Portal:Anarchism

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NARCHISM PORTAL

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Anarchism is a political philosophy and movement that seeks to abolish all institutions that perpetuate authority, coercion, or hierarchy, primarily targeting the state and capitalism. Anarchism advocates for the replacement of the state with stateless societies and voluntary free associations. A historically left-wing movement, anarchism is usually described as the libertarian wing of the socialist movement (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 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 once more, growing in popularity and influence within anti-capitalist, anti-war and anti-globalisation movements. (Full article...)

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Dyer Lum was a 19th-century American anarchist labor activist and poet. A leading anarcho-syndicalist and a prominent left-wing intellectual of the 1880s, he is remembered as the lover and mentor of early anarcha-feminist Voltairine de Cleyre. Lum was a prolific writer who wrote a number of key anarchist texts, and contributed to publications including Mother Earth, Twentieth Century, Liberty (Benjamin Tucker's individualist anarchist journal), The Alarm (the journal of the International Working People's Association) and The Open Court among others. Following the arrest of Albert Parsons, Lum edited The Alarm from 1892–1893. Traditionally portrayed as a "genteel, theoretical anarchist", Lum has recently been recast by the scholarship of Paul Avrich as an "uncompromising rebel thirsty for violence and martyrdom" in the light of his involvement in the Haymarket Riot in 1886. (read more...)

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Graffito from a 2004 CrimethInc. campaign.

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.

Did you know?

... that in his book In Defense of Anarchism, anarchist Robert Paul Wolff argues that the incompatibility of state authority and individual autonomy means that all states are morally illegitimate?
... that according to Franz Oppenheimer's book The State, the purpose of the political state is to establish and enforce class divisions between conquerors and the dominated?
...that Unabomber for President was a 1996 write-in campaign to elect Theodore Kaczynski a.k.a. "the Unabomber" (pictured) as President of the United States?
...that although he contributed to an anti-militarist resolution at a congress of the Second International in 1891, Christiaan Cornelissen was one of a few syndicalists to support the Allied effort in World War I in 1914?
... that in his 1971 book Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Murray Bookchin anticipated the importance of cybernetic technology to the development of human potential over a decade before the origin of cyberpunk?

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Anniversaries for August 21

1869 - Fortuné Henry born, Limeil-Brévannes, France.
1927 - Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (pictured) refuses to hear request for stay of execution in the case of the anarchists Nicola Sacco & Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
1930 - Goliardo Fiaschi (d. 2000) born.
1937 - Emma Goldman travels to Nice & later in the month to St. Tropez for her final stay at Bon Esprit, which is sold shortly after her departure for Spain the following month, temporarily freeing Goldman from financial worries & allowing her to continue her work for the anarchists in Spain.
1944 - Eugène Dieudonne (b. 1884) dies. Individualist, illegalist anarchist & member of the Bonnot Gang.
1973 - Juan Portales Casamar (b. 1922) dies, near Paris, France.

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