Category Archives: Anarchism/Anti-State

Invasive Laws Create Anarchy and Tyranny at the Same Time Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Law/Justice, Police State/Civil Liberties, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism

The late American paleoconservative columnist Samuel T. Francis on the phenomenon of “anarcho-tyranny”, a useful term for describing much of the systematic legalist bullshit plaguing the West today, particularly the U.K. and mainland Europe.

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~MRDA~

By Samuel Francis

If, as Bill Clinton tells us, the “era of Big Government is over,” somebody needs to tell the state of Maryland (not to mention Bill Clinton). Earlier this month the Maryland legislature had itself a small orgy of swelling the powers of the state government, and apparently it helped give Mr. Clinton some ideas of his own (orgies seem to have that effect on him).

Just before the end of this year’s legislative session, the Maryland lawmakers passed several new laws that (a) allow policemen to stop drivers for not wearing seat belts, (b) authorize hidden cameras at red lights to take secret photographs of the license plates of cars that run the lights, (c) ban loud car stereos on state roads, (d) forbid minors from buying butane lighters because they might inhale the gas, and (e) require drivers whose windshield wipers are running to keep their headlights on. The lawmakers seem to have missed outlawing cooking breakfast in your underwear, but of course there’s always another session next year.

The citizens of Maryland will no doubt be thrilled to learn that law enforcement in their state has now so mastered violent crime that the cops have little else to do but round up non-seat-belt wearers and butane-sniffers. As a matter of fact, Maryland’s Prince George’s County has just announced that rapes and homicides increased in the first three months of 1997. Nevertheless, you can be certain that no one will be raped or murdered without wearing a seat belt.

The new Maryland laws are rather perfect instances of what I have previously called “anarcho-tyranny” – a form of government that seems to be unknown in history until recently.  Anarcho-tyranny is a combination of the worst features of anarchy and tyranny at the same time.

Under anarchy, crime is permitted and criminals are not apprehended or punished. Under tyranny, innocent citizens are punished. Most societies in the past have succumbed to either one or the other, but never as far as I know to both at once.

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Anarchy: What It Is and Why Pop Culture Loves It 3

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

Hilariously, an article about anarchism appears in teen vogue magazine. It’s actually a pretty good article so far it goes. My one criticism is that it only focused on the leftist-activist version of anarchism, and not the wider range of anarchist thought. But nothing’s perfect.

By Kim Kelly

Teen Vogue

Writer Kim Kelly is an anarchist based in New York City and an organizer with the Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council (MACC).

In a pop-cultural sense, at least, the idea of anarchy has been characterized by either a middle-fingers-up, no-parents-no-rules punk attitude, or a panicky, more conservative outlook used by national and state sources to represent violent chaos and disorder. Today, we can see an extremely serious, radical leftist political philosophy on T-shirts at Hot Topic.

So what is anarchism? What do those people raising black flags and circling A’s really want? Here’s what you need to know:

What is anarchism?

Anarchism is a radical, revolutionary leftist political philosophy that advocates for the abolition of government, hierarchy, and all other unequal systems of power. It seeks to replace what its proponents view as inherently oppressive institutions — like a capitalist society or the prison industrial complex — with nonhierarchical, horizontal structures powered by voluntary associations between people. Anarchists organize around a key set of principles, including horizontalism, mutual aid, autonomy, solidarity, direct action, and direct democracy, a form of democracy in which the people make decisions themselves via consensus (as opposed to representative democracy, of which the United States government is an example).

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The Present and Future of the LP (and the Problem of “Libertarian Socialism”) Reply

by • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

Tom Woods interviews Joshua Smith on the libertarian capitalist vs libertarian socialist conflict in the Libertarian Party. Listen here.

Joshua Smith, who secured a spot on the Libertarian National Committee at the party’s recent convention, joins me to discuss the party’s present and future, the controversy with “libertarian socialists,” and much more.

Pan-Anarchy Manifesto 3

by • Anarchism/Anti-State

Apparently, some ATS folks have been doing some time travel back to 100 years ago.

By A.L Gordin and V.L. Gordin

Panarchy.Org

Pan-anarchy literally means all-embracing anarchy, ‘pan’ being ‘all’ in Greek. Pan-anarchy is a comprehensive and articulate anarchy. Aside from the ideal of no government, or anarchy proper, it entails four other ideals, namely:
– communism, with its ‘everything belongs to everybody’;
– pedism, or the liberation of children and youth from the vice of servile education;
– cosmism (national-cosmopolitanism), the total emancipation of oppressed nationalities; and, finally,
– gyneantropism, that is, the emancipation and humanization of women.

Taken together, these five ideals fall under the general heading of ‘pan-anarchy’. Pan-anarchy implies a synthesis (unification) of all the principal social ideals, actions and aspirations aiming towards a basic overthrow and reconstruction of all society – the economy, the family, the school, international relations and the institutions of government.

In the economic sphere pan-anarchy entails the replacement of capitalism by communism, the abolition of private property in land, means of production and consumer goods. In the family it means the replacement of polygamy and the traffic in women by genuine love between individual man and woman, as well as the end of male domination of the family and of life as a whole, both in fact and in law, the free participation of women in all branches of labour and art and their equal enjoyment of all the benefits of society. In the school it means the replacement of present-day book learning, which indoctrinates our children and youth with religious and scientific prejudices, by a practical education in technical crafts which will be useful in everyday life and which will afford them freedom, self-reliance and the ability to create things by themselves with originality and independence of mind.

It also means that the existing territorial system, with its fatherlands and state frontiers and national and private territorial ownership, will be replaced by a national-cosmopolitan order in which there are neither fatherlands nor frontiers but only free unions of free peoples to whom the whole earth belongs in common. ‘The whole earth to all humanity’ – such is the motto of pan-anarchy, as opposed to the territorialism and imperialism of predatory nations which declare that ‘the whole earth is mine’.

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Political Naïveté (or what are we to do about Maoism) 4

by • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Left and Right, Strategy • Tags: ,

By Aragorn

Anarchist Library

One of the reasons that anarchism has become a popular political perspective is because in many contexts (for instance mass mobilizations or broad direct action campaigns) we seem open, friendly, and nonsectarian. This is in great contrast to visible (and visibly) Marxist or Leftist organizations, which either seem like newspaper-selling robots or ancient thorny creatures entirely out of touch with the ambivalence of the modern political atmosphere. Anarchists seem to get that ambivalence and contest it with hope and enthusiasm rather than finger-wagging.

The public face of anarchism tends towards approachability and youth: kids being pepper-sprayed, the general assemblies of the occupy movement, and drum circles. These are the images of the past five years that stand in contrast to the image of anarchists as athletic black clad window breakers. Both are true (or as true as an image can be) and both demonstrate why a criticism of anarchists continues to be that (even at our best) we are politically naïve.

Of course very few window breakers believe that breaking windows means much beyond the scope of an insurance form or a janitorial task, but that is beside the point. What matters is that the politics of no demands makes the impossible task of intelligent political discourse in America even more complicated (by assuming that discourse is a Pyhrric act). To put the issue differently, the dialectical binary of both engaging in the social, dialogic, compromising act of public politics while asserting that there is no request of those-in-power worth stating or compromising on isn’t possible. It is cake-and-eat-it thinking that is exactly why Anarchists must do what Anarchist must do[1].

This rejection of how the game is played while participating in it hasn’t shown itself to be a long term strategy– impossible never is. For lessons on playing the game we have to turn to the winners of politics and revolution: neoliberalists, sure, but also statist Marxists, reactionaries (from racist populists to nationalist Know Nothings or their descendants in the Tea Party), and what remnants exist of the old and new Left. Just to make the point crystal clear I’ll restate it. On the one hand you have the ridiculous non- or even anti-strategy of anarchist political theater that cannot achieve the impossible goal of everything for everybody forever. On the other hand you have realpolitik: the pragmatic application of power in the political sphere. This simplistic dualism is why most intelligent people abandon politics altogether and retreat to NIMBYism (at best) or the quiet solitude of screaming at a television screen as the only expression of engagement with the outside world.

In this light, a discussion about maoism might seem outrageous and it is! Maoism isn’t a relevant political tendency or movement in America. It isn’t leading guerrilla forces in the hills, it has no leaders-in-waiting just outside the border (unless you count Avakian which you should in no way do), but it isn’t further from the mainstream of American political thought than Anarchism is (anarchist big tent populists to the contrary) and is arguably much closer (in an often cited example, the mayor of Oakland, Jean Quan, is a former Maoist). More pointedly, Maoism and Anarchism have been cross-pollinating for decades. Our task here is to shine a light on that history and challenge what benefits anarchists have garnered from this little-discussed pollination.

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Anarcho-Coalitionism? 1

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Strategy, Uncategorized • Tags:

The meme below was recently posted on Facebook with the following comments by a proponent of “anarcho-coalitionism”:

#AnarchoCoalitionism is militant panarchy. It’s the only way forward. The elites LIKE the masses fighting amongst each other, and that doesn’t change, no matter how “woke” you are. You are not an island, and neither am I. Wanna win? Be #AnarchoCoalitionist.

Shake some hands. Find some agreements. You don’t have to compromise to move forward. But working with many you called “enemies” is going to be a first step.

And to anyone who sees this, feel free to use the banner pic.

They call it a banner for a reason, and the more people flying it, the more obvious it will be that we are coming, we are many, and we are not going away.

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I responded with the following comments:

I’ve been thinking and writing about these kinds of ideas for years. I think the first problem is that there are too few anarchists at present for anarchism to exercise any real impact on the wider society, so anarchists tend to spend a lot of time in their own ideological enclaves fighting with each other. A second problem is that many anarchists of the hyphenated varieties are essentially the hyphens first and anarchists second. So the first goal probably needs to be to grow the number of anarchists of whatever kind, period.

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EVACUATING UTOPIA: A History of Christian Anarchism Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Religion and Philosophy, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

Lecture delivered by Wayne John Sturgeon at the second international conference of the National-Anarchist Movement, England, June 23, 2018.

“Isn’t the world already

At Peace and aren’t we

The only warring faction?”

-Crass

Improvements made straight roads,

but the crooked roads without improvement,

are the roads of genius.

-William Blake

INTRODUCTION

I would like to begin this lecture with a quote from a contemporary theologian, Alasdair Macintyre, who made the following candid observation in reference to our own times, when writing on the fall of the western Roman Empire:

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Reflections on Anarchist Rivalries Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State

Recently an article on Medium attacked the National-Anarchist Movement, whose second annual conference was recently held in London. Read the original article here. This was my response:

Some of the comments in this article are extraordinarily misinformed. National-Anarchism is very similar to older ecumenical anarchist tendencies like panarchism, synthesism, or anarchism without adjectives, plus some other ideas like neo-tribalism and ecology. Recently, this meme was posted on an N-A page:

And these were some of the comments in response by leading N-As:

“This chart would be an overview of interaction between various N-AM communities, which serves as an umbrella for, sometimes mutually exclusive, ways of life.”

“I agree, but I doubt whether some of these variations would be quite as tolerant as we are. Agreeing to disagree is one thing, but true Anarchism should never venture into the realms of coercion. In other words, the squares to avoid should never become squares upon which to impose your own views.”

“The chart is also very atheistic/materialistic in that it leaves out a vast multitude of Anarchist variations centred on spirituality. Think of all the Christian, Islamic, Jewish and Occult groups, for example. And there is always room for thematic Anarchists, too, who may base their communities on sexual (beyond homosexuality), musical, dietary, historical, fictional or cinematic themes. The list is endless and the N-AM is the only movement on the planet that caters for such diversity.”

Obviously, the ideas expressed above have nothing to do with either fascist totalitarianism nor neo-Nazi terrorism.

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“Tribes” Magazine Now Available! 5

by • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

The new magazine of the National-Anarchist Movement, “Tribes,” is now available. Please contact me through this website’s contact page or via Facebook for inquiries about orders. Complimentary copies will be provided on a selective basis to reviewers, publishers, academics and journalists.

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Contents

Editorial by Troy Southgate

The Challenge of National-Anarchism by Adam Ormes

Birth Against the Modern World by Hildr Jorgensen

Deep Roots Are Not Reached by the Frost by Linda Hext

Anarchy Against Politics by Kostas Exarchos

Autonomy and Introspection by Mary Kate Morris

Ecology and the Ethnosphere by Thom Forester

From the Streets in Black to a Field in a Wide-Brimmed Hat: A Left-Anarchist’s Journey to N-AM by Gregor Eugen Elliott

Tribe-Race-Ethnicity by Piercarlo-Bormida

Eonorenesis Ethnogenesis by Alexander Storrsson

Anarchism Without Adjectives: National-Anarchism and the Diversity of Communities by Sean Jobst

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Where Are You as an Anarchist? 7

by • Anarchism/Anti-State

Guide to anyone confused (left to right, top row):
– Anarcho-Capitalists
– Anarcho-Communists
– Anarcho-Syndicalists
– Anarcho-Primitivists
– Mutualists
– Agorists
– Anarcho-Transhumanists
– Queer-Anarchists
– Anarcha-Feminists
– Anarcho-Pacifists
– Egoist-Anarchists
– Individualist-Anarchists
– Anarchists Without Adjectives

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“This chart would be an overview of interaction between various N-AM communities, which serves as an umbrella for, sometimes mutually exclusive, ways of life.“- Zbigniew Boguslawski

“The chart is also very atheistic/materialistic in that it leaves out a vast multitude of Anarchist variations centred on spirituality. Think of all the Christian, Islamic, Jewish and Occult groups, for example. And there is always room for thematic Anarchists, too, who may base their communities on sexual (beyond homosexuality), musical, dietary, historical, fictional or cinematic themes. The list is endless and the N-AM is the only movement on the planet that caters for such diversity.” -Troy Southgate

Anarcho-capitalism (AKA actually believing that absentee property exists without a state despite having 0 historical examples of this)

Anarcho-primitivism (AKA my utopia requires billions of people to die)
Mutualist (AKA obsolete political economy)
Post-left anarchism (AKA people who have given up on their dreams)
Egoist anarchism (AKA thinking that watching Ghostbusters is praxis)
Anarcho-transhumanism (AKA Elon Musk daddy please solve my problems)
Anarcho-communism (AKA thinking direct democracy prevents tyranny of the majority)

Anarchism without adjectives (AKA the radical centrism of the libertarian left)

Anarcho-syndicalism (AKA Catalonians stealing cows from innocent peasants)
Neo-Mutualist/LWMAs in general (AKA jerking off Kevin Carson)
Anarcho-pacifism (AKA Smash the Fash in the euphemistic sense)
Anarcha-feminism (AKA just an unspoken part of almost everything on this list, why should it get it’s own option)
Religious anarchism (AKA I hate hierarchy but have you heard of this God guy? he’s my lord)
Communalism (AKA REEEEEEEE LIFESTYLISTS GET OUT)
Egoist Communism (AKA dr bones believes in magic so I do too)
Collectivist anarchist (AKA still butthurt about the 1st international)

Review: Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Economics/Class Relations • Tags: , ,

By Kevin Carson

Center for a Stateless Society

Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London and New York: Verso, 2015, 2016).

I approached this book with considerable eagerness and predisposed to like it. It belongs to a broad milieu of -isms for which I have strong sympathies (postcapitalism, autonomism, left-accelerationism, “fully automated luxury communism,” etc.). So I was dismayed by how quickly my eager anticipation turned to anger when I started reading it. Through the first third of the book, I fully expected to open my review with “I read this book so you don’t have to.” But having read through all of it, I actually want you to read it.

There is a great deal of value in the book, once you get past all the strawman ranting about “folk politics” in the first part. There is a lot to appreciate in the rest of the book if you can ignore the recurring gratuitous gibes at horizontalism and localism along the way. The only other author I can think of who similarly combines brilliant analysis with bad faith caricatures of his perceived adversaries is Murray Bookchin.

I quote at length from their discussion of folk politics:

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Truth! Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Uncategorized

By Vince Rinehart

What legitimizes a ruler or ruling class hasn’t changed a whole lot over time. In antiquity the emperor was supposed to be God on earth. And he was supported by true believers and those that he could bribe into following him in a mutually beneficial relationship. Any internal dissent was murdered or politically repressed and any external threats were fought off or eliminated.

Image result for roman state cult

Under feudalism the King was God’s representative on earth. He was supported by true believers and those he could bribe into following him in a mutually beneficial relationship. Any internal dissent was murdered or politically repressed into submission and any external threats were fought off or eliminated.

Image result for divine right of kings

Under modern nation states there are variations on the same theme. The state claims to represent “the people” whether it’s the revolutionary parties of communist states or the elected figure heads of capitalist democracies. This rule is supported by true believers and those that are bribed into following the system in a mutually beneficial relationship. Any internal dissenters are murdered or politically repressed and external threats are fought off or eliminated. Put a conservative-approved Trump as the figurehead, or a liberal-approved Obama. Whichever maintains power the most effectively will be chosen.

Image result for totalitarianism

Image result for totalitarianism democracy