One of the commonest objections to Communism is, that men are not good enough to live under a Communist state of things. They would not submit to a compulsory Communism, but they are not yet ripe for free, Anarchistic Communism. Centuries of individualistic education have rendered them too egotistic. Slavery, submission to the strong, and work under the whip of necessity, have rendered them unfit for a society where everybody would be free and know no compulsion except what results from a freely taken engagement towards the others, and their disapproval if he would not fulfill the engagement. Therefore, we are told, some intermediate transition state of society is necessary as a step towards Communism.
Old words in a new shape; words sai... (From: AnarchyArchives.)
The biggest service that governments have done for the cause of penal reform has been in imprisoning war resisters; for its effect has often been to give them a lifelong concern with prison and prisoners; almost all the ameliorations of the prison system in this country in the last forty years can be traced in one way or another to their influence. The imprisonment of conscientious objectors in the first World War led to the formation of an unofficial committee, the Prison System Inquiry Committee, which produced in 1922 an immensely influential report, the 700-page volume English Prisons Today, edited by Stephen Hobhouse and Fenner Brockway. This “bible for the reformers” as Margery Fry called it, was compiled largely from ques... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chances are you have already heard something about who anarchists are and what they are supposed to believe. Chances are almost everything you have heard is nonsense. Many people seem to think that anarchists are proponents of violence, chaos, and destruction, that they are against all forms of order and organization, or that they are crazed nihilists who just want to blow everything up. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion. But it’s one that the rich and powerful have always found extremely dangerous.
At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs tur... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
I would like to write about the bullshitization of academic life: that is, the degree to which those involved in teaching and academic management spend more and more of their time involved in tasks which they secretly — or not so secretly — believe to be entirely pointless.
For a number of years now, I have been conducting research on forms of employment seen as utterly pointless by those who perform them. The proportion of these jobs is startlingly high. Surveys in Britain and Holland reveal that 37 to 40 percent of all workers there are convinced that their jobs make no meaningful contribution to the world. And there seems every reason to believe that numbers in other wealthy countries are much the same. There would app... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Anarchists have long argued that the working class, in its struggle against oppression, organizes itself and creates combative bodies which can not only fight hierarchy but can become the framework of a free society. In “From Riot to Revolution” I discussed this in regards to the current social conflict in Argentina.
Unsurprisingly enough, the developments in Argentina have been analyzed by the various shades of the left. The results are illuminating, shedding a light on the way Leninism views working class struggle and the role of the vanguard party. Simply put, their attempts to analyze the events in Argentina exposes the substitutionist nature of vanguardism. Facing a working class which is applying direct self-managem... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
It has been a year since the people of Argentina took to the streets to protest yet more iniquitous government responses to the deepening economic crisis. Once hailed as a model for neo-liberalism, the popular uprising exposed the human results of over 20 long years of structural adjustment plans and “free-market reforms.” The economy is a mess, with poverty and unemployment at disgusting levels. In the past four years of recession, the poverty rate has ballooned from 31 to 53 percent of the population of 37 million, and unemployment has climbed from 14 to 21.4 percent, according to official figures.
The revolt reached massive levels. Seven million workers took part in a general strike. The president declared a state of e... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
The anarchists do not wait for a theoretical maturity of the times or for
a certain evolution before acting, because they know that action is in
itself what better ripens both evolution and times.
From the newspaper La Pampa Libre, 1930.
FLA has member groups in Rosario,
Trenque Lauquen, La Pampa, San
Pedro, Chaco y Corrientes. In the
federal capital (Buenos Aires) it has a
local of its own where there are
foundational and member groups. This
is also open for other groups which
might request it for talks, lectures,
different activities and meetings.
There is a bookshop that makes
donations of materials for libraries and
different anarchist groups, as well as
selling it at a low price to spread our
ideas and hel... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Introduction
This book was written in 1977 in the momentum of the revolutionary struggles that were taking place in Italy at the time, and that situation, now profoundly different, should be borne in mind when reading it today.
The revolutionary movement, including the anarchist one, was in a developing phase and anything seemed possible, even a generalization of the armed clash.
But it was necessary to protect oneself from the danger of specialization and militarization that a restricted minority of militants intended to impose on the tens of thousands of comrades who were struggling with every possible means against repression and against the State’s attempt—rather weak to tell the truth—to reorganiz... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
The guerrilla struggle against Francoism actually arose in the days following the army revolt against the Spanish Republic on 18 July 1936. Across the country, workers launched a revolution and took up arms against the armed forces. In areas which fell immediately to the mutinous army, a bloody repression was promptly set in motion and this obliged many anti-fascists to take to the hills to save their skins. This was repeated over nearly three years of civil war as areas were conquered, one after another, by the Francoist army and it extended to virtually the entirety of the Peninsula after the Republican troops surrendered in the Center-Levante zone on 31 March 1939.
Very little has been written about the scale of the armed struggle... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
As is the case with any state-controlled historical narrativizations, the history is often de-contextualized and re-contextualized, de-coded and re-coded so as to serve the interests of a particular class. What I have tried to do in this article is to subvert that process and, in effect, to deconstruct that which has been constructed as “Armenian History”.
This article works its way from ancient movements such as Pavlikians, Tondrakiyts, Messalians and Borborits, on to more recent anarchist fradments of Armenian history such as Shaamirian, Nalbandian, Jheon, Atabekian and especially the Anarchist origins of early Dashnaks (ARF). [This article could be of particular interest to anyone interested in Armenian history as well... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Revolt Library 
Anarchism 
