Portal:Anarchism

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NARCHISM PORTAL

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Anarchism is a far-left political philosophy and movement that seeks to abolish all institutions that perpetuate authority, coercion, or hierarchy, primarily targeting the state, capitalism, and organised religion. Anarchism advocates for the replacement of these hierarchical social structures with stateless societies consisting of horizontal networks of voluntary associations that operate based on the principles of free association and reciprocity. Anarchism is described as being part of the libertarian wing of the socialist movement, broadly known as libertarian socialism.

Although traces of anarchist ideas are found all throughout history, modern anarchism emerged from the Enlightenment. During the latter half of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century, the anarchist movement flourished in most parts of the world and had a significant role in workers' struggles for their immediate interests and for emancipation. Various anarchist schools of thought formed during this period. Anarchists have taken part in several revolutions, most notably in the Paris Commune, the Russian Civil War and the Spanish Civil War, whose conclusion marked the end of the classical era of anarchism. In the last decades of the 20th and into the 21st century, the anarchist movement has been resurgent, growing in popularity and influence within anti-capitalist, anti-war and anti-globalisation movements. (Full article...)

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Crimethought is not any ideology or value system or lifestyle, but rather a way of challenging all ideologies and value systems and lifestyles—and, for the advanced agent, a way of making all ideologies, value systems, and lifestyles challenging.

— Crimethinc.com, "All Traveler Kids Purged From CrimethInc. Membership"

CrimethInc. is a decentralized anarchist collective composed of multiple cells which act independently of one another. It emerged in the mid-1990s from its beginnings as the hardcore zine Inside Front, and began operating as a collective in 1996. It has since published widely-read propaganda for the anarchist movement, and expanded into nearly all areas of the contemporary anti-capitalist movement. Several divisions of the group have published books, while others have released records or organized large-scale national campaigns against globalization and representative democracy in favor of radical community organizing. Less public splinter groups have carried out direct action (including arson and hacktivism), hosted international conventions and other events, maintained local chapters, sparked riots and toured with multimedia performance art and/or hardcore anarcho-punk musical ensembles. The collective has received national media and academic attention, as well as strong criticism and praise from other anarchists for its activities and philosophy. (read more...)

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Credit: Mark Strandquist, November 4, 2005.

Stenciled graffito in Washington D.C. bearing the slogan of CrimethInc.'s 2004 Don't Just Vote campaign, which exhorted voters to expand their political advocacy beyond voting to direct action. Image courtesy of the Brian MacKenzie Infoshop.

CrimethInc. argued that "[v]oting for people to represent your interests is the least efficient and effective means of applying political power. The alternative, broadly speaking, is acting directly to represent your interests yourself." This posture is typical of anarchism's historical anti-electoralism.

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Did you know?

... that the 1869 anarchist manifesto Catechism of a Revolutionary, which established the importance of Russian anarchist Sergey Nechayev (pictured), portrays the revolutionary as an amoral avenger?
... that Future Primitive and Other Essays by anarcho-primitivist philosopher John Zerzan is regarded as an underground classic by anarchists and technophobes alike?
... that many of the tendencies within anarchism criticized by Chaz Bufe in his pamphlet Listen, Anarchist! are thought to have stemmed from the movement's individualist, Stirnerite wing?
... that in his 2001 post-anarchist book From Bakunin to Lacan, Saul Newman questions how classical anarchism can refrain from reproducing the forms of oppression that it tries to overcome?
... that rather than await execution, Russian anarchist assassin Moishe Tokar doused himself in paraffin from his prison cell lamp and burned himself alive?

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So anarchists keep asking themselves the same question: What is anarchism? What does it mean to be an anarchist? Why? Because it is not a definition that can be made once and for all, put in a safe and considered a heritage to be tapped little by little. Being an anarchist does not mean one has reached a certainty or said once and for all, ‘There, from now on I hold the truth and as such, at least from the point of view of the idea, I am a privileged person’. Anyone who thinks like this is an anarchist in word alone. Instead the anarchist is someone who really puts themselves in doubt as such, as a person, and asks themselves: What is my life according to what I do and in relation to what I think? What connection do I manage to make each day in everything I do, a way of being an anarchist continually and not come to agreements, make little daily compromises, etc? Anarchism is not a concept that can be locked up in a word like a gravestone. It is not a political theory. It is a way of conceiving life, and life, young or old as we may be, whether we are old people or children, is not something final: it is a stake we must play day after day. When we wake up in the morning and put our feet on the ground we must have a good reason for getting up, if we don’t it makes no difference whether we are anarchists or not. We might as well stay in bed and sleep. And to have a good reason we must know what we want to do because for anarchism, for the anarchist, there is no difference between what we do and what we think, but there is a continual reversal of theory into action and action into theory. That is what makes the anarchist unlike someone who has another concept of life and crystallises this concept in a political practice, in political theory.

This is what is not normally said to you, this is what you never read in the newspapers, this is what is not written in books, this is what school jealously keeps quiet about, because this is the secret of life: never ever separate thought from action, the things we know, the things we understand, from the things we do, the things with which we carry out our actions.

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—Alfredo M. Bonanno, The Anarchist Tension, 1998.

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Anniversaries for October 5

1839 – Future internationalist anarchist and elected member of the Paris Commune of 1871 Eugène Varlin is born in the vicinity of Paris.
1858 – While exiled in Tomsk, Siberia, "Godfather of anarchism" Mikhail Bakunin weds the daughter of a Polish merchant, Antonia Ksaverievna Kwiatkowska (couple pictured)
1917 – Mother Earth Bulletin is published for the first time by a collective including Emma Goldman
1923 – Swedish anarcho-syndicalist playwright and novelist Stig Dagerman (d. 1954) is born
1934 – Surrealist and anarchist filmmaker Jean Vigo (b. 1905) dies

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