Note: Murray Bookchin submitted the following resolution to the Second Continental Conference of the Left Green Network on July 1st, 1990. It was adopted by a vote of 24 -- yes; 16 -- no; 6 - Abstain.
Resolution: "On Gubernatorial Races"
Libertarian municipalism is premised on developing a dual power --
grassroots in the fullest sense in that its politics rests on the most
immediate popular institutions in the political realm namely the
municipality, and confederal relationships between municipalities in
which the coordination of power is vested in confederal councils whose
authority diminishes as the confederal structure is raised to encompass
ever-wider political jurisdictions.
State power functions on precisely the opp... (From: Anarchy Archives.)
The contemptible sentiment par excellence. Mosaic of crystallized fears; mixture of herd stupidity and secular religiosity.
I mean the respect of collective beings; of the maleficent and deceptive metaphors that populate our social mythologies.
Stirner gives collective entities the characteristic name of “respectful personalities.” Moral idols, political idols, society idols, they float, like the specter of religion in Lucretius’ heavens; ghostly, vain, formidable.
Stendhal had already pointed out the respectful mania, the mother of all hypocrisies, guardian of all big shots and oligarchs.
The beatific social optimism of the crowd is only a form of that respectful mania. For the crowd, whatever ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
The great economist and early anti-statist thinker Bastiat famously pointed out the way our attention is often drawn to the most immediate, losing sight of the wider array of consequences and causations. Such myopia is how modern statism flourishes, obscuring the threat of the policeman’s pistol and the swing of his truncheon, so that a proposed tax for instance is sliced away from all context and rendered into a seemingly inert, docile thing.
Through centuries of hard fought progress the public has increasingly grown adverse to violence and explicit acts of domination. It is impossible to understate the accomplishment this represents. And yet our rulers have compensated not by lessening their brutality but by obscuring it. Eve... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
I’ve been asked to respond to the review of Utopia of Rules by Anastasia Piliavsky, but I must confess I find myself rather at a loss for how to do so.
The book is a collection of essays (I had originally wanted to call it “Three Essays on Bureaucracy”) which I had hoped might spark a debate about what I call the present “age of total bureaucratization.” In the introduction, I argue that since the 1970s, we have seen a kind of synthesis of public and private bureaucracies in a way that has made administrative procedures such a constant fixture of our everyday existence that we no longer even notice them, and that, what is more, the accompanying fusion of private and public power has become the main means... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Response to Paul Nizan’s Crise Manifesto
Source: La Littérature et le peuple. Edited by Jérôme Radwan. Les Amis d'Henry Poulalle & Plein Chant, 2003 ; Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor 2017; CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2017.
The manifesto referred to by Poulaille, apparently calling for writers to rally to the review Crise, sent by Communist writer Paul Nizan, has not been located. This response, apparently sent to other writers, was not published in Poulaille’s lifetime, but is a clear statement of his artistic and political beliefs – Tr. Paris, September 18, 1931
Comrade:
You have perhaps received the manifesto of Crise, a group of intel... (From: Marxists.org.)
Suddenly a strange piece has appeared in an unknown journal. It accuses the principal leader of the secret societies between 1834-39 of treason.
Blanqui, the supposed author, did not write it, didn’t sign it. No sign reveals its origin or guarantees its authenticity.
It’s a question here of killing a man who had become an obstacle and a danger. Using police and court clerk notes, perhaps even using personal memories, a history of the secret societies of the years 1835-39 was fabricated, and at the top was written: “Blanqui’s Declaration before the Minister of the Interior.”
And so here I am garbed in the shirt of Nessus!
What was the forger’s secret? The use of the first person. How can anyone resist... (From: Marxists.org.)
I can only thank you, ladies and gentlemen, and say that the best return I could
receive would be to take a list out of my pocket at the next meeting of the Society
of 20 or 30 new members. That would be a real vote of thanks to me. After all, what
one wants is the opportunity to go on working in the same course.
Bibliographical Note
Title
Response to a Vote of Thanks (1889).
Deliveries
1. 3 July 1889: Before the Annual Meeting held at ?.
Publication
1. [Untitled] in SPAB Report, 1889, (London 1889), p. 79. (From: Marxists.org.)
(The substance of a paper read on December 5, 1899, before the Freedom Discussion Group, London by M. Nettlau.)
The following remarks, based on an article published by me in Freedom, November 1897, must not be understood as wishing to replace direct Anarchist propaganda by a "remedy or a "hobby," they simply raise a general subject which has been, as far as I know and am told, neglected up till now : the possibility of some new form and combination in the labor struggle; and I am anxious for Anarchist criticism, which, apart from the general possibility has to examine whether the means suggested are on the road to freedom or the contrary ; consequently, whether they merit the support of Anarchists or not.
Progress in the labor m... (From: Anarchy Archives.)
During the night of Wednesday October 19th we took part, alongside many other groups and individualities, in the street clashes around the Polytechnic in Exarchia, that lasted for several hours with constant attacks with molotovs, stones and fireworks against antiriot police squads.
Street clashes, in any of their forms (exiting university premises through incendiary means, rioting in demonstrations, etc.), are part of the multiform anarchic attack against Power and the imposed normality. Because of their characteristics, this is one of the most effective ways to demonstrate the conflict between anarchy and the world of Power. This is why we support the diffusion of this and other forms of struggle that aim to destabilize and spread ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Twenty-years ago, Dwight Macdonald published a series of articles in Politics on the responsibility of peoples and, specifically, the responsibility of intellectuals. I read them as an undergraduate, in the years just after the war, and had occasion to read them again a few months ago. They seem to me to have lost none of their power or persuasiveness. Macdonald is concerned with the question of war guilt. He asks the question: To what extent were the German or Japanese people responsible for the atrocities committed by their governments? And, quite properly, he turns the question back to us: To what extent are the British or American people responsible for the vicious terror bombings of civilians, perfected as a technique of warfare by the... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
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