1902

Anarchist Beginnings

Ricardo Mella, “The Bankruptcy of Beliefs” and “The Rising Anarchism” (1902-03)

January 12, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur
[These articles present a very challenging vision of the development of a revolutionary anarchism. They continue Mella’s arguments for an anarchism “without adjectives,” but also connect that notion to the idea of an “anarchist synthesis,” long before Voline presented his account of anarchist development and the need for synthesis that emerges from the very nature of anarchism itself. The translation is perhaps a little rough around the edges, but I think the ideas are clear enough.] THE BANKRUPTCY OF BELIEFS To my brother J. Prat: Faith has had its moment; it has also had its noisy bankruptcy. There is nothing […]
Saint Ravachol

A Female Nihilist (1902)

June 22, 2016 A Beautiful Nihilist
A FEMALE NIHILIST ——– Young Russian Woman With an Infernal Machine in Handkerchief LONDON. May 28. —A dispatch to the Central News from St. Petersburg, dated May 27, says: “Secret service agents arrested a young woman at Tsarkoeselo, the summer residence of the czar, yesterday, carrying an infernal machine concealed in a handkerchief. The identity of the woman has not been established.” “A Female Nihilist,” Los Angeles Herald 29 no. 240 (May 29, 1902): 1.
Blazing Star Library

George Willis Cooke, “William Batchelder Greene”

June 5, 2016
“WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE” from George Willis Cooke’s Historical and Biographical Introduction to the Rowfant Club reprint of The Dial (Cleveland, 1902) [NOTE: There is considerable disagreement among sources about the particulars of Greene’s literary output. Titles and dates in this account may be unreliable. In particular, poetry volumes attributed to Greene, such as “Imogen,” may be the work of his son, also William Batchelder Greene. In the third number of the second volume of “The Dial” was printed an article on “First Principles” by William Batchelder Greene, then minister of the Unitarian church at Brookfield, Mass. This was his only […]
anarchism without adjectives

Max Nettlau, Fragment (1902)

May 4, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] All my arguments are based on the fact that men are different from one another, so that the same thing cannot be known to the same degree by everyone. If we accept in theory that all the possibilities of development exist in a rudimentary state or develop in all of us, the practical life shows that these possibilities develop in a different manner for each of us. We do think nor wish to render men uniform — just as we do not think of leveling the mountains and the plains. We […]
biography

Amilcare Cipriani, “A Woman” (1902)

April 27, 2014
A WOMAN Nature had been kind in bestowing her gifts on her; beauty, goodness, strength, will and energy, she possessed all these in the highest degree. She might have been happy, she chose instead to embrace and devote herself, to the “cause” which spreads fear amongst cowards and governments. Life had just commenced to smile on her, when the Italian war of Independence broke out. Three of her brothers took up arms to deliver their enslaved motherland. She had already been asked in marriage, but refused. “I cannot think of marriage,” said she, “while my brothers are risking their lives […]