
country.

Pancho Villa (Left) Commander of the Divisin del Norte (Division of the North)" and Emiliano Zapata Commander of the
Ejrcito Libertador del Sur (Liberation Army of the South)".
Villa is sitting in the presidential throne in the Palacio Nacional.

As the constitutionalist forces began to split with

Francisco Pancho Villa posing a popular front against
Carranzas constitutionalism, Carranza worked diplomatically to get the Zapatistas to recognize his rule. He
sent Dr. Atl as an envoy to propose a compromise with
Zapata. Zapata nonetheless refused to recognize Car-

321
ranzas leadership, stating that the only acceptable result is following the plan de Ayala, which would make
him supreme chief of an interim government.[18] Finally,
Zapata decided to side with Villa against Carranza and
Obregon (Womack 196-99). Villa and the other antiCarrancista leaders of the north established the Aguascalientes against Carranza. Zapata and his envoys managed to get the Convention to adopt some of the agrarian principles of the Plan de Ayala .[19] Zapata and Villa
met in Xochimilco to negotiate an alliance and divide the
responsibility for ridding Mexico of the remaining Carrancistas. The meeting was awkward but amiable, and
was widely publicized. It was decided that Zapata should
work on securing the area east of Morelos from Puebla
towards Veracruz. Nonetheless, during the ensuing campaign in Puebla, Zapata was disappointed by Villas lack
of support. He did not initially provide the Zapatistas
with the weaponry they had agreed on and, when he did,
he did not provide adequate transportation. There were
also a series of abuses by Villistas against Zapatista soldiers and chiefs. These experiences led Zapata to grow
unsatised with the alliance, turning instead his eorts
to reorganizing the state of Morelos that had been left in
shambles by the onslaught of Huerta and Robles. Having
taken Puebla, Zapata left a couple of garrisons there but
did not support Villa further against Obregn and Carranza. The Carrancistas saw that the Convention was divided and decided to concentrate on beating Villa, which
left the Zapatistas to their own devices for a while (Womack 220-23).

38.4 Zapata rebuilds Morelos

The peasant army of Zapata assembled in Morelos

Through 1915, Zapata began remodeling Morelos after

the Plan de Ayala, redistributing hacienda lands to the
peasants and largely letting village councils run their own
business. Most peasants did not turn to cash crops, instead growing subsistence crops such as corn, beans, and
vegetables. The result was that as the capital was starving Morelos peasants had more to eat than they had had
in 1910 and at lower prices. The only ocial event in
Morelos during this entire year was a bullght in which

322

CHAPTER 38. EMILIANO ZAPATA

Zapata himself and his nephew Amador Salazar participated. 1915 was a short period of peace and prosperity
for the farmers of Morelos, in between the massacres of
Huerta and the war to come.[20]

38.5 Guerrilla
Carranza

warfare

against

Even when Villa was on retreat, having lost the Battle

of Celaya and Obregn took the Capital from the conventionists who retreated to Toluca, Zapata did not open
a second front. Finally when Carranza was poised to
move into Morelos, Zapata took action. He attacked Carrancista positions with large forces trying to harry the
Carrancistas in the rear as they were occupied with routing Villa throughout the Northwest. Though Zapata managed to take many important sites such as the Necaxa
powerplant that supplied Mexico City, he was unable
to hold them. The Convention was nally routed from
Toluca, and Carranza was recognized by the US President
Wilson as the authority of Mexico in October. (Womack 245-6). Through 1916 Zapata raided federal forces
from Hidalgo to Oaxaca, and Genovevo de la O fought
the carrancistas in Guerrero. The Zapatistas attempted
to amass support for their cause by emitting new manifestos against the hacendados, but this had little eect
as the hacendados had already lost power throughout the
country (Womack 250-5).

38.6 Carranza consolidates power

In 1916, Carranza sent a force under general Pablo Gonzalez Garza to attack Morelos from the northwest. The
Zapatista generals Pachecho and Genovevo de la O who
believed the former to be a traitor, struggled against each
other, and Zapatista positions began to fall. First Cuernavaca, then Cuautla and then Tlaltizapan. In Tlaltizapan Gonzalez executed 289 civilians, including minors
of both sexes. Throughout Morelos thousands of civilian
prisoners were stued on box cars and carried to Mexico City, and further to the Henequen plantations of Yucatn as forced laborers. Zapata ed into the hills as his
headquarters were raided, returning after a few months
later to organize guerrilla resistance throughout Morelos.
The brutality of the nationalist forces further drove the
Morelos peasantry towards Zapata, who mounted guerrilla warfare throughout the state and into the Federal District, blowing up trains between Cuernavaca and the capital. Having been put in charge of the eorts to root out
Zapatismo in Morelos, Gonzalez was humiliated by Zapatas attacks, and enforced increasingly draconian measures against the locals. He received no reinforcements
as Obregn, the Minister of War, needed all his forces
against Villa in the north and against Felix Diaz in Oaxaca. Through low scale attacks on Gonzalezs positions,

Zapata had driven Gonzalez out of Morelos by the end of

1916 (Womack 269-71). Nonetheless, outside of Morelos the revolutionary forces started disbanding. Some
joined the constitutionalists such as Domingo Arena, or
lapsed into banditry. In Morelos Zapata once more reorganized the Zapatista state, continuing with democratic
reforms and legislation meant to keep the civil population safe from abuses by soldiers. Though his advisers
urged him to mount a concerted campaign against the
Carrancistas across southern Mexico, again he concentrated entirely on stabilizing Morelos and making life tolerable for the peasants (Womack 281-2). Meanwhile
Carranza mounted national elections in all state capitals
except Cuernavaca, and promulgated the 1917 Constitution which incorporated elements of the Plan de Ayala.

38.7 Zapata under pressure

Meanwhile the disintegration of the revolution outside of
Morelos put pressure on the Zapatistas. As General Arenas had turned over to the constitutionalists, he had secured peace for his region and he remained in control
there. This suggested to many revolutionaries that perhaps the time had come to seek a peaceful conclusion
to the struggle. A movement within the Zapatista ranks
led by former General Vazquez and Zapatas erstwhile
adviser and inspiration Otilio Montao moved against
the Tlaltizapan headquarters demanding surrender to the
Carrancistas. Reluctantly, Zapata had Montao tried for
treason and executed (Womack 1983-86).
Zapata began looking for allies among the northern revolutionaries and the southern Felicistas, followers of the
Liberalist Felix Diaz. He sent Gildardo Magaa as an envoy to communicate with the Americans and other possible sources of support. In the fall of 1917 a force
led by Gonzalez and the ex-Zapatista Sidronio Camacho,
who had killed Zapatas brother Eufemio, moved into the
eastern part of Morelos taking Cuautla, Zacualpan and
Jonacatepec.
Zapata continued his work to try to unite with the national
anti-Carrancista movement through the next year, and the
constitutionalists did not make further advances. In the
winter of 1918 a harsh cold and the onset of the Spanish
u decimated the population of Morelos, causing the loss
of a quarter of the total population of the state, almost
as many as had been lost to Huerta in 1914. (Womack
311). Furthermore Zapata began to worry that by the
end of the World War, the US would turn its attention
to Mexico forcing the Zapatistas to either join the Carrancistas in a national defense or to acquiesce to foreign
domination of Mexico. In December 1918 Carrancistas
under Gonzalez undertook an oensive campaign taking
most of the state of Morelos, and pushing Zapata to retreat. The main Zapatista headquarters were moved to
Tochimilco, Puebla, although Tlaltizapan also continued
to be under Zapatista control. Through Castro, Carranza

38.9. AFTERMATH
issued oers to the main Zapatista generals to join the
nationalist cause, with pardon. But apart from Manuel
Palafox, who having fallen in disgrace among the Zapatistas had joined the Arenistas, none of the major generals
did (Womack 313-14). Zapata emitted statements accusing Carranza of being secretly sympathetic to the Germans (Womack 315). In March Zapata nally emitted
an open letter to Carranza urging him for the good of the
fatherland to resign his leadership to Vazquez Gmez, by
now the rallying point of the anti-constitutionalist movement (Womack 319-20). Having posed this formidable
moral challenge to Carranza prior to the upcoming 1920
presidential elections, the Zapatista generals at Tochimilco, Magaa and Ayaquica, urged Zapata not to take any
risks and to lay low. But Zapata declined, considering that
the respect of his troops depended on his active presence
at the front (Womack 320-22).

38.8 Death

323
however, never reached Guajardo but instead wound up
on Gonzlezs desk. Gonzlez devised a plan to use this
note to his advantage. He accused Guajardo of not only
being a drunk, but of being a traitor. After reducing Guajardo to tears, Gonzlez explained to him that he could
recover from this disgrace if he feigned a defection to
Zapata. So Guajardo wrote to Zapata telling him that he
would bring over his men and supplies if certain guarantees were promised.[21] Zapata answered Guajardos
letter on April 1, 1919, agreeing to all of Guajardos
terms. Zapata suggested a mutiny on April 4. Guajardo
replied that his defection should wait until a new shipment of arms and ammunition arrived sometime between
the 6th and the 10th. By the 7th, the plans were set:
Zapata ordered Guajardo to attack the Federal garrison
at Jonacatepec because the garrison included troops who
had defected from Zapata. Gonzlez and Guajardo notied the Jonacatepec garrison ahead of time, and a mock
battle was staged on April 9. At the conclusion of the
mock battle, the former Zapatistas were arrested and shot.
Convinced that Guajardo was sincere, Zapata agreed to a
nal meeting where Guajardo would defect.[22] On April
10, 1919, Guajardo invited Zapata to a meeting, intimating that he intended to defect to the revolutionaries.[7]
However, when Zapata arrived at the Hacienda de San
Juan, in Chinameca, Ayala municipality, Guajardos men
riddled him with bullets. They then took his body to
Cuautla to claim the bounty, where they are reputed to
have been given only half of what was promised.

38.9 Aftermath

Zapatas corpse

In early 1919, events conspired to cause the death of Zapata. In mid-March, Gen. Pablo Gonzlez ordered his subordinate Col. Jess Guajardo to commence operations
against the Zapatistas in the mountains around Huautla.
But when Gonzlez later discovered Guajardo carousing
in a cantina, he had him arrested, and a public scandal
ensued. On 21 March, Zapata attempted to smuggle in a
note to Guajardo, inviting him to switch sides. The note,

According to La Democrata, he had taken in the consciousness of the natives the proportions of a myth because he had given them a formula of vindication against
old oenses.(Womack 328) In spite of Gonzalezs attempts to sully the name of Zapata and the plan de Ayala, the people of Morelos continued to support Zapatista generals, providing them with weapons, supplies
and protection. Carranza was wary of the threat of an
American intervention, and Zapatista generals decided to
take a conciliatory approach. Bands of Zapatistas started
surrendering in exchange for amnesties, and many Zapatista generals went on to become local authorities, such
as Fortino Ayaquica who became municipal president of
Tochimilco (Womack ). Other generals such as Genovevo de la O remained active in small-scale guerrilla
warfare. As Carranza moved to curb his rivals in 1920
Obregon sought to align himself with the Zapatista movement against that of Carranza. And de la O and Magaa
supported him in the coup that ousted Carranza in May
1920. Zapatistas were given important posts in the Obregonista governments of Adolfo de la Huerta and Obregon,
and achieved almost total control of the state of Morelos.
There they carried out a program of agrarian reform and
land redistribution based in the provisions of the Plan de
Ayala.

324

38.9.1

CHAPTER 38. EMILIANO ZAPATA

Legacy

the 1994 indigenous Zapatista uprising which still continues in Chiapas. Towns, streets, and housing developments called Emiliano Zapata are common across the
country and he has, at times, been depicted on Mexican
banknotes.
Modern activists in Mexico frequently make reference to
Zapata in their campaigns; his image is commonly seen
on banners, and many chants invoke his name: Si Zapata
viviera con nosotros anduviera, If Zapata lived, he would
walk with us. Zapata vive, la lucha sigue, Zapata lives;
the struggle continues.

38.10 In popular culture

Sign at the entrance to one of the communities under the control
of the Ejrcito Zapatista de Liberacin Nacional, the sign reads
You are in Zapatista territory in rebellion, here the people issues
the order and government obeys.

Main article: Cultural depictions of Emiliano Zapata

Zapata has been depicted in movies, comics, books, music, and clothing popular with teenagers and young adults.
For example, there is a Zapata (1980) stage musical written by Harry Nilsson and Perry Botkin, libretto by Allan
Katz, which ran for 16 weeks at the Goodspeed Opera
House in East Haddam, Connecticut. A movie called
Zapata: El sueo de un hroe (Zapata: A Heros Dream)
was produced in 2004, starring Mexican actors Alejandro
Fernandez, Jaime Camil, and Lucero.

Zapatas inuence continues to this day, particularly in

revolutionary tendencies in south Mexico. In the long
run, he has done more for his ideals in death than he did in
life.[7] Like many charismatic idealists, Zapata became a
martyr after his treacherous murder.[7] Even though Mexico still has not implemented the sort of land reform he
wanted, he is remembered as a visionary who fought for
Marlon Brando played Emiliano Zapata in the awardhis countrymen.[7]
winning movie based on his life, Viva Zapata! in 1952.
Zapatas Plan of Ayala also inuenced Article 27 of the The lm co-starred Anthony Quinn, who won best supprogressive 1917 Mexican Constitution that codied an porting actor. The director was Elia Kazan and the writer
agrarian reform program.[23] While the Mexican Revo- was John Steinbeck.
lution did restore some land that had been stolen under
El compadre Mendoza of the Revolution Trilogy by
Diaz,[9] the land reform on the scale imagined by Zapata
Fernando de Fuentes includes character of General Fewould never be enacted.[9] However, a great deal of the
lipe Nieto, a ctitious Zapata cousin resembling Zapatas
signicant land distribution which Zapata sought would
life and zapatism itself.
later be enacted after Mexican President Lzaro Crdenas took oce in the 1930s.[23][24] Cardenas would ful- The Rap Metal band Rage Against The Machine feall not only the land distribution policies written in Arti- tures a reference to Zapata in their lyrics for the song
cle 27, but also the other reforms written in the Mexican Calm Like A Bomb. The 2001 video release The Battle Of Mexico City discusses their support for political
Constitution as well.[25]
movements such as the Zapatistas and the revolution in
There are controversies about the portrayal of Emiliano
the Mexican State of Chiapas.[27]
Zapata and his followers, whether they were bandits or
revolutionaries.[26] But in modern times, Zapata is one of In the novel The Friends of Pancho Villa (1996), by James
the most revered national heroes of Mexico. To many Carlos Blake, Zapata is a major character.
Mexicans, specically the peasant and indigenous citizens, Zapata was a practical revolutionary who sought
the implementation of liberties and agrarian rights out- 38.11 Aliases
lined in the Plan of Ayala. He was a realist with the goal
of achieving political and economic emancipation of the
"Calpuleque (nhuatl)" - leader, chief
peasants in southern Mexico and leading them out of severe poverty.
"El Tigre del Sur" - Tiger of the South
Many popular organizations take their name from Zap "El Tigre" - The Tiger
ata, most notably the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejrcito Zapatista de Liberacin Nacional or EZLN
"El Tigrillo" - Little Tiger
in Spanish), the initially Marxist guerrilla group that
"El Caudillo del Sur" - Caudillo of the South
emerged in the state of Chiapas in 1983 and precipitated

38.13. SOURCES
"El Atila del Sur" - The Attila of the South

38.12 References
[1] John E. Kicza (1993). The Indian in Latin American History: Resistance, Resilience, and Acculturation. Scholarly
Resources. p. 203. ISBN 0-8420-2421-2.
[2] Diccionario Porra de Historia, Biografa y Geografa de
Mxico. Editorial Porra.
[3] Miguel Leon-Portilla, Earl Shorris. 2002. In the Language of Kings: An Anthology of Mesoamerican Literature, Pre-Columbian to the Present. W. W. Norton &
Company. p. 374 (Testimony of Doa Luz Jimnez originally published in Horcasitas, 1968)

325

[22] John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution

1969, p323-324
[23] Emiliano Zapata Facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com articles about Emiliano Zapata. Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved December 18, 2011.
[24] Lazaro Cardenas : Faces of the Revolution : The Storm
That Swept Mexico. PBS. April 9, 1936. Retrieved December 18, 2011.
[25] BRIA 25 4 Land Liberty and the Mexican Revolution.
Constitutional Rights Foundation. Retrieved December
18, 2011.
[26] Brunk, Samuel. The Sad Situation of Civilians and Soldiers": The Banditry of Zapatismo in the Mexican, The
American Historical Review, Vol. 101, No. 2 (Apr.,
1996), pp. 331353

[4] Womack, J. (1969, [c1968]). Zapata and the Mexican

Revolution. New York,: Knopf.

[27] wikipedia.org

[5] Emiliano Zapata: Life Before the Mexican Revolution.

Latinamericanhistory.about.com. Retrieved December
18, 2011.

38.13 Sources

[6] The Mexican Revolution: Zapata, Diaz and Madero.

Latinamericanhistory.about.com. May 13, 1911. Retrieved December 18, 2011.

Emiliano Zapata, BBC Mundo.com

[7] Biography of Emiliano Zapata. Latinamericanhistory.about.com. April 10, 1919. Retrieved December 18,
2011.

Fernando Horcasitas, De Porrio Daz a Zapata,

memoria nhuatl de Milpa Alta, UNAM, Mxico
DF.,1968 (eye and ear-witness account of Zapata
speaking Nahuatl)

[8] Womack, J. (1969, [c1968]). Zapata and the Mexican

Revolution. New York,: Knopf. S.71
[9] Emiliano Zapata and The Plan of Ayala. Latinamericanhistory.about.com. April 10, 1919. Retrieved December 18, 2011.
[10] Womack, J. (1969, [c1968]). Zapata and the Mexican
Revolution. New York,: Knopf. P. 76
[11] Womack, J. (1969, [c1968]). Zapata and the Mexican
Revolution. New York,: Knopf. P.76
[12] Womack, J. (1969, [c1968]). Zapata and the Mexican
Revolution. New York,: Knopf. P.79
[13] Womack, J. (1969, [c1968]). Zapata and the Mexican
Revolution. New York,: Knopf. P.80
[14] Womack, J. (1969, [c1968]). Zapata and the Mexican
Revolution. New York,: Knopf. P.82
[15] Womack 1968, p. 186.

Villa and Zapata by Frank Mclynn

Womack, John (1968). Zapata and the Mexican

Revolution. New York: Vintage. ISBN 0-39470853-9.
Enrique Krauze, Zapata: El amor a la tierra, in the
Biographies of Power series.
Samuel Brunk, Emiliano Zapata! Revolution and
Betrayal in Mexico. Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 1995.
Jerey Kent Lucas, The Rightward Drift of Mexicos
Former Revolutionaries: The Case of Antonio Daz
Soto y Gama. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press,
2010.

38.14 External links

[16] Womack 1968, p. 188.

Emiliano Zapata Quotes, Facts, Books and Movies

[17] Womack 1968, p. 190.

Full text html version of Zapatas Plan de Ayala in

Spanish

[18] Womack 1968, p. 195.

[19] Womack 1968, pp. 214-219.
[20] Womack 1968, pp. 240-1.
[21] John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution
1969, p322-323

Emiliano Zapata videos

Bicentenario del inicio del movimiento de Independencia Nacional y del Centenario del inicio de la
Revolucin Mexicana

Chapter 39

Magonism
Magonism[1][2] (Spanish: Magonismo) is an anarchist,
or more precisely anarcho-communist,[3][4] school of
thought precursor of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. It
is mainly based on the ideas of Ricardo Flores Magn,[5]
his brothers Enrique and Jess, and also other collaborators of the Mexican newspaper Regeneracin (organ
of the Mexican Liberal Party), as Prxedis Guerrero,
Librado Rivera and Anselmo L. Figueroa.[6][7]

shared the ideas of the Flores Magn brothers, who inspired the overthrow of the dictatorship of Porrio Daz
and perform an economic and not only political revolution. The ght against tyranny encouraged by the Flores
Magn contravened ocial discourse of Porrian Peace
by which the protesters were rated as the Revoltosos Magonistas (i.e. Magonist rioters) to isolate any social basis
and preserve the image of peace and progress imposed by
force.[8]
Both Flores Magn brothers, like other members of
the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM), used the term magonista[9] to refer to the libertarian movement that promoted; as they felt they were ghting for an ideal and
not not to elevate in power to a boss or a group, they
called themselves liberals, as they were organized in the
PLM, and later anarchists. The same Ricardo Flores
Magn armed: Liberal Party members are not magonistas, they are anarchists!. In his literary work Verdugos
y Vctimas (i.e. Executioners and Victims),[10] one of
the characters responds indignantly when he was arrested
and judged: I'm not a magonist, I am an anarchist. An
anarchist has no idols.

39.1 Magonism and anarchism

Magonist thinking was inuenced by anarchist philosophers such as Mikhail Bakunin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and others as lise Reclus, Charles Malato, Errico
Malatesta, Anselmo Lorenzo, Emma Goldman, Fernando
Tarrida del Mrmol and Max Stirner. They were also inuenced by the works of Marx, Gorky and Ibsen. However, the most inuential works were the ones of Peter
Kropotkin The Conquest of Bread and Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, at the same time they were inuenced by
the Mexican liberal tradition of 19th century and the selfgovernment system of the indigenous people.[11]

39.2 Magonism and indigenous

movement
Cover of Regeneracin, with portraits of the organizing board of
PLM and European anarchists (1910)

See also: Magonista rebellion of 1911

Indigenous peoples, since the Spanish conquest of MexMexican government and the press of the early 20th ico, searched to preserve the practice of direct democcentury called as magonistas people and groups who racy, decision-making in assembly, rotation of admin326

39.3. LEGACY

327

Magonistas in Tijuana in 1911

istrative charges, the defense of communal property,

mutual aid as the community exploitation and rational use
of natural resources, shared anarchist principles raised by
the magonists.[12]
The direct inuence of indigenous thought in magonism
were the teachings of Teodoro Flores,[13] mestizo Nahua,
father of the Flores Magn brothers, and the coexistence of other members of the PLM with indigenous
groups during periods of organization and insurrection
of PLM, between 1905 and 1910, such as the Popoluca Citizen Year of Ricardo Flores Magn poster (1997)
in Veracruz, the Yaqui and Mayo in Sonora, and the
Cocopah in Baja California.
Fernando Palomares, a Mayo indigenous, was one of the
most active members of the Liberal Party who took part
in the Cananea strike and libertarian campaign of 1911
lieved that the Mexican social revolution is not yet over,[17]
in Mexicali and Tijuana.[14][15]
could enjoy security until the presidency of Lzaro Crdenas.

39.3 Legacy
After the end of the armed phase of Mexican Revolution,
and after the death of Ricardo Flores Magn in 1922, began the rescue of magonist thought, mainly due to trade
unionists in Mexico and the United States. In the postrevolutionary Mexico, the gures of Flores Magn brothers was recollected by governments, considering them
precursors of the revolution. Both the insurrection of
1910 as social rights enshrined in the Mexican Constitution of 1917 was due largely to the magonistas, which
since 1906 took up arms and drafted an economic and
social program.[16]

The Mexican Anarchist Federation, founded in 1941

and active for about 40 years, edited the newspaper
Regeneracin and spread magonist thought.
In the 1980s the magonism survived among some youth
anarcho-punk groups. The Biblioteca Social Reconstruir,
founded in 1980 by the Spanish anarchist in exile Ricardo
Mestre and located in Mexico City, was a library where
to nd anarchist literature and works on Ricardo Flores
Magn or copies of Regeneracin.[18]

In 1994, when the Zapatista Army of National Liberation

(EZLN) took up arms in Chiapas, claimed the ideas of
the Flores Magn brothers. In 1997, indigenous organizations, social groups of libertarians and municipal counHowever, although the demands that led to the revolu- cils of the state of Oaxaca, declared the Citizen Year of
from 21 November (1997) to 16
tion in theory were resolved in the Constitution and in Ricardo Flores Magn
[19]
September
1998.
the speeches of the revolutionary governments, there was
no signicant change in the lives of the most vulnerable In August 2000, driven by indigenous organizations in
populations. Also the magonistas considered not ght- the State of Oaxaca and libertarian groups in Mexico
ing to change the administrators of the state, but to abol- City, the Magonistas Days (Jornadas Magonistas) were
ish them. For this reason, the survived magonistas con- held for the 100 years of the founding of the newspaper
tinued to spread anarchist propaganda. Librado Rivera Regeneracin. In the popular uprising of Oaxaca of 2006,
was persecuted and imprisoned during the government of took part organizations and youth groups also inuenced
Plutarco Elas Calles and Enrique Flores Magn, who be- by anarchist magonistas ideals.[20]

328

CHAPTER 39. MAGONISM

39.4 Literature

[18] (Spanish) Article about the Biblioteca Social Reconstruir

[19] (Spanish) Article about the Citizen Year of Ricardo Flores

Rubn Trejo: Magonismo: utopa y revolucin,

Magn
1910-1913. 2005, Cultura Libre - ISBN 970-9815[20] (Spanish) Anarchy and libertarian currents in the Oaxaca
00-8
M. Ballesteros, J. C. Beas, B. Maldonado: Magonismo y Movimiento Indgena en Mxico. 2003, CeAcatl AC[21]

insurrectionary movement
[21] Magonismo y Movimiento Indgena en Mxico (AK Press)

39.7 External links

39.5 See also
39.6 References
This article incorporates information from the
Spanish Wikipedia.
This article incorporates information from the
Portuguese Wikipedia.
[1] Magn and Magonism at Blackwell Reference
[2] Magonism and Zapatism
[3] The Mexican Revolution (libcom.org)
[4] Review of Mexicos Revolution Then and Now, by James
D. Cockcroft (academia.edu)
[5] (Spanish) Magonismo, anarquismo en Mxico
[6] Magonismo: An Overview
[7] (Spanish) History of Magonism
[8] National Archive of Mexico, Governance Branch: Revoltosos Magonistas (1906)
[9] Magonistas at Oxford Reference
[10] (Spanish) Verdugos y Vctimas from the Ricardo Flores
Magn Archive
[11] (Spanish) Magonism; Historical Perspectives of a Mexican Anarchist Model
[12] (Spanish) Magonism and Indigenous Movement in Mexico
[13] (Spanish) The Indian in the Magonist Movement
[14] The uprising in Baja California. Libcom.org/Organise.
August 24, 2012.
[15] Lawrence D. Taylor (Winter 1999). The Magonista Revolt in Baja California. The Journal of San Diego History.
[16] (Spanish) Program of the PLM
[17] Enrique Flores Magn: Aclaraciones a la vida y obra de
Ricardo Flores Magn, La Protesta, Argentina, 30 March
1925

An overview about the magonism

(Spanish) Ricardo Flores Magn Archive

Chapter 40

Left-wing market anarchism

Left-wing market anarchism, a form of leftlibertarianism, individualist anarchism[1] and libertarian
socialism,[2][3] is associated with contemporary scholars
such as Kevin Carson,[4][5] Roderick T. Long,[6][7]
Charles Johnson,[8] Brad Spangler,[9] Samuel Edward Konkin III,[10] Sheldon Richman,[11][12][13] Chris
Matthew Sciabarra,[14] and Gary Chartier,[15] who stress
the value of radically free markets, termed freed markets
to distinguish them from the common conception which
these libertarians believe to be riddled with statist and
capitalist privileges.[16] Referred to as left-wing market
anarchists[17] or market-oriented left-libertarians,[13]
proponents of this approach strongly arm the classical
liberal ideas of self-ownership and free markets, while
maintaining that, taken to their logical conclusions, these
ideas support anti-capitalist,[18][19][20] anti-corporatist,
anti-hierarchical, pro-labor positions in economics;
anti-imperialism in foreign policy; and thoroughly liberal
or radical views regarding such cultural issues as gender,
sexuality, and race.

left-libertarians who support private property do so under the condition that recompense is oered to the local
community.

40.1 Precedents
40.1.1 19th century: Mutualism, American individualist anarchism and
Georgism
Josiah Warren is widely regarded as the rst American
anarchist,[27] and the four-page weekly paper he edited
during 1833, The Peaceful Revolutionist, was the rst anarchist periodical published,[28] an enterprise for which
he built his own printing press, cast his own type, and
made his own printing plates.[28] Warren was a follower of
Robert Owen and joined Owens community at New Harmony, Indiana. Josiah Warren termed the phrase "Cost
the limit of price", with cost here referring not to monetary price paid but the labor one exerted to produce an
item.[29] Therefore, he proposed a system to pay people
with certicates indicating how many hours of work they
did. They could exchange the notes at local time stores for
goods that took the same amount of time to produce..[27]
He put his theories to the test by establishing an experimental labor for labor store called the Cincinnati Time
Store where trade was facilitated by notes backed by a
promise to perform labor. The store proved successful
and operated for three years after which it was closed
so that Warren could pursue establishing colonies based
on mutualism. These included "Utopia" and "Modern
Times. Warren said that Stephen Pearl Andrews' The
Science of Society, published in 1852, was the most lucid and complete exposition of Warrens own theories.[30]
Catalan historian Xavier Diez report that the intentional
communal experiments pioneered by Warren were inuential in European individualist anarchists of the late 19th
and early 20th centuries such as Emile Armand and the
intentional communities started by them.[31]

The genealogy of contemporary market-oriented leftlibertarianismsometimes labeled left-wing market

anarchism[21] overlaps to a signicant degree with that
of SteinerVallentyne left-libertarianism as the roots of
that tradition are sketched in the book The Origins of LeftLibertarianism.[22] CarsonLong-style left-libertarianism
is rooted in 19th-century mutualism and in the work of
gures such as Thomas Hodgskin and the individualist anarchists Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner. While,
with notable exceptions, market-oriented libertarians after Tucker tended to ally with the political right, relationships between such libertarians and the New Left
thrived in the 1960s, laying the groundwork for modern left-wing market anarchism.[23] Left-wing market anarchism identies with Left-libertarianism (or left-wing
libertarianism)[24] which names several related but distinct approaches to politics, society, culture, and political and social theory, which stress both individual freedom and social justice. Unlike right-libertarians, they
believe that neither claiming nor mixing ones labor with
natural resources is enough to generate full private property rights,[25][26] and maintain that natural resources
(land, oil, gold, trees) ought to be held in some egalitarian Mutualism began in 18th-century English and French
manner, either unowned or owned collectively.[26] Those labour movements before taking an anarchist form associated with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in France and others
329

330
in the United States.[32] Proudhon proposed spontaneous
order, whereby organisation emerges without central authority, a positive anarchy where order arises when
everybody does what he wishes and only what he
wishes[33] and where business transactions alone produce the social order.[34] It is important to recognize that
Proudhon distinguished between ideal political possibilities and practical governance. For this reason, much in
contrast to some of his theoretical statements concerning ultimate spontaneous self-governance, Proudhon was
heavily involved in French parliamentary politics and allied himself not with Anarchist but Socialist factions of
workers movements and, in addition to advocating stateprotected charters for worker-owned cooperatives, promoted certain nationalization schemes during his life of
public service. Mutualist anarchism is concerned with
reciprocity, free association, voluntary contract, federation, and credit and currency reform. According to the
American mutualist William Batchelder Greene, each
worker in the mutualist system would receive just and
exact pay for his work; services equivalent in cost being exchangeable for services equivalent in cost, without prot or discount.[35] Mutualism has been retrospectively characterised as ideologically situated between individualist and collectivist forms of anarchism.[36] Proudhon rst characterised his goal as a third form of society,
the synthesis of communism and property.[37]

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the rst self-identied anarchist, supported a left-wing market anarchism called mutualism.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a French activist and theorist, the founder of Mutualist philosophy, an economist
and a libertarian socialist. He was the rst person to
declare himself an anarchist [38] and is among its most
inuential theorists. He is considered by many to be
the father of anarchism.[39] He became a member
of the French Parliament after the revolution of 1848,
whereupon and thereafter he referred to himself as a
federalist.[40] Proudhon, who was born in Besanon, was
a printer who taught himself Latin in order to better
print books in the language. His best-known assertion
is that Property is Theft!, contained in his rst major
work, What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and Government (Qu'est-ce que la proprit?

CHAPTER 40. LEFT-WING MARKET ANARCHISM

Recherche sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement),
published in 1840. The books publication attracted the
attention of the French authorities. It also attracted the
scrutiny of Karl Marx, who started a correspondence with
its author. The two inuenced each other: they met in
Paris while Marx was exiled there. Their friendship nally ended when Marx responded to Proudhons The
System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy
of Poverty with the provocatively titled The Poverty of
Philosophy. The dispute became one of the sources of
the split between the anarchist and Marxian wings of the
International Working Mens Association. Some, such as
Edmund Wilson, have contended that Marxs attack on
Proudhon had its origin in the latters defense of Karl
Grn, whom Marx bitterly disliked, but who had been
preparing translations of Proudhons work. Proudhon favored workers associations or co-operatives, as well as
individual worker/peasant possession, over private ownership or the nationalization of land and workplaces. He
considered social revolution to be achievable in a peaceful
manner. In The Confessions of a Revolutionary Proudhon asserted that, Anarchy is Order Without Power, the
phrase which much later inspired, in the view of some,
the anarchist circled-A symbol, today one of the most
common grati on the urban landscape.[41] He unsuccessfully tried to create a national bank, to be funded by
what became an abortive attempt at an income tax on
capitalists and shareholders. Similar in some respects to
a credit union, it would have given interest-free loans.[42]
William Batchelder Greene (18191878) was a 19thcentury mutualist individualist anarchist, Unitarian minister, soldier and promotor of free banking in the United
States. Greene is best known for the works Mutual
Banking(1850), which proposed an interest-free banking system, and Transcendentalism, a critique of the
New England philosophical school. For American anarchist historian Eunice Minette Schuster It is apparent...that Proudhonian Anarchism was to be found in
the United States at least as early as 1848 and that
it was not conscious of its anity to the Individualist Anarchism of Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews...William B. Greene presented this Proudhonian
Mutualism in its purest and most systematic form..[43]
After 1850 he became active in labor reform.[43] He
was elected vice-president of the New England Labor Reform League, the majority of the members holding to
Proudhons scheme of mutual banking, and in 1869 president of the Massachusetts Labor Union.[43] He then publishes Socialistic, Mutualistic, and Financial Fragments
(1875).[43] He saw mutualism as the synthesis of liberty
and order.[43] His associationism...is checked by individualism..."Mind your own business, Judge not that
ye be not judged. Over matters which are purely personal, as for example, moral conduct, the individual is
sovereign, as well as over that which he himself produces.
For this reason he demands mutuality in marriagethe
equal right of a woman to her own personal freedom and
property.[43]

40.1. PRECEDENTS

331
characterizes American individualist anarchism saying
that Unlike the rest of the socialist movement, the individualist anarchists believed that the natural wage of labor
in a free market was its product, and that economic exploitation could only take place when capitalists and landlords harnessed the power of the state in their interests.
Thus, individualist anarchism was an alternative both to
the increasing statism of the mainstream socialist movement, and to a classical liberal movement that was moving
toward a mere apologetic for the power of big business.
[50]
Two individualist anarchists who wrote in Benjamin
Tuckers Liberty were also important labor organizers of
the time. Joseph Labadie and Dyer Lum. Kevin Carson
has praised Dyer Lum's fusion of individualist laissezfaire economics with radical labor activism as creative
and described him as more signicant than any in the
Boston group.[51]

American individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker, known for

his libertarian journal, Liberty

A form of individualist anarchism was found in

the United States, as advocated by the Boston
anarchists.[44] Some Boston anarchists, including
Benjamin Tucker, identied themselves as "socialists",
which in the 19th century was often used in the sense
of a commitment to improving conditions of the working class (i.e. "the labor problem").[45] By around the
start of the 20th century, the heyday of individualist anarchism had passed,[46] On the other hand anarchist historian George Woodcock describes Lysander Spooner's
essays as an eloquent elaboration of Josiah Warren and
the early American development of Proudhon's ideas,
and associates his works with that of Stephen Pearl Andrews.[47] Woodcock also reports that both Lysander
Spooner and William B. Greene had been members of
the socialist First International[47] American individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker identied as a socialist,[48]
and argued that the elimination of what he called the
four monopoliesthe land monopoly, the money and
banking monopoly, the monopoly powers conferred by
patents, and the quasi-monopolistic eects of taris
would undermine the power of the wealthy and big
business, making possible widespread property ownership and higher incomes for ordinary people, while
minimizing the power of would-be bosses and achieving socialist goals without state action. Tucker inuenced and interacted with anarchist contemporaries
including Spooner, Voltairine de Cleyre, Dyer D. Lum,
and William B. Greenewho have in various ways inuenced later left-libertarian thinking.[49] Kevin Carson

Some of the American individualist anarchists later in

this era, such as Benjamin Tucker, abandoned natural
rights positions and converted to Max Stirner's Egoist anarchism. Rejecting the idea of moral rights, Tucker said
that there were only two rights, the right of might and
the right of contract. He also said, after converting to
Egoist individualism, In times past ... it was my habit
to talk glibly of the right of man to land. It was a bad
habit, and I long ago sloughed it o ... Mans only right to
land is his might over it.[52] In adopting Stirnerite egoism (1886), Tucker rejected natural rights which had long
been considered the foundation of libertarianism. This
rejection galvanized the movement into erce debates,
with the natural rights proponents accusing the egoists of
destroying libertarianism itself. So bitter was the conict
that a number of natural rights proponents withdrew from
the pages of Liberty in protest even though they had hitherto been among its frequent contributors. Thereafter,
Liberty championed egoism although its general content
did not change signicantly.[53]
Geolibertarianism, an anarchist form of Henry George's
philosophy, is considered left-libertarian because it assumes land to be initially owned in common, so that when
land is privately appropriated the proprietor pays rent
to the community.[54] Geolibertarians generally advocate
distributing the land rent to the community via a land
value tax, as proposed by Henry George and others before
him. For this reason, they are often called single taxers.
Fred E. Foldvary coined the word geo-libertarianism in
an article so titled in Land and Liberty.[55] In the case
of geoanarchism, the voluntary form of geolibertarianism as described by Foldvary, rent would be collected by
private associations with the opportunity to secede from
the rent-sharing community (and not receive the communitys services).[56]

332

CHAPTER 40. LEFT-WING MARKET ANARCHISM

ism. One variety of this kind of libertarianism has been
a resurgent mutualism, incorporating modern economic
ideas such as marginal utility theory into mutualist theory.
Kevin A. Carsons Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
helped to stimulate the growth of new-style mutualism,
articulating a version of the labor theory of value incorporating ideas drawn from Austrian economics.[65] Other
market-oriented left-libertarians have declined to embrace mutualist views of real property, while sharing the
mutualist opposition to corporate hierarchies and wealth
concentration.[66] Left-libertarians have placed particular
emphasis on the articulation and defense of a libertarian theory of class and class conict, though considerable
work in this area has been performed by libertarians of
other persuasions.[67]

Karl Hess

40.1.2

The 1960s: American libertarian- 40.2

ism and the New Left

The doyen of modern American market-oriented libertarianism, Austrian School economist Murray Rothbard,
was initially an enthusiastic partisan of the Old Right,
particularly because of its general opposition to war and
imperialism.[57] But Rothbard had long embraced a reading of American history that emphasized the role of elite
privilege in shaping legal and political institutionsone
that was thus naturally agreeable to many on the Left
and he came increasingly in the 1960s to seek alliances on
the Leftespecially with members of the New Left
in light of the Vietnam War,[58] the military draft, and the
emergence of the black power movement.[59]

Theory

Arguing that vast disparities in wealth and social inuence

result from the use of force, and especially state power,
to steal and engross land and acquire and maintain special privileges, members of this thought typically urge the
abolition of the state. They judge that, in a stateless society, the kinds of privileges secured by the state will be
absent, and injustices perpetrated or tolerated by the state
can be rectied. Thus, they conclude that, with state interference eliminated, it will be possible to achieve socialist ends by market means.[68] According to libertarian scholar Sheldon Richman:

Working with other radicals like Ronald Radosh[60] and

Karl Hess,[61] Rothbard argued that the consensus view of
American economic history, according to which a beneficent government has used its power to counter corporate predation, is fundamentally awed. Rather, he argued, government intervention in the economy has largely
beneted established players at the expense of marginalized groups, to the detriment of both liberty and equality.
Moreover, the Robber Baron period, hailed by the right
and despised by the left as a heyday of laissez-faire, was
not characterized by laissez-faire at all, but was in fact a
time of massive state privilege accorded to capital.[62] In
tandem with his emphasis on the intimate connection between state and corporate power, he defended the seizure
of corporations dependent on state largesse by workers
and others.[63]

Left-libertarians favor worker solidarity vis--vis bosses, support poor peoples

squatting on government or abandoned property, and prefer that corporate privileges be
repealed before the regulatory restrictions
on how those privileges may be exercised.
They see Walmart as a symbol of corporate
favoritismsupported by highway subsidies
and eminent domainview the ctive personhood of the limited-liability corporation
with suspicion, and doubt that Third World
sweatshops would be the best alternative
in the absence of government manipulation.
Left-libertarians tend to eschew electoral
politics, having little condence in strategies
that work through the government. They
prefer to develop alternative institutions and
methods of working around the state.[13]

Rothbard himself ultimately broke with the left, allying

himself instead with the burgeoning paleoconservative
movement.[64] However, drawing on the work of Rothbard during his alliance with the left and on the thought
of Karl Hess, some thinkers associated with marketoriented American libertarianism came increasingly to
identify with the Left on a range of issues, including
opposition to war, to corporate oligopolies and statecorporate partnerships, and an anity for cultural liberal-

Gary Chartier has joined Kevin Carson, Charles Johnson,

and others (echoing the language of Benjamin Tucker
and Thomas Hodgskin) in maintaining that, because of
its heritage and its emancipatory goals and potential, radical market anarchism should be seenby its proponents and by othersas part of the socialist tradition,
and that market anarchists can and should call themselves
socialists.[69]

40.2. THEORY

40.2.1

Labour rights

Also there is a tendency to support labour struggles.

Kevin Carson has praised individualist anarchist Dyer
Lum's fusion of individualist economics with radical labor activism as creative and described him as more
signicant than any in the Boston group.[51] Roderick
T. Long is an advocate of build[ing] worker solidarity.
On the one hand, this means formal organisation, including unionizationbut I'm not talking about the prevailing model of 'business unions ... but real unions, the
old-fashioned kind, committed to the working class and
not just union members, and interested in worker autonomy, not government patronage..[70] Long in particular
has described the situation where:

40.2.2

Cultural politics

Contemporary free-market left-libertarians also

show markedly more sympathy than mainstream or
paleolibertarians towards various cultural movements
which challenge non-governmental relations of power.
For instance, left-libertarians Roderick Long and Charles
Johnson have called for a recovery of the 19th-century
alliance with radical liberalism and feminism.[71]
While adopting familiar libertarian views, including opposition to drug prohibition, gun control, civil liberties
violations, and war, left-libertarians are more likely than
most self-identied libertarians to take more distinctively
leftist stances on issues as diverse as feminism, gender
and sexuality, class, immigration, and environmentalism.
Especially inuential regarding these topics have been
scholars including Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Roderick T.
Long, Charles W. Johnson, and Arthur Silber.

40.2.3

Theorists

Kevin Carson describes his politics as on the outer

fringes of both free market libertarianism and socialism.
He has identied the work of Benjamin Tucker, Thomas
Hodgskin, Ralph Borsodi, Paul Goodman, Lewis Mumford, and Ivan Illich as sources of inspiration for his approach to politics and economics.[72] In addition to individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker's big four monopolies (land, money, taris, and patents), Carson argues
that the state has also transferred wealth to the wealthy
by subsidizing organizational centralization, in the form
of transportation and communication subsidies. He believes that Tucker overlooked this issue due to Tuckers
focus on individual market transactions, whereas Carson
also focuses on organizational issues. The theoretical sections of Studies in Mutualist Political Economy are presented as an attempt to integrate marginalist critiques into
the labor theory of value.[73] Carson has also been highly
critical of intellectual property.[74] The primary focus of
his most recent work has been decentralized manufactur-

333
ing and the informal and household economies.[75] In response to claims that he uses the term capitalism incorrectly, Carson says he is deliberately choosing to resurrect
what he claims to be an old denition of the term in order
to make a point. He claims that the term capitalism,
as it was originally used, did not refer to a free market, but
to a type of statist class system in which capitalists controlled the state and the state intervened in the market on
their behalf.[76] Carson holds that Capitalism, arising
as a new class society directly from the old class society
of the Middle Ages, was founded on an act of robbery
as massive as the earlier feudal conquest of the land. It
has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege without which its
survival is unimaginable.[77] Carson argues that in a truly
laissez-faire system, the ability to extract a prot from labor and capital would be negligible.[78] Carson coined the
pejorative term vulgar libertarianism, a phrase that describes the use of a free market rhetoric in defense of
corporate capitalism and economic inequality. According to Carson, the term is derived from the phrase vulgar political economy, which Karl Marx described as an
economic order that deliberately becomes increasingly
apologetic and makes strenuous attempts to talk out of
existence the ideas which contain the contradictions [existing in economic life].[79]
Gary Chartier oers an understanding of property rights
as contingent but tightly constrained social strategies
reective of the importance of multiple, overlapping rationales for separate ownership and of natural law principles of practical reasonableness, defending robust but
non-absolute protections for these rights in a manner similar to that employed by David Hume.[80] This account
is distinguished both from Lockean and neo-Lockean
views which deduce property rights from the idea of selfownership and from consequentialist accounts that might
license widespread ad hoc interference with the possessions of groups and individuals.[81] Chartier uses this account to ground a clear statement of the natural law basis for the view that solidaristic wealth redistribution by
individual persons is often morally required, but as a response by individuals and grass-roots networks to particular circumstances rather than as a state-driven attempt to
achieve a particular distributive pattern.[82] He advances
detailed arguments for workplace democracy rooted in
such natural law principles as subsidiarity,[83] defending
it as morally desirable and as a likely outcome of the
elimination of injustice rather than as something to be
mandated by the state.[84] He discusses natural law approaches to land reform and to the occupation of factories by workers.[85] He objects on natural-law grounds to
intellectual property protections, drawing on his theory
of property rights more generally.[86] And he develops a
general natural law account of boycotts.[87] He has argued
that proponents of genuinely freed markets should explicitly reject capitalism and identify with the global anticapitalist movement, while emphasizing that the abuses
the anti-capitalist movement highlights result from state-

334

CHAPTER 40. LEFT-WING MARKET ANARCHISM

tolerated violence and state-secured privilege rather than [9] Spangler, Brad (15 September 2006). "Market Anarchism as Stigmergic Socialism.
from voluntary cooperation and exchange. According to
Chartier, it makes sense for [left-libertarians] to name
[10] Konkin III, Samuel Edward. The New Libertarian Maniwhat they oppose capitalism. Doing so . . . ensures
festo.
that advocates of freedom arent confused with people
who use market rhetoric to prop up an unjust status quo, [11] Richman, Sheldon (23 June 2010).
"Why LeftLibertarian?" The Freeman. Foundation for Economic
and expresses solidarity between defenders of freed marEducation.
kets and workersas well as ordinary people around
the world who use capitalism as a short-hand label for
[12] Richman, Sheldon (18 December 2009). "Workers of the
the world-system that constrains their freedom and stunts
World Unite for a Free Market. Foundation for Economic
their lives.[88]
Education.

40.3 See also

Bleeding-heart libertarianism

40.4 References
[1] Chartier, Gary; Johnson, Charles W. (2011). Markets Not
Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty. Brooklyn, NY:Minor Compositions/Autonomedia
[2] It introduces an eye-opening approach to radical social thought, rooted equally in libertarian socialism and
market anarchism. Chartier, Gary; Johnson, Charles
W. (2011). Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power,
and Structural Poverty. Brooklyn, NY:Minor Compositions/Autonomedia. Pg. Back cover
[3] But there has always been a market-oriented strand of
libertarian socialism that emphasizes voluntary cooperation between producers. And markets, properly understood, have always been about cooperation. As a commenter at Reason magazines Hit&Run blog, remarking
on Jesse Walkers link to the Kelly article, put it: every trade is a cooperative act. In fact, its a fairly common observation among market anarchists that genuinely
free markets have the most legitimate claim to the label
socialism.".Socialism: A Perfectly Good Word Rehabilitated by Kevin Carson at website of Center for a Stateless Society
[4] Carson, Kevin A. (2008). Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective. Charleston, SC:BookSurge.
[5] Carson, Kevin A. (2010). The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto. Charleston, SC:
BookSurge.
[6] Long, Roderick T. (2000). Reason and Value: Aristotle
versus Rand. Washington, DC:Objectivist Center
[7] Long, Roderick T. (2008). "An Interview With Roderick
Long"
[8] Johnson, Charles W. (2008).
"Liberty, Equality,
Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism. Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country? In Long, Roderick T. and Machan, Tibor Aldershot:
Ashgate pp. 155-88.

[13] Sheldon Richman (3 February 2011). "Libertarian Left:

Free-market anti-capitalism, the unknown ideal. The
American Conservative. Retrieved 5 March 2012.
[14] Sciabarra, Chris Matthew (2000). Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism. University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press.
[15] Chartier, Gary (2009). Economic Justice and Natural
Law. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.
[16] Gillis, William (2011). The Freed Market. In Chartier,
Gary and Johnson, Charles. Markets Not Capitalism.
Brooklyn, NY:Minor Compositions/Autonomedia. pp.
1920.
[17] Chartier, Gary; Johnson, Charles W. (2011). Markets Not
Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty. Brooklyn, NY:Minor Compositions/Autonomedia. pp. 116.
[18] Gary Chartier and Charles W. Johnson (eds). Markets
Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses,
Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty. Minor Compositions; 1st edition (November 5, 2011
[19] Writing before the rise of the CarsonLong school of leftlibertarianism, historian of American anarchism David
DeLeon was disinclined to treat any market-oriented variant of libertarianism as leftist; see DeLeon, David (1978).
The American as Anarchist: Reections on Indigenous
Radicalism. Baltimore, MD:Johns Hopkins University
Press. p. 123.
[20] Gary Chartier has joined Kevin Carson, Charles Johnson, and others (echoing the language of Benjamin Tucker
and Thomas Hodgskin) in maintaining that, because of its
heritage and its emancipatory goals and potential, radical market anarchism should be seenby its proponents
and by othersas part of the socialist tradition, and that
market anarchists can and should call themselves socialists. See Gary Chartier, Advocates of Freed Markets Should Oppose Capitalism, Free-Market AntiCapitalism?" session, annual conference, Association of
Private Enterprise Education (Csars Palace, Las Vegas, NV, April 13, 2010); Gary Chartier, Advocates of
Freed Markets Should Embrace 'Anti-Capitalism'"; Gary
Chartier, Socialist Ends, Market Means: Five Essays. Cp.
Tucker, Socialism.
[21] Chris Sciabarra is the only scholar associated with this
school of left-libertarianism who is skeptical about anarchism; see Sciabarras Total Freedom

40.4. REFERENCES

[22] Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner. The origins of Left

Libertarianism. Palgrave. 2000
[23] Long, Roderick T. (2006). "Rothbards 'Left and Right':
Forty Years Later. Rothbard Memorial Lecture, Austrian
Scholars Conference.
[24] Related, arguably synonymous, terms include libertarianism, left-wing libertarianism, egalitarian-libertarianism,
and libertarian socialism.
Sundstrom, William A. "An Egalitarian-Libertarian
Manifesto.
Bookchin, Murray and Biehl, Janet (1997). The
Murray Bookchin Reader. New York:Cassell. p.
170.
Sullivan, Mark A. (July 2003). Why the Georgist Movement Has Not Succeeded: A Personal
Response to the Question Raised by Warren J.
Samuels. American Journal of Economics and Sociology. 62:3. p. 612.
[25] Vallentyne, Peter; Steiner, Hillel; Otsuka, Michael (2005).
Why Left-Libertarianism Is Not Incoherent, Indeterminate, or Irrelevant: A Reply to Fried. Philosophy and
Public Aairs (Blackwell Publishing, Inc.) 33 (2). Retrieved 2013-07-23.
[26] Hamowy, Ronald. Left Libertarianism. The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. p. 288
[27] Palmer, Brian (2010-12-29) What do anarchists want
from us?, Slate.com
[28] William Bailie, Josiah Warren: The First American Anarchist A Sociological Study, Boston: Small, Maynard
& Co., 1906, p. 20
[29] A watch has a cost and a value. The COST consists of
the amount of labor bestowed on the mineral or natural
wealth, in converting it into metals". Warren, Josiah.
Equitable Commerce
[30] Charles A. Madison. Anarchism in the United States.
Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 6, No. 1. (Jan.,
1945), pp. 53
[31] Xavier Diez. L'Anarquisme Individualista A Espanya
1923-1938 pg. 42
[32] A member of a community, The Mutualist; this 1826 series criticised Robert Owen's proposals, and has been attributed to a dissident Owenite, possibly from the Friendly
Association for Mutual Interests of Valley Forge; Wilbur,
Shawn, 2006, More from the 1826 Mutualist"?".
[33] Proudhon, Solution to the Social Problem, ed. H. Cohen
(New York: Vanguard Press, 1927), p. 45.
[34] Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1979). The Principle of Federation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 08020-5458-7. The notion of anarchy in politics is just as
rational and positive as any other. It means that once industrial functions have taken over from political functions,
then business transactions alone produce the social order.

335

[35] Communism versus Mutualism, Socialistic, Communistic, Mutualistic and Financial Fragments. (Boston: Lee
& Shepard, 1875) William Batchelder Greene: Under
the mutual system, each individual will receive the just
and exact pay for his work; services equivalent in cost being exchangeable for services equivalent in cost, without
prot or discount; and so much as the individual laborer
will then get over and above what he has earned will come
to him as his share in the general prosperity of the community of which he is an individual member.
[36] Avrich, Paul. Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America, Princeton University Press 1996 ISBN
0-691-04494-5, p. 6
Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought, Blackwell
Publishing 1991 ISBN 0-631-17944-5, p. 11.
[37] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. What Is Property? Princeton,
MA: Benjamin R. Tucker, 1876. p. 281.
[38] The Dynamite Club, John M. Merriman, page 42
[39] Daniel Guerin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1970).
[40] Binkley, Robert C. Realism and Nationalism 18521871.
Read Books. p. 118
[41] Marshall, Peter. Demanding the Impossible. Fontana,
London. 1993. p. 558
[42] Martin, Henri, & Alger, Abby Langdon. A Popular History of France from the First Revolution to the Present
Time. D. Estes and C.E. Lauria. p. 189
[43] Native American Anarchism: A Study of Left-Wing American Individualism by Eunice Minette Schuster
[44] Levy, Carl. "Anarchism". Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2007. Archived 2009-10-31.
[45] Brooks, Frank H. 1994. The Individualist Anarchists: An
Anthology of Liberty (18811908). Transaction Publishers. p. 75.
[46] Avrich, Paul. 2006. Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of
Anarchism in America. AK Press. p. 6.
[47] Woodcock, G. (1962). Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. Melbourne: Penguin. p. 434.
[48] Tucker, Benjamin (1897). "State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree and Wherein They Dier.
Instead of a Book: By a Man Too Busy to Write One. New
York
[49] On the nineteenth-century American individualist anarchists, see James J. Martin, Men against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America (Colorado
Springs, CO: Myles 1970).
[50] Kevin Carson. Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective. BOOKSURGE. 2008. Pg. 1
[51] Carson, Kevin. May Day Thoughts: Individualist Anarchism and the Labor Movement. Mutualist Blog: Free
Market Anti-Capitalism.
[52] Tucker, Instead of a Book, p. 350

336

CHAPTER 40. LEFT-WING MARKET ANARCHISM

[53] Wendy McElroy, Benjamin Tucker, Individualism, &

Liberty: Not the Daughter but the Mother of Order
[54] Geoanarchism by Fred Foldvary.
2001-07-15. Retrieved 2013-03-26.

Anti-state.com.

[55] May/June 1981, pp. 5355.

[56] Foldvary, Fred E. (2001-07-15). Geoanarchism. antistate.com. Retrieved 2009-04-15.
[57] See Justin Raimondo, An Enemy of the State: The Life of
Murray N. Rothbard (Amherst, NY: Prometheus 2001).
[58] Cp. Raimondo 151209.
[59] See Brian M. Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian
Movement (New York: Public Aairs 2007) 338.
[60] See Murray N. Rothbard and Ronald Radosh, eds., A New
History of Leviathan: Essays on the Rise of the American
Corporate State (New York: Dutton 1972).
[61] Cp. Karl Hess, Dear America (New York: Morrow 1975).
[62] On partnerships between the state and big business and the
role of big business in promoting regulation, see Gabriel
Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 19001916 (New York: Free
1977); Butler Shaer, In Restraint of Trade: The Business
Campaign against Competition, 19181938 (Auburn, AL:
Mises 2008).
[63] Rothbard, Murray N. (15 June 1969). Conscation and
the Homestead Principle. Libertarian Forum. 1:6. pp.
34.
[64] See Raimondo 277-8; Doherty 562-5.
[65] See Kevin A. Carson, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (Charleston, SC: BookSurge 2007). This book was
the focus of a symposium in the Journal of Libertarian
Studies.
[66] See, e.g., Roderick T. Long, Land Locked: A Critique of
Carson on Property Rights, Journal of Libertarian Studies
20.1 (Winter 2006): 8795.

Comte and Charles Dunoyer (PhD diss., U of Cambridge, 1994); Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis, Journal of Libertarian Studies 9.2
(1990): 7993; Roderick T. Long, Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class, Social Philosophy and Policy 15.2
(Sum. 1998): 30349.
[68] Chartier, Gary (2009). Socialist Ends, Market Means: Five
Essays. Tulsa, OK:Tulsa Alliance of the Libertarian Left.
[69] See Gary Chartier, Advocates of Freed Markets Should
Oppose Capitalism, Free-Market Anti-Capitalism?"
session, annual conference, Association of Private Enterprise Education (Csars Palace, Las Vegas, NV, April
13, 2010); Gary Chartier, Advocates of Freed Markets Should Embrace 'Anti-Capitalism'"; Gary Chartier,
Socialist Ends, Market Means: Five Essays. Cp. Tucker,
Socialism.
[70] Richman, Sheldon (February 3, 2011). Libertarian
Left. The American Conservative. Retrieved April 16,
2014.
[71] Long, Roderick T.; Johnson, Charles W. (1 May 2005).
"Libertarian Feminism: Can this Marriage Be Saved?"
Molinari Society.
[72] Kevin A. Carson, Introduction, The Art of the Possible.
[73] Kevin A. Carson, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
chs. 1-3
[74] Carson, Kevin. Intellectual Property A Libertarian
Critique. c4ss.org. Retrieved May 23, 2009.
[75] Carson, Kevin. Industrial Policy: New Wine in Old Bottles. c4ss.org. Retrieved May 26, 2009.
[76] Carson, Kevin A. Carsons Rejoinders. Journal of Libertarian Studies, Volume 20, No. 1 (Winter 2006): 97-136,
p. 116, 117
[77] Richman, Sheldon, Libertarian Left, The American Conservative (March 2011)
[78] Dean, Brian (Winter 2002). Bluers Guide to Revolutionary Economics. The Idler. Retrieved May 24, 2009.
[79] Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, III, p. 501.

[67] Sheldon Richman, Class Struggle Rightly Conceived,

The Goal Is Freedom (Foundation for Economic Education, July 13, 2007); Nock, Our Enemy, the State; Franz
Oppenheimer, The State (San Francisco: Fox 1997); Tom
G. Palmer, Classical Liberalism, Marxism, and the Conict of Classes: The Classical Liberal Theory of Class
Conict, Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice (Washington: Cato 2009) 255-76;
Wally Conger, Agorist Class Theory: A Left Libertarian Approach to Class Conict Analysis (Agorism.info,
n.d.); Kevin A. Carson, Another Free-for-All: Libertarian Class Analysis, Organized Labor, Etc., Mutualist
Blog: Free-Market Anti-Capitalism (n.p., Jan. 26, 2006);
Walter E. Grinder and John Hagel, Toward a Theory of
State Capitalism: Ultimate Decision Making and Class
Structure, Journal of Libertarian Studies 1.1 (1977): 59
79; David M. Hart, The Radical Liberalism of Charles

[80] See Gary Chartier, Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and
Politics for a Stateless Society (New York: Cambridge UP
2013) 44-156.
[81] See Gary Chartier, Natural Law and Non-Aggression,
Acta Juridica Hungarica 51.2 (June 2010): 7996 and,
for an earlier version, Justice 3246.
[82] See Justice 4768.
[83] Justice 89120.
[84] See Gary Chartier, Pirate Constitutions and Workplace
Democracy, Jahrbuch fr Recht und Ethik 18 (2010):
44967.
[85] Justice 123-54.

40.6. EXTERNAL LINKS

[86] See Gary Chartier,' Intellectual Property and Natural

Law, Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy 36 (2011):
5888.
[87] See Justice 176-82.
[88] Richman, Sheldon, Libertarian Left, The American Conservative (March 2011)

40.5 Further reading

Kevin A. Carson, The Iron Fist behind the Invisible
Hand: Corporate Capitalism As a State-Guaranteed
System of Privilege (Nanaimo, BC: Red Lion 2001)
Kevin A. Carson, Austrian and Marxist Theories
of Monopoly-Capital (London: Libertarian Alliance
2004)
Kevin A. Carson, Contract Feudalism: A Critique of
Employer Power Over Employees (London: Libertarian Alliance 2006)
Kevin A. Carson, The Ethics of Labor Struggle: A
Free Market Perspective (n.p.: Alliance of the Libertarian Left 2008
Chartier, Gary. The Conscience of an Anarchist
(2011) Apple Valley, CA: Cobden Press. ISBN
978-1439266991. OCLC 760097242
Chartier, Gary. Economic Justice and Natural Law
(2009). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ISBN 978-0521767200. OCLC 318871444
Chartier, Gary; Johnson, Charles W. (2011). Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against
Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty. Brooklyn, NY:Minor Compositions/Autonomedia
Chartier, Gary. Anarchy and Legal Order: Law
and Politics for a Stateless Society. (2013) New
York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107032286. OCLC 795645156

40.6 External links

Alliance of the Libertarian Left
Mutualist.org, free market anti-capitalism
Center for a Stateless Society

337

Chapter 41

Communization
Communization (or communisation in British English[1] ) mainly refers to a contemporary communist theory in which we nd a mixing-up of insurrectionist anarchism, the communist ultra-left, post-autonomists, antipolitical currents, groups like the Invisible Committee,
as well as more explicitly communizing currents, such
as Thorie Communiste. Obviously at the heart of the
word is communism and, as the shift to communization suggests, communism as a particular activity and
process...[2] It is important to note the big dierences
in perception and usage. Some groups start out from an
activist voluntarism (Tiqqun, Invisible Committee), while
others derive communization as an historical and social
result emerging out of capitals development over the last
decades (Endnotes, Thorie Communiste). Endnotes totally distinguishes itself from the mixing of all sorts of
meanings of the word communization and explicitly refers
to the dierent reception in the Anglophone world as opposed to the original french milieu from which it emerged
as a critique.[3]

41.1 Theory
In communist political theory, communization is the process of abolishing ownership of the means of production,
which, in societies dominated by the capitalist mode of
production, are owned by individual capitalists, states,
or other collective bodies. In some versions of communist theory, communization is understood as the transfer of ownership from private capitalist hands to the collective hands of producers, whether in the form of cooperative enterprises or communes, or through the mediation of a state or federation of workers councils on a
local, national, or global scale. In other programs, such
as those of some left communists (e.g. Gilles Dauv),
autonomists (e.g., Mario Tronti), and libertarian communists (e.g. Peter Kropotkin), communization means the
abolition of property itself along with any state-like institutions claiming to represent a given subset of humanity.
In these accounts humanity as a whole, directly or indirectly, would take over the task of the production of goods
for use (and not for exchange). People would then have
free access to those goods rather than exchanging labor
for money, and distribution would take place according

to the maxim "from each according to his ability, to each

according to his need.

41.2 History
41.2.1 Origins and precedents
The term communization was not used by Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels, but it was employed in the above
sense by early Marxists.[4] Communization in this sense
is equivalent to the establishment of the higher phase of
communist society described by Marx in Critique of the
Gotha Program. In State and Revolution Vladimir Lenin
referred to the lower phase, organized around the principle "To each according to his contribution", as socialism, with the higher phase as complete communism,
or full communism as Joseph Stalin will later put it.
Thus both Lenin and Stalin gave grounds for thinking
of communization not as a transition from capitalism to
communism, but as a transition from socialism to communism, a transition that would take place after the working class had seized power, and which may last a long
time (in the 1930s Stalin conceived of full communism
as still a long way o[5] ). Thus the interval between the
two transitions came to be seen as a necessary period of
transition between the workers revolution and communism.
It appears that within so-called communist regimes the
demand for communization was associated with an impatience with the period of transition and a desire to
break with the remaining capitalist forms (e.g., money,
wage labor) still in place in those regimes.[6] Those pushing for a move toward communizing in this sense were
typically denounced as "ultra-left", with their suggestions
dismissed as impractical and utopian, but they were able
to point to the historical examples of the Paris Commune
and the Spanish Revolution, where more radical measures of popular collectivization had been taken than in
the Russian and Chinese revolutions, as well as to the
German Revolution of 191819 and the Italian councils
movement of 1919-1920 in which the historic "left communist" tendencies had been formed.

338

41.2. HISTORY

41.2.2

Late 20th century

339
its subsequent dissolution, and on developments in global
capitalist accumulation and class struggle.

The association of the term communization with a selfidentied "ultra-left" was cemented in France in the
1970s, where it came to describe not a transition to a 41.2.3
higher phase of communism but a vision of communist
revolution itself. Thus the 1975 Pamphlet A World Without Money states: insurrection and communisation are
intimately linked. There would not be rst a period of insurrection and then later, thanks to this insurrection, the
transformation of social reality. The insurrectional process derives its force from communisation itself.[7] This
vision was opposed to the statism and vanguardism of the
Leninist conception of revolution, but it also identied the
perceived failure of the Russian and Chinese revolutions
(carried out on the Leninist politico-military model) with
the insuciency of measures taken to abolish capitalist
social relations (e.g. lack of direct collectivization, persistence of monetary relations). It also reversed the supposed pragmatism of the Leninist focus on the state,
arguing that the nal goal of the "withering away of the
state" could hardly be advanced by the seizure of state
power and the establishment of a revolutionary bureaucracy, but that the most practical means to achieve this
goal would rather be the abolition of the capitalist relations (money, capital, wages) on which state power depends. Thus La Banquise writes:
one can foresee that a movement of communisation that destroys the State, undermines
the social base of the enemy, and spreads under
the eect of the irresistible appeal arousing the
birth of new social relations between men, will
bond together the revolutionary camp far better
than any power which, while waiting to conquer the world before communising it, would
behave no dierently than... a State.[8]
Within this 1970s French tendency communization
thus came to represent the absence of a period of transition and a conception of revolution as the application
of communist measures throughout the economy and
society.[9] The term is still used in this sense in France
today and has spread into English usage as a result of the
translation of texts by Gilles Dauv and Thorie Comuniste, two key gures in this tendency.
In collaboration with other left communists such as
Franois Martin and Karl Nesic, Dauv has attempted to
fuse, critique, and develop dierent left communist currents, most notably the Italian movement associated with
Amadeo Bordiga (and its heretical journal Invariance),
German-Dutch council communism, and the French perspectives associated with Socialisme ou Barbarie and the
Situationist International.[10] He has focused on theoretical discussions of economic issues concerning the controversial failure of Second International Marxism (including both Social Democracy and Leninist Communism), the global revolutionary upsurge of the 1960s and

Early 21st century

The Coming Insurrection

But in the late 1990s a close but not identical sense

of communization was developed by the French postsituationist group Tiqqun. In keeping with their ultra-left
predecessors, Tiqquns predilection for the term seems to
be its emphasis on communism as an immediate process
rather than a far-o goal, but for Tiqqun it is no longer
synonymous with the revolution considered as an historical event, but rather becomes identiable with all sorts
of activities from squatting and setting up communes
to simply sharing that would typically be understood
as pre-revolutionary.[11] From an ultra-left perspective
such a politics of dropping-out or, as Tiqqun put it, desertion setting up spaces and practices that are held
to be partially autonomous from capitalism is typically dismissed as either naive or reactionary.[12] Due to
the popularity of the Tiqqun-related works Call and The
Coming Insurrection in US anarchist circles it tended to be
this latter sense of communization that was employed
in US anarchist and "insurrectionist" communiques, notably within the Californian student movement of 20092010.[13] More recently its ideas have been elaborated
and extended in discussions with like-minded groups in-

340

CHAPTER 41. COMMUNIZATION

cluding the English language Endnotes and the Swedish [12] For a critique of Tiqqun from an ultra-left perspective, as
well as a description of the opposition between the two
journal Ri Ra. Together these collectives have resense of communization see "Reexions Around Call"
cently collaborated to produce Sic an international jourLetters Journal #3. See also Dauv and Nesic, Un Appel
nal of communisation (issue number one was published in
et une Invite.
[14]
2011).

41.3 See also

Socialization (economics)

41.4 References
[1] communisation. libcom.org. Retrieved 2013-10-12.
[2] Benjamin Noys (ed). Communization and its Discontents:
Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles. Minor Compositions, Autonomedia. 2011. 1st ed.

[13] See e.g. After the Fall: Communiqus from Occupied

California
[14] ""Communisation theory and the question of fascism by
Cherry Angioma. Libcom.org. Retrieved 2013-10-12.

41.5 Further reading

Bring Out Your Dead by Endnotes.
Invisible Politics - An Introduction to Contemporary Communisation by John Cunningham.
Reexions Around Call Letters Journal #3 (2009).

[3] It has thus become necessary to make the distinction: the

'communization theory' now spoken of in the Anglosphere
is largely an imaginairy entity, an artefact of the Anglophone reception of various unrelated works...For us communization does not signify some general positive process
of 'sharing' or 'making common'. It signies the specic
revolutionairy undoing of the relations of property constitutive of the capitalist class relation. " e.g. Endnotes
What are we to do?"

The Story of Our Origins by La Banquise.

[4] e.g. William Morris The Policy of Abstention (1887)

and E. Belfort Bax Et Impera (1888)

Archive of texts on communisation at the Libertarian Communist Library.

[5] See e.g. Stalins Economic Problems of Socialism of the

U.S.S.R. (1939)

After the Fall: Communiqus from Occupied California

[6] e.g. some Chinese Ultra-Left tendencies during the socalled "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
[7] A World Without Money: Communism by Les amis de
4 millions de jeunes travailleurs. (quoted passage not included in this English extract)
[8] The Story of Our OriginsLa Banquise No. 2 (1983)
[9] For an historical account see: Endnotes Bring Out Your
Dead, Endnotes no. 1 (2008). Although they do not use
the term a very similar conception can be found in the
early works of Antonio Negri, e.g. the chapter Communism and Transition in his Marx Beyond Marx (1978), as
well as in the 1980s works of the insurrectionist anarchist
Alfredo M. Bonanno.
[10] The text surveys the Italian and German lefts, Socialisme Ou Barbarie and the Situationist International and
describes the theoretical development of the French ultraleft.Re-collecting our past - La Banquise
[11] As we apprehend it, the process of instituting communism can only take the form of a collection of acts of
communisation, of making common such-and-such space,
such-and-such machine, such-and-such knowledge. That
is to say, the elaboration of the mode of sharing that attaches to them. Insurrection itself is just an accelerator, a
decisive moment in this process. Anonymous, Call

Call by Anonymous.
Communism and Transition by Antonio Negri in
Marx Beyond Marx (1978).
The Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist
Movement by Gilles Dauve and Francois Martin.

Chapter 42

Contemporary anarchism
Anarchism is a political philosophy which holds the state
to be undesirable, unnecessary, or harmful.[1][2] However, others argue that while anti-statism is central, it
is inadequate to dene anarchism solely on this basis.[3]
Therefore, they argue instead that anarchism entails opposing authority or hierarchical organization in the conduct of human relations, including, but not limited to,
the state system.[4][5][6][7][8][9][10] Proponents of this form
of anarchism advocate stateless societies based on nonhierarchical free associations.[5][11][12][13][14]
Since the last third of the 20th century, anarchists have
been involved in student protest movements, peace movements, squatter movements, and the anti-globalization Members of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist trade union CNT
movement, among others. Anarchists have participated marching in Madrid in 2010
in violent revolutions (such as in Revolutionary Catalonia
and the Free Territory) and anarchist political organizations (such as IWA-AIT or the IWW) exist since the 19th
ham's Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarcentury.
ian Ideas, Volume Two, The Emergence of the New Anarchism (1939-1977). Although feminist tendencies have
always been a part of the anarchist movement in the form
of anarcha-feminism, they returned with vigour during
42.1 Overview
the second wave of feminism in the 1960s. The American
Civil Rights Movement and the movement against the war
Anarchism was inuential in the Counterculture of the
in Vietnam also contributed to the revival of North Amer1960s[15][16][17] and anarchists actively participated in the ican anarchism. European anarchism of the late 20th cenlate sixties students and workers revolts.[18] In 1968 in
tury drew much of its strength from the labour movement,
Carrara, Italy the International of Anarchist Federations and both have incorporated animal rights activism. Anwas founded during an international anarchist conferarchist anthropologist David Graeber and anarchist hisence held there in 1968 by the three existing European torian Andrej Grubacic have posited a rupture between
federations of France (the Fdration Anarchiste), the
generations of anarchism, with those who often still have
Federazione Anarchica Italiana of Italy and the Iberian not shaken the sectarian habits of the 19th century conAnarchist Federation as well as the Bulgarian federation trasted with the younger activists who are much more inin French exile.[19][20]
formed, among other elements, by indigenous, feminist,
In the United Kingdom in the 1970s this was associated ecological and cultural-critical ideas, and who by the
with the punk rock movement, as exemplied by bands turn of the 21st century formed by far the majority of
such as Crass and the Sex Pistols.[21] The housing and anarchists.[23]
employment crisis in most of Western Europe led to the Around the turn of the 21st century, anarchism grew in
formation of communes and squatter movements like that popularity and inuence as part of the anti-war, antiof Barcelona, Spain. In Denmark, squatters occupied a capitalist, and anti-globalisation movements.[24] Anardisused military base and declared the Freetown Chris- chists became known for their involvement in protests
tiania, an autonomous haven in central Copenhagen.
against the meetings of the World Trade Organization
Since the revival of anarchism in the mid 20th (WTO), Group of Eight, and the World Economic Focentury,[22] a number of new movements and schools rum. Some anarchist factions at these protests engaged
of thought emerged, well documented in Robert Gra- in rioting, property destruction, and violent confronta341

342

CHAPTER 42. CONTEMPORARY ANARCHISM

tions with police. These actions were precipitated by ad

hoc, leaderless, anonymous cadres known as black blocs;
other organisational tactics pioneered in this time include
security culture, anity groups and the use of decentralised technologies such as the internet.[24] A signicant
event of this period was the confrontations at WTO conference in Seattle in 1999.[24]
International anarchist federations in existence include the International of Anarchist Federations, the
International Workers Association, and International
Libertarian Solidarity. The largest organised anarchist movement today is in Spain, in the form of the
Confederacin General del Trabajo (CGT) and the CNT.
CGT membership was estimated at around 100,000 for
2003.[25] Other active syndicalist movements include in
Sweden the Central Organisation of the Workers of Sweden and the Swedish Anarcho-syndicalist Youth Federation; the CNT-AIT in France;[26] the Union Sindicale Italiana in Italy; in the US Workers Solidarity Alliance and
the UK Solidarity Federation. The revolutionary industrial unionist Industrial Workers of the World, claiming
10,000 paying members, and the International Workers
Association, an anarcho-syndicalist successor to the First
International, also remain active.

42.2 Post-classical
schools
thought and movements

of

Anarchism continues to generate many philosophies and

movements, at times eclectic, drawing upon various
sources, and syncretic, combining disparate concepts to
create new philosophical approaches.[27]
Anarcha-feminism developed as a synthesis
of radical feminism and anarchism that views
patriarchy (male domination over women) as a
fundamental manifestation of compulsory government. It was inspired by the late 19th century
writings of early feminist anarchists such as Lucy
Parsons, Emma Goldman, and Voltairine de Cleyre.
Anarcha-feminists, like other radical feminists,
criticize and advocate the abolition of traditional
conceptions of family, education, and gender roles.
Green anarchism (or eco-anarchism)[28] is a school
of thought within anarchism that emphasizes environmental issues,[29] with an important precedent in anarcho-naturism,[30][31][32] and whose main
contemporary currents are anarcho-primitivism and
social ecology.
Anarcho-syndicalism is a movement within anarchism that seeks to organize society along economic
syndicalism. Among its proponents include Noam
Chomsky who said it is highly relevant to advanced
industrial societies.[33]

Anarcho-pacism is a tendency that rejects violence in the struggle for social change (see
non-violence).[34][35] It developed mostly in the
Netherlands, Britain, and the United States, before
and during the Second World War".[35] Christian
anarchism is a movement in political theology that
combines anarchism and Christianity.[36] Its main
proponents included Leo Tolstoy, Dorothy Day,
Ammon Hennacy, and Jacques Ellul.
Platformism is a tendency within the wider anarchist
movement based on the organisational theories in
the tradition of Dielo Truda's Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft).[37]
The document was based on the experiences of
Russian anarchists in the 1917 October Revolution, which led eventually to the victory of the
Bolsheviks over the anarchists and other groups.
The Platform attempted to address and explain the
anarchist movements failures during the Russian
Revolution. Today Platformism is an important
current in international anarchism. Around thirty
platformists and especistas are linked together
in the Anarkismo.net project, including groups
from Africa, Latin America, North America and
Europe.[38] At least in terms of the number of afliated organisations, the Anarkismo network is
larger than other anarchist international bodies, like
the International of Anarchist Federations and the
International Workers Association. It is not, however, a formal international and has no intention of
competing with these other formations. Today there
are organisations inspired by the Platform in many
countries, including the Workers Solidarity Movement in Ireland, Common Struggle/Lucha Comn
in the United States, the Union Communiste Libertaire in Quebec, Common Cause[39] in Ontario,
the Federacin Comunista Libertaria (FCL) and Organizacin Comunista Libertaria (OCL) in Chile,
the Federacin Anarco-Comunista de Argentina
(FACA) and Lnea Anarco-Comunista (LAC) in
Argentina, the Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici
(FdCA) in Italy, the Frum do Anarquismo Organizado in Brazil, Unin Socialista Libertaria in
Peru, the Organisation Communiste Libertaire and
Alternative Libertaire in France, the Alianza de los
Comunistas Libertarios (ACL) in Mexico, the Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group (MACG) and
Sydney Anarchist Communist Trajectory (SACT)
in Australia, Motmakt in Norway, Libertre Socialister in Denmark, Collective Action in the UK,
the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF)
in South Africa, and the Revolutionary Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists by the name of N. I.
Makhno (RKAS), which is an international anarchosyndicalist, platformist confederation with sections
and individual members in Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Germany, Latvia, Bulgaria and Israel. Organ-

42.2. POST-CLASSICAL SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT AND MOVEMENTS

isations inspired by the Platform were also among
the founders of the now-defunct International Libertarian Solidarity network and its successor, the
Anarkismo network; which is run collaboratively by
roughly 30 platformist and especista organisations
around the world.

Contemporary members of the Italian Anarchist Federation

marching in Rome in 2008 in an anti-catholic church manifestation. The text translates as free from dogmas, always heretics

Synthesis anarchism is a form of anarchist organization that tries to join anarchists of dierent tendencies under the principles of anarchism without
adjectives.[40] In the 1920s, this form found as its
main proponents the anarcho-communists Voline
and Sbastien Faure.[40][41] It is the main principle behind the anarchist federations grouped around
the contemporary global International of Anarchist
Federations.[40] The International of Anarchist Federations (IAF/IFA) was founded during an international anarchist conference in Carrara in 1968 by
the three existing European anarchist federations of
France (Fdration Anarchiste), Italy(Federazione
Anarchica Italiana) and Spain (Federacin Anarquista Ibrica) as well as the Bulgarian federation in
French exile. These organizations were also inspired
on synthesist principles.[40] Currently alongside the
previously mentioned federations, the IAF includes
the Argentine Libertarian Federation, the Anarchist
Federation of Belarus, the Federation of Anarchists
in Bulgaria, the Czech-Slovak Anarchist Federation,
the Federation of German speaking Anarchists in
Germany and Switzerland, and the Anarchist Federation in the United Kingdom and Ireland.[42]
Post-left anarchy is a recent current in anarchist
thought that promotes a critique of anarchisms relationship to traditional Left-wing politics. Some
post-leftists seek to escape the connes of ideology
in general also presenting a critique of organizations
and morality.[43] Inuenced by the work of Max

343

Stirner[43] and by the Marxist Situationist International,[43] post-left anarchy is marked by a focus on
social insurrection and a rejection of leftist social
organisation.[44]
Insurrectionary anarchism is a revolutionary theory,
practice, and tendency within the anarchist movement which emphasizes insurrection within anarchist practice.[45][46] It is critical of formal organizations such as labor unions and federations that
are based on a political programme and periodic
congresses.[45] Instead, insurrectionary anarchists
advocate informal organization and small anity
group based organization.[45][46] Insurrectionary anarchists put value in attack, permanent class conict, and a refusal to negotiate or compromise with
class enemies.[45][46] The Informal Anarchist Federation (not to be confused with the synthesist Italian
Anarchist Federation also FAI ) is an Italian insurrectionary anarchist organization.[47] It has been described by Italian intelligence sources as a horizontal structure of various anarchist terrorist groups,
united in their beliefs in revolutionary armed action. In 2003, the group claimed responsibility for
a bomb campaign targeting several European Union
institutions.[48][49] In 2010, Italys postal service intercepted a threatening letter containing a bullet
addressed to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.[50]
A large envelope containing a letter addressed to
Berlusconi with the threat you will end up like a rat
was discovered on Friday in a post oce in the Libate suburb of the northern city of Milan. On 23 December 2010, credit for exploding parcels delivered
to the Swiss and Chilean embassies in Rome was
claimed by the Informal Anarchist Federation,.[51]
Post-anarchism is a theoretical move towards
a synthesis of classical anarchist theory and
poststructuralist thought, drawing from diverse
ideas including post-modernism, autonomist
marxism, post-left anarchy, situationism, and
postcolonialism.
Analytical anarchism, which
partly began as a response to analytical Marxism,
is a recent development in academia that uses the
methods of analytic philosophy to clarify or defend
anarchist theory.[52] Analytical anarchists include
Robert Paul Wol, Alan Carter, and Michael
Taylor. Wol argues that we have no obligation
to obey the state, while Carter argues that the
state cannot be trusted to liberate the people, and
Taylor uses game theory to argue that cooperation
is possible without the state.[53]
Free-market anarchism, usually referring to
anarcho-capitalism, is a political philosophy advocating property rights and the non-aggression
principle. It is most common in the United
States.[54] It is based on a belief in the freedom

344

CHAPTER 42. CONTEMPORARY ANARCHISM

to own private property, a rejection of any form
of governmental authority or intervention, and
the upholding of the competitive free market as
the main mechanism for social interaction.[55]
Anarcho-capitalists advocate for all services,
including law enforcement and security, to be performed by multiple private providers all competing
for business, rather than by a monopolist state
agency funded by taxation. Anarcho-capitalisms
proponents include Murray Rothbard, David D.
Friedman, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Walter Block,
and Stefan Molyneux.

42.3 New Anarchism

New Anarchism is a term that has been notably used by
Andrej Grubacic, amongst others, to describe the most
recent reinvention of the anarchist thought and practice.
What distinguishes the new anarchism of today from the
new anarchism of the 1960s and 1970s, or from the work
of US-UK based authors like Murray Bookchin, Paul
Goodman, Herbert Read, Colin Ward and Alex Comfort,
is its emphasis on the global perspective. Some of essays
on new anarchism include David Graeber's New Anarchists in A Movement of Movements: is Another World
Really possible?, ed. Tom Mertes (London: Verso, 2004)
and Grubacics Towards Another Anarchism in World
Social Forum: Challenging Empires, ed. Jai Sen and Peter
Waterman (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2007).[56][57]

42.4 See also

Anarchist schools of thought
History of anarchism

42.5 References
[1] Malatesta, Errico. Towards Anarchism. MAN! (Los
Angeles: International Group of San Francisco). OCLC
3930443. Archived from the original on 7 November
2012. Agrell, Siri (14 May 2007). Working for The
Man. The Globe and Mail. Archived from the original
on 16 May 2007. Retrieved 14 April 2008. Anarchism.
Encyclopdia Britannica. Encyclopdia Britannica Premium Service. 2006. Archived from the original on 14
December 2006. Retrieved 29 August 2006. Anarchism. The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: 14. 2005. Anarchism is the view that a society without the state, or government, is both possible and desirable. The following sources cite anarchism as a political
philosophy: Mclaughlin, Paul (2007). Anarchism and Authority. Aldershot: Ashgate. p. 59. ISBN 0-7546-61962. Johnston, R. (2000). The Dictionary of Human Geography. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers. p. 24. ISBN
0-631-20561-6.

[2] Slevin, Carl. Anarchism. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics. Ed. Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan.
Oxford University Press, 2003.
[3] Anarchists do reject the state, as we will see. But to claim
that this central aspect of anarchism is denitive is to sell
anarchism short.Anarchism and Authority: A Philosophical Introduction to Classical Anarchism by Paul McLaughlin. AshGate. 2007. pg. 28
[4] Authority is dened in terms of the right to exercise social control (as explored in the sociology of power) and
the correlative duty to obey (as explored in the philosophy of practical reason). Anarchism is distinguished,
philosophically, by its scepticism towards such moral
relations-by its questioning of the claims made for such
normative power- and, practically, by its challenge to
those authoritative powers which cannot justify their
claims and which are therefore deemed illegitimate or
without moral foundation.Anarchism and Authority: A
Philosophical Introduction to Classical Anarchism by Paul
McLaughlin. AshGate. 2007. pg. 1
[5] IAF principles. International of Anarchist Federations.
Archived from the original on 5 January 2012. The IAF
- IFA ghts for : the abolition of all forms of authority
whether economical, political, social, religious, cultural or
sexual.
[6] Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the
human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation
of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social
wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being
free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations. Emma Goldman. What it Really Stands for
Anarchy in Anarchism and Other Essays.
[7] Individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker dened anarchism as opposition to authority as follows They found
that they must turn either to the right or to the left,
follow either the path of Authority or the path of Liberty. Marx went one way; Warren and Proudhon the other.
Thus were born State Socialism and Anarchism ... Authority, takes many shapes, but, broadly speaking, her enemies divide themselves into three classes: rst, those who
abhor her both as a means and as an end of progress, opposing her openly, avowedly, sincerely, consistently, universally; second, those who profess to believe in her as a
means of progress, but who accept her only so far as they
think she will subserve their own selsh interests, denying
her and her blessings to the rest of the world; third, those
who distrust her as a means of progress, believing in her
only as an end to be obtained by rst trampling upon, violating, and outraging her. These three phases of opposition to Liberty are met in almost every sphere of thought
and human activity. Good representatives of the rst are
seen in the Catholic Church and the Russian autocracy; of
the second, in the Protestant Church and the Manchester
school of politics and political economy; of the third, in
the atheism of Gambetta and the socialism of Karl Marx.
Benjamin Tucker. Individual Liberty.

42.5. REFERENCES

[8] Ward, Colin (1966). Anarchism as a Theory of Organization. Archived from the original on 25 March 2010.
Retrieved 1 March 2010.
[9] Anarchist historian George Woodcock report of Mikhail
Bakunin's anti-authoritarianism and shows opposition to
both state and non-state forms of authority as follows: All
anarchists deny authority; many of them ght against it.
(pg. 9) ... Bakunin did not convert the Leagues central committee to his full program, but he did persuade
them to accept a remarkably radical recommendation to
the Berne Congress of September 1868, demanding economic equality and implicitly attacking authority in both
Church and State.
[10] Brown, L. Susan (2002). Anarchism as a Political Philosophy of Existential Individualism: Implications for
Feminism. The Politics of Individualism: Liberalism,
Liberal Feminism and Anarchism. Black Rose Books Ltd.
Publishing. p. 106.
[11] That is why Anarchy, when it works to destroy authority in all its aspects, when it demands the abrogation of
laws and the abolition of the mechanism that serves to
impose them, when it refuses all hierarchical organization
and preaches free agreement at the same time strives
to maintain and enlarge the precious kernel of social customs without which no human or animal society can exist. Peter Kropotkin. Anarchism: its philosophy and ideal
[12] anarchists are opposed to irrational (e.g., illegitimate)
authority, in other words, hierarchy hierarchy being
the institutionalisation of authority within a society. B.1
Why are anarchists against authority and hierarchy?" in
An Anarchist FAQ
[13] ANARCHISM, a social philosophy that rejects authoritarian government and maintains that voluntary institutions are best suited to express mans natural social tendencies. George Woodcock. Anarchism at The Encyclopedia of Philosophy
[14] In a society developed on these lines, the voluntary associations which already now begin to cover all the elds of
human activity would take a still greater extension so as
to substitute themselves for the state in all its functions.
Peter Kropotkin. Anarchism from the Encyclopdia
Britannica
[15] These groups had their roots in the anarchist resurgence
of the nineteen sixties. Young militants nding their way
to anarchism, often from the anti-bomb and anti-Vietnam
war movements, linked up with an earlier generation of
activists, largely outside the ossied structures of ocial
anarchism. Anarchist tactics embraced demonstrations,
direct action such as industrial militancy and squatting,
protest bombings like those of the First of May Group
and Angry Brigade and a spree of publishing activity.""Islands of Anarchy: Simian, Cienfuegos, Refract and
their support network by John Patten
[16] Farrell provides a detailed history of the Catholic Workers and their founders Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. He
explains that their pacism, anarchism, and commitment
to the downtrodden were one of the important models
and inspirations for the 60s. As Farrell puts it, Catholic

345

Workers identied the issues of the sixties before the Sixties began, and they oered models of protest long before
the protest decade.The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar Radicalism by James J. Farrell
[17] While not always formally recognized, much of the
protest of the sixties was anarchist. Within the nascent
womens movement, anarchist principles became so
widespread that a political science professor denounced
what she saw as "The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Several groups have called themselves Amazon Anarchists.
After the Stonewall Rebellion, the New York Gay Liberation Front based their organization in part on a reading
of Murray Bookchin's anarchist writings. Anarchism
by Charley Shively in Encyclopedia of Homosexuality. pg.
52
[18] Within the movements of the sixties there was much
more receptivity to anarchism-in-fact than had existed in
the movements of the thirties...But the movements of the
sixties were driven by concerns that were more compatible with an expressive style of politics, with hostility to
authority in general and state power in particular...By the
late sixties, political protest was intertwined with cultural
radicalism based on a critique of all authority and all hierarchies of power. Anarchism circulated within the movement along with other radical ideologies. The inuence of
anarchism was strongest among radical feminists, in the
commune movement, and probably in the Weather Underground and elsewhere in the violent fringe of the antiwar movement. Anarchism and the Anti-Globalization
Movement by Barbara Epstein
[19] London Federation of Anarchists involvement in Carrara
conference, 1968 International Institute of Social History.
Retrieved 19 January 2010
[20] Short history of the IAF-IFA A-infos news project. Retrieved 19 January 2010
[21] McLaughlin, Paul (2007). Anarchism and Authority.
Aldershot: Ashgate. p. 10. ISBN 0-7546-6196-2.
[22] Williams, Leonard (September 2007). Anarchism
Revived. New Political Science 29 (3): 297312.
doi:10.1080/07393140701510160.
[23] David Graeber and Andrej Grubacic, "Anarchism, Or The
Revolutionary Movement Of The Twenty-rst Century",
ZNet. Retrieved 2007-12-13. or Graeber, David and
Grubacic, Andrej(2004)Anarchism, Or The Revolutionary Movement Of The Twenty-rst Century Retrieved 26
July 2010
[24] Rupert, Mark (2006). Globalization and International Political Economy. Lanham: Rowman & Littleeld Publishers. p. 66. ISBN 0-7425-2943-6.
[25] Carley, Mark Trade union membership 19932003
(International:SPIRE Associates 2004).
[26] http://www.cnt-ait-fr.org/CNT-AIT/ACCUEIL.html
Website of the Confdration Nationale du Travail Association Internationale des Travailleurs
[27] Perlin, Terry M. Contemporary Anarchism. Transaction
Books, New Brunswick, NJ 1979

346

CHAPTER 42. CONTEMPORARY ANARCHISM

[28] David Pepper (1996). Modern Environmentalism p. 44.

Routledge.

[49] Italy acts over EU letter bombs. CNN. 31 December

2003.

[29] Ian Adams (2001). Political Ideology Today p. 130.

Manchester University Press.

[50] http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010%
5C03%5C28%5Cstory_28-3-2010_pg4_6

[30] Diez, Xavier. La insumisin voluntaria (in Spanish).

Acracia. Retrieved 5 September 2013.

[51] Associated Press. Rome Embassy Blasts Wound 2; Anarchists Suspected. National Public Radio. Retrieved 23
December 2010.

[31] Anarchism and the dierent Naturist views have always

been related.Anarchism - Nudism, Naturism by Carlos Ortega at Asociacion para el Desarrollo Naturista de la
Comunidad de Madrid. Published on Revista ADN. Winter 2003
[32] EL NATURISMO LIBERTARIO EN LA PENNSULA
IBRICA (1890-1939) by Jose Maria Rosello
[33] The Relevance of Anarcho-syndicalism
[34] Ostergaard, Georfrey. RESISTING THE NATION
STATE the pacist and anarchist tradition. Peace Pledge
Union. Retrieved 5 September 2013.
[35] George Woodcock. Anarchism: A History of Libertarian
Ideas and Movements (1962)
[36] Christoyannopoulos, Alexandre (2010). Christian Anarchism: A Political Commentary on the Gospel. Exeter:
Imprint Academic. pp. 24. Locating Christian anarchism...In political theology
[37] Dielo Trouda group (2006) [1926]. Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft). Italy:
FdCA. Archived from the original on 11 March 2007. Retrieved 24 October 2006.
[38] Anarkismo,
2012,
About
Us
|url=http:
//www.anarkismo.net/about_us
|accessdate=5
January 2012|

[52] Carter, Alan, Analytical anarchism: some conceptual

foundations, Political Theory 28, 2 (2000): 23053
[53] Taylor, Michael, Anarchy and Cooperation (New York:
John Wiley & Sons, 1976)
[54] Sargent, Lyman Tower. Extremism in American: A
Reader, NYU Press, 1995, p. 11; Also, Tormey, Simon,
Anti-Capitalism, A Beginners Guide, Oneworld Publications, 2004, p. 118-119 Pro-capitalist anarchism, is as
one might expect, particularly prevalent in the U.S. where
it feeds on the strong individualist and libertarian currents
that have always been part of the American political imaginary. To return to the point, however, there are individualist anarchists who are most certainly not anti-capitalist
and there are those who may well be.
[55] anarcho-capitalism. Oxford English Dictionary. 2004.
Oxford University Press
[56] http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/9258
David
Graeber and Andrej Grubacic, Anarchism or the
Revolutionary Movement of the 21st Century,
[57] Leonard Williams, The New Anarchists, paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA, August 31,
2006, online, pdf, 2008-05-07 http://www.allacademic.
com/meta/p152623_index.html

[39] Common Cause/Linchpin

[40] J.3.2 What are synthesis federations?" in An Anarchist
FAQ
[41] The remedy has been found:
libertarian
communism.Sbastien Faure.
Libertarian Communism
[42] IFA-IAF pagina ocial
[43] Post-Left Anarchy: Leaving the Left Behind Prologue to
Post-Left Anarchy by Jason McQuinn
[44] Macphee, Josh (2007). Introduction. Realizing the Impossible. Stirling: AK Press. ISBN 1-904859-32-1.
[45] Some Notes on Insurrectionary Anarchism from Venomous Buttery and Willful Disobedience
[46] ""Anarchism, insurrections and insurrectionalism by Joe
Black. Ainfos.ca. 19 July 2006. Archived from the original on 6 December 2010. Retrieved 20 September 2010.
[47] MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base
[48] Bologna mail blocked after bombs. BBC News. 31 December 2003.

42.6 External links

Amster, Randall, et al. (eds.), Contemporary Anarchist Studies. Routledge, New York/UK 2009.
Graham, Robert. Ed.The New Anarchism (19742012). Black Rose Books,Montreal 2012.
Perlin, Terry M. Contemporary Anarchism. Transaction Books, New Brunswick, NJ 1979.

42.7. TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

347

42.7 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

42.7.1

Text

Libertarian socialism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian%20socialism?oldid=637118467 Contributors: AxelBoldt, The

Cunctator, Derek Ross, Eloquence, DanKeshet, Larry Sanger, Eclecticology, Arvindn, Toby Bartels, DavidLevinson, Graft, GrahamN,
Camembert, Tzartzam, N8chz, Soulpatch, Quercusrobur, Olivier, Edward, Lir, Infrogmation, Tillwe, Michael Hardy, LenBudney, MartinHarper, Sam Francis, 172, Paul A, Radicalsubversiv, Ams80, Muriel Gottrop, Snoyes, Angela, Ugen64, Sir Paul, Cadr, Atob, Harry
Potter, Tb, Wik, Zoicon5, Foodman, Tpbradbury, Hyacinth, Kevehs, Optim, Pstudier, Jerzy, SonofRage, Hajor, Owen, Jni, Robbot, Chris
73, Xiaopo, Fifelfoo, Goethean, Psychonaut, Sam Spade, Chris Roy, Mirv, Kesuari, AaronS, (:Julien:), Sunray, Michael Snow, Seano1,
Wayland, MikeCapone, JacobCurtis, Snobot, Psb777, Matt Gies, Cobra libre, Nikodemos, Taion, Nat Krause, Lussmu, Millerc, Crag,
Satorishi, Grant65, Bobblewik, Bacchiad, OldakQuill, Gadum, Telso, UgenBot, Phe, Thorn969, Savant1984, Kaldari, Mzajac, Martin
Wisse, Tothebarricades.tk, Sam Hocevar, Creidieki, Davidstrauss, Gazpacho, N-k, CannedLizard, Rich Farmbrough, Rhobite, Guanabot,
MarkDilley, Metamatic, Silence, Tony Kao, Tsujigiri, Bender235, Ntennis, Curunwe, Ebrooks, Aranel, Livajo, Lycurgus, Causa sui,
Cretog8, Che y Marijuana, Infocidal, Chuck F, .:Ajvol:., Alpheus, La goutte de pluie, VBGFscJUn3, Catlingm, Sam Korn, Knucmo2,
Mr. Ibrahim, Eleland, Dalinian, Improv, Darrelljon, Wikidea, Rfgdxm, Radical Mallard, Ombudsman, Max rspct, RJII, Bookandcoee,
Dtobias, Saii, Woohookitty, Jacob Haller, Commander Keane, Lapsed Pacist, Plrk, Toussaint, Graham87, Descendall, Szorko, Rjwilmsi,
Notapond, Harry491, Akohler, X1011, Zanturaeon, The wub, DickClarkMises, Firebug, Loof Lirpa, FlaBot, Ian Pitchford, Michaelbluejay, SchuminWeb, Ground Zero, Harmil, Alberrosidus, Jrtayloriv, Born2cycle, Zaxios, Saswann, Adamburton, Chobot, Jersey Devil,
Bgwhite, Manscher, RobotE, RussBot, BernardL, Conscious, Pigman, DanMS, Stephenb, Gaius Cornelius, Kyorosuke, Draeco, PaulGarner, NawlinWiki, Bachrach44, Leutha, Nirvana2013, NickBush24, Yoninah, Equilibrial, Akulaalfa, Palpalpalpal, M3taphysical, Tullie,
LamontCranston, Deville, Itake, Zzuuzz, Mike Dillon, Nikkimaria, Arthur Rubin, John humphreys, Cassandraleo, RunOrDie, Jade Knight,
Sardanaphalus, Intangible, Attilios, Veinor, SmackBot, Nicolas Barbier, Zazaban, Reedy, InverseHypercube, Darkstar1st, Batman Jr.,
WookieInHeat, Free.dog, Frymaster, GreggW, Revkat, Teemu Ruskeep, Chris the speller, Bluebot, Polotet, Pietaster, Full Shunyata,
DStoykov, Ladislav the Posthumous, CMacMillan, Colonies Chris, Zachorious, Chesaguy, Battlecry, Light in Water, Kinders, Wine Guy,
AndySimpson, SwitChar, Harris0, Horses In The Sky, Aeln, BullRangifer, Byelf2007, The Ungovernable Force, Cast, Krashlandon,
Tazmaniacs, Felix-felix, Gobonobo, Clore, CJames745, Libertatia, N1h1l, UKER, SandyGeorgia, Ttlxxx, Gothic Embrace, Iridescent,
Lollernets, Theoldanarchist, BlackFlag, Tony Fox, RekishiEJ, Octane, Linkspamremover, Malickfan86, Albertod4, CmdrObot, Bobfrombrockley, John Riemann Soong, Vision Thing, JohnCD, ShelfSkewed, Thetasigmapi, Onemanbandbjm, Musicalantonio, Shanoman, Perfect
Proposal, Spylab, DumbBOT, G3papad, Salvor Hardin, Andrew250, Donnachadelong, InSpace, Jed, Frank, Benny K, Stratvic, Mmortal03, AntiVandalBot, Liquid-aim-bot, Carolmooredc, Prolog, PatriotFirst, Dylan Lake, FfaHog, Darklilac, Kepin, Blahblahblahblahblahblah, Skomorokh, Samil20, Yahel Guhan, Magioladitis, JNW, Harel, ThatsHot, Couki, Lenschulwitz, Torchiest, Orangefg, Fang 23,
Anarcho-capitalism, Barttomlin, Rickard Vogelberg, Asecondforever, FisherQueen, R'n'B, AlexiusHoratius, UlliD, All Is One, Revoranii,
Eric Alan Isaacson, DadaNeem, Madhava 1947, Bonadea, Djr13, Harris88, Funandtrvl, Malik Shabazz, VolkovBot, QuackGuru, Toffel07, Lynxmb, Josephholsten, TouristPhilosopher, Bsharvy, Sjeng, Imasleepviking, JhsBot, Supertask, BotKung, MearsMan, Billinghurst,
Naama, Seraphita, Dylansmrjones, Etcetc, MuzikJunky, Teknolyze, Fibo1123581321, Adabow, Le Pied-bot, Likeminas, Illegal editor,
The Four Deuces, Jbaranek, DeepQuasar, JL-Bot, Operation Spooner, Lenerd, ClueBot, EoGuy, Lawrence Cohen, Nnemo, TheOldJacobite, Cirt, Passargea, Solar-Wind, Singwaste, Kakofonous, Corrado 72, Dylan38, Editor2020, Vanished user uih38riiw4hjlsd, DumZiBoT,
Lerner.hu, BigK HeX, XLinkBot, User2102, GnomeUrthona, Stonewhite, Addbot, Fan of Freedom, Wingspeed, ContiAWB, Leszek
Jaczuk, Download, Woland1234, Zedweiller, JohnnyPolo24, Ben Ben, Yobot, Apollonius 1236, Slimerance, Richard Blatant, Eduen,
CounterEconomics, Mnation2, AnomieBOT, Floquenbeam, Jim1138, OpenFuture, AdjustShift, Ulric1313, Materialscientist, Citation bot,
LilHelpa, Gsmgm, TheBTMANIAC5, JALatimer, Gatorade0192837465, Srich32977, Omnipaedista, Jadabocho, Costho, Amaury, JeanJacques Georges, Jugis, Jibbideejibbish, Alpha-ZX, Ennio morricone, Shadowjams, Entuluve, Introman, A. di M., Destructive Creation,
FrescoBot, Adam9389, Telofy, Citation bot 1, Biker Biker, Kozmik ironi, Skyerise, North8000, Theo10011, Troop69, Commissarusa,
Aircorn, Sbrianhicks, Jprattx, Rami radwan, GoingBatty, Dave l sexton, Tisane, Joaosac, A50000, Jjcascadia, Jarrito, Doctor Procedure,
Anir1uph, Unused000705, Semmler, SporkBot, MisterDub, , Seven days seven nights, AndyTheGrump, Sentimmm33, Helpsome, ClueBot NG, Green4liberty, Somedierentstu, LittleJerry, Helpful Pixie Bot, Gob Lofa, Onebiglie, Lowercase sigmabot, BG19bot, Compfreak7, Glacialfox, BattyBot, StarryGrandma, Rarkenin, IjonTichyIjonTichy, Aua1422, Sabiusaugustus, Poplarcod, Depakin, Leninostu,
Ross Hill, CreazyHorse36, CsDix, Jodosma, YiFeiBot, Androgyne, Monkbot, Denisrodman88, Crisbucek, Jstnwiki, BenLinus1214 and
Anonymous: 486
Anti-capitalism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-capitalism?oldid=637043783 Contributors: Guppie, William Avery, SimonP,
HollyAm, MartinHarper, 172, CesarB, Sir Paul, Nv8200p, Kevehs, Owen, Jni, Nikodemos, Millerc, CyborgTosser, Richard Myers, Andycjp, Loremaster, Cberlet, Tothebarricades.tk, Soman, Avihu, Imroy, Spleeman, Mal, Ntennis, Bcat, The King Of Gondor, Livajo, Lycurgus, Causa sui, Cretog8, Che y Marijuana, Remuel, Jerryseinfeld, Aquillion, VBGFscJUn3, Hipocrite, John Quiggin, Bootstoots, Radical
Mallard, TheRealFennShysa, RJII, Albamuth, Amorymeltzer, VoluntarySlave, Ghirlandajo, Bookandcoee, Yurivict, Dtobias, Bobrayner,
OleMaster, Jacob Haller, Lapsed Pacist, Alienus, FreplySpang, Rjwilmsi, Madcat87, Ground Zero, Jrtayloriv, Str1977, LeCire, Saswann,
YurikBot, Wavelength, Stan2525, Hairy Dude, Roadcollective, RussBot, Pigman, Mykenism, CambridgeBayWeather, NawlinWiki, LaszloWalrus, Formeruser-82, Fair&Balanced, BOT-Superzerocool, DNAku, Zzuuzz, Closedmouth, Eduard Gherkin, Innity0, Biltmore
Blob, C mon, Rogerz, SmackBot, Looper5920, KVDP, Kasyapa, Colonies Chris, John sargis, Chlewbot, Agrofelipe, Dantadd, Kukini, TenPoundHammer, Byelf2007, The Ungovernable Force, Lambiam, Green01, Gobonobo, Bydand, Robosh, Mr. Quertee, Epiphyllumlover,
Ryulong, WGee, BlackFlag, RekishiEJ, Tawkerbot2, RookZERO, FISHERAD, George100, JForget, Bobfrombrockley, Van helsing, Vision Thing, Normski3000, THF, Erick91, Davnor, Cydebot, R-41, Spylab, DumbBOT, Alexbonick, Omicronpersei8, EnglishEfternamn,
Thijs!bot, Cory Liu, Vodomar, Widefox, Carolmooredc, Xolom, Dylan Lake, David Shankbone, Blahblahblahblahblahblah, JAnDbot,
Skomorokh, Supertheman, Solidarityjoe, Frederico., Usws, VoABot II, Rexfan2, CCWilliams, Freebornjohn, Jessicapierce, Fang 23, Skylights76, Emeraude, CommonsDelinker, VAcharon, Jlohmeyer, Kesal, Ruadh, Colchicum, Vanished User 4517, Lygophile, Inomyabcs,
Endlessmike 888, Scott Illini, VityUvieu, Djr13, Wohmfg, Intangible2.0, JGHowes, Je G., , Jfrascencio, Philip Trueman, TXiKiBoT, Billy Ego, Wassermann, Anarchangel, Mr. Absurd, TruthSeeker777, Juakali, Nikosgreencookie, Larklight, Wassamatta, Falcon8765,
Dynimite 007, Jon33, SieBot, Caltas, Freedomwarrior, NavyFalcon, Janfri, Wuhwuzdat, Operation Spooner, Gr8opinionater, ClueBot,
Otolemur crassicaudatus, Hangakommy, Kitsunegami, Beheader6, Bite MeRance14, Quacking, Garybanham, Rancewringer, Redthoreau,
Blindghost, Tchurovsky, Olybrius, XLinkBot, Roxy the dog, DaL33T, SilvonenBot, Gigoachef, Addbot, Andreave1977, Jncraton, Eedlee,
BFairntrue, AndersBot, Tide rolls, Lightbot, Jarble, Legobot, Drpickem, Luckas-bot, Yobot, Eduen, Azurian, AnomieBOT, Killiondude,
Valois bourbon, Aditya, Materialscientist, Citation bot, Racconish, Crzer07, GrouchoBot, RibotBOT, Many Heads, Jean-Jacques Georges,

348

CHAPTER 42. CONTEMPORARY ANARCHISM

FrescoBot, Sausagehiders, Adam9389, Ele67, HelloKittyBack, Trust Is All You Need, Trotskut, Mimzy1990, Thekappen, CaptainEagle,
Motorizer, RobertHuaXia, Jonkerz, Callanecc, Gritob, 777sms, Defender of torch, Britney Gramsci, Fellytone, Minigoody101, Erianna,
Ego White Tray, Financestudent, Anticapitalistpower, Diatarveden, Mjskay, Helpful Pixie Bot, Simpsonguy1987, Sigiheri, Lowercase
sigmabot, BG19bot, Fidel Guevara, LLTSU, KhabarNegar, Adventjah, EM Che, SantiLak, BrightonC, Denisrodman88, Alyxr and Anonymous: 186
Anti-statism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-statism?oldid=636527874 Contributors: Fubar Obfusco, Owen, Fifelfoo, AaronS,
Nikodemos, Nat Krause, Tothebarricades.tk, Zondor, Shiftchange, Shahab, Bender235, RJII, Dtobias, Jacob Haller, Lapsed Pacist,
Nightscream, Koavf, Bob A, Saswann, Hogeye, NawlinWiki, LaszloWalrus, BirgitteSB, Nick, Zzuuzz, Mike Dillon, Petri Krohn, Saboteur,
Sardanaphalus, Konulu, Bluebot, Socialistjedi, D-Rock, Zachorious, Battlecry, Nihilo 01, Byelf2007, Cast, Spiritia, Joseph Solis in Australia, CmdrObot, Gregbard, Dougweller, Donnachadelong, Bot-maru, Blahblahblahblahblahblah, Skomorokh, PhilLiberty, A Nobody,
Al B. Free, VolkovBot, Creagh, Lightbreather, JL-Bot, Aprock, Addbot, Lightbot, Sharangir, PublicSquare, Srich32977, KnightCourt,
ZroBot, Hekeheke, Amanski, Nightshift Bagel cart, Aua1422, CsDix, Zenvalharo, SalviaCookie, BobShela and Anonymous: 50
Anti-authoritarianism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-authoritarianism?oldid=624831875 Contributors: SimonP, Nikodemos, ShaneCavanaugh, Tom harrison, Chaosplanet, LockeShocke, Tothebarricades.tk, Milk, Shiftchange, Livajo, El C, Fraghappy, RJII,
Lapsed Pacist, BD2412, Rjwilmsi, SchuminWeb, Jrtayloriv, Bgwhite, RussBot, Pigman, Shaddack, Malcolma, Tonywalton, Maphisto86,
SmackBot, Elonka, Impaciente, Zazaban, FluteyFlakes88, Byelf2007, Tazmaniacs, Gregbard, Kitten86, Callmarcus, Mrmrbeaniepiece,
Blathnaid, Prolog, Farbotron, Fang 23, JhsBot, Toddst1, Wahrmund, TheOldJacobite, MrKIA11, Sirius85, BOTarate, Aleksd, Addbot,
Jarble, Luckas-bot, Yobot, Eduen, PublicSquare, ImperatorExercitus, Srich32977, Learner001, FrescoBot, Adam9389, Skyerise, RedBot,
BeaverOtter28, UnderHigh, Clarice Reis, DASHBot, EmausBot, Werieth, ZroBot, MikeDonovan123, Donner60, EdoBot, Helpful Pixie
Bot, BG19bot, Amakan, Makecat-bot, Vanamonde93, CsDix, ReconditeRodent, Darth Jadus and Anonymous: 34
Anarchism and issues related to love and sex Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism%20and%20issues%20related%20to%
20love%20and%20sex?oldid=636490991 Contributors: Bender235, Woohookitty, Koavf, Vegaswikian, Pigman, Aeusoes1, Carabinieri,
SmackBot, Zazaban, Chris the speller, Byelf2007, Cast, Gobonobo, Robosh, RekishiEJ, Cydebot, Chris Henniker, CommonsDelinker,
Aymatth2, Michaeldsuarez, Strombomboli, Xe7al, Sun Creator, Wrin, Delicious carbuncle, MystBot, Addbot, Lihaas, Yobot, KamikazeBot,
Eduen, AnomieBOT, LilHelpa, Omnipaedista, FrescoBot, Surv1v4l1st, Adam9389, Transform.everything, Zujine, John of Reading, Beta
M, RememberingLife, Cobaltcigs, , Polisher of Cobwebs, Snotbot, Helpful Pixie Bot, Free-loving, CsDix, Ohnohedinnit and Anonymous:
10
Anarchism and religion Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism%20and%20religion?oldid=637276051 Contributors: SimonP,
Edward, Kingturtle, Darkwind, Rednblu, Owen, Xiaopo, SchmuckyTheCat, Gbog, Tom Radulovich, Lockeownzj00, Sam Hocevar,
CALR, Discospinster, Freestylefrappe, Corvun, Che y Marijuana, Infocidal, Sherurcij, Clubmarx, Albamuth, Grenavitar, SteinbDJ,
Anonymous4367, Hojimachong, CWH, Jacob Haller, Koavf, Iluvchineselit, ElKevbo, Kiwirad, Jrtayloriv, WouterBot, Gdrbot, YurikBot, RussBot, Mparise, Leutha, Nirvana2013, Joel7687, . , Mike Dillon, Closedmouth, Blackhand, Funkybeat, Sardanaphalus, SmackBot, Zazaban, Konulu, Frymaster, Daykart, Black Buttery, Fuzzypeg, Cast, Mitso Bel, Theoldanarchist, RekishiEJ,
IronChris, Switchercat, Dionysius84, Horselover Fat, Itsm3ghan, Chris Henniker, Thijs!bot, AntiVandalBot, Colin MacLaurin, Skomorokh,
Hello32020, PhilKnight, VoABot II, KingWen, Gomm, Fang 23, Yonidebot, Laplandian, KeithHebden, Wh44, Tomabird, YonaBot,
Ostap R, EvilJuan, Anarchocelt, ClueBot, Horseshnoodle, TheOldJacobite, Rhododendrites, BOTarate, DumZiBoT, XLinkBot, Addbot, Wingspeed, Lightbot, Yobot, Eduen, 1oddbins1, AnomieBOT, Materialscientist, Srich32977, Adam9389, Lutterworth Press, LutP,
Bobalugee1940, DASHBot, EmausBot, ChuispastonBot, Helpful Pixie Bot, The Banner Turbo, Wasbeer, Jeremy112233, ChrisGualtieri,
Cedewey, CsDix, Lordgrenville, Bladesmulti, OccultZone, Ahsims1 and Anonymous: 72
Anarcha-feminism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcha-feminism?oldid=634213174 Contributors: SimonP, Edward, Lquilter,
Frank Shearar, Andres, Far, Adam Bishop, Francs2000, Owen, Robbot, Fifelfoo, Sunray, Saulisagenius, JCapone, DNewhall, Phil Sandifer, Tothebarricades.tk, Anirvan, Johnfreez, AndrewH, Rich Farmbrough, Wadewitz, Livajo, Che y Marijuana, AnnaAniston, Hagerman,
Max rspct, RJII, VoluntarySlave, Doviende, JeTK, Woohookitty, CWH, Thorpe, Plrk, Stefanomione, Magister Mathematicae, Rjwilmsi,
Koavf, MapsMan, Roarjo, Jrtayloriv, Mr.Rocks, YurikBot, Roadcollective, 4C, RussBot, Pigman, Stephenb, Gaius Cornelius, Mesolimbo,
Encephalon, MrVoluntarist, Carabinieri, LeonardoRob0t,
robot, Sardanaphalus, Stormydawn, SmackBot, HarisX, Aim Here, Zazaban, Monty Cantsin, Revkat, Mladilozof, Nihilo 01, The Ungovernable Force, Cast, Gobonobo, N1h1l, Darkdaughta, Meco, Mikael
V, Robgraham, Vision Thing, W guice, Timthepenguin, Karimarie, Ebyabe, Maziotis, JamesAM, Lectert, Missvain, SusanLesch, Robert.
Helms, Blahblahblahblahblahblah, Skomorokh, LMAOnade, SPresley, Obi777, Cailil, Fang 23, Crltn, Xomic, Kostisl, CommonsDelinker,
Snow Shoes, Yonidebot, Ginsengbomb, PhilLiberty, Belovedfreak, Pintorj2, VolkovBot, Cantaire87, TXiKiBoT, Rei-bot, Cerberus of
elyssia, UnitedStatesian, Etcetc, SieBot, Dawn Bard, Xe7al, Smilo Don, Operation Spooner, Dakinijones, Mozric, Solar-Wind, Auntof6,
Alexbot, Lartoven, Grrrlriot, DumZiBoT, XLinkBot, Good Olfactory, Kbdankbot, Addbot, USchick, Lihaas, AwOc, Contributor777,
Luckas-bot, Yobot, Apollonius 1236, Themfromspace, Eduen, AnomieBOT, Noq, Xqbot, Mikewazhere, GrouchoBot, Omnipaedista,
RibotBOT, Dan6hell66, Anarcha, D'ohBot, BenzolBot, DrilBot, Jonkerz, MelmothX, Transform.everything, Hajatvrc, Zujine, Eboda,
, Dante8, Johannesgrillet, Cgtdk, Helpsome, ClueBot NG, Helpful Pixie Bot, Scochran4, Lapa38, ChrisGualtieri, IjonTichyIjonTichy,
SPECIFICO, Economic roles, CsDix, Lehappymerchant, AbigailBuccaneer, Je.est.un.autre and Anonymous: 83
Anarchism and education Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism%20and%20education?oldid=619894756 Contributors:
Bearcat, Woohookitty, Vegaswikian, Pigman, Chris the speller, Byelf2007, Dsp13, R'n'B, Eduen, AnomieBOT, Ulric1313, FrescoBot,
EmausBot, Mikejamesshaw, Helpful Pixie Bot, NGC 2736, Khazar2, IjonTichyIjonTichy, CsDix, Hamoudafg, Jaredsquee, Monkbot and
Anonymous: 2
Queer anarchism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer%20anarchism?oldid=635282140 Contributors: Rich Farmbrough, Tabletop, Koavf, Gaius Cornelius, Carabinieri, SmackBot, Michael%Sappir, SwitChar, Kleuske, Byelf2007, Cast, Gobonobo, Clare., Cydebot, RebelRobot, Interstates, Solar-Wind, Alexbot, Sun Creator, Luckas-bot, Yobot, Eduen, AnomieBOT, Srich32977, Mikewazhere,
Adam9389, Rushbugled13, EmausBot, , Mentibot, ChuispastonBot, HaydenFlanery, Helpful Pixie Bot, Calabe1992, Mogism, CsDix,
Dreadgrrl, Anqqa, Monkbot, Ahsims1, Stamboliyski and Anonymous: 10
Individualist anarchism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individualist%20anarchism?oldid=637336181 Contributors: Toby Bartels, SimonP, Camembert, Edward, Nixdorf, Ixfd64, Ahoerstemeier, Nikodemus, Far, Oliver Crow, Harvester, Pizza Puzzle, Dabugas,
Radgeek, Atreyu42, Haukurth, HarryHenryGebel, Kevehs, Bloodshedder, Olathe, Owen, Xiaopo, AaronS, Btljs, Sunray, Benc, Rdfuerle,
Xanzzibar, Alan Liefting, Centrx, Graeme Bartlett, Nikodemos, Nat Krause, Philwelch, Wighson, SteveFoerster, Millerc, Daniel Brockman,
Ehusman, Rlquall, Sam Hocevar, TonyW, Grunt, RevRagnarok, Freakofnurture, Rich Farmbrough, Guanabot, Bender235, Kross, Che y
Marijuana, Cmdrjameson, Maurreen, Aquillion, Pharos, Virgin Molotov Cocktail, HasharBot, TimMony, Ricky81682, Radical Mallard,

42.7. TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

349

Max rspct, RJII, Gene Nygaard, Dtobias, FrancisTyers, The JPS, Woohookitty, Jacob Haller, Goodgerster, Lapsed Pacist, Stefanomione,
Marudubshinki, Graham87, BD2412, Jaxhere, Rjwilmsi, Yamamoto Ichiro, Mirror Vax, Ground Zero, Mishuletz, Jrtayloriv, Frappyjohn,
Bgwhite, Algebraist, YurikBot, Wavelength, Dannycas, RussBot, Pigman, Hogeye, Gaius Cornelius, Theelf29, Nicke L, NawlinWiki,
SEWilcoBot, Nirvana2013, Ospalh, Kyle Barbour, BOT-Superzerocool, Kewp, Wknight94, Bishop^, Delirium of disorder, Maphisto86,
Blackhand, Esprit15d, JLaTondre, Innity0, Arcadie, Sardanaphalus, Intangible, Veinor, KnightRider, SmackBot, MrDemeanour, Zazaban, Reedy, Unyoyega, Allixpeeke, Sciintel, Eskimbot, Ohnoitsjamie, Hmains, Revkat, Chris the speller, Full Shunyata, FordPrefect42,
DoctorW, Mr.Z-man, Lox, SwitChar, Nihilo 01, Byelf2007, The Ungovernable Force, Cast, Good Intentions, SocialistJack, Gobonobo, Libertatia, N1h1l, JHunterJ, Ryulong, Dl2000, Mikael V, Theoldanarchist, BlackFlag, CmdrObot, MonicaTTmed, Bobfrombrockley, Memetics, Vision Thing, Azaza767, Gregbard, Cydebot, Nescio*, Skittleys, Fifo, DumbBOT, Donnachadelong, Lectert, Thijs!bot, Geothermal,
Jakebreaker, AntiVandalBot, Seaphoto, Liberoo, Lordmetroid, 2bornot2b, Lingeron, Modernist, MECU, Blahblahblahblahblahblah, Beeboe, Itafroma, Skomorokh, PhilKnight, TheIndividualist, .anacondabot, Animaly2k2, Magioladitis, InformationJihad, ThatsHot, DTC,
Anarcho-capitalism, MartinBot, Revolution Guy, R'n'B, CommonsDelinker, Masebrock, PhilLiberty, Ianmathwiz7, JayJasper, Plasticup,
Madhava 1947, Intangible2.0, Elodoth, Malik Shabazz, VolkovBot, Your honor, Philip Trueman, TXiKiBoT, Josephholsten, Aymatth2,
Billinghurst, Etcetc, Givegains, Born Again 83, Caltas, Green man from space, Chinesearabs, Pianoer, Dominik92, Crashola, Ravanacker,
Mais o menos, Helltwin, Operation Spooner, Libertarian92, TheOldJacobite, Niceguyedc, Cirt, Auntof6, Ktr101, John Nevard, Sun Creator,
Njardarlogar, Iohannes Animosus, Curious Blue, Jonathan Winsky, Koroesu, DumZiBoT, Little Mountain 5, Addbot, DOI bot, Queenmomcat, Download, Debresser, LinkFA-Bot, Woland1234, Tassedethe, Luckas-bot, Yobot, Legobot II, Richard Blatant, IW.HG, Eduen,
AnomieBOT, IRP, PublicSquare, Darolew, Citation bot, Frankenpuppy, LilHelpa, Awesomeeconomist, Fare, John Bessa, Rtozzi, Erud,
Eru Ilvatar, Srich32977, J04n, Ee, Omnipaedista, Jadabocho, Costho, Shadowjams, WebCiteBOT, DeathPhone, FrescoBot, Lothar
von Richthofen, Adam9389, , Citation bot 1, Jonesey95, Waterfalling, Goalyoman, Mjs1991, TobeBot, Trappist
the monk, Jonkerz, RjwilmsiBot, EmausBot, John of Reading, Dan huck, GoingBatty, Peaceray, Finn Bjrklid, Thecheesykid, Eyadhamid, H3llBot, Hyblackeagle22, Hazard-Bot, Peter Karlsen, Est.r, Will Beback Auto, Schoolibrary, Reference Desker, Helpful Pixie Bot,
BG19bot, Compfreak7, Maxstirner242, ChrisGualtieri, Khazar2, Mogism, Lgfcd, Herbtea, CsDix, Mann De Light, Froglich, Anarcham,
Kingronnie1, Monkbot, Je.est.un.autre, Thinktwicethinknice and Anonymous: 142
Anarchism and violence Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism%20and%20violence?oldid=611442211 Contributors: Ffaker,
Graft, Tzartzam, MartinHarper, Sam Francis, Lquilter, Delirium, Wereon, Suitov, Phil Sandifer, Tothebarricades.tk, Rich Farmbrough,
Charon.sk, Woohookitty, VolatileChemical, Nirvana2013, Sardanaphalus, SmackBot, Zazaban, Bluebot, AntelopeInSearchOfTruth, Xiamcitizen, Byelf2007, Cast, J. Finkelstein, Gobonobo, FairuseBot, Eastlaw, Devourer09, Themightyquill, Thijs!bot, TrevorLSciAct, Skomorokh, Balloonguy, Andy Marchbanks, PeterCanthropus, Otolemur crassicaudatus, Furball4, BOTarate, DumZiBoT, The Editing Shrew,
Addbot, Mortense, Goatstein, AnnaFrance, Aldrich Hanssen, Lightbot, Eduen, AnomieBOT, Projectyugo, Materialscientist, Nkautz,
Srich32977, GrouchoBot, Jibbideejibbish, Libleft, NFSreloaded, WikitanvirBot, Kevin Gorman, Helpful Pixie Bot, Andrew Gwilliam,
PhnomPencil, CsDix, GPRamirez5, John Cracklemore and Anonymous: 27
Green anarchism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green%20anarchism?oldid=637335670 Contributors: Mav, Bryan Derksen,
DanKeshet, Tzartzam, Quercusrobur, Lir, Liftarn, Karada, Mcarling, Ahoerstemeier, Marshman, Kevehs, Owen, Xiaopo, Fifelfoo, Aaron
Pannell, Sunray, Bkell, Alan Liefting, Tom Radulovich, Beta m, Falcon Kirtaran, Chowbok, Antandrus, Lockeownzj00, Beland, Loremaster, Manchineel, N-k, Poccil, Rich Farmbrough, Guanabot, MeltBanana, Bender235, Fatal, CanisRufus, Art LaPella, Leif, Che y
Marijuana, Reinyday, ZayZayEM, Alpheus, La goutte de pluie, Acjelen, Pharos, Max rspct, ReyBrujo, Dbolton, Lapsed Pacist, Stefanomione, Rjwilmsi, Pariah, Koavf, Salix alba, Gozar, Feil0014, Eldamorie, Jrtayloriv, King of Hearts, YurikBot, Wavelength, Borgx,
Roadcollective, RussBot, Pigman, Hogeye, ENeville, Nirvana2013, Ziel, Rwxrwxrwx, Covington, Closedmouth, Arthur Rubin, C mon,
Sardanaphalus, SmackBot, Zazaban, Eskimbot, Ryanlarsen, Colonies Chris, Reaper X, D-Rock, No Parking, Ezra haSofer, Nihilo 01,
Daykart, LavosBaconsForgotHisPassword, Rockpocket, Byelf2007, Cast, Gobonobo, Notwist, Beetstra, Urbanscout, Mikael V, Theoldanarchist, Linkspamremover, Yashgaroth, FISHERAD, Postmodern Beatnik, Vision Thing, Cydebot, Maziotis, Thijs!bot, Second Quantization, Jebrim, Widefox, Informaton882T45, Skomorokh, Rich257, Gabriel Kielland, JaGa, CommonsDelinker, Dhawal1, Anonywiki,
Belovedfreak, Idioma-bot, Deor, VolkovBot, Murderbike, Anna Quist, Philip Trueman, Aymatth2, Vert et Noir, AlleborgoBot, SieBot,
Froztbyte, Interstates, Albion moonlight, Adam Cuerden, ImageRemovalBot, JuniorB03, Meta4r, Loren.wilton, Sfan00 IMG, ClueBot,
Czarko, Otolemur crassicaudatus, Carterab, Alexbot, Mumia-w-18, Dgiardin, SchreiberBike, XLinkBot, Kbdankbot, Ghost accounty,
Johnhamfull, Blueberrypie12, Addbot, TomLovesCake, Tassedethe, Jarble, Contributor777, Yobot, Usmcsoldier27, Ptbotgourou, Legobot
II, Eduen, Ecobio, AnomieBOT, Rubinbot, Akhran, Sz-iwbot, LilHelpa, Mark Schierbecker, Locobot, Prezbo, ThompsonFest, FrescoBot,
Mrbuddhafreak, D'ohBot, DrilBot, Pinethicket, Alarichus, MelmothX, DA1, Dewritech, RememberingLife, Werieth, ZroBot, H3llBot,
JimmyCos, Epigrammed, Saxon wood, Frietjes, Helpful Pixie Bot, PhnomPencil, Warbles, AnonNep, CsDix, Melcous, Monkbot, Xylocode, Leosylvester and Anonymous: 113
Eco-socialism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eco-socialism?oldid=631890836 Contributors: Edward, Warofdreams, Sunray,
Chowbok, SarekOfVulcan, Joeblakesley, Loremaster, Jokestress, Soman, Neutrality, CanisRufus, Causa sui, Storm Rider, Pinar, LtNOWIS, Dierentgravy, Danthemankhan, Redvers, Woohookitty, Lapsed Pacist, SqueakBox, BD2412, Rjwilmsi, Erebus555, Madcat87,
Ian Pitchford, Jrtayloriv, Wavelength, RussBot, NawlinWiki, Ospalh, Maphisto86, Bhumiya, ZabMilenko, BorgQueen, Fram, Meegs,
Nick-D, C mon, Sardanaphalus, David Straub, SmackBot, Prodego, DuncanBCS, OrionK, Betacommand, Chris the speller, Bidgee, PieRRoMaN, TheLateDentarthurdent, RolandR, The Ungovernable Force, Franklin Dmitryev, JzG, Robosh, Dl2000, Joseph Solis in Australia, FISHERAD, CmdrObot, Bobfrombrockley, ShelfSkewed, Neelix, Shultz IV, Cydebot, Gogo Dodo, Chasingsol, Spylab, Draculadonor, Legotech, Thijs!bot, Barticus88, PerfectStorm, Frank, Bobblehead, Itsmejudith, Nick Number, Active85, NSH001, JAnDbot,
TheEditrix2, APB-CMX, JaGa, SlaineMacRoth, Hug-en, Numbo3, DASonnenfeld, Inventis, Nikosgreencookie, Dawn Bard, AlexWaelde,
NickCT, GorillaWarfare, Pakaraki, Toomanysmilies, TheOldJacobite, Niceguyedc, Solar-Wind, Muhandes, Rancewringer, Redthoreau,
Iancoleangus, DumZiBoT, XLinkBot, Golden graham99, Porn Jesus, Kbdankbot, Addbot, AmericanAgrarian, Woland1234, Tassedethe,
Lightbot, Yobot, Mattia Luigi Nappi, HandGrenadePins, Eduen, AnomieBOT, Clara rosa, Ingenosa, Xqbot, Miracleworker5263, Fol de rol
troll, KosMal, Tpantazidis, RibotBOT, Eisfbnore, Shadowjams, JotaCartas, FrescoBot, Bencourtice, Romansiii, Zachary Klaas, Full-date
unlinking bot, DA1, Barotoa, EmausBot, , Joaosac, RememberingLife, ZroBot, Kieranlatty, Jasonwsmoore, Semmler, Asamut79, Rostz, Jeereyman, Wukai, RJFF, , MerlIwBot, Gob Lofa, Lowercase sigmabot, Justincheng12345-bot, Khazar2,
MCaecilius, CsDix, I am One of Many, ElHef, Monkbot, Knayeri, Xylocode, Ethvoyager and Anonymous: 85
Libertarian Marxism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian%20Marxism?oldid=629671262 Contributors: Tpbradbury, Esperant, Ntennis, Malo, Bookandcoee, Ground Zero, Jrtayloriv, Peter G Werner, RussBot, Fnorp, Leutha, Welsh, Sardanaphalus, Intangible, SmackBot, Haymaker, InverseHypercube, DuncanBCS, Darkstar1st, Full Shunyata, Pegua, SwitChar, Kikodawgzz, Nihilo 01, Lph,
Byelf2007, JzG, SocialistJack, Mayis, Midnightblueowl, Mrdthree, Bobfrombrockley, Thijs!bot, Tsiatko, Skomorokh, Moralist, DimiTalen,
DeepQuasar, TheOldJacobite, Estevoaei, Solar-Wind, Addbot, Woland1234, Yobot, Apollonius 1236, Eduen, AnomieBOT, LilHelpa, Om-

350

CHAPTER 42. CONTEMPORARY ANARCHISM

nipaedista, Loyalprecision, Zujine, WikitanvirBot, MisterDub, , Anatoly-Rex, Financestudent, Dylan Flaherty, ClueBot NG, Mattiafoc,
Snotbot, Docteur Saint James, BG19bot, AvocatoBot, Compfreak7, ChrisGualtieri, Khazar2, Mogism, CsDix, I am One of Many, TheJourney318 and Anonymous: 29
Anarchism and Marxism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism%20and%20Marxism?oldid=633176939 Contributors: Ed
Poor, SimonP, Edward, Sam Francis, J'raxis, Dcoetzee, SonofRage, JorgeGG, Owen, Xiaopo, Fifelfoo, Chris Roy, DocWatson42, Marcika, Everyking, Chuck0, Beta m, Mboverload, Richard Myers, Bacchiad, Phil Sandifer, Kevin B12, Rich Farmbrough, Violetriga, Mqduck,
Cretog8, Che y Marijuana, Hajenso, R7, Pharos, Pearle, Dhartung, Max rspct, Grenzbegrie, Albamuth, Kusma, Bookandcoee, Firsfron, Woohookitty, Jacob Haller, Plrk, Qwertyus, Rjwilmsi, Koavf, Jrtayloriv, Born2cycle, VolatileChemical, TheTrueSora, Hairy Dude,
RussBot, Mykenism, NawlinWiki, Leutha, Disillusioned kid, Ad Nauseam, Mike Dillon, Closedmouth, Arthur Rubin, Josh3580, Petri
Krohn, Tevildo, Innity0, Adbarnhart, Sardanaphalus, SmackBot, HarisX, Zazaban, InverseHypercube, K-UNIT, Hmains, Squiddy, Mike
Werther, Full Shunyata, DKalkin, Colonies Chris, Hongooi, RolandR, Tompsci, Byelf2007, Gobonobo, NYCJosh, Iridescent, CmdrObot,
Onemanbandbjm, Ntsimp, Fl, DumbBOT, Draculadonor, Barticus88, HappyInGeneral, Invitatious, Darklilac, Barek, Skomorokh, Feeeshboy, Hisownspace, Richard a b, Evaunit666, Fang 23, STBot, EyeSerene, Howl5, Wiki Raja, UlliD, Anas Salloum, Ptcollins, Laurusnobilis, SelketBot, Demigod Ron, Teknolyze, CmrdMariategui, Anarchocelt, Bowei Huang 2, Lenerd, Expelrance, Plastikspork, AmishSexy,
Mild Bill Hiccup, Passargea, Canis Lupus, FrankPalmerWhite, Deadloss99, Stonewhite, Addbot, Bitemerance67, Favonian, Woland1234,
Yobot, Eduen, AnomieBOT, Materialscientist, FaleBot, Omnipaedista, Michael93555, Cdw1952, Dream within a dream, Hisabness, Tbhotch, Mean as custard, John of Reading, Wikipelli, ZroBot, Aronlee90, Unused000705, SporkBot, LWG, Helpsome, ClueBot NG,
Edmund West, Helpful Pixie Bot, Kyactivist, Lowercase sigmabot, CsDix, Tony grunge, Shoootkommies, Shoootkommies2, Viola287,
Zozs, LukasMatt and Anonymous: 83
Mutualism (economic theory) Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutualism%20(economic%20theory)?oldid=625479812 Contributors: Alex.tan, BrianHoltz, Charles Matthews, Silvonen, Atreyu42, Kevehs, Sam Spade, AaronS, Nikodemos, Nat Krause, Tom harrison,
Millerc, Chowbok, DNewhall, The Land, Sam Hocevar, Blanchette, Rich Farmbrough, Bender235, Eric Forste, Lycurgus, Mjk2357,
Adambro, Remuel, Cmdrjameson, Oolong, Moxie, NTK, Radical Mallard, Max rspct, RJII, Gatewaycat, Jacob Haller, Julo, Rjwilmsi,
Koavf, Dionyseus, Subversive, Mr.Rocks, YurikBot, Mushin, RussBot, Hauskalainen, Pigman, Hogeye, Grafen, Isolani, Maunus, WAS
4.250, Maphisto86, Mike Dillon, Lawyer2b, Sardanaphalus, KnightRider, SmackBot, Radak, Zazaban, Frymaster, Gilliam, Revkat, Chris
the speller, Bluebot, Full Shunyata, Battlecry, TKD, Nihilo 01, Rebooted, Byelf2007, Cast, Gobonobo, Shyamsunder, CJames745, Libertatia, N1h1l, Mikael V, WGee, JoeBot, BlackFlag, Tawkerbot2, Bobfrombrockley, Vision Thing, Jac16888, Cydebot, Mattergy, Bpadinha, Donnachadelong, Thijs!bot, Epbr123, Davidlawrence, Indrek, Blahblahblahblahblahblah, JAnDbot, Skomorokh, TheIndividualist,
Magioladitis, Hroulf, Soulbot, ThatsHot, 8653564, Gomm, Anarcho-capitalism, Jim Yar, Tremello, R'n'B, Dispenser, JayJasper, Cxx
guy, S, SergeyKurdakov, Cambrick, Station1, TXiKiBoT, Rei-bot, Wdrev, The Devils Advocate, Etcetc, SieBot, Teknolyze, Nancy,
Illegal editor, Smilo Don, Operation Spooner, ClueBot, TheOldJacobite, Solar-Wind, Super propane, Jemmy Button, Excirial, PixelBot, SchreiberBike, Editor2020, Joel.a.davis, Gavin Webb, Qgil-WMF, Armyaware, Timothy.lucas.jaeger, Kbdankbot, Addbot, Ettrig,
Luckas-bot, JJARichardson, Richard Blatant, Sageo, KamikazeBot, Eduen, CounterEconomics, Anarchy is Order, PublicSquare, Bobisbob2, Aaagmnr, Clark89, Xqbot, Omnipaedista, Costho, Quiet Bird, Waterfalling, Zikharon, Cooperate23, Jonkerz, Dinamik-bot, Mean
as custard, Bluszczokrzew, Acather96, Pechke, ClueBot NG, Aurixious, Achillemarotta, Somedierentstu, Frietjes, Bagsfull, BG19bot,
Rastapunk, StarryGrandma, SD5bot, Khazar2, Homealone1990, Saehry, CsDix, Bronx Discount Liquor, Kingronnie1, Je.est.un.autre,
Anarcho-statist and Anonymous: 115
Collectivist anarchism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivist%20anarchism?oldid=619046950 Contributors: Owen, Millosh,
N-k, Rich Farmbrough, Paul August, Mjk2357, La goutte de pluie, Themindset, RJII, Tainter, Bastin, Jacob Haller, Lapsed Pacist, Stefanomione, Rjwilmsi, Helvetius, Jrtayloriv, RussBot, Pigman, Gaius Cornelius, NawlinWiki, Thiseye, White Lightning, Sardanaphalus,
SmackBot, Kellen, Zazaban, Full Shunyata, Thumperward, Elagatis, Tsca.bot, SwitChar, Nihilo 01, Byelf2007, Cast, Katstevens, Robgraham, Vision Thing, Gregbard, Doctormatt, DumbBOT, Thijs!bot, Mmortal03, Skomorokh, ThatsHot, DTC, Monkeyeggs16, Fang 23,
Anarcho-capitalism, Jim Yar, C Ruth, Sidhekin, Jwiley80, Atsinganoi, Ghostbear616, Marc Esnouf, Djr13, Kyle the bot, SieBot, Gerakibot, Teknolyze, Illegal editor, Operation Spooner, Bkz., Alexbot, PixelBot, Lserven, Singwaste, BOTarate, DumZiBoT, Kuborion,
Kbdankbot, Addbot, Luckas-bot, KamikazeBot, Eduen, AnomieBOT, TechBot, Costho, TobeBot, Jonkerz, Updatehelper, In ictu oculi,
EmausBot, WikitanvirBot, RenamedUser01302013, ZroBot, Bostjan46, Sahimrobot, Suprsilver, ClueBot NG, LittleJerry, Widr, Lowercase sigmabot, Wasbeer, Compfreak7, Mogism, CsDix, Je.est.un.autre and Anonymous: 37
Anarcho-syndicalism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism?oldid=635835749 Contributors: Tarquin, DanKeshet,
Qbmessiah, DavidLevinson, Graft, Camembert, Tzartzam, Stevertigo, Edward, Lquilter, Radicalsubversiv, Darkwind, LittleDan, Netsnipe,
Cadr, Scott, Kaihsu, Aszekely, Kevehs, Secretlondon, SonofRage, Owen, Robbot, Fredrik, Xiaopo, Altenmann, (:Julien:), Sunray, Benc,
Xanzzibar, Snobot, Mshonle, Nikodemos, Southpark, Paso del Ebro, Richard Myers, ChicXulub, Pgan002, Knutux, HorsePunchKid,
Chaikney, J3, Phil Sandifer, Tothebarricades.tk, Pnot, Rakista, Zro, R, Hinrik, Helohe, Rich Farmbrough, Guanabot, Bender235,
Project2501a, RebelWorker, Livajo, Zenohockey, Mjk2357, Leif, Che y Marijuana, Evolauxia, Beige Tangerine, Kevin Myers, Savvo,
Nk, AnnaAniston, Pharos, HasharBot, Mrzaius, Dr Zen, Max rspct, Evil Monkey, Omphaloscope, RJII, Tony Sidaway, Drat, Tainter,
Markaci, Rzelnik, Woohookitty, Jacob Haller, Lapsed Pacist, Plrk, DESiegel, Stefanomione, Marudubshinki, Floydgeo, Chun-hian,
Jorunn, Rjwilmsi, Koavf, Leon Trotsky, Gioueeoi, Keimzelle, FlaBot, Tswold, SchuminWeb, Ground Zero, Jrtayloriv, Quuxplusone, Tedder, MichaelWarron, Chobot, Bgwhite, Mr.Rocks, Banaticus, YurikBot, TexasAndroid, RobotE, Stan2525, RussBot, Conscious, Pigman,
Gaius Cornelius, Theelf29, NawlinWiki, Welsh, Solstag, BOT-Superzerocool, Olleicua, 21655, Jicksta, Mateo LeFou, Bevo74, Carabinieri, Kubra, Sardanaphalus, Intangible, SmackBot, Recall, Khfan93, Zazaban, InverseHypercube, Konulu, Fitch, Linus n, Wakeupgod,
Hmains, Dahn, Father McKenzie, Christopher Dale, Full Shunyata, Sadads, Bayano, Chendy, Cybercobra, Nihilo 01, Horses In The Sky,
Eran of Arcadia, Nmpenguin, CartoonDiablo, Byelf2007, The Ungovernable Force, Cast, Catch, SashatoBot, Tazmaniacs, Gobonobo,
Kschlot1, Cowbert, MTSbot, PJB, Crashmcbean, Christian Roess, Keith-264, Shoeofdeath, Exander, Eewild, Vision Thing, To hell with
poverty!, Musicalantonio, R-41, Ejk81, DumbBOT, Btharper1221, Donnachadelong, Thijs!bot, The Wednesday Island, Kingnixon, AntiVandalBot, Kylemcinnes, Prolog, Hermis, Dylan Lake, Jasmonio, JAnDbot, Skomorokh, The Transhumanist, Yahel Guhan, Magioladitis,
ST3V0, Job L, Realisis, Levin-bj84, RobMasterFunk, BluesEtude, Dankidding, Robertgreer, Gr8white, DorganBot, Djr13, RJASE1, Ottershrew, VolkovBot, Murderbike, Philip Trueman, TXiKiBoT, Tamira C., TouristPhilosopher, JhsBot, Supertask, Winkers6767, Shadowlapis, Billinghurst, Noillirt, Etcetc, SieBot, Brenont, Dawn Bard, Libertycookies, Transcona Slim, CmrdMariategui, Lightmouse, Illegal editor, EverHopefull, Albertopithecus, Operation Spooner, Rananegra, Neonknights, Orestisv, Alexbot, Sun Creator, Singwaste,
Cleireac, Redthoreau, DumZiBoT, XLinkBot, TFOWR, Kbdankbot, Addbot, Rancie sooks, Grinchitude, Michaelwuzthere, Woland1234,
Willondon, Jarble, Mdukas, Legobot, Drpickem, Yobot, Apollonius 1236, The Grumpy Hacker, PMLawrence, Eduen, Siancjeries,
Bbb23, AnomieBOT, PublicSquare, Bobisbob2, Sergisr, Xqbot, TinucherianBot II, Ekwos, Randy Seltzer, CasualForce, GrouchoBot,
Omnipaedista, SassoBot, Carrite, Wseitz, Bluehotel, Thehelpfulbot, FrescoBot, Surv1v4l1st, Adimitri82, Snotragsneaker, Bgljb, RedBot,

42.7. TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

351

Chromatikoma, Jonkerz, Libertatis, Dinamik-bot, Bjwallace, Skakkle, DARTH SIDIOUS 2, Sbrianhicks, EmausBot, WikitanvirBot, RememberingLife, Jjcascadia, Cogiati, , Semmler, Seismicio, ClueBot NG, Green4liberty, LittleJerry, BioJess, Helpful Pixie Bot,
Lowercase sigmabot, Kaltenmeyer, PhnomPencil, Compfreak7, Ites76, Liamsoprych, TheJarl, Earl King Jr., Tabascov, CreazyHorse36,
CsDix, Hendrick 99, NorthBySouthBaranof, Androgyne, Anarcham, Kapamaru, Monkbot, Kopology, Ljubog and Anonymous: 220
De Leonism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De%20Leonism?oldid=622341988 Contributors: Edward, Warofdreams, SonofRage,
Mboverload, Martin Wisse, David Schaich, Ntennis, Shorne, Kaibabsquirrel, Qwertyus, Ground Zero, YurikBot, NawlinWiki, Bronks,
Sardanaphalus, Hmains, Squiddy, Bluebot, Dahn, JonHarder, Byelf2007, Crashmcbean, GMcGath, Bobfrombrockley, Dynzmoar,
Bellerophon5685, R-41, DumbBOT, Omicronpersei8, BetacommandBot, RobotG, Dogru144, J.delanoy, Robertgreer, Djr13, Alexbot,
ChrisHodgesUK, MystBot, Addbot, Woland1234, Lightbot, PaulWalter, AnomieBOT, Omnipaedista, Zujine, EmausBot, ZroBot, Ever
present past, Andattaca2010, Lowercase sigmabot, Izraas, Hses and Anonymous: 22
Council communism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council%20communism?oldid=625768379 Contributors: William Avery,
172, Dysprosia, Maximus Rex, Warofdreams, Fifelfoo, Altenmann, Nikodemos, Millerc, Martin Wisse, Esperant, Ntennis, CanisRufus,
QuartierLatin1968, Che y Marijuana, Sentience, Alansohn, Mick Knapton, Philip Cross, Mattley, Saga City, VoluntarySlave, Tiger Khan,
Lapsed Pacist, Lol, Qwertyus, Rjwilmsi, Ground Zero, Escobar600ie, YurikBot, RussBot, NawlinWiki, Leutha, Limetom, Sardanaphalus,
SmackBot, InverseHypercube, Edgar181, Squiddy, Bluebot, Dahn, Bayano, Nbarth, NicAgent, Kikodawgzz, Lambiam, Mayis, Robosh,
Joseph Solis in Australia, Bobfrombrockley, ShelfSkewed, Raoul NK, Frank, Nick Number, RobotG, TheEvilPanda, Ipoellet, Mbc362,
Heme, Fang 23, R'n'B, Numbo3, Natty4bumpo, Laurusnobilis, Inbloom2, Robertgreer, Bonadea, Wiendietry, Tpb, Janggeom, Jaquefois,
CultureDrone, DeepQuasar, SummerWithMorons, Solar-Wind, MystBot, Stonewhite, Addbot, Michaelwuzthere, Deamon138, SamatBot,
Lightbot, Yobot, Apollonius 1236, PaulWalter, Slimerance, Eduen, AnomieBOT, Flinders Petrie, ArthurBot, LilHelpa, Xqbot, XZeroBot,
GrouchoBot, JanDeFietser, DHint, Trust Is All You Need, Dasha14, Updatehelper, Semmler, Anatoly-Rex, Haigee2007, ClueBot NG,
Mikejamesshaw, Petey Parrot, Helpful Pixie Bot, Lowercase sigmabot, J48antialias, Comatmebro, Soni, Hairandballs69, Hendrick 99 and
Anonymous: 71
Left communism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left%20communism?oldid=632070606 Contributors: The Anome, 172, Sannse,
Minesweeper, Nikai, Wik, Maximus Rex, Warofdreams, Optim, Italo Svevo, Secretlondon, Jerzy, SonofRage, Robbot, RedWolf, Fifelfoo,
Altenmann, Naddy, Chris Roy, Hemanshu, Saulisagenius, Nikodemos, Formeruser-83, Golbez, OwenBlacker, Martin Wisse, Rlquall, Jock
Haston, Sam Hocevar, Soman, N-k, Rich Farmbrough, Arthur Holland, Mani1, CanisRufus, Livajo, Che y Marijuana, Cmdrjameson, La
goutte de pluie, Espoo, Pinar, Philip Cross, Darrelljon, Grenavitar, OleMaster, Woohookitty, Mindmatrix, Lapsed Pacist, Descendall,
DJ Silversh, Koavf, Leon Trotsky, Klonimus, Hanshans23, Vclaw, YurikBot, Pigman, Theelf29, NawlinWiki, Leutha, Ezeu, Ospalh,
Hans Joseph Solbrig, Abune, C mon, Sardanaphalus, Intangible, SmackBot, Mister X, Lukas bauermann, Srnec, Squiddy, Dahn, Darth
Sidious, NicAgent, JonHarder, Stevenmitchell, Kikodawgzz, Zdravko mk, Derek R Bullamore, Ap4k, Rklawton, Guroadrunner, Jaer,
Mayis, Robosh, E-Kartoel, Iridescent, Kencf0618, Joseph Solis in Australia, Chinaleftcom, CmdrObot, Bobfrombrockley, DumbBOT,
Advocatus diaboli, Richhoncho, Bjrn-Olav Kvidal, CharlotteWebb, RobotG, Chill doubt, Heme, Just H, Tremello, R'n'B, Laurusnobilis,
Inbloom2, Pdcook, Jlittlenz, VolkovBot, Wiendietry, UnitedStatesian, Phe-bot, Lightmouse, EverHopefull, Henry Merrivale, ClueBot,
Wikijens, Arjayay, Mlas, Addbot, Woland1234, Caseyrd1, Miasnikov, Urpunkt, Luckas-bot, Yobot, Legobot II, Eduen, AnomieBOT,
TechBot, Omnipaedista, Born Gay, Fratra, Ong saluri, Phoneyname, Gabdoo, RedBot, Dasha14, Prancisz, Hoygan!!, ZroBot, Semmler,
Ever present past, Staszek Lem, Andattaca2010, Philafrenzy, Sherlock Holmes Fan, Lowercase sigmabot, BG19bot, Khazar2, Charles
Essie, CsDix, PietjePPaulisme, AsharaDayne and Anonymous: 93
Socialisme ou Barbarie Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialisme%20ou%20Barbarie?oldid=587260226 Contributors: Vicki
Rosenzweig, Netsnipe, GCarty, Harry Potter, Warofdreams, JorgeGG, Everyking, Bobblewik, Esperant, Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters, Taragui,
Ground Zero, AllyD, YurikBot, Peter G Werner, Gaius Cornelius, NawlinWiki, Leutha, Paki.tv, Jkelly, Zazaban, Ligulembot, Catch, Santa
Sangre, Bobfrombrockley, RobotG, Dsp13, Lawilkin, SlamDiego, JoergenB, Hcleaver, Davidamescurtis, PipepBot, Solar-Wind, DragonBot, Gtstricky, Sun Creator, Kikos, Radh, Addbot, DOI bot, Woland1234, Lightbot, Ysogo, Luckas-bot, Yobot, Eduen, AnomieBOT,
Jos Fontaine, Lapost, Omnipaedista, FrescoBot, Loyalprecision, EmausBot, MisterDub, Spartacus Marat, Lowercase sigmabot, BG19bot,
CsDix and Anonymous: 36
JohnsonForest Tendency Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson%E2%80%93Forest%20Tendency?oldid=631093909 Contributors: Netsnipe, Warofdreams, Altenmann, Merovingian, Proslaes, Ntennis, Darrelljon, Batmanand, Tabletop, Lapsed Pacist, Rjwilmsi,
Gaius Cornelius, Avraham, Sardanaphalus, InverseHypercube, Rmalhotr, Ligulembot, Byelf2007, Catch, Checco, Zahid Abdassabur, Dialecticas, Robosh, Vision Thing, Cydebot, Bellerophon5685, Krisnabest, Magioladitis, Nat, Aaa3-other, Cityofwind, Addbot, Lightbot,
Yobot, Zeugmazwang, JmCor, Omnipaedista, Spamaschine, BabbaQ and Anonymous: 12
Autonomism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomism?oldid=637179784 Contributors: Rossami, Editor B, Adamahill, Fifelfoo,
Nagelfar, Loremaster, DNewhall, OwenBlacker, JereyN, D6, Rama, Ntennis, Carlon, Lycurgus, Mjk2357, Foobaz, Woohookitty, Jacob
Haller, Tabletop, Lapsed Pacist, Grace Note, BD2412, Qwertyus, JIP, Behemoth, Koavf, Hanshans23, Jrtayloriv, Scosco62, Bgwhite,
Ecemaml, RussBot, Pigman, CambridgeBayWeather, Aeusoes1, Audiorevolution, Bayle Shanks, Michalis Famelis, Igin, Sardanaphalus,
SmackBot, Zazaban, Cacuija, Hmains, Chris the speller, Bluebot, Full Shunyata, FordPrefect42, Colonies Chris, Mladilozof, Apostolos
Margaritis, Adamantios, Breadandroses, Nihilo 01, Wizardman, Arthur Welle, Byelf2007, Tazmaniacs, Gobonobo, Bydand, Giordaano,
Mikem1234, Comrade9, Iridescent, JoeBot, CmdrObot, Bobfrombrockley, ShelfSkewed, Nohope, Character, Markluel, Hypnosadist,
Epbr123, Bot-maru, Frank, Dice.b, Tpth, Skomorokh, Mclay1, Ling.Nut, Nyttend, R'n'B, Enslin, Hcleaver, Obeaten, Gjashnan, GrahamHardy, Hauteville, VolkovBot, TreasuryTag, Mattteo, , Zweidinge, Malcolmxl5, Fawkes1, LSmok3, Huku-chan, Kai-Hendrik,
DionysosProteus, Orestisv, TheOldJacobite, Hangakommy, DOHill, Lucas55555, Il Moderato, Kbdankbot, Harry Barrow, Hakan Kay,
Aryder779, Woland1234, Khawaga, Yobot, Eduen, AnomieBOT, Rainbough redux, LilHelpa, Autonomitheite!, Estlandia, Omnipaedista,
FrescoBot, Maxacohen, Vyvyan Ade Basterd, , JokerXtreme, Rzuwig, GoingBatty, Cogiati, Semmler, Laneways,
ClueBot NG, Vincent Moon, Anatole Marinov, MerlIwBot, Helpful Pixie Bot, Allarais, Prostoi paren, TBrandley, Gus77, Charles Essie,
CsDix, Castoriadis68, Tamaravdpl and Anonymous: 122
Georgism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism?oldid=637202110 Contributors: Derek Ross, Michael Hardy, Paul A, Pde,
Sir Paul, AndreaPersephone, Etherialemperor, RickK, Pm67nz, Wetman, Owen, Jni, Robbot, Chrism, Chris Roy, Merovingian, Superm401, Neilc, Pgan002, Craverguy, DNewhall, Pmanderson, Bender235, Mjk2357, RoyBoy, Dystopos, Tmh, VBGFscJUn3, Perceval,
Ricky81682, John Quiggin, RJII, Reaverdrop, Luigizanasi, Bastin, Bobrayner, Wachholder0, Jorunn, Rjwilmsi, Koavf, Klonimus, Silversoul7, Winterstein, Polsequ95, Chobot, Bgwhite, Wavelength, RussBot, Jrideout, Bronks, Canley, Asterion, Sardanaphalus, SmackBot,
CSMR, Lawrencekhoo, Aivazovsky, Hmains, Chris the speller, Dahn, Thumperward, RobBlakemore, H Bruthzoo, Mike hayes, Tamfang, MrRadioGuy, EPM, Derek R Bullamore, Byelf2007, Joshuavincent, Collect, Ewulp, ChrisCork, CmdrObot, GeorgeLouis, PegArmPaul, Neelix, Gregbard, Yaris678, Dougweller, Thijs!bot, Headbomb, Kborer, Its The Economics, Stupid!, Mdotley, Erxnmedia, Skomorokh, Magioladitis, Ling.Nut, Lenschulwitz, Creativename, Roy Langston, Gomm, Jim.henderson, R'n'B, Al B. Free, DASonnenfeld,

352

CHAPTER 42. CONTEMPORARY ANARCHISM

Izno, TXiKiBoT, JohnAugust, GroveGuy, Howard Silverman, TJRC, Jojalozzo, Operation Spooner, Hst, Drmies, P. S. Burton, Cirt,
Elpiseos, Sun Creator, Lususromulus, SchreiberBike, El bot de la dieta, Mhockey, DumZiBoT, Addbot, Cssiitcic, AndersBot, Debresser,
Gpeterw, Blaylockjam10, Larsrindsig, Lightbot, Luckas-bot, Yobot, JJARichardson, Denispir, AnomieBOT, Darolew, Logical Premise,
Wikirpg, Teilolondon, Quebec99, The3seashells, InpoliticTruth, Srich32977, Hxasmirl, Omnipaedista, Wikilobster, Jonesey95, Bbarkley2,
Peter Gibb, ErikvanB, G103317, John of Reading, Maxmex, Jonpatterns, , Celosia61, H3llBot, MisterDub, Grampion76, Rjmatter, Purple1342, Helpful Pixie Bot, Dtellett, Guest2625, BG19bot, FiveColourMap, BattyBot, ChrisGualtieri, Kurper, Rothbardanswer, Makecat-bot, CsDix, R4N40069, Bronx Discount Liquor, Whomyl, Monkbot, Adventurer61, Maureensherrardthompson, Sanne6,
Shanecav and Anonymous: 148
Henry George Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry%20George?oldid=637271560 Contributors: Derek Ross, DavidLevinson,
AdamRetchless, Michael Hardy, Llywrch, Iluvcapra, Sir Paul, Jiang, Kaihsu, Conti, Pm67nz, Jay, Wik, Mtcv, Calieber, Jni, Dimadick,
Pigsonthewing, Profoss, Fennec, Everyking, Christofurio, MistToys, D6, Poccil, Farkas2029, Guanabot, JimR, Morten Blaabjerg, Byrial, Bender235, Magius, VBGFscJUn3, JesseHogan, Hooperbloob, Spangineer, Brock, Lev lafayette, Bkobres, Versageek, Crosbiesmith,
Bastin, Bobrayner, Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ), Rotten, DESiegel, Ashmoo, Qwertyus, DJ Silversh, JIP, Casey Abell, Rjwilmsi, KAM,
DickClarkMises, Dabljuh, Kodemizer, RexNL, Bgwhite, Flcelloguy, YurikBot, Jamesmorrison, RussBot, Nicke L, Andrew K Robinson,
Wiki alf, Nirvana2013, Welsh, Howcheng, BirgitteSB, Dsol, Tony1, Gsf, Ejl, Johntriggs, Alarob, Homagetocatalonia, Marketdiamond,
SmackBot, Radak, InverseHypercube, Lawrencekhoo, Eric.d.dixon, Jab843, JJay, Aivazovsky, Freddy S., Cool3, Nfgii, Ephraim33, Jabbi,
MalafayaBot, Rscannix, Sct72, Tamfang, Smallbones, GRuban, LeContexte, Anthon.E, EPM, BillFlis, Werdan7, Starvingeyes, Joseph
Solis in Australia, Grundskyld, Ewulp, Billy Hathorn, Picaroon, Kalanchoe77, Neelix, TheArchduke, Chrislk02, Biruitorul, Hiramhamilton,
Marek69, Notmyrealname, Its The Economics, Stupid!, KevinWho, AntiVandalBot, RobotG, Paste, Lvtfan, David Shankbone, Erxnmedia,
MER-C, Samuel Webster, Dannyc77, Ling.Nut, Waacstats, Roy Langston, Anarcho-capitalism, Kraxler, Roygsaltman, R'n'B, DBlomgren,
Onlymelbourne, JayJasper, Aquatics, KCinDC, Al B. Free, Mrmuk, Gwen Gale, DASonnenfeld, Ottershrew, TXiKiBoT, JohnAugust,
Mtsuje, Enigmaman, Leehach, Phmoreno, CarlM2007, SieBot, AaronJBiterman, Bluebookred, Pubdog, Dwiakigle, Monegasque, ClueBot, The Thing That Should Not Be, TableManners, Drmies, Cirt, Sun Creator, Lususromulus, Arjayay, BOTarate, Aitias, DumZiBoT,
Little Mountain 5, Scruy4903, Good Olfactory, Kbdankbot, Addbot, DOI bot, Shakescene, NjardarBot, Lightbot, Luckas-bot, Yobot,
Erel Segal, Auranor, Citation bot, Srich32977, Omnipaedista, Irredeemableblogger, Carrite, Windowpoo, Myrramax, FrescoBot, LucienBOT, Alarics, Citation bot 1, RedBot, Foobarnix, CLC Editorial, 777sms, Canuckian89, Beyond My Ken, John of Reading, Ballofstring,
Djembayz, Lamb99, Westley Turner, , Wayne Slam, Sugar-Baby-Love, ClueBot NG, Ahmedsunset, Green4liberty, Purple1342,
Spinoziano, Helpful Pixie Bot, BG19bot, Northamerica1000, MusikAnimal, YendisSkoorb, YFdyh-bot, Mohammad Al Khalid, Hmainsbot1, Makecat-bot, Jhyoons, VIAFbot, Nimetapoeg, Revolution1221, Banzai6666, Kingronnie1, Whomyl, Monkbot, Dsprc, Oh-yahhhh
and Anonymous: 141
Guild socialism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild%20socialism?oldid=594361263 Contributors: Shii, Bogdangiusca, Charles
Matthews, Francs2000, Nikodemos, Pgan002, Loremaster, Esperant, QuartierLatin1968, Foobaz, Darrelljon, Mattley, Koavf, AllyD, NawlinWiki, Sardanaphalus, NantucketNoon, GwydionM, Squiddy, Bluebot, Apeloverage, Robosh, Bobfrombrockley, Vision Thing, DumbBOT, Thijs!bot, Syskill, AntiVandalBot, Widefox, Moralist, TXiKiBoT, TheOldJacobite, Addbot, Lightbot, Zorrobot, J. Milch, Eduen,
Bob Burkhardt, Xqbot, Srich32977, Carrite, Trust Is All You Need, Christiansocialism, Ewigtreter, PBS-AWB, Semmler, Lowercase
sigmabot, Shirudo, CsDix and Anonymous: 19
Gandhism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandhism?oldid=636904386 Contributors: AxelBoldt, SimonP, Ixfd64, Hauser, Charles
Matthews, Romanm, Naddy, Mboverload, Rdsmith4, Bodnotbod, Kuralyov, Soman, Esperant, Mike Rosoft, Shahab, Rich Farmbrough,
User2004, Paul August, Kwamikagami, Riana, Tintin1107, Koavf, Moorlock, Lairor, GregAsche, Ground Zero, Gurubrahma, Deeptrivia,
NawlinWiki, Nirvana2013, Grafen, Joel7687, PatCheng, Rjensen, Thiseye, Priyanath, Maunus, Nirav.maurya, SmackBot, Classiclms,
Tmandry, KocjoBot, Thunderboltz, Vikramsingh, Ramas Arrow, Can't sleep, clown will eat me, Black Buttery, Ohconfucius, Will
Beback, Khazar, Shyamsunder, IronGargoyle, MarcAurel, DabMachine, RudyB, DanielRigal, Cydebot, Adrian Glamorgan, Danorton,
Babub, Phydend, Prof75, Qwyrxian, Hazmat2, Nick Number, Escarbot, AntiVandalBot, Akulabubu, Luna Santin, Ste4k, Gregorof, Ekabhishek, SiobhanHansa, Magioladitis, Bongwarrior, TinaSparkle, Hisownspace, Cgingold, DancingPenguin, Grandia01, Iamg, Smokizzy,
LordAnubisBOT, DadaNeem, Rumpelstiltskin223, Madhava 1947, Squids and Chips, Signalhead, Jmrowland, TXiKiBoT, Maurici, Pjoef,
Jonah22, Harry, Spitre19, Capitalismojo, Huku-chan, Sitush, ClueBot, Alexbot, Aitias, Indopug, DumZiBoT, Addbot, Sillyfolkboy, Sunzlvy, Noisyshore, Dzied Bulbash, Routekeeper, Nasnema, GrouchoBot, Cgnk, Nihar S, Tyrfs, Wireless Keyboard, Phirangi, DrilBot, I
dream of horses, Jethwarp, TjBot, EmausBot, Orphan Wiki, Rjrya395, Sachinvenga, Socialservice, Lklusener, Helpsome, ClueBot NG,
Green4liberty, Aberdonian99, Hazhk, Helpful Pixie Bot, Electriccatsh2, Mzahidtanoli, 4thaugust1932, Brendandavison, Siba1976, Minsbot, Dav subrajathan.357, ChrisGualtieri, EuroCarGT, Charles Essie, Camcs1, Tentinator, Evano1van, Wikiuser13, Tkatnth, Darkhorse
Warrior, JaconaFrere, Viratk, BethNaught, SarahZaman94, Thecnsguy, Bypolar duck and Anonymous: 145
Gandhian economics Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandhian%20economics?oldid=632500088 Contributors: Leandrod, Edward,
SebastianHelm, MistToys, Bodnotbod, John Quiggin, Bobrayner, Koavf, FayssalF, EvanDiBiase, Phantomsteve, RussBot, Rjensen,
Stevage, Ramas Arrow, Shyamsunder, Joseph Solis in Australia, Cydebot, Skomorokh, Cgingold, Coolg49964, TreasuryTag, Pjoef,
David Sher, 7, Addbot, Betterusername, Drsq, Faunas, Eduen, Neptune5000, Srich32977, Omnipaedista, Nihar S, FrescoBot, Diannaa,
Kaimakides, ZroBot, Pun, Mentibot, Helpful Pixie Bot, Lelwilson, Rrronny, Mdann52, Returnofunclefester, Faizan, Evano1van, Bakerlander, Grand equal and Anonymous: 25
Platformism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platformism?oldid=636072982 Contributors: Tedernst, Edward, Pir, Owen, Pgan002,
Pinnerup, Esperant, Rich Farmbrough, Supersheep, La goutte de pluie, Helvetius, NawlinWiki, Closedmouth, Sardanaphalus, SmackBot, Betacommand, Squiddy, Chlewbot, Nihilo 01, Byelf2007, Tazmaniacs, Bobfrombrockley, DumbBOT, Michael Johnson, Thijs!bot,
Darklilac, Skomorokh, Albany NY, Xeno, Fang 23, Wikip rhyre, AndrewFleming72, WainoGronroos, Ottershrew, Murderbike, Kyle
the bot, TheOldJacobite, Thucuth, XLinkBot, Mm40, Kbdankbot, Addbot, Lihaas, Debresser, Lightbot, Sindinero, Luckas-bot, Yobot,
Eduen, Libertarian Youth, AnomieBOT, ArthurBot, Xqbot, Omnipaedista, Jackriter, Louperibot, Jibe86, Jonkerz, Tbhotch, Updatehelper,
Thomas.giovanni, Life in General, Anarcentric, MisterDub, Kingkula, LittleJerry, Helpful Pixie Bot, BattyBot, Nestor.mcnab, Reclus,
Revolutionary Hominid, Redblackwritings, Makhnocomrade, CsDix, A. Pseudonym, Anarcham, JaconaFrere, Riddleh and Anonymous:
33
New Left Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New%20Left?oldid=637254430 Contributors: Eclecticology, Shii, Netesq, R Lowry, Soulpatch, Stevertigo, Edward, Jrcrin001, Hermeneus, Sir Paul, Jiang, Kaihsu, Charles Matthews, Nedward, Nohat, Viajero, Wik, Steinsky,
Bloodshedder, Jni, PuzzletChung, Eil, Fifelfoo, Prizepatrol, Gidonb, HaeB, Tremolo, DocWatson42, Nikodemos, Gadum, Formeruser81, Ot, Sam Hocevar, Herschelkrustofsky, Jcw69, Lacrimosus, A-giau, Rich Farmbrough, Dbachmann, Bender235, Ntennis, CanisRufus,
Mjk2357, Marcok, Viriditas, El Chemaniaco, Mavros, Max rspct, Garzo, Reaverdrop, Drbreznjev, Ianking, Mel Etitis, Woohookitty,

42.7. TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

353

Alci12, Canadian Paul, Smmurphy, Descendall, DJ Silversh, Rjwilmsi, Salix alba, Haric0tvert, Zaurus, Ground Zero, SmarterChild3,
Wrightbus, Chobot, Sus scrofa, YurikBot, RussBot, 10stone5, Gaius Cornelius, NawlinWiki, Welsh, Rjensen, So-called Genius, Froth,
Cerejota, KevinGovaerts, CWenger, Whobot, Sycthos, Piquant, C mon, Tuulispask, Hugo Estrada, SmackBot, Britannicus, JimmyGuano,
Allixpeeke, Hmains, GwydionM, Kitrus, Red star, TDS, Jprg1966, Droll, Robth, Colonies Chris, D-Rock, LucVerhelst, Stevenmitchell,
Yohan euan o4, BrownHairedGirl, Tazmaniacs, Gobonobo, Gilead, Levineps, Joseph Solis in Australia, JoeBot, CmdrObot, Bobfrombrockley, DumbBOT, Salvor Hardin, Kingstowngalway, Legotech, Thijs!bot, Bobblehead, Rlitwin, AntiVandalBot, Fayenatic london, Dylan
Lake, MECU, JAnDbot, Janejellyroll, Dcooper, DRHagen, Dentren, Jackbirdsong, Truthseeker 85.5, Cgingold, Fred114, Gomm, Ludvikus, DerHexer, Grunge6910, Ekotkie, NatureA16, Dwalls, R'n'B, Katalaveno, DarwinPeacock, Olegwiki, Balsamicvinegar, STBotD,
Inter16, ForrestLane42, VolkovBot, Messir, Arethriel, Andysoh, Room429, Ralfundorian, KearF, Saz127, Fratrep, Beachgrinch, Sfan00
IMG, ClueBot, Jchatter, Ichinguching, Boodlesthecat, Fadesga, TheOldJacobite, Alexbot, Jaro7788, Robjlucas, Kmaster, Redthoreau,
Thingg, Dsmurat, Indopug, Heironymous Rowe, AgnosticPreachersKid, Tdreyer, Rallensmith, Addbot, DOI bot, Kingsley Clarke, Tassedethe, Tide rolls, Luckas-bot, Yobot, PaulWalter, Ptbotgourou, Pohick2, Eduen, AnomieBOT, Rubinbot, F.morett, Wandering Courier,
Bigscream, RibotBOT, Carrite, Rodrigogomesonetwo, Learner001, FrescoBot, Misiekuk, Nnoell, Haeinous, Trust Is All You Need, Ji
Weiss, Orenburg1, TobeBot, DixonDBot, Jonkerz, Grantbonn, ErikvanB, Hamfruitcake, Gorigori, Dynesepp, 19towerapt35, Seeltrund,
, H3llBot, Highvale, TheGreenVeil, AxiomOfFaith, Green4liberty, Netsurfer123, Jagorocco, Hazhk, Helpful Pixie Bot, Lowercase sigmabot, BG19bot, PhnomPencil, CitationCleanerBot, Michael Cockrell, Shirudo, Minsbot, Ddcm8991, Weathervane13, Soni,
Noodle90, Cherubinirules, LudicrousTripe, DhDHdhDHdhDH, Puthoni, Monkbot, MCP926, Kokkoro and Anonymous: 194
Social ecology Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social%20ecology?oldid=633334805 Contributors: Mav, Karl, Radicalsubversiv,
, Netsnipe, Fernkes, Nilmerg, Millosh, Oleg326756, Alexf, Loremaster, Tothebarricades.tk, Random account 47, Squash,
Rich Farmbrough, Bobo192, Reinyday, Olve Utne, Viriditas, Pearle, Lightdarkness, Nallan, Stemonitis, Woohookitty, Lapsed Pacist,
Amerique, Ian Pitchford, Common Man, King of Hearts, YurikBot, Wavelength, Icarus3, Pigman, Moe Epsilon, Allens, Xtraeme, C mon,
Sardanaphalus, SmackBot, Kellen, Persian Poet Gal, Sgt Pinback, Nihilo 01, Nils Simon, Byelf2007, Cast, Catch, O.E.Tal, Dstokols,
Levineps, Twas Now, RekishiEJ, Ytny, Cyberbrook, Sarcastic Avenger, Bobfrombrockley, Phauly, MaxEnt, Arnold Binder, Cydebot,
ST47, Maziotis, Escarbot, JAnDbot, Skomorokh, Hydro, APB-CMX, Talon Artaine, DASonnenfeld, VolkovBot, Fences and windows, Urbanecology, AllGloryToTheHypnotoad, YonaBot, Teknolyze, WRK, Solar-Wind, Akosokof, XLinkBot, User2102, Kbdankbot, Addbot,
MrOllie, Lightbot, Elm, Yobot, Denispir, Eduen, LarabyCa, Dwayne, Teilolondon, LilHelpa, AL3X TH3 GR8, FD Johnston, EVNatasha,
GrouchoBot, Omnipaedista, FrescoBot, Elmf, DixonDBot, Ripchip Bot, JaysonSunshine, SporkBot, ChuispastonBot, Rocketrod1960, Frietjes, Helpful Pixie Bot, Justen.oconnor, Aua1422, Plurofuturo, CsDix, Shiningroad, Gharris7, Noegid and Anonymous: 72
Communalism (political philosophy) Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communalism%20(political%20philosophy)?oldid=
624440552 Contributors: William Avery, Bobrayner, Tabletop, InverseHypercube, Byelf2007, Subvertc, Jay1279, Teknolyze, Yobot,
Eduen, OpenFuture, Omnipaedista, Thehelpfulbot, GoingBatty, MisterDub, Jay-Sebastos, Helpful Pixie Bot, Jckrgn600, Muxxxa,
BattyBot, ChrisGualtieri, IjonTichyIjonTichy, CsDix, Peoples Deputy and Anonymous: 3
Participism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participism?oldid=609965374 Contributors: DanielCD, Cretog8, Giraedata, Ground
Zero, Number 57, SmackBot, Byelf2007, Cydebot, Nick Number, R'n'B, Teknolyze, CorenSearchBot, EoGuy, Solar-Wind, Iohannes Animosus, SchreiberBike, CanadianLinuxUser, Denispir, Eduen, Omnipaedista, VernoWhitney, Lambert Meertens, Goti123, Life in General,
Secondetcher, PhnomPencil, Compfreak7, DMSchneider and Anonymous: 16
Inclusive Democracy Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive%20Democracy?oldid=629566220 Contributors: Charles Matthews,
Pgan002, SarekOfVulcan, Loremaster, Rich Farmbrough, C12H22O11, Sam Korn, Pearle, Rd232, Melaen, OwenX, Hairy Dude, Narap43,
Chriswaterguy, Attilios, SmackBot, Stie, John sargis, Nihilo 01, Byelf2007, O.E.Tal, Joseph Solis in Australia, Cydebot, Spylab, RobDe68,
Skomorokh, R'n'B, Drake Dun, TreasuryTag, TXiKiBoT, TouristPhilosopher, Nikosgreencookie, Pavel2007, Alaniaris, Teknolyze, Tryfonaration, Davidamescurtis, ChardonnayNimeque, SchreiberBike, Editor2020, XLinkBot, Mm40, Addbot, MrOllie, Denispir, Gongshow,
Eduen, AnomieBOT, Panlis, Smpickens, Xqbot, TechBot, Rilli1066, Omnipaedista, Prunesqualer, Shadowjams, FrescoBot, Surreal01,
Kaimakides, ZroBot, LittleJerry, Calabe1992, BG19bot, Bagoto, ChrisGualtieri, Charles Essie, Mogism, CsDix and Anonymous: 62
Insurrectionary anarchism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrectionary%20anarchism?oldid=618219663 Contributors: Edward, Delirium, Owen, HaeB, Loremaster, N-k, Rich Farmbrough, Cnwb, Nihila, Splat, Radical Mallard, Embryomystic, Lapsed Pacist, Stefanomione, Mandarax, SchuminWeb, Russavia, Pigman, NawlinWiki, Sardanaphalus, SmackBot, Prodego, Rthunder, Hmains,
Durova, FordPrefect42, Mladilozof, Nihilo 01, Daykart, Zdravko mk, Byelf2007, Cast, Tazmaniacs, Gobonobo, Robosh, N1h1l, Theoldanarchist, CmdrObot, Pascal.Tesson, DumbBOT, Youzwan, Alaibot, Maziotis, Thijs!bot, R'n'B, X!, Malik Shabazz, Je G., Willy91,
Charberry, Turgan, Loveless2, Lenerd, ClueBot, The Thing That Should Not Be, TheOldJacobite, Auntof6, Jusdafax, Singwaste, DumZiBoT, XLinkBot, Fastily, Revolutionrugger, Sargoth, Kbdankbot, Addbot, Innv, Luckas-bot, Yobot, Eduen, AnomieBOT, Piano non troppo,
LilHelpa, Abigor, FrescoBot, Lothar von Richthofen, Originalq, , Terturam, Jonesey95, RedBot, Thinking of England, Tbhotch, RjwilmsiBot, John of Reading, ZroBot, Tashiattack, Lowercase sigmabot, BG19bot, IluvatarBot, Glacialfox, BattyBot,
TheCascadian, GrenadeF1, CsDix, Anarcham, BethNaught and Anonymous: 42
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oldid=636265418 Contributors: Derek Ross, Vicki Rosenzweig, AstroNomer, DanKeshet, Alex.tan, Fnielsen, Danny, AdamRetchless,
Tzartzam, Hephaestos, Jose Icaza, Stevertigo, Asereje, Lexor, Liftarn, Ahoerstemeier, Kingturtle, Nerd, Jiang, Ike9898, Daniel Quinlan,
Wik, Kaare, VeryVerily, Thue, Juggleandhope, Earthsound, Joy, Hjr, JorgeGG, Robbot, Ke4roh, Bkalafut, Sam Spade, Palinuro, Ukuk,
Acegikmo1, Lupo, Unfree, Elconde, DO'Neil, Beta m, Iota, Wmahan, Pgan002, Chaikney, Piotrus, Kaldari, Tothebarricades.tk, Jafro,
Mennonot, Esperant, Sfeldman, Discospinster, Rich Farmbrough, Andrew1718, Kbh3rd, Axi0m, El C, Surachit, Domukin, Tlacaelel,
Acntx, Mixcoatl, Pearle, Vizcarra, Alansohn, Eleland, Aoa, Sugaar, Sligocki, Wtmitchell, Danntm, Mikeo, Sumit Dutta, SteinbDJ, Nightstallion, Bastin, Bobrayner, Woohookitty, Ataru, Jacobolus, Canaen, Lapsed Pacist, Bluemoose, Isambard, Dumboy, Icydid, SqueakBox,
Graham87, Descendall, BD2412, Dubkiller, Rjwilmsi, Seidenstud, Carwil, Kennethgodoy, Kalogeropoulos, Gsp, Kerowyn, NekoDaemon,
Rune.welsh, Dyrnych, Jrtayloriv, CJLL Wright, Jersey Devil, Karch, Helios, Gap, Roboto de Ajvol, Jamesmorrison, Stan2525, RussBot,
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Asarelah, CLW, Maunus, User27091, Itake, Barryob, Closedmouth, 8:16 a.m., LeonardoRob0t, Innity0, Asterion, Dzonko, SmackBot, Shlensky, Zazaban, InverseHypercube, Delldot, Eskimbot, RobotJcb, T.Wood, Evanreyes, Ohnoitsjamie, Isaac Dupree, KDRGibby,
Atomsprengja, Snori, Paulscan, Apeloverage, Hibernian, Colonies Chris, Mladilozof, Moonsword, Vermontevan, OrphanBot, EOZyo,
Wes!, JesseRafe, Edivorce, Khoikhoi, Laurent666, SwitChar, Harris0, Elbelz, Horses In The Sky, Trackstand, Tompot, The Ungovernable
Force, Cast, Oneangrydwarf, AThing, JoseJones, Ramonaz, Clore, Diderot1, AFOH, Posmodern2000, Waggers, Irn, Jcrav2k6, Albino
Ibis, Joseph Solis in Australia, JoeBot, Tubezone, Tawkerbot2, CmdrObot, GeorgeLouis, OldManRivers, ShelfSkewed, AndrewHowse,
Themightyquill, Cydebot, Nick2253, Mirrormundo, Odie5533, DBaba, Nsaum75, Abtract, Maziotis, Gimmetrow, Tortillovsky, Thijs!bot,

354

CHAPTER 42. CONTEMPORARY ANARCHISM

Epbr123, Woody, Horologium, Platte Daddy, CharlotteWebb, AntiVandalBot, Courtjester555, Fayenatic london, JAnDbot, Aille, Skomorokh, Nwe, InniteHunter, Magioladitis, @aron, Fitnr, Marsupilami04, Parsecboy, VoABot II, Jackbirdsong, Pipester, Homunq,
MetsBot, Gunsfornuns, Sorie, Fang 23, Exiledone, Hbent, Renegade27, MartinBot, CommonsDelinker, RockMFR, Shawn in Montreal,
RoommateRiot, HaldirOLorien, ArazZeynili, VityUvieu, Andy Marchbanks, Wewelsburg, Marianovsky, Nattfodd, Idioma-bot, Speciate, Billyjoekini, VolkovBot, Morenooso, TXiKiBoT, Jastokfer, Lots42, Technopat, Richard2704, Anonymous Dissident, C.J. Grin,
Quiet Melvin, BotKung, Bill weinberg, SQL, Mokturtl, Sylent, Mccormackt, AlleborgoBot, DesertedMetropolis, SieBot, Billykauman, VVVBot, Jbmurray, Teknolyze, Ridley1, Lightmouse, Theleez, Nest718, Correogsk, Smilo Don, Jimmy Slade, Gr8opinionater,
ClueBot, NickCT, Eorann, Niki1968, Equal Enjoy, Rene Valderrama, Sappythewhite, Slothman5000, Flazard, Solar-Wind, Auntof6,
IMOW, Fabzgy, Daedalic, Sun Creator, Arjayay, Drawn Some, Zrx6677, Lydia 86, Redthoreau, Aitias, Genesiswinter, DumZiBoT,
Scapler, Cortne7, Yopis, SilvonenBot, Ghost accounty, Addbot, Stier84b, Jafeluv, Twaz, Ironholds, Cuaxdon, Lihaas, Protoftruth85,
Woland1234, Lambdazteca, ProximaEstacion Esperanza, Bricklayer, Luckas-bot, Yobot, Apollonius 1236, JJARichardson, Nallimbot,
Eamonster, AnomieBOT, Floquenbeam, ImperatorExercitus, Kasaalan, ArthurBot, Xqbot, Transity, BrabantMAS229, Phil225, Snkla2,
Ocelotl10293, GrouchoBot, Hammer of the Gods27, Omnipaedista, Eabbate, Jibbideejibbish, Nome3000, FrescoBot, Fortdj33, Kcoble,
Sekwanele 2, D'ohBot, , Citation bot 1, PigFlu Oink, I dream of horses, Jonesey95, Motorizer, Robo Cop, Beao,
Iowawindow, Blacksup0, Abrusletten, Inluminetuovidebimuslumen, Zujine, DASHBot, Michealk2, Marknutley, John of Reading, WikitanvirBot, Armandobarbosa2000, HiW-Bot, Checkingfax, King0dill, Laneways, Lokpest, Demiurge1000, Jguy, MonoAV, Donner60,
Carmichael, Anatoly-Rex, R2D2-D, 28bot, ClueBot NG, Rich Smith, Wbrycem, Luvel071885, Chillllls, Ramstein23, Dgr1992, Helpful Pixie Bot, Gob Lofa, BG19bot, Cameronrath, Pcuninghame, Demanado, Saulpaugh, Harizotoh9, Karma842w, Cottonop, Gus77,
Pandafrahelvete, ChrisGualtieri, Spanishprof, Khazar2, IjonTichyIjonTichy, Charles Essie, Mogism, Eleventhblock, Melechesh812, CsDix, Sarahegreen, Arellanofsu, Kelcey.allen, 51coin, Trinity Abbey, Ben Tuckett, GPRamirez5, Last401, Jcksgp, Je.est.un.autre, Nnlpz
and Anonymous: 507
Emiliano Zapata Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emiliano%20Zapata?oldid=637408886 Contributors: Eclecticology, Youssefsan,
Peterlin, Graft, Tzartzam, Ericd, Ubiquity, Infrogmation, Liftarn, Muriel Gottrop, CatherineMunro, Kingturtle, Ruhrjung, Diftong, Dysprosia, WhisperToMe, Kaare, VeryVerily, Kenatipo, Hjr, Twice25, Robbot, Fredrik, Jredmond, RedWolf, Jmabel, ZimZalaBim, Mohan ravichandran, Academic Challenger, JB82, Hadal, Ruiz, Unfree, Apol0gies, DocWatson42, Tagishsimon, Sesel, Wmahan, Spjholland, SarekOfVulcan, UgenBot, Kjetil r, Quadell, Antandrus, Jossi, Mikko Paananen, Al-Andalus, Sam Hocevar, Klemen Kocjancic,
Zro, Dryazan, Mike Rosoft, Quirk, D6, Discospinster, Rich Farmbrough, Paul August, Stereotek, ESkog, Jos Gnudista, MBisanz, El C,
Bobo192, Yonghokim, Satyadasa, Nk, Mixcoatl, Polylerus, Krellis, Nsaa, HasharBot, Danski14, Alansohn, Eleland, ThePedanticPrick,
Arthena, Spangineer, Malo, Snowolf, Szumyk, Melaen, Stephen Hodge, Aurbina, RJFJR, Sagitario, Mr Tan, Bkkbrad, Rohitbhatia, Encyclopedist, Isambard, Marudubshinki, Dysepsion, Sin-man, Marskell, Magister Mathematicae, Descendall, Sjakkalle, Rjwilmsi, Koavf,
Amire80, Yamamoto Ichiro, Serie, FlaBot, Nihiltres, Crazycomputers, Rune.welsh, RexNL, Gurch, Alphachimp, Themissinglint, Dalta,
CJLL Wright, Chobot, Raymond Cruise, Volunteer Marek, 10qwerty, Gwernol, Dnadan, Wikizen, DemonPiggy666, Demonpiggy???,
YurikBot, RobotE, Butsuri, StuOfInterest, RussBot, Hydrargyrum, Gaius Cornelius, Wimt, Deivo, Draeco, Sentausa, NawlinWiki, DB,
Welsh, Trovatore, Howcheng, Irishguy, Brandon, Splitter8, Rockero, My Cat inn, Semperf, Syrthiss, EdwardJP, Emefectivo, Maunus, Ccgrimm, Nlu, Pozole, Theda, Pb30, Dspradau, Garion96, Katieh5584, One, Kf4bdy, SmackBot, David Kernow, Prodego, Roofus, Zayeck,
KocjoBot, Delldot, Arniep, Alsandro, Evanreyes, Gilliam, Hmains, OscarZavala, Lapsus Linguae, Izehar, Ciacchi, Dahn, Persian Poet Gal,
Columbiafan, B00P, Apeloverage, Colonies Chris, Josephhhh, Kaimiddleton, Parent5446, Bolivian Unicyclist, 1diot, Ramon4, Tvaughn05,
Savidan, Akriasas, Zero Gravity, Kukini, Ohconfucius, Michael David, The Ungovernable Force, SashatoBot, Odonian, ArglebargleIV,
Nareek, Ckatz, Posmodern2000, Dumpster, Hargle, Buckboard, Dr.K., TwistOfCain, Clarityend, Joseph Solis in Australia, Tmangray,
Hawkestone, Amakuru, Adam sk, Tubezone, Tawkerbot2, HennessyC, JForget, CmdrObot, Unlimited89, Awakened 1, Nczempin, Kmannpwr, WeggeBot, Razorback130, Chicheley, Shanew2, Cydebot, PDTantisocial, Gogo Dodo, Jaime777, Corpx, Lugnuts, Studerby, Dferrantino, DBaba, RedWolfX, Kuteogre, Kingstowngalway, Bwmcmaste, Junior707, Thijs!bot, Epbr123, Jopo, N5iln, Missvain, Escarbot,
Majorly, Widefox, Carolmooredc, Paste, Cbrodersen, Neil (London), Aille, Instinct, PhilKnight, DervishD, VzjrZ, Karlhahn, VoABot II,
Faizhaider, Mgoodyear, Gabe1972, Dtnix77, Vssun, JoergenB, Crash Comet, Edward321, Job L, Jackson Peebles, MartinBot, Kronnang
Dunn, CliC, Rettetast, R'n'B, CommonsDelinker, VirtualDelight, Fconaway, J.delanoy, Uncle Dick, Nigholith, Bret.stenger, JayJasper,
NewEnglandYankee, JPAntonios, Daniel Denis, Christopher Kraus, KylieTastic, Juliancolton, Inter16, CA387, Idioma-bot, VolkovBot, Je
G., JBazuzi, Philip Trueman, TXiKiBoT, Technopat, Kevinandhobbes, Crohnie, Melsaran, Leafyplant, Madhero88, Greswik, Sonnysalsbury, Zinet, AlleborgoBot, Logan, Brandon97, EmxBot, Assasin Joe, Theoneintraining, SieBot, Calliopejen1, Tresiden, Timothhy, Tiddly
Tom, Scarian, Phe-bot, Jbmurray, Yintan, Logisticalnightmare, Tiptoety, Almeyda64, Monegasque, Lightmouse, Hobartimus, Correogsk,
Thelmadatter, Pauljoe, ImageRemovalBot, RCCassin, ClueBot, The Thing That Should Not Be, Wysprgr2005, Arakunem, CounterVandalismBot, Automasraton, Piledhigheranddeeper, Fabzgy, Excirial, Killidude, Lartoven, Global Dissident, Jotterbot, 7&6=thirteen,
Tnxman307, Redthoreau, Freedom! Forever!, Aitias, Jesusmariajalisco, Gordianoalex, DumZiBoT, Darkicebot, Tuxlie, Duncan, Good
Olfactory, Propars55, Addbot, Newuser01, Tcncv, Friginator, TutterMouse, Kcranson, Fieldday-sunday, Vishnava, CanadianLinuxUser,
Rosarodr, OsotedeMonte, Protonk, LaaknorBot, Bassbonerocks, Enciclopedikt, 5 albert square, Hockeycrazed646, Tide rolls, Avono, Zorrobot, TundraGreen, HerculeBot, Egpizano, Legobot, Luckas-bot, Yobot, II MusLiM HyBRiD II, Alexkin, AnomieBOT, A More Perfect
Onion, Piano non troppo, Ipatrol, Dzhugashvili, Bluerasberry, Mxboy92, Xqbot, Sionus, Hammersbach, Supakacha, Ched, Joshrox06,
Ollinislas, Rangond, 399man, GorgeCustersSabre, SassoBot, SilverMoonWolf, Sabrebd, Maderavideo, Joaquin008, FrescoBot, Mapachin,
Sudopeople, Alyssajv, HGD2006, CircleAdrian, Pinethicket, I dream of horses, HRoestBot, Hoo man, Tatianadms, Evenrd, Beao, Plasticspork, TobeBot, Swine Flu Manchu, Lotje, Vrenator, MrX, Az81964444, Reaper Eternal, Reach Out to the Truth, Lolspamcakes,
TjBot, Sammysem, EmausBot, Milkunderwood, Heracles31, Racerx11, Tommy2010, Psutclie, Wikipelli, Attafei, Babelnetz, MisterDub, Quike99, Dlandrum-at-ucsd, L Kensington, Donner60, KentMiddle, ChuispastonBot, Juanjosegreen2, Spicemix, Petrb, ClueBot NG,
MelbourneStar, A520, Frietjes, Braincricket, Mesoderm, Widr, JoetheMoe25, Soyunpeneahumado, Helpful Pixie Bot, DBigXray, Puppydog100, BG19bot, Ckeeble23, Alf.laylah.wa.laylah, MusikAnimal, Mark Arsten, OttawaAC, Diegoazmx, Glacialfox, Emilio58, Sodesigns, Victorharris, ChrisGualtieri, Khazar2, Arzate01, Ebdmero, MarcusModulus, Charles Essie, Mogism, Jackninja5, Starships109,
Lugia2453, VIAFbot, Frosty, Little green rosetta, Chrisgerbo, Derekboeh, Tentinator, Seebeeay, Ginsuloft, Texterri, Yeyinpe, Nowthis,
TranquilHope, CZFMS and Anonymous: 737
Magonism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magonism?oldid=604170728 Contributors: R'n'B, DerBorg, BG19bot, AdventurousSquirrel and Anonymous: 1
Left-wing market anarchism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing%20market%20anarchism?oldid=626135017 Contributors:
Bender235, RussBot, SchreiberBike, Yobot, Eduen, AnomieBOT, Omnipaedista, DA1, Jonpatterns, BG19bot, Mogism, Kingronnie1 and
Anonymous: 1
Communization Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communization?oldid=610073257 Contributors: Edward, Greenrd, Tpbradbury,

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Warofdreams, Piotrus, Darrelljon, BD2412, Josh Parris, Ground Zero, Gurch, RussBot, Pigman, PaulGarner, Sardanaphalus, Bluebot,
Checco, Tazmaniacs, Chinaleftcom, Vision Thing, Frank, RobotG, Skomorokh, Nat, R'n'B, Laurusnobilis, Johnjoby, Demigod Ron, Robjlucas, DumZiBoT, Addbot, Yobot, Apollonius 1236, Eduen, Viking59, AnomieBOT, Omnipaedista, Spamaschine, Escapepea, Benwadou, CsDix and Anonymous: 11
Contemporary anarchism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary%20anarchism?oldid=623793745 Contributors: Ed Poor,
Edward, Ijon, Topbanana, Loremaster, Woohookitty, Koavf, Jrtayloriv, Bhny, Pigman, SmackBot, Zazaban, Hmains, Chris the speller,
CartoonDiablo, Cast, Kencf0618, Aeternus, Nick Number, Skomorokh, AVRS, R'n'B, CommonsDelinker, Knight of BAAWA, Malik
Shabazz, Msrasnw, Sun Creator, SchreiberBike, Jonathan Winsky, XLinkBot, Addbot, LaaknorBot, LarryJe, Yobot, Sageo, Eduen,
Againme, Bility, AnomieBOT, Jim1138, Darolew, Mikewazhere, Jadabocho, Shadowjams, OutsideBartertown, Citation bot 1, Piandcompany, MeUser42, Full-date unlinking bot, Trappist the monk, Jonkerz, Peaceaz, Zujine, Chiton magnicus, Cogiati, L Kensington,
Tricee, Anondoesnotforget, Jay hill radio, Helpful Pixie Bot, Electriccatsh2, Northamerica1000, Adammquinn, Stephenwanjau, Hethrir,
SD5bot, Amour de Cosmos, Hmainsbot1, Webclient101, EternalFlare, Monkbot and Anonymous: 28

42.7.2

Images

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File:8La_Voz_de_la_Mujer.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/8La_Voz_de_la_Mujer.jpg License:
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commons/d/db/Abbie_Hoffman_visiting_the_University_of_Oklahoma_circa_1969.jpg License: CC-BY-2.0 Contributors: Abbie
Homan Original artist: Richard O. Barry from San Diego, California, United States
File:Adolf_Brand_ca._1930.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c8/Adolf_Brand_ca._1930.jpg License:
Public domain Contributors: Goodbye to Berlin? 100 Jahre Schwulenbewegung (Berlin: Verlag rosa Winkel, 1997), p. 93. Original artist:
photo: unknown; le James Steakley
File:Aegopodium_podagraria1_ies.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Aegopodium_podagraria1_ies.
jpg License: CC-BY-SA-3.0 Contributors: Own work Original artist: Frank Vincentz
File:Albert_libertad.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Albert_libertad.jpg License: CC-BY-SA-3.0
Contributors: http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/l/i.htm Original artist: Unknown
File:Ambox_important.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Ambox_important.svg License: Public domain Contributors: Own work, based o of Image:Ambox scales.svg Original artist: Dsmurat (talk contribs)
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File:Anfem.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/Anfem.svg License: Public domain Contributors: User
created Original artist: Liftarn
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created Original artist: Liftarn
File:Anti-capitalism_color.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Anti-capitalism_color.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: [1] Original artist: IWW
File:Antonie_Pannekoek.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c6/Antonie_Pannekoek.jpg License: Fair use Contributors:
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File:AntonioNegri_SeminarioInternacionalMundo.jpg
Source:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/
AntonioNegri_SeminarioInternacionalMundo.jpg License: CC-BY-2.0 Contributors: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fabiogoveia/
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File:Athens_2008_anti-police_graffiti.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Athens_2008_anti-police_
graffiti.jpg License: GFDL Contributors: Own work (Own photo) Original artist: Badseed
File:Bakunin.png Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Bakunin.png License: Public domain Contributors:
Sothebys Original artist: Nadar
File:Bakunin2.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/Bakunin2.jpg License: Public domain Contributors:
Own work Original artist: Koroesu
File:Bakunin_speaking.png Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Bakunin_speaking.png License: Public domain Contributors: Own work Original artist: Rafael Farga i Pellicer

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File:Bakuninfull.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Bakuninfull.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: ? Original artist: ?

File:Band_a_bonnot_desenho.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/Band_a_bonnot_desenho.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: Le Figaro (Bibliothque Nationale de France ) Original artist: Le Figaro
File:Bandera_CNT-FAI.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Bandera_CNT-FAI.svg License: Public domain Contributors: user created Original artist: Liftarn
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Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
File:BlackFlagSymbol.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/BlackFlagSymbol.svg License: CC-BY-3.0
Contributors: Originally from en.wikipedia; description page is/was here. Original artist: Original uploader was Jsymmetry at en.wikipedia
File:Blessed_are_the_Peacemakers.gif Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Blessed_are_the_Peacemakers.
gif License: Public domain Contributors: When Jesus was Left: Christians, Socialists and the Masses by Mike Mosher, February 2005
Original artist: George Bellows
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Original artist: Epiq. Original uploader was Epiq at en.wikipedia
File:CNT-1mayo2010.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/CNT-1mayo2010.jpg License: CC-BY-SA2.0 Contributors: originally posted to Flickr as Maiatzaren lehena Original artist: Olatz eta Leire
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File:Casa_natal_de_Emiliano_Zapata_1.JPG Source:
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File:Cnt_1910.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/Cnt_1910.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: ?
Original artist: ?
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?
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opprest.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: Literary Digest. Originally from the Memphis Commercial Appeal (Alley) Original
artist: Alley
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artist: ?
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domain Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
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000005&g= as: Original artist: SKopp
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File:PoliticalJustice3.png Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/PoliticalJustice3.png License: Public domain
Contributors: Eighteenth Century Collections Online Original artist: William Godwin
File:Portal-puzzle.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fd/Portal-puzzle.svg License: Public domain Contributors: ?
Original artist: ?
File:Portrait_Emma_Goldman.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Portrait_Emma_Goldman.jpg License: Public domain Contributors:
http://www.lib.uconn.edu/online/research/speclib/ASC/Exhibits/Images/goldman.jpg
Original artist: Unknown
File:Portrait_of_Pierre_Joseph_Proudhon_1865.jpg Source:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Portrait_of_
Pierre_Joseph_Proudhon_1865.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: 1. FineArtPrintsOnDemand.com
Original artist: Gustave Courbet
File:Proudhon-children.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/Proudhon-children.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: Unknown Original artist: Gustave Courbet
File:Proudhonpropietat.JPG Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Proudhonpropietat.JPG License: Public
domain Contributors: http://anarcoefemerides.balearweb.net/post/36960 Original artist: Unknown
File:Question_book-new.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/99/Question_book-new.svg License: Cc-by-sa-3.0
Contributors:
Created from scratch in Adobe Illustrator. Based on Image:Question book.png created by User:Equazcion Original artist:
Tkgd2007
File:Rainbow_flag_and_blue_skies.jpg Source:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Rainbow_flag_and_blue_
skies.jpg License: CC-BY-2.0 Contributors: https://www.flickr.com/photos/23912576@N05/2942525739 Original artist: Ludovic Bertron
from New York City, Usa
File:Rb-star.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Rb-star.svg License: Public domain Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
File:Red_flag_II.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Red_flag_II.svg License: CC-BY-2.5 Contributors:
? Original artist: ?
File:Red_flag_waving.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Red_flag_waving.svg License: Public domain
Contributors: Original PNG by Nikodemos. Original artist: Wereon
File:Regeneracion_1910.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Regeneracion_1910.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bright/magon/images/anarchism.jpg Original artist: Unknown
File:Rosa_Luxemburg.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Rosa_Luxemburg.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: http://www.marxists.org/francais/img/rosa.jpg Original artist: Unknown
File:Rudolf_Rocker.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/Rudolf_Rocker.jpg License: Public domain
Contributors: Own work Original artist: Koroesu
File:SexEquality.png Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/SexEquality.png License: Public domain Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
File:Situationist.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Situationist.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: Own work Original artist: Espencat
File:Socialisme_ou_barbarie.JPG Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Socialisme_ou_barbarie.JPG License: Public domain Contributors: own work/selbst gemacht Original artist: Sirdon

362

CHAPTER 42. CONTEMPORARY ANARCHISM

File:Socrates.png Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Socrates.png License: Public domain Contributors:

Originally from en.wikipedia; description page is/was here. Original artist: Original uploader was Magnus Manske at en.wikipedia Later
versions were uploaded by Optimager at en.wikipedia.
File:Statism_and_Anarchy.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Statism_and_Anarchy.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: Own work Original artist: Koroesu
File:Stephen_Pearl_Andrews.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Stephen_Pearl_Andrews.jpg License:
Public domain Contributors: MHS Original artist: Unknown
File:Stirner-kar1900.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Stirner-kar1900.jpg License: Public domain
Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
File:SubMarcosHorseFromAfar.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/SubMarcosHorseFromAfar.jpg
License: CC-BY-SA-3.0 Contributors: Own work Original artist: (Jose Villa) at VillaPhotography
File:Sunflower_(Green_symbol).svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Sunflower_%28Green_symbol%
CC-BY-SA-3.0 Contributors:
Sunower_(Green_symbol).png <a href='//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:
29.svg License:
Sunflower_(Green_symbol).png' class='image'><img alt='Sunower (Green symbol).png' src='//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/
commons/thumb/5/59/Sunflower_%28Green_symbol%29.png/50px-Sunflower_%28Green_symbol%29.png' width='50' height='50'
srcset='//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/59/Sunflower_%28Green_symbol%29.png/75px-Sunflower_
%28Green_symbol%29.png
1.5x,
//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/59/Sunflower_%28Green_symbol%29.
png/100px-Sunflower_%28Green_symbol%29.png 2x' data-le-width='500' data-le-height='500' /></a>
Original artist: Sunower_(Green_symbol).png: Bndnis 90/Die Grnen
File:Sustainable_development.svg Source:
cense: CC-BY-SA-3.0 Contributors:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Sustainable_development.svg Li-

Inspired from Developpement durable.jpg Original artist:

original: Johann Dro (talk contribs)
File:Symbol-hammer-and-sickle.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Symbol-hammer-and-sickle.svg
License: Public domain Contributors: self-made; based on Image:Hammer and sickle.svg by Zscout370 Original artist: Rocket000
File:Syndicalism_Outline.gif Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fa/Syndicalism_Outline.gif License: CC-BY-3.0 Contributors:
Adobe Photoshop CS2
Original artist:
CartoonDiablo
File:Text_document_with_red_question_mark.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Text_document_
with_red_question_mark.svg License: Public domain Contributors: Created by bdesham with Inkscape; based upon Text-x-generic.svg
from the Tango project. Original artist: Benjamin D. Esham (bdesham)
File:Textil.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Textil.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: http://
www.anarchosyndicalism.net/media Original artist: Anonymous[#cite_note-1 [1]] . Issued by: CNT, Sindicato nico de la Industria Fabril,
Textil, Vestir y anexos de Barcelona [and others]
File:The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17_with_transparent_background.png Source:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/
commons/4/43/The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17_with_transparent_background.png License:
Public domain Contributors:
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/html/object_page/a17_h_148_22727.html Original artist: NASA
File:The_Modern_School_in_New_York_City,_circa_1911-12.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/
The_Modern_School_in_New_York_City%2C_circa_1911-12.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: Published on the cover of the
rst issue of The Modern School magazine, 1912. Original artist: The Modern School
File:The_hand_that_will_rule_the_world.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/The_hand_that_will_
rule_the_world.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: Industrial Workers of the World journal Solidarity (June 30, 1917 issue) Original artist: Ralph Chaplin
File:Timeline_icon.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Timeline_icon.svg License: CC-BY-SA-3.0 Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
File:Tute_bianche.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Tute_bianche.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: en:Image:Tute bianche.jpg Original artist: Own work
File:Walden_Thoreau.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Walden_Thoreau.jpg License: Public domain
Contributors: English Wikipedia, originally updated by user:Shward103. Same title page can be seen at The Walden Woods Project Original
artist: Unknown
File:Wallst14occupy.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Wallst14occupy.jpg License: CC-BY-SA-3.0
Contributors: Own work Original artist: Mrwho00tm
File:Wendy_McElroy_16_September_2006_AM.jpg Source:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/Wendy_
McElroy_16_September_2006_AM.jpg License: ? Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
File:Wikiquote-logo.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Wikiquote-logo.svg License: Public domain
Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
File:Wikisource-logo.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Wikisource-logo.svg License: CC-BY-SA-3.0
Contributors:
Original artist: Nicholas Moreau
File:Wikiversity-logo.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Wikiversity-logo.svg License: CC-BY-SA-3.0
Contributors: Snorky (optimized and cleaned up by verdy_p) Original artist: Snorky (optimized and cleaned up by verdy_p)

42.7. TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

363

File:WilliamGodwin.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/WilliamGodwin.jpg License: Public domain

Contributors: National Portrait Gallery, London: NPG 1236 Original artist: James Northcote
File:WilliamGodwinNorthcote.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/WilliamGodwinNorthcote.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: National Portrait Gallery, London: NPG 1236 Original artist: James Northcote
File:William_Morris_age_53.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/William_Morris_age_53.jpg License:
Public domain Contributors: http://books.google.com/books?id=0ZQOAAAAIAAJ Google Books edition of J. W. Mackail The Life of
William Morris in two volumes, London, New York and Bombay: Longmans, Green and Co., 1899 Original artist: Frederick Hollyer
File:Woman-power_emblem.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Woman-power_emblem.svg License:
Public domain Contributors: Made by myself, based on a character outline in the (PostScript Type 1) Fnord Hodge-Podge Discordian fonts
version 2 by toa267 (declared by him to be Public Domain). I chose the color to be kind of equally intermediate between red, pink, and
lavender (without being any one of the three...). Original artist: AnonMoos, toa267
File:Young_Kropotkin.png Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/Young_Kropotkin.png License: Public domain Contributors: http://flag.blackened.net/liberty/archive/kropotkin.gif Original artist: Unknown
File:Zap1.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/Zap1.jpg License: CC-BY-SA-3.0 Contributors: Own work
Original artist: (Jose Villa) at VillaPhotography
File:Zapataandvilla.png Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Zapataandvilla.png License: Public domain Contributors: Transferred from en.wikipedia; transferred to Commons by User:Darwinius using CommonsHelper.
Original artist: Unknown Original uploader was Zero Gravity at en.wikipedia
File:Zapatista_sign.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/Zapatista_sign.jpg License: CC-BY-SA-2.0 Contributors: Flickr Original artist: Paolo Massa ('phauly')
File:Zentralbibliothek_Zrich_Das_Kapital_Marx_1867.jpg Source:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/
Zentralbibliothek_Z%C3%BCrich_Das_Kapital_Marx_1867.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: This document was created as
part of the Zentralbibliothek Zrich project. Original artist: Zentralbibliothek Zrich
File:Zo_d'Axa_portrait.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Zo_d%27Axa_portrait.jpg License: Public
domain Contributors:
Original artist:
File:mile_Pouget.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/%C3%89mile_Pouget.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: [1] Original artist: Aristide Delannoy (1874-1911)

42.7.3

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