Anarchists and Fellow Travellers |
I am convinced that those societies
(as the Indians) which live without government enjoy in their general
mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under
the European governments. Among the former, public opinion is in the
place of law, & restrains morals as powerfully as laws ever did
anywhere. Among the latter, under pretence of governing they have
divided their nations into two classes, wolves & sheep. I do not
exaggerate. |
- Thomas Jefferson
philosopher, statesman, slave-boffer |
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Anarchism is the theory that no government is just and that no government
is therefore exactly what we ought to strive for. The theme of this
particular page on anarchism is "they said it best, first."
I've included some non-anarchist thinkers (e.g. Thomas Paine) whose radical
critiques of (then) established governments are worth a look, as well as
some
future-primitivist
and luddite theorists (e.g. Zerzan) and
others (e.g. Bey, Black) whose critique of modern society and whose
programs for change reach further than the organization and dissolution of
government.
Anarchism (when it's not merely a leather-jacket fashion statement) is
often thought of as a dramatic battle of mad bombers (Kaczynski) and
assassination (Czolgosz, Berkman) - but the con-game of government has
never been more powerful or more jealous of power, and thanks to the
Stockholm syndrome it's never been
more popular. Today anarchism is a battle of inches - individuals
insisting on reclaiming individual sovereignty one decision and one moment
at a time (e.g. Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zones).
You can't assassinate tyrants very often anymore and expect anything
meaningful to change. Taking casualties from 'their side' may have a
deterrent effect but may just as easily make things worse. If you want to
kill the tyrant today you're talking about oceans of blood, probably
including your own. The tyrant today is the body politic as an evolved
organism, parasitical where it is tangent to our lives.
So if assassinating tyrants is out, what's left for the freedom-fighter?
Wouldn't you know it: Revolution can be fun! Exercise your creativity
and exorcise the busybodies and sadists at the same time by checking out
the rest of the Culture Jammer's
Encyclopedia.
Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876)
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"A tacit contract! That is to say, a wordless, and consequently a
thoughtless and will-less contract: a revolting nonsense! An absurd
fiction, and what is more, a wicked fiction! An unworthy hoax! For it
assumes that while I was in a state of not being able to will, to think,
to speak, I bound myself and all my descendents - only by virtue of
having let myself be victimized without raising any protest - into
perpetual slavery"
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Alexander Berkman (1870-1936)
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"Tyranny must be opposed at the start. Autocracy, once secured in the
saddle, is difficult to dislodge.... You should know that a republic is
not synonymous with democracy, and that America has never been a real
democracy, but that it is the vilest plutocracy on the face of the globe."
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Hakim Bey
"The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State,
a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of
imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen,
before the State can crush it."
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Bob Black
"There is more freedom in any moderately deStalinized dictatorship than
there is in the ordinary American workplace."
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Murray Bookchin
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"Anarchism [has] developed in the tension between two basically
contradictory tendencies: a personalistic commitment to individual
autonomy and a collectivist commitment to social freedom."
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Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912)
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"Of the essence of government... it is a thing apart, developing its own
interests at the expense of what opposes it; all attempts to make it
anything else fail."
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Emma Goldman (1869-1940) |
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"Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help
to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in.
But if man is doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build
roads for thirty years of his life, there can be no talk of wealth. What
he gives to the world is only gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull
and hideous existence - too weak to live, too cowardly to die. Strange
to say, there are people who extol this deadening method of centralized
production as the proudest achievement of our age. They fail utterly to
realize that if we are to continue in machine subserviency, our slavery
is more complete than was our bondage to the King. They do not want to
know that centralization is not only the death-knell of liberty, but also
of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a
clock-like, mechanical atmosphere."
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Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) |
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"If you reason instead of repeating what is taught you; if you analyze the
law and strip off those cloudy fictions with which it has been draped in
order to conceal its real origin, which is the right of the stronger, and
its substance, which has ever been the consecration of all the tyrannies
handed down to mankind through its long and bloody history; when you have
comprehended this, your contempt for the law will be profound indeed."
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Errico Malatesta (1853-1932)
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"In all times and in all places, whatever may be the name of that the
government takes, whatever has been its origin, or its organization, its
essential function is always that of oppressing and exploiting the masses,
and of defending the oppressors and exploiters. Its principal
characteristic and indispensable instruments are the policeman and the tax
collector, the soldier and the prison."
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Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
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"Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, nor to
have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better
secured."
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Lysander Spooner (1808-1887)
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"A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new
master once in a term of years."
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Henry David Thoreau (1816-1862)
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"I have not so surely forseen that any Cossack or Chippeway would come to
disturb the honest and simple commonwealth, as that some monster
institution would at length embrace and crush its free members in its
scaly folds; for it is not to be forgotten, that while the law holds fast
the thief and murderer, it lets itself go loose. When I have not paid the
tax which the State demanded for that protection which I did not want,
itself has robbed me; when I have asserted the liberty it presumed to
declare, itself has imprisoned me... Thus it has happened, that not the
Arch Fiend himself has been in my way, but these toils which tradition
says were originally spun to obstruct him."
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Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854-1939)
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"The Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. They believe
that 'the best government is that which governs least,' and that that which
governs least is no government at all."
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John Zerzan
"Many say that millions would die if the present techno-global fealty to
work and the commodity were scrapped. But this overlooks many
potentialities. For example, consider the vast numbers of people who would
be freed from manipulative, parasitic, destructive pursuits for those of
creativity, health and liberty."
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assorted authors
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miscellaneous resources
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