Anarchist Beginnings

Anarchist Beginnings

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? […]

Anarchist Beginnings

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. […]