This is a write-up of a talk I gave in Edinburgh in April 2019 on anarchist ideas on social change and organisation. I have used the slides I created for the talk as the basis of this write-up, although as usual I am sure this is not the same as what was said on the night but close enough. Hopefully this talk gives a useful summary of anarchist ideas on organisation and their development from the birth of anarchism to around 1920.
Topic: Anarchist movement
Anarchists from Proudhon onwards have met with misunderstanding and not a little deliberate distortion. Peter Kropotkin, despite being one of the most widely read anarchist thinkers, has also suffered this fate. This, perhaps, is due to him being so widely read for the most easily available works are those he wrote as general introductions to anarchism. The more numerous works he wrote for the anarchist press addressing the issues it was facing remain mostly buried in archives.
Supplementary Material
Categories
Precursors of Syndicalism II
The first instalment of Precursors of Syndicalism (ASR No. 75, Winter 2019) sketched the rise of syndicalist ideas within the First International. Championed by Bakunin, the idea of the International as a militant union for economic struggle was the majority trend within it and Marx preferred to destroy the organisation when it did not endorse his position of transforming it into parties pursuing political action.
In 1994 Class War organised an international anarchist gathering in London under the heading of ’10 days the shook the world’. It provided a location that brought together a number of anarchist who had been working on the promotion of the anarchist idea online and set off a string of collaborations that would last in some cases to the present day.
System of Economic Contradictions
or, the Philosophy of Misery
Volume 2
(Translated by Iain McKay)
Chapter XIV: Summary and Conclusion
It has been said of Newton, to express the immensity of his discoveries, that he has revealed the abyss of human ignorance.
Bank of the People
31st January 1849
Translator: Clarence L. Swartz (“Declaration” and “Formation of the Company”) and Ian Harvey (“Report of the Luxembourg Delegate and Workers’ Corporation Commission”)
Organisation of Credit and Circulation and the Solution of the Social Problem
31st March 1848
Translators: Clarence L. Swartz and Jesse Cohn
PROGRAMME
It has been proved that Socialist doctrines are powerless to relieve the People in the present crisis.[1] Utopia needs for its realisation capital accumulated, credit opened, circulation established and a prosperous state. It has need of everything we now lack; and these it is powerless to create.
This is a write-up of my notes for the book launch of Kropotkin’s Modern Science and Anarchy in Nottingham, 17th of November 2018. This, in turn, was a slightly revised version of a talk I did in Edinburgh early that year. As with all my subsequent write-ups, this is more what I aimed to say rather than what was said (this, for example, has far fewer jokes than uttered on the day). Still, it covers the main points said on the day.
Categories
Precursors of Syndicalism
It is a standard cliché of Marxist attacks on anarchism to contrast “individualistic” anarchism with “collectivist” syndicalism. The former are backward looking, reactionary and beyond the pale while the latter are almost Marxist, and so worthy of faint praise. Another, also wrong, cliché has wider acceptance, namely that syndicalism arose in France during the 1890s in response to the failure of “propaganda of the deed.”