Portal:Anarchism

Portal topics: Activities; Culture; Geography; Health; History; Mathematics; Nature; People; Philosophy; Religion; Society; Technology; Random portal

THE

NARCHISM PORTAL

Selected Anarchism-related content

Anarchism is a political philosophy and movement that is skeptical of all justifications for authority and seeks to abolish the institutions it claims maintain unnecessary coercion and hierarchy, typically including nation-states, and capitalism. Anarchism advocates for the replacement of the state with stateless societies and voluntary free associations. As a historically left-wing movement, this reading of anarchism is placed on the farthest left of the political spectrum, usually described as the libertarian wing of the socialist movement (libertarian socialism).

Humans have lived in societies without formal hierarchies long before the establishment of states, realms, or empires. With the rise of organised hierarchical bodies, scepticism toward authority also rose. Although traces of anarchist ideas are found all throughout history, modern anarchism emerged from the Enlightenment. During the latter half of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century, the anarchist movement flourished in most parts of the world and had a significant role in workers' struggles for emancipation. Various anarchist schools of thought formed during this period. Anarchists have taken part in several revolutions, most notably in the Paris Commune, the Russian Civil War and the Spanish Civil War, whose end marked the end of the classical era of anarchism. In the last decades of the 20th and into the 21st century, the anarchist movement has been resurgent once more, growing in popularity and influence within anti-capitalist, anti-war and anti-globalisation movements. (Full article...)

Refresh with new selections below (purge)

edit

Selected article

I once believed it's too bad that there are a lot of people who work for government who are hard-working and honest people who will get hit (by Assassination Politics) and it's a shame…Well, I don't believe that any more. They are all either crooks or they tolerate crooks or they are aware of crooks among their numbers.

Jim Bell in interview with Wired, on 2000-11-11.

Jim Bell (born James Dalton Bell, 1958) is a contemporary American crypto-anarchist theorist and activist. Bell attracted wide attention in 1996 when he authored a notorious crypto-anarchist essay called "Assassination Politics", which detailed an elaborate assassination market in which anonymous benefactors could securely order assassinations of government officials via the Internet. Bell was targeted and identified by the Federal government of the United States as a "techno-terrorist" in 1997 and following an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service, was arrested and subsequently jailed for 11 months on felony charges of harassment and using fraudulent Social Security numbers.

While he was serving his sentence, two of Bell's acolytes succeeded in partially implementing his assassination market scheme and were also swiftly charged and jailed. After his release, Bell was subjected to heavy surveillance and was rearrested for harassment and stalking of federal agents, charged with intimidation and stalking and again imprisoned, this time for a decade-long sentence. Bell protested vociferously against the conduct of the trial, going so far as to file civil lawsuits against two judges, at least two prosecutors, his former probation officers and his defense attorneys, but ultimately to no avail. Bell was hailed by Wired in 2001 as "[o]ne of the Internet's most famous essayists" and "the world's most notorious crypto-convict". (read more...)

More selected articles

edit

Selected image

Credit: Napoleon Sarony

Oscar Wilde, novelist, poet and playwright, was so enchanted by the work of Peter Kropotkin that he converted to anarchism and wrote the essay The Soul of Man under Socialism.

More selected images

Read more...

edit

Did you know?

...that the physician Marie Equi (pictured) became an anarchist after being attacked by police while she was picketing during a strike supported by the Industrial Workers of the World?
...that the slang word "scab" comes from the idea that people hired to replace striking workers are covering a wound?
...that when Rudolf Rocker became the editor of the short-lived Yiddish anarchist newspaper Dos Fraye Vort, he did not speak Yiddish?
...that while anarcho-syndicalists are usually a minority in their respective labor movements, the anarcho-syndicalist General Confederation of Labour was not only the largest but the only union in post-World War I Portugal?
...that the memo calling for the 1907 International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam went unsigned by French anarchists, as many rejected the very idea of organized collaboration?

More did you know facts

edit

Selected quote

“

The economic dictatorship of the monopolies and the political dictatorship of the totalitarian state are the outgrowth of the same political objectives, and the directors of both have the presumption to try to reduce all the countless expressions of social life to the mechanical tempo of the machine and to tune everything organic to the lifeless machine of the political apparatus. Our modern social system has split the social organism in every country into hostile classes internally, and externally it has broken the common cultural circle up into hostile nations; and both classes and nations confront one another with open antagonism and by their ceaseless warfare keep the communal social life in continual convulsions. The late World War and its terrible after effects, which are themselves only the results of the present struggles for economic and political power, are only the logical consequences of this unendurable condition, which will inevitably lead us to a universal catastrophe if social development does not take a new course soon enough. The mere fact that most states are obliged today to spend from fifty to seventy percent of their annual income for so-called national defence and the liquidation of old war debts is proof of the untenability of the present status, and should make clear to everybody that the alleged protection which the state affords the individual is certainly purchased too dearly.

The ever growing power of a soulless political bureaucracy which supervises and safeguards the life of man from the cradle to the grave is putting ever greater obstacles in the way of the solidaric co-operation of human beings and crushing out every possibility of new development. A system which in every act of its life sacrifices the welfare of large sections of the people, yes, of whole nations, to the selfish lust for power and the economic interests of small minorities must of necessity dissolve all social ties and lead to a constant war of all against all. This system has been merely the pacemaker for the great intellectual and social reaction which finds its expression today in modern Fascism, far surpassing the obsession for power of the absolute monarchy of past centuries and seeking to bring every sphere of human activity under the control of the state. Just as for the various systems of religious theology, God is everything and man nothing, so for this modern political theology, the state is everything and the man nothing. And just as behind the "will of God" there always lay hidden the will of privileged minorities, so today there hides behind the "will of the state" only the selfish interest of those who feel called to interpret this will in their own sense and to force it upon the people.

”

—Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism, 1938.

More selected quotes

More...

edit

Anniversaries for December 11

1879 - Marius Jacob was born in Marseilles, France.
1937 - Ángel Pestaña (pictured) died in Barcelona, Spain.

More December anniversaries

edit

Relevant lists

Outline of anarchism

edit

Related portals

Parent portals

Socio-political portals

edit

Related WikiProjects

Parent projects

Economics · Philosophy
Politics · Sociology

Socio-political projects

Anarchism
Cooperatives · Fascism
Libertarianism · Marxism
Gender Studies · LGBT studies
Organized Labour · Socialism
Social and political philosophy

Topics

edit

Things you can do

Thank you for your interest in improving the coverage of anarchism on Wikipedia!

For tasks you can do, visit the anarchism cleanup listing, an automated list of articles needing improvement.

If you would like to help maintain the anarchism portal, a list of tasks needing attention is maintained on its talk page.

You are also invited to visit the Anarchism Task Force, a work group organizing the collective effort to improve anarchism's coverage on Wikipedia! If you are interested in joining it, please add your details to the list of participants.

edit