Anarchist Beginnings Archives - The Libertarian Labyrinth

“What Anarchy Is” (Le Monde Libertaire, 1967)

April 18, 2025 Shawn P. Wilbur

Anarchists, precisely because of the positive spirit that makes them reject the moral authority of all clergy, the economic authority of all forms of capitalism, the political authority of all states, are the most resolute supporters and defenders of the construction of a society with full responsibility for everyone, a society based on the constant relationship between producers and consumers, at the level that concerns them, and any centralization can only have a coordinating character. […]

Benjamin Colin (1818-1884)

October 21, 2024 Shawn P. Wilbur

There are a handful of very early anarchist or at least anarchistic writings identified by Max Nettlau that have remained elusive in my searches. One in particular — “Plus de gouvernement!” by Benjamin Colin — has nagged at me a bit, since I have known that the paper it was published in, L’Homme, journal de la démocratie universelle, was accessible in various forms and included some other anarchism-related content. But I have never got around the making the extra effort or financial outlay necessary to get my hands on it. […]

The Three Eras (May 22, 1848)

April 15, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur

What does anarchy mean in the streets, if not the absence of informers and armed police? But if, without armed police, without informers, without gendarmes, order reigns in the streets; if no one is robbed there, if no one is murdered there, if no one is insulted there, will the population not have proven that it can do without this power called gendarmes, police and municipal guards? Will it not have proven that it knows how to guard, protect and govern itself? […]

Pierre Mualdes, “Etre anarchiste / To Be an Anarchist” (1924)

July 14, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

To be an anarchist is to be individualist, first of all. It is oneself that one is most keen to liberate, but as one’s total emancipation is intimately linked to that of one’s neighbors, one is communist by force of circumstance. No offense to the most affirmative anti-societarists: I also believe that man is an animal that instinct drives to live in society. A kind of human feeling is thus created that goes from the individual to the species, a feeling that the rabble of the rulers strives to channel to its own profit within the limits of a fatherland, but which has manifested even during the last butchery between “enemies” a feeling that knows no borders. […]