A standard reproach against anarchism is that it would not be able to withstand crises as well as hierarchies. This is often the underlying assumption of Marxist diatribes against Anarchism – although these usually invoke euphemisms to avoid admitting that what is really being suggested is that they and their party should be in power.
For an anarchist, it is annoying to see the right – whether Trump or Johnson, the Tories or the Republicans – proclaimed “libertarians” or “anti-government”. They are neither, not least because they are members of governments and so repeatedly and regularly use State power to further their own and their backers’ interests.
This is my introduction to Modern Science and Anarchy by Peter Kropotkin (AK Press, 2018). This was the last book published by Kropotkin during his lifetime (La Science Moderne et L’Anarchie, 1913) and he explores themes he had been raising since his first joined the anarchist movement in the 1870s. It shows that he did not become a reformist, as some claim, but remained a revolutionary anarchist communist to his death. The book is available, so please consider buying it for AK Press.
This is a write up of a talk I gave in Glasgow in 2018 entitled Now and After: What would Anarchy be like and how we create the new world by fighting the current one. It summarises anarchist ideas of what a free society would be like and how we get there. As with my previous write-ups, this reflects more what I intended to say rather than what was said. Hopefully it will be close enough. For more details of the ideas raised here, see Section I of An Anarchist FAQ.
This is a write-up of a talk I gave in Nottingham in March 2019. It is an introduction to the 1936 Spanish Revolution as well as a general introduction to the anarchist theory which inspired it. After all, you cannot see how 1936 was anarchy in action if you do not know what anarchy is. The meeting was advertised as following:
“Iain McKay takes us back to Spain in the 1930s where anarchists occupied the factories and the land, to make a revolution at the same time as fighting Franco’s fascists. And within that revolution, the women of Mujeres Libres fought also for the liberation of women.”
This is what I would like to have said, rather than what was actually said at the meeting. Hopefully the difference is not too great. It is based on section I.8 of An Anarchist FAQ.
This is the introduction to Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology (AK Press, 2014). It is a comprehensive selection of texts, many of which are translated or reprinted for the first time. As the introduction shows, Kropotkin was not some kind of anarcho-Santa but rather a revolutionary anarchist with a clear idea of what was wrong with society, how to change it and what a better world should be like. The book is still available, so please consider buying it for AK Press.
Most anarchists come across Victor Serge (1889-1947) at some stage, the elitist-individualist anarchist turned elitist-Bolshevik whom Leninists to this day like to invoke as “the best of the anarchists” to get libertarians to join their party (“Victor Serge: The Worst of the Anarchists,” ASR no. 61). This work by him and Natalia Sedova Trotsky, The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), is a biography of Leon Trotsky and is of note as a good example of what could be termed The Trotskyist School of Falsification, to invoke the title of Trotsky’s 1937 work The Stalin School of Falsification. (171)
A discussion of the Paris Commune and its legacy from an anarchist perspective, indicating how it influenced both Anarchism and Marxism. It shows that anarchism alone has learnt its lessons and that Marxism, particularly in its Leninist form, paid lip-service to it while ignoring both its actual politics and its lessons.
A discussion of anarchist views on organisation, placing it within the historical context of liberalism, democracy and the labour movement. It shows that anarchists have had a firm notion of what a good organisation should be, one in which all members participate as equals rather than in a hierarchy of masters and slaves.
In 1998 Murray Bookchin wrote a response to the critics of his Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm entitled Wither Anarchism?. Twenty years later appears a pamphlet bearing the same name and in a way covering the same issue – the state of the movement. Only the most blinkered anarchist would disagree that this is a valid question – and one we need to address even if the rest of the revolutionary left is hardly much better and without the benefit of having a viable theory.