Category: Anarchism/Anti-State

Anarchism 101

These are some comments I recently posted in a social media forum concerning the basics of anarchist theory, and why it is important and helpful. From my readings of the classical anarchist theorists, I don’t know that any of them literally believed in a society with no social […]

Mass Outreach Project to Introduce Anarchist Ideas to General Public

AnarchistAgency.Com FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE January 15, 2015 CONTACT: agent@anarchistagency.com Mass Outreach Project to Introduce Anarchist Ideas to General Public CrimethInc. Publishes Free Primer in 20 Languages WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Thursday, January 15, the underground publishing group CrimethInc. launched To Change Everything, a multimedia outreach project intended to […]

Anarchism by Branch

Good introductory overview. The Basics of Philosophy Introduction Back to Top Anarchism is the political philosophy which rejects (and supports the elimination of ) compulsory government or compulsory rule, and holds that society can (and should) be organized without a coercive state. This may, or may not, involve […]

Conservative Statism

By Roger Hicks The Telegraph It’s generally assumed that statism is a characteristic of the political Left, which the Tory Right is opposed to, but in fact, both the Left and the Right are committed to the STATE and, in their own rather different ways, each as statist […]

The Political Theory of Anarchism

April Carter’s classic 1971 work is now available online. See here. The Political Theory of Anarchism April Carter Formerly lecturer in Politics, Lancaster University1971 Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1 The Political Theory of Anarchism 13 The Leviathan The Social Contract Hobbes and Godwin Primacy of the Individual […]

The Mafia with a Flag

The State is the mafia with a flag. Why does the mafia exist? To control territory, monopolize resources, enrich and protect an artificially privileged elite, exploit subjects, and expand its own realm of power and domination. When a gang’s territory is threatened, it responds with extreme violence. How […]

Rough Justice

Good article from 2010 about over criminalization in the US. The Economist IN 2000 four Americans were charged with importing lobster tails in plastic bags rather than cardboard boxes, in violation of a Honduran regulation that Honduras no longer enforces. They had fallen foul of the Lacey Act, […]

The Pan-Anarchist 12-Step Program

1. Continue to attack all mainstream institutions across the board, until all of the system’s institutions have a single digit approval rating, just as Congress presently does. 2. Continue all dissident movements everywhere, and grow these to the point that they collectively become a majority, and then a […]

Steel Anarchism

Accepting Ignorance he first thing to understand that the only true anarchism is a flavour of anarcho-capitalism. This is anarchy fully steelmanned, logicked forward until it could be logicked no more. (This is philosophical anarchism, not bomb-things anarchism. Philosophical anarchism is recognizing each dire ape as responsible to […]

Libertarians, Left and Right

A Facebook reader posted a response to this critique of Libertarianism in Salon by Michael Lind. Says the reader: To me, libertarianism represents the time in old England-portrayed by Charles Dickens, where the poor completely had to fend for themselves when they could not find work. They could […]

Growing Up

By John Jacobi Anarchist Library While most of the anarchist movement consists of fairly young people, I have the privilege of living in a town with many older anarchists. By “older” I mean people in their 30s, but also people in their 40s and 50s (or at least […]

Post-Left Anarchy: Leaving the Left Behind

A classic work on post-left anarchism. By Jason McQuinn Anarchist Library Prologue to Post-Left Anarchy Introduction Leftists in the Anarchist Milieu Recuperation and the Left-Wing of Capital Anarchy as a Theory & Critique of Organization Anarchy as a Theory & Critique of Ideology Neither God, nor Master, nor […]

The Cat is Out of the Bag

By Keith Preston For an opposing perspective, see this article by Joseph Nye. For an article that makes comparable arguments, see this piece in Foreign Policy by Gideon Rachman. When the future history of the former United States of America is written, the pivotal turning point that likely […]

The State: Its Rise and Decline

Read this classic lecture from 2000 by Professor Van Creveld, and then read my “Philosophical Anarchism and the Death of Empire” from 2003. Van Creveld’s lecture describes the emerging world order, and my essay outlines a new paradigm for the “worldwide Grey Tribe” as it might be called. […]

The Rise of the Grey Tribe

Right now, the most important thing that anarchists, libertarians, anti-state radicals, decentralists, anti-authoritarians, paleos, communitarians, and allied others can be doing is growing the Grey Tribe as a third force in U.S. politics beyond the Red Tribe/Blue Tribe dichotomy. Read the blog post below and then read Scott […]

Is the Nation State Obsolete?

By Chuck Spinney The Blaster Introduction to the Changing Face of War Uri Avnery’s thoughtful essay Scotland on the Euphrates questions the future viability of the nation-state as a form of social organization.  His concerns are not new, although as Avnery noted, recent events certainly make them more believable — […]

Towards a Redefinition of Nationalism

Not bad. It looks like someone has been reading ATS. I certainly hope the Alternative Right/Neo-Reactionary/Dark Enlightenment evolves in this direction. I noticed in the comments threads at Radix that some of the fascists and white supremacists aren’t too happy with this piece, lol. By Batu Caliskan Radix […]

Imagine….

Imagine in the year 2044 a poll is taken showing the following results: 10% of Americans consider themselves to be anarchists. 20% consider themselves to be “hard-core” libertarians. 20% consider themselves to be “moderate” libertarians. 20% consider themselves to be “libertarian-leaning.” 55% say that would prefer decentralizing the […]

Millennial Libertarians Are Diverse

By Emily Ekins Reason.Com Handsraised Yesterday, Rachel Burger at Townhall made the case that “Libertarianism isn’t confined to Caucasians anymore.” Data from both the Pew Research Center and the Reason-Rupe poll bolster her thesis, particularly among younger people. Pew finds that roughly equal numbers of white (12%) and Hispanic Americans (11%) say the term […]

American Machiavelli

This is absolutely required reading for anarchists and libertarians. You cannot understand modern statecraft without understanding James Burnham. By Daniel McCarthy The American Conservative illustration by Michael Hogue America is badly governed. Congress has dismal approval ratings, sometimes as low as single digits. Presidential elections, settled by popular […]

Free Lingít Aaní!

From Lingit Latseen Today is Free Nations Day. Free Nations Day is an opportunity to reclaim the idea that nations are voluntary groupings of free individuals, not externally imposed political borders or states. Both geographic localities and identities that transcend space are legitimate entities with the right to […]

The Case for the City-State System

By Keith Preston I recently suggested that the next necessary step in the cultivation of the pan-anarchist movement will be the coalescence of the many scattered factions and tendencies within anarchism and overlapping philosophies into a new “Gray” anarchist macro-tribe that maintains its own political and cultural identity […]

A Realistic Libertarianism?

This should ruffle some feathers. I should qualify that I am not necessarily taking Hoppe’s side in this argument, which is a growing  argument in libertarian and anarchist milieus, concerning whether anti-statism is more compatible with a leftist or rightist worldview. As those who are familiar with the […]

Democracy: The Hanging Judge

My Takimag debut. The responses pretty much reinforce what I said in the piece about the demos. I noticed a fair few mentions of the phrase “death penalty” from UK news outlets last fortnight; little surprise, given that the antepenultimate Wednesday marked the half-century since this Sceptered Isle’s […]