[1] Elisée Recluse, Anarchy, Geography, and Modernity, trans. and ed. John Clark and Camille Martin (Oakland: PM Press, 2013), 233. Taken from the last chapter, “Progress,” of his magnum opus, Man and the Earth (1905).

[2] Álvaro Girón Sierra, En la mesa con Darwin: evolución y revolución en el movimiento libertario en España (1869–1914) (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2005), 66.

[3] Peter Kropotkin, “Modern Science and Anarchism” in Roger N. Baldwin ed., Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2002), 15556.

[4] William Archer, The Life, Trial and Death of Francisco Ferrer (New York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1911), 22.

[5] José Álvarez Junco, La ideología política del anarquismo español (1868–1910) (Madrid: Siglo veintiuno editories, 1976), 316.

[6] Ibid., 50.

[7] Ibid., 161; Ferran Aisa, La cultura anarquista a Catalunya (Barcelona: Edicions de 1984, 2006), 78; Girón Sierra, En la mesa con Darwin, 63.

[8] For an in depth account from a worker-theorist who participated, see Martin Glaberman, Wartime Strikes: The Struggle against the No Strike Pledge in the UAW during World War II (Detroit: Bewick Editions, 1980), accessed December 28, 2015 libcom.org.

[9] Focusing on cotton workers in Santiago, Peter Winn presents that narrative arc of the Chilean experience during that period in Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chili’s Road to Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

[10] Augustín Guillamón, Ready for Revolution: The CNT Defense Committees in Barcelona, 19331938 (Oakland: AK Press, 2014), passim.

[11] The last chapter gives a short overview, but some background may be found throughout Steven Hirsch and Lucien Van der Walt eds., Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940: The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill publishers, 2010).

[12] Daniel Barret, Los Sediciosos Despertares de la Anarquía (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Libros de Anarres, 2011), passim.

[13] For overviews, see: John Holland, Emergence: From Chaos to Order (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Helix, 1998); Peter Corning, “The Reemergence of “Emergence”: A Venerable Concept in Search of a Theory” Complexity 7, No. 6 (2002): 18–30; Richard Lewontin, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (New York: Scribner, 2002).

[14] A succinct account of emergence within the social sciences is found in Richard Sawyer, Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

[15] Marco Lagi, Karla Z. Bertrand, and Yaneer Bar-Yam, The Food Crises and Political Instability in North Africa and the Middle East (2011), accessed April 27, 2016, necsi.edu.

[16] U.S. Department of Defense, National Security Implications of Climate-Related Risks and a Changing Climate (July 23, 2015), accessed April 27, 2016, archive.defense.gov.

[17] Robert D Kaplan, “The South China Sea is the Future of Conflict,” Foreign Policy (August 15, 2011), accessed December 28, 2015, foreignpolicy.com.

[18] Reported in Naomi Klein, “How Science Is Telling Us All to Revolt,” New Statesman, October 29, 2013, accessed December 28, 2015, www.newstatesman.com. Original paper by Brad Werner, “Is earth F**ked? Dynamically Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism,” American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2012, adsabs.harvard.edu.

[19] David Gelles, “At Zappos, Pushing Shoes and a Vision,” New York Times, July 17, 2015, accessed December 28, 2015, www.nytimes.com. Matthew Shaer, “The Boss Stops Here,” New York Magazine, June 16, 2013, accessed December 28, 2015, nymag.com.

[20] Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (New York: Frederick A. Stokes & Brother, 1888), accessed April 27, 2016, www.questia.com#.

[21] Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1896), passim, accessed January 1, 2015, www.questia.com.

[22] William James, “Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment (Lecture Delivered before the Harvard Natural History Society),” Atlantic Monthly, October, 1880, passim, accessed January 1, 2015, www.uky.edu.

[23] Particularly look to Chapters one, two, and six of Michael King and Christopher J. Thornhill. Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Politics and Law (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), accessed April 27, 2016, dl4a.org

[24] Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, Biology under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on the Coevolution of Nature and Society (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007), passim.

[25] See Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together (New York: Penguin, 2008); and Paul Mason’s Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions (New York: Verso Books, 2012) for examples of these uses of emergence.

[26] Graham Purchase, Anarchism and Ecology (Montreal, Canada: Black Rose Books Limited, 1997), 33–74.

[27] Ibid., 111–135.

[28] Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988).

[29] This is not helped by the lack of original sources or historical exploration due to institutional hostility to the tradition.

[30] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

[31] Bertrand, Russell “Wisdom of the West a Historical Survey of Western Philosophy in Its Social and Political Setting” (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), 7.

[32] Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

[33] Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks: Three Volume Set (New York, Columbia University Press, 2011), passim.

[34] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. (Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2010), section 109.

[35] Those interested for an overview may see Daniel Stoljar and Nic Damnjanovic, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2014 ed., s.v. “The Deflationary Theory of Truth,” accessed April 27, 2016, plato.stanford.edu.

[36] The classic elaboration of this is Alfred Tarski, “The Semantic Conception of Truth: And the Foundations of Semantics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4, no. 3 (1944): 341–376.

[37] For an accessible overview of some of these issues, see Bernard d’Espagnat, On Physics and Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

[38] I’m isolating philosophy’s contribution here, whereas in reality it is a consistent back and forth between all the elements and disciplines of cognitive science driving forward these questions.

[39] Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association: 1911), 62, accessed April 27, 2016, archive.org.

[40] Though it is an interesting twist in the story that Karl Korsch himself came to critique the idea that a coherent Marxist method exists and Marxism’s role in the failures of the Russian revolution and Germany post-WWI in his worthwhile texts “A Non-Dogmatic Approach to Marxism” Politics, May, 1946, accessed April 27, 2016, libcom.org and “Ten Theses on Marxism Today” TELOS 26 (Winter 1975–1976), accessed April 27, 2016, www.marxists.org.

[41] Karl Korsch, The Marxist Dialectic, trans. Karl-Heinz Otto (1923), accessed January 4, 2015, www.marxists.org.

[42] Whether or not science is fundamentally about predictions or whether it is adequate to give better accounts of the past/present and potential predictions does not affect my argument either way, so I proceed with this most simplistic notion of science for argument’s sake.

[43] There were certainly other methods such as magical or religious methods which sought knowledge through appealing to spiritual beings in rituals, prayers, etc.

[44] Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. R. Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), accessed April 29, 2016, www.Marxists.org.

[45] Ericco Malatesta, Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, ed. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1984), 104.

[46] Peter Kropotkin, Encyclopedia Britannica, 11^th ed., s.v. “Anarchism” (New York, 1910), passim, accessed January 14, 2016, dwardmac.pitzer.edu. See also the discussion of an anarchist method to post-capitalist society in Wayne Price’s essay “The Anarchist Method: An Experimental Approach to Post-Capitalist Economics” in eds. Deric Shannon, Anthony J Nocella II, and John Asimakopoulas, The Accumulation of Freedom: Writings on Anarchist Economics (Oakland: AK Press, 2012).

[47] The best of dialectics uses it as a way of looking at problems. There are some similarities with a more fluid and libertarian approach to dialectics with emergence. This is not the place to address the good and bad of dialectics, but emergence could be seen as a possible tool for people who do think dialectics is useful and want a more rigorous and usable form of that kind of thinking. All of this line of thinking reinforces the misuse of the concept of method in some circles.

[48] Determinism was perhaps the manifest destiny of the official Marxist-Leninist ideologues and states.

[49] Noam Chomsky, “Notes on Anarchism,” in Daniel Guerin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), accessed May 8, 2016, chomsky.info.

[50] The length of this quote is instructive and worth repeating because it is a strong example against this kind of thinking. Louis Beam, “Leaderless Resistance,” The Seditionist 12 (1992): 12–13, accessed April 27, 2016, www.researchgate.net’.

[51] For the history of this current of thought see Brain McLaughlin, “The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism” in Emergence or Reduction?: Prospects for Nonreductive Physicalism, eds. Ansgar Beckermann, Hans Flohr, and Jaegwon Kim (New York; Walter de Gruyter, 1992), 49–93.

[52] John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (New York: Harpers and Brothers Publishers, 1882), 246, accessed April 27, 2016, archive.org.

[53] George Henry Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind (London: Trubner & Co., 1874), 369, accessed April 27, 2016, archive.org.

[54] Mark A. Bedau, “Weak Emergence” Noûs 31, s11 (1997): 375–399, accessed May 7, 2016, people.reed.edu.

[55] Mark A. Bedau, “Downward Causation and Autonomy in Weak Emergence” in Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science, eds. Mark A. Bedau and Paul Ed Humphreys (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT press, 2008), 155–188.

[56] This position is supported by rapidly increasing examples of artificial life models being able to predict otherwise indescribable phenomena like the path of weather, diseases, birthrates, traffic, etc. Research increasingly shows the validity of such models for making predictions and learning about the systems themselves. We can engineer models that can do calculations and follow paths that our minds cannot.

[57] Though not relevant to the purposes of this text, assessing the relevance of social and political emergence, there are varieties here we are skipping. Some forms of emergentism reject both reducibility and physicalism (the idea that the world is exclusively physical). There are non-reducible variants of physicalism, reducible physicalism (in matter not thought), and irreducible non-physicalism (among other positions). At stake here is both what the universe is made of, how high-level things relate to lower-level things, our explanations of the world and sciences, and how we understand it. An adequate exploration of these themes would take us well outside our domain. An excellent resource for these debates is found in the collection of philosophical and scientific articles within Bedau and Humphreys, Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science (2008).

[58] Corning “The Re-Emergence of “Emergence”: A Venerable Concept in Search of a Theory,” 18–30.

[59] This is distinct from the discussion of whether properties of salt can be reduced to a robust chemical explanation of such, which indeed is more plausible with salt than other examples of reported emergence. It would not, however, likely explain our experience of salt or the emergent responses of living systems to salt even if you can reduce salt’s properties to a combination of sodium and chlorine’s collective natures.

[60] Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species, (1872), quoted in Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 49

[61] Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely, 46–61.

[62] We could make any number of lists here (adaptation, evolution, self-organization, reproduction, etc.). This is mostly incidental to the following arguments, but worth studying for those with interest. From the emergentist perspective, see Bruce H. Weber, “What is Life? Defining Life in the Context of Emergent Complexity” Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres 40, no. 2 (2010): 221–229.

[63] Lewontin and Levins, Biology under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on the Coevolution of Nature and Society, 223.

[64] A more robust account of the physics of moving an object would also complicate the example I gave of course.

[65] With the case of salt, we could probably produce a sufficiently robust chemical explanation of its chemical properties based on the atomic and molecular facts. Still the example is illustrative, so it is worth keeping.

[66] The failure of those attempts is covered in Erik Laursen, The People’s Pension: The Struggle to Defend Social Security since Reagan (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012).

[67] See Sawyer, Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems.

[68] For an overview from the sciences, see Lee Alan Dugatkin, “Kropotkin’s Adventure in Science and Politics” Scientific American, September 13, 2011, accessed February 16, 2015, www.scientificamerican.com.

[69] Graham Purchase, “Peter Kropotkin: Ecologist, Philosopher and Revolutionary” (PhD dis., University of New South Wales, 2003), passim, accessed February 15, 2016, libcom.org

[70] Reclus, Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: Selected Writings of Elisée Reclus, 178.

[71] Ibid., 217.

[72] Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Property is Theft!: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology, ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011), 655.

[73] Ibid., 661.

[74] Ibid., 663.

[75] Rocker, Nationalism and Culture, 28.

[76] His collection of writings here gives a good overview: Purchase, Anarchism and Ecology.

[77] See for example Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982), accessed May 7, 2016, libcom.org.

[78] Lewontin and Levins, Biology under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on the Coevolution of Nature and Society, 183. The authors here however mean a more specific type of reductionism that would negate emergence conclusions. This is not necessary for the argument that follows.

[79] For example, look at Immanuel Wallerstein, “Crisis of the Capitalist System: Where Do We Go from Here?” The Harold Wolpe Lecture, University of KwaZulu-Natal, November 5, 2009, republished in Monthly Review Zine, November 11, 2009, accessed January 24, 2016, mrzine.monthlyreview.org.

[80] These ideas are most explicit in Nicole Pepperell, “Disassembling Capital” (PhD dis., RMIT University, 2010), accessed April 27, 2016, rtheory.files.wordpress.com.

[81] See their collection of essays, Lewontin and Levins, Biology under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on the Coevolution of Nature and Society.

[82] A few examples of such are Scott Nicholas Nappalos, “Ditching Class,” in The Accumulation of Freedom: Writings on Anarchist Economics, eds. Anthony J. Nocella, Deric Shannon, and John Asimakopoulos, (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012), 291–331. Also see the three-part essay Towards Theory of Political Organization for Our Time (2011), accessed April 27, 2016, libcom.org.

[83] Marco Lagi, Yavni Bar-Yam, and Yaneer Bar-Yam, “UPDATE July 2012—the Food Crises: The US Drought” (July 23, 2012), accessed April 27, 2016, necsi.edu.

[84] Industrial Workers of the World. “Work-to-Rule: A Guide” ed. Libcom Collective (2006), passim, accessed April 27, 2016, libcom.org.

[85] An extended history of such is contained in Cynthia Ann Ruder, Making History for Stalin: The Story of the Belomor Canal (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998).

[86] Fisher’s describes the history and situates it well as a more general phenomenon in Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Ropley, Hants, UK: Zero Books), 2009.

[87] The documentary, A State of Mind, provides an interesting look into this phenomenon in contemporary North Korea. Daniel Gordon, A State of Mind, DVD (New York: Kino International, 2005).

[88] Lewontin and Levins, Biology under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on the Coevolution of Nature and Society, 183.

[89] Coletivo Maria Tonha. “Fundador do MPL Fala Sobre o Movimento, as Jornadas de Junho e o Tarifa Zero,” Brazil De Fato, July 25, 2013, accessed January 14, 2016, www.brasildefato.com.br.

[90] Marxism coined its own version of materialism as meaning a very specific thing linked to the ideas of Marx. However, here I am using it in the more general sense that philosophers have used it outside of Marxist circles.

[91] Michel Foucault ties the rise of the state to the theater of governing that distinguishes it from prior means of governance. See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, vol. 4, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2009), 265–278.

[92] Rocker, Nationalism and Culture, 21–41.

[93] Famously in Karl Marx, Preface and Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Pekin: Foreign Languages Press, 1976).

[94] Luigi Fabbri, “El Concepto Anarquista de la Revolución,” in Dictadura y Revolución (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones Libertad, 1921), accessed May 8, 2016, folletoslibertad.angelfire.com.

[95] Reclus, Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: Selected Writings of Elisée Reclus, 122–123.

[96] Ericco, Malatesta, Anarchy: A Pamphlet (1891), accessed February 2, 2016, dwardmac.pitzer.edu.

[97] Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, “On Representative Government and Universal Suffrage,” in Bakunin on Anarchy, ed. and trans. Sam Dolgoff (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), accessed February 2, 2016, www.marxists.org.

[98] Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism, comp. and ed. Grigorii Petrovich Maksimov (London: The Free Press, 1964), 253.

[99] Rocker, Nationalism and Culture, 28.

[100] Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis (London: Routledge, 2004), 4.

[101] Luce Fabbri, El Camino: Hacia un Socialismo sin Estado: En Cada Paso la Realidad de la Meta (Montevideo, Uruguay: Editorial Nordan-Comunidad, 2000). 53.

[102] Clastres was a French anarchist anthropologist who broke from Marxism to argue that the State is the creator of class and that some primitive societies are organized against the emergence of the state.

[103] Angel J Cappelletti, La Ideología Anarquista (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Libros de la Araucaria, 2006), 18. Translated by the author.

[104] Proudhon, Property is Theft!: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Reader, 654–662.

[105] Ibid., 663.

[106] Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), passim.

[107] Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 340–346.

[108] Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy.

[109] A series of anarchists have attempted to answer these questions historically and anthropologically including Harold B. Barclay, The State (London: Freedom Press, 2003); Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology (New York: Zone Books, 1987); David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), accessed April 27, 2016, abahlali.org; Peter Kropotkin, The State: Its Historic Role (London: “Freedom” Office, 1896), accessed May 8, 2016, theanarchistlibrary.org; and Gaston Leval, Juan Gómez Casas, and Florentino Iglesias, El Estado en la Historia (Cali, Colombia: Zero, 1978).

[110] For example, Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975–1976.

[111] See Felipe Correa, “Crear un Pueblo Fuerte,” in Anarquismo y Poder Popular: Teoría y Práctica Suramericana (Bogotá, Colombia: Ediciones Gato Negro, 2011).

[112] Some admirers of Lenin dispute this today and are invested in a textual exegesis project such as that of Lars Lih in his 2006 Lenin Rediscovered: What is to be done? in Context. Chicago: Haymarket Books, (2008), accessed April 27, 2016, ouleft.org. But in some ways that speaks to the large scale political shifts created by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the integration of libertarian if not anarchist ideas such as rejection of institutionalized political elites, direct democracy, and a critique of power within the radical left mainstream today.

[113] Edward Palmer Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), passim.

[114] For my account of such, see Scott Nicholas Nappalos, The Anarchosyndicalist Contribution to the Theory of Revolutionary Consciousness (2009), accessed February 15, 2016, snappalos.wordpress.com.

[115] On the more semantic side, consciousness carries with it spiritual connotations in popular speech, which may unintentionally encourage overly intellectual takes on the role of ideas. Framing is only so important, but it is worth a mention.

[116] This has been often overstated relative to the role of social struggle however.

[117] For example, Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 19771978.

[118] An interesting analysis of the secular State’s role in religious organization is found in Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).

[119] Chomsky and Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, passim.

[120] Ericco Malatesta, Anarchism and Organization (1897), accessed Aril 26, 2016, www.marxists.org.