On Anarchism

Chapter 5 : Language and Freedom
5. Language and Freedom When I was invited to speak on the topic “language and freedom,” I was puzzled and intrigued. Most of my professional life has been devoted to the study of language. There would be no great difficulty in finding a topic to discuss in that domain. And there is much to say about the problems of freedom and liberation as they pose themselves to us and to others in the mid-twentieth century. What is troublesome in the title of this lecture is the conjunction. In what way are language and freedom to be interconnected? As a preliminary, let me say just a word about the contemporary study of language, as I see it. There are many aspects of language and language use that raise intriguing questions, but—in my judgment—only a few have so far led to productive theoretical work. In particular, our deepest insights are in the area of formal grammatical structure. A person who knows a language has acquired a system of rules and... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 4 : Interview with Harry Kreisler, from Political Awakenings
4. Interview with Harry Kreisler, from Political Awakenings March 22, 2002 How do you think your parents shaped your perspectives on the world? Those are always very hard questions, because it’s a combination of influence and resistance, which is difficult to sort out. My parents were immigrants, and they happened to end up in Philadelphia, as part of what amounted to kind of a Hebrew ghetto, Jewish ghetto, in Philadelphia. Not a physical ghetto—it was scattered around the city—but a cultural ghetto. When my father’s family came over, for whatever reason, they went to Baltimore, and my mother’s family, from another part of the Pale of Settlement, came to New York. The families were totally different. The Baltimore family was ultra-orthodox. In fact, my father told me that they had become more orthodox when they got here than they even were in the shtetl in the Ukraine where they came from. In gener... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 3 : Part II of Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship
3. Part II of Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship If it is plausible that ideology will in general serve as a mask for self-interest, then it is a natural presumption that intellectuals, in interpreting history or formulating policy, will tend to adopt an elitist position, condemning popular movements and mass participation in decision making, and emphasizing rather the necessity for supervision by those who possess the knowledge and understanding that is required (so they claim) to manage society and control social change. This is hardly a novel thought. One major element in the anarchist critique of Marxism a century ago was the prediction that, as Bakunin formulated it: According to the theory of Mr. Marx, the people not only must not destroy [the state] but must strengthen it and place it at the complete disposal of their benefactors, guardians, and teachers—the leaders of the Communist party, namely Mr. Marx and his friends,...

Chapter 2 : Excerpts from Understanding Power
2. Excerpts from Understanding Power Transcending Capitalism MAN: Referring back to your comments about escaping from or doing away with capitalism, I’m wondering what workable scheme you would put in its place? Me? MAN: Or what would you suggest to others who might be in a position to set it up and get it going? Well, I think that what used to be called, centuries ago, “wage slavery” is intolerable. I mean, I do not think that people ought to be forced to rent themselves in order to survive. I think that the economic institutions ought to be run democratically—by their participants, and by the communities in which they live. And I think that through various forms of free association and federalism, it’s possible to imagine a society working like that. I mean, I don’t think you can lay it out in detail—nobody’s smart enough to design a society; you&rs... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 1 : Notes on Anarchism
1. Notes on Anarchism A French writer, sympathetic to anarchism, wrote in the 1890s that “anarchism has a broad back, like paper it endures anything”—including, he noted, those whose acts are such that “a mortal enemy of anarchism could not have done better.” There have been many styles of thought and action that have been referred to as “anarchist.” It would be hopeless to try to encompass all of these conflicting tendencies in some general theory or ideology. And even if we proceed to extract from the history of libertarian thought a living, evolving tradition, as Daniel Guérin does in Anarchism, it remains difficult to formulate its doctrines as a specific and determinate theory of society and social change. The anarchist historian Rudolf Rocker, who presents a systematic conception of the development of anarchist thought towards anarchosyndicalism, along lines that bear comparison to Guérin&... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Introduction Anarcho-Curious? or, Anarchist Amnesia Nathan Schneider The first evening of a solidarity bus tour in the West Bank, I listened as a contingent of college students from around the United States made an excellent discovery: they were all, at least kind of, anarchists. As they sat on stuffed chairs in the lobby of a lonely hotel near the refugee camp in war-ravaged Jenin, they probed one another’s political tendencies, which were reflected in their ways of dressing and their most recent tattoos. All of this, along with stories of past trauma, made their way out into the light over the course of our ten-day trip. “I think I would call myself an anarchist,” one admitted. Then another jumped into the space this cre... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)