Revolt Library : Revolutionary Materials from the Past

Translated from the French by Robert Helms "La Justice de Paix" first appeared in La France on July 24, 1885, and was later anthologized in Lettres de ma Chaumiere, dedicated to Guy de Maupassant. The Justice of the Peace occupied a ground floor hearing room in the village's town hall that looked out onto the square. The stark, tiled room was divided in the middle by a sort of railing made of wh... (From : Mid-Atlantic Infoshop.)

Can Marxist and Anarchist explanations of the class struggle between Capitalists and workers be reconciled? Peter Kennedy Not available.

3. The Middle Ages: Church and State THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF POWER. CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE. PAPISM. AUGUSTINE'S CITY OF GOD. THE HOLY CHURCH. THE STRUGGLE FOR WORLD DOMINION. GREGORY VII, INNOCENT III. THE EFFECT OF POWER ON ITS POSSESSORS. ROME AND THE GERMANS. GERMANIC CAESARISM. THE STRUGGLE FOR ROME. THE FOREIGN DOMINION. THE SUBMERSION OF OLD SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS. ARISTOCRACY AND ROYALTY. FEUDALISM AND SERFDOM. THE FRANKISH EMPIRE. CHARLEMAGNE AND THE PAPACY. STRUGGLE BETWEEN EMPEROR AND POPE. EVERY power is animated by the wish to be the only power, because in the nature of its being it deems itself absolute and consequently opposes any bar which reminds it of the limits of its influence. Power is active consciousness of authority. Like God, it cannot endure any other God beside it. This is the reason why a struggle for hegemony immediately breaks out as soon as different power groups appear together or have...

Domestication and sedentization are not processes that were only imposed on “primitive” peoples; these processes occurred in Europe as well. Latin American nomads and European vagabonds experienced similar repression but by different means. Missions and prisons served similar functions: they settled the roamers and put them to work. Now, there are many all too familiar ways to regulate or fix movement. Here in the US, incarceration rates are skyrocketing. The computerization of biometrics is a new weapon in the State’s arsenal that greatly increases the accuracy with which they can identify human beings: this facilitates incarceration and immigration control. The above technologies and institutions of control share a common aim: to regulate movement and direct human action into the repetitive rotation of production and consumption. Domestication in Latin America Throughout Latin America during the colonial period Spanish style towns an... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Prince Nekhliudof was nineteen years of age when, at the end of his third term at the university, he came to spend his summer vacation on his estate. He was alone there all the summer. In the autumn he wrote in his unformed, boyish hand, a letter to his aunt, the Countess Biéloretskaïa, who, according to his notion, was his best friend, and the most genial woman in the world. The letter was in French, and was to the following effect:— "Dear Auntie,—I have adopted a resolution upon which must depend the fate of my whole existence. I have left the university in order to devote myself to a country life, because I feel that I was born for it. For God's sake, dear auntie, don't make sport of me. You say that I am young. Perhaps I am still almost a child; but this does not prevent me from feeling sure of my vocation, from wishing to accomplish it successfully, and from loving it. "As I have already written you, I found our aff...

Alexandros Schismenos is a researcher working on social-historical phenomena of the 21st century. He is coauthor of The end of National Politics with Nikos Ioannou. Writes: Continental Philosophy, Political Theory and Philosophy. Author of : Castoriadis and Autonomy in the Twenty-first Century. (From : Bloomsbury.com.)

(1818 - 1883) ~ Author of the Communist Manifesto
Karl Heinrich Marx FRSA (German: [maʁks]; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary. Born in Trier, Germany, Marx studied law and philosophy at university. He married Jenny von Westphalen in 1843. Due to his political publications, Marx became stateless and lived in exile with his wife and children in London for decades, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and publish his writings, researching in the reading room of the British Museum. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1883). Marx's political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history. His name has been used as an adjective, a noun and a school of social theory. (From : Wikipedia.org.)

Mark Bray is a historian of human rights, terrorism, and politics in Modern Europe. He earned his BA in Philosophy from Wesleyan University in 2005 and his PhD in History from Rutgers University in 2016. He is the author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (Melville House 2017), Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street (Zero 2013), The Anarchist Inquisition: Terrorism and Human Rights in Spain and France, 1890-1910 (forthcoming on Cornell University Press), and the coeditor of Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader (PM Press 2018). His work has appeared in Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, Salon, Boston Review, and numerous edited volumes. (From : history.rutgers.edu.)

(1912 - 2003)
John Edward Christopher Hill (6 February 1912 – 23 February 2003) was an English Marxist historian and academic, specializing in 17th-century English history. From 1965 to 1978 he was Master of Balliol College, Oxford. (From : Wikipedia.org.)

(1873 - 1894)
Sante Geronimo Caserio (Italian: [ˈsante caˈzɛrjo]; 8 September 1873 – 16 August 1894) was an Italian anarchist and the assassin of Marie François Sadi Carnot, President of the French Third Republic. Caserio was born in Motta Visconti, Lombardy. On 24 June 1894, he fatally stabbed President Carnot after a banquet, to avenge the executions of anarchist bombers Auguste Vaillant and Émile Henry. (From : Wikipedia.org.)

Night in a prison cell! A chair, a bed, a small washstand, four blank walls, ghastly in the dim light from the corridor without, a narrow window, barred and sunken in the stone, a grated door! Beyond its hideous iron latticework, within the ghastly walls, -a man! An old man, gray-haired and wrinkled, lame and suffering. There he sits, in his great loneliness, shut in front all the earth. There he walks, to and fro, within his measured space, apart from all he loves! 'There, for every night in five long years to come, he will walk alone, while the white age-flakes drop upon his head, while the last years of the winter of life gather and pass, and his body draws near the ashes. Every night, for five long years to come, he will sit alone, this chattel slave, whose hard toll is taken by the State, -and without recompense save that the Southern planter gave his Negroes, -every night he will sit there so within those four white walls. Every night, for five long years to... (From : Anarchy Archives.)

Her Evolutionary Development
In the earlier times of the world’s history when man was but little higher in the intellectual scale than the beast which he slew for food, and whose skins he used for raiment, muscular strength and physical endurance were the standards of excellence and the stamp of superiority which prevailed. As nature had not endowed woman with these requisites to the same extent she had man, he looked upon her as a being inferior to himself. Possibly this was the beginning of man’s domination and woman’s subjugation. But as man ascended in the social scale of development, he began to acquire property, which he wished to transmit along with his name to his offspring—then woman became his household drudge. She was regarded as a sort of necessary evil; as something to be used and abused; to be bought and sold—as a thing fit only to cater to his pleasures and his passions—this was woman’s lowly position. For countless centuries, t... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

To the Editor of The Socialist: Believing it to be a principle of human nature for people to want to know what others think of them, I would like, for the benefit of workingwomen especially, to lay before your many readers a few extracts from an article entitled “Hints to Young Housekeepers,” printed in Scribner’s Magazine for January, 1879, as follows: Choice of Servants Unless they (the servants) have grown old in your service, it is better that servants should not be over forty, for many reasons. Cooks, chambermaids, and laundresses should be strong and active, wholesome and honest-looking, with clean hands, and no long backs, and reject finery. The better educated are more likely to understand their responsibility, and do their duty. For a waitress, you want good looks, an active and neat person, and quick motion. Engagement of Servants... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

THE popular notion about marriage and love is that they are synonymous, that they spring from the same motives, and cover the same human needs. Like most popular notions this also rests not on actual facts, but on superstition. Marriage and love have nothing in common; they are as far apart as the poles; are, in fact, antagonistic to each other. No doubt some marriages have been the result of love. Not, however, because love could assert itself only in marriage; much rather is it because few people can completely outgrow a convention. There are to-day large numbers of men and women to whom marriage is naught but a farce, but who submit to it for the sake of public opinion. At any rate, while it is true that some marriages are based on love, and while it is equally true that in some cases love continues in married life, I maintain that it does so regardless of marriage, and not because of it. On the other hand, it is utterly false that love results from mar... (From : Anarchy Archives.)

No one at all capable of an intense conscious inner life need ever hope to escape mental anguish and suffering. Sorrow and often despair over the so-called eternal fitness of things are the most persistent companions of our life. But they do not come upon us from the outside, through the evil deeds of particularly evil people. They are conditioned in our very being; indeed, they are interwoven through a thousand tender and coarse threads with our existence. It is absolutely necessary that we realize this fact, because people who never get away from the notion that their misfortune is due to the wickedness of their fellows never can outgrow the petty hatred and malice which constantly blames, condemns, and hounds others for something that is inevitable as part of themselves. Such people will not rise to the lofty heights of the true humanitarian to whom good and evil, moral and immoral, are but limited terms for the inner play of human emotions upon the human sea o... (From : Anarchy Archives.)