Year: 2021

Constructing Anarchisms Part II—Anarchist History: Margins and Problems (An Idiosyncratic Survey) General Resources: Part I—Constructing an Anarchism [main page] Anarchist Beginnings archive The Rise and Progress of the Great Atercratic Revolution II—Anarchist History: Margins & Problems: I—Constructing an Anarchism: ❦ ❦ ❦ Having fun? Donations help to expand and sustain the archive. I use speculative fiction—mostly vignettes and snippets of prose, stored safely away in notebooks or word-processing files—as a personal tool to supplement more traditional sorts of study and analysis. I have been known to share fragments from that work here in the Labyrinth, but the bits tend to […]

We’re concerned, in these early phases of the survey, with the means by which we might recognize an anarchism emerging in contexts where that term did not yet have any of its familiar associations. What are the conditions for an emerging body of thought to inspire in us the same responses we have to the sorts of anarchism we presently espouse?

As we move forward, let’s propose some distinctions between the various varieties of anarchism and near-anarchism that we might encounter. Let’s start with an ideal and probably nonexistent integral anarchism, which would represent a successful synthesis or distillation of the various attempts to express basic anarchist principles in a way that would simply allow us to apply them. That sort of anarchism might require a significant body of work to express—or it might be the sort of thing that, finally clarified, could be comfortably scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin.

Constructing Anarchisms Part II—Anarchist History: Margins and Problems (An Idiosyncratic Survey) Onward!—to the next experiment—with Scandal as our muse and encounter as our method. General Resources: Part I—Constructing an Anarchism [main page] Anarchist Beginnings archive The Rise and Progress of the Great Atercratic Revolution II—Anarchist History: Margins & Problems: I—Constructing an Anarchism: ❦ ❦ ❦ Having fun? Donations help to expand and sustain the archive. Let’s be clear: The history that we will be exploring will not be The Story of Anarchism—or anything particularly close to that. It will be a story about anarchism—and specifically about some margins and problems […]

Constructing Anarchisms Part II—Anarchist History: Margins and Problems (An Idiosyncratic Survey) Onward!—to the next experiment—with Scandal as our muse and encounter as our method. General Resources: Part I—Constructing an Anarchism [main page] Anarchist Beginnings archive The Rise and Progress of the Great Atercratic Revolution II—Anarchist History: Margins & Problems: I—Constructing an Anarchism: ❦ ❦ ❦ Having fun? Donations help to expand and sustain the archive. Let’s say that, taking inspiration from Déjacque’s bilge-rat, we decide that our present experience of anarchism is too constraining—and decide to scuttle this particular vessel. What happens next? As the anarchist past floods in, how […]

Constructing Anarchisms Part II—Anarchist History: Margins and Problems (An Idiosyncratic Survey) General Resources: Part I—Constructing an Anarchism [main page] Anarchist Beginnings archive The Rise and Progress of the Great Atercratic Revolution II—Anarchist History: Margins & Problems: I—Constructing an Anarchism: ❦ ❦ ❦ Having fun? Donations help to expand and sustain the archive. Onward!—to the next experiment—with Scandal as our muse and encounter as our method. Lets establish some working assumptions for this new experiment: If anarchism—understood as a kind of joint enterprise—is to be useful in attaining and sustaining anarchy, then we can almost certainly anticipate at least a certain […]