Revolt Library : The Written Word to Help You Revolt!Welcome to RevoltLib! Here you will find an archive of materials from the past that once helped people to abolish the state, fight capitalism, end sexism, demolish imperialism, and eliminate all forms of social domination. Information is power -- arm yourself! This archive contains 15,612 texts, with 64,666,647 words or 404,279,279 characters. |
A collection of historic materials detailing Anarchism, Libertarianism, and Anti-Authoritarianism. By understanding more about the past, we can better apply the principles we discover today.
"As to parliamentary rule, and representative government altogether... It is becoming evident that it is merely stupid to elect a few men, and to entrust them with the task of making laws on all possible subjects, of which subject most of them are utterly ignorant." -- Peter Kropotkin
I was alone and sad. I walked aimlessly through the deserted countryside under the scourge of the noonday sun, with the sole aim of living a few hours in solitude, far from the crowd of voluptuaries and paupers. Dark thoughts bombarded my brain, my mind was in turmoil and I walked, I walked tirelessly, paying no attention to the passing time, not to paths I traversed, which were completely unknown to me. The sun was nearly setting when I found myself in a place that I called the realm of death. The terrain was all muddy, not one tree, not one blade of grass. A corrupt stench emanated from the pond, over which the sky was almost covered with a myriad of insects and strange black birds, that whirled through the still air without making any noise. Where was I? I turned around and began walking again with the intention of going back home, but I hadn’t even gone ten steps when a voice sounded in that bog and called me by name. Hesitating a bit, I turned toward the point f... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Last Thursday the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission released an interim report on the Garda rape-threat tape recordings that were revealed last April. GSOC is the official state body to investigate complaints against the police force of southern Ireland (Garda). The GSOC report contains a major error that suggests GSOC are the source of repeated attempts to spin the story in the media as somehow being the fault of the women the Garda were recorded discussing threatening to rape. The timing of the release of the report was also suspect, coming in the week Shell resumed construction and the day before a national day of action in Erris durig which four Shell to Sea campaigners were injured by Garda and/or private security violence. Such was the level of spin applied that some media made the mistake of leading with the news that the Garda had been cleared of something no-one had ever accused them of — directly threatening the two women with rape. Alan Sha... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
( I am, on occasion, asked about my time in with the worlds of the lawless. And while reticent to discuss any current activities that might be construed, by anyone, as being illegal; I realize that as regards my earlier shenanigans, the statute of limitations is in my corner. Before I begin, a disclaimer or two, first I never knowingly physically harmed anyone. Material harm? Property harm? Different story. Second, most of my criminal activities were driven by survival, in some cases by desperation--the need to eat, to obtain shelter, to keep a needle in my arm. It was only later that I realized the political ramifications of these actions; their moment as a rejection of nation-state and Capital. In effect, their resonance.—pzs) Basic Terms Robbery- Usually armed. The use of force or the threat of the use of force to get money or goods from a store or a person. Considered sloppy, violent, usually counter-productive by most of the people I ran with. Why threat... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
This work, volume 11 of The Collected Works of Peter Kropotkin, is in two parts. The first part is Kropotkin’s classic book “Modern Science and Anarchism.” The second part is concerned with his thoughts on the latest theories and experiments in biology and evolutionary thought. As will become clear, the combining of these two very different works is not as contradictory as it first seems. “Modern Science and Anarchism” is Kropotkin’s attempt to place anarchist theory in the scientific tendencies of 19th Century thought. In doing so, he stresses the importance of the inductive-deductive method, “the method ... of natural sciences,” namely the analysis of everyday society and the basing of theory on the facts produced by that analysis rather than creating a theory in abstraction and fitting the facts into it. This methodology is pa... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
This small book is about the ideology of Maoism and its development out of the Chinese Revolution. As the author says, that revolution shook the world. The world is living with its aftermath today. And it is possible, as there is a regrowth of U.S. radicalism, that Maoism may have an influence on a revived U.S. Left. So it is important to understand Mao’s legacy. Most works on this topic are either academic (and implicitly pro-capitalist) or pro-Maoist (or sometimes Trotskyist). Unusually, Elliot Liu claims to “offer a critical analysis of the Chinese Revolution and Maoist politics from an anarchist and communist perspective.” It may not be entirely clear what that means,. The term “communist” includes everything from anarchist-communism (the mainstream of anarchism since Kropotkin) to Pol Pot’s auto-genocide. However Liu writes that he is “in line with many anarchist and anti-state communist critics of Mar... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
About the people and individuals of the past who have made up revolutions, whether they were active revolutionaries or brilliant theoreticians. If we know how they lived in the past, we might know what's possible to do today.
"EPOPS: They speak of benefits so great it is impossible either to describe or conceive them; all shall be yours, all that we see here, there, above and below us; this they vouch for. CHORUS: Are they mad? EPOPS: They are the sanest people in the world." -- Aristophanes
(1859 - 1892)
François Claudius Koenigstein, also known as Ravachol (1859–1892), was a French anarchist. He was born on 14 October 1859, at Saint-Chamond, Loire and died by being guillotined on 11 July 1892, at Montbrison after being twice found guilty of complicity in bombings. (From : Wikipedia.org.)
(1856 - 1938)
Joseph Reifgraber, an Austrian machinist, became president of the Metal Workers Union and was Editor of ‘Die Parole’, St. Louis. He was buried at Bellefontaine Neighbors, St. Louis County, Missouri, USA. (From : RevoltLib.com.)
(1864 - 1943) ~ German-American Anarchist Revolutionary and Mother Earth Editor
Max Baginski (1864 – November 24, 1943) was a German-American anarchist revolutionary. Baginski was born in 1864 in Bartenstein (now Bartoszyce), a small East Prussian town. His father was a shoemaker who had been active in the 1848 revolution and was thus shunned by the conservative inhabitants of the village. Under his fathers influence, Baginski read freethinker August Specht's writings and Berliner Freie Presse, Johann Most's newspaper, in his youth. After school Baginski became his father's apprentice. Already a staunch socialist, Baginski moved to Berlin in 1882. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1893. (Source: Wikipedia.org) Rocker thought Baginski was "one of the most outstanding human beings I have met in my life." This Rocker's obituary for Baginski a prolific anarchist writer and activist. I. On 24 November 1943, Max Baginski died at Bellevue Hospital in New York at the age of 79. With his passing, the world lost one of th... (From : Wikipedia.org / LibCom.org.)
Venezuelan anarchist group who take a strong anti-Chavez line. (From : LibCom.org.)
‘Insurrection’ is an anarchist magazine of the 1980’s which was edited by Jean Weir of Elephant Editions, UK. Among agitational news reports of rebellion and repression, the publication carried some of the first English language translations of the work of Italian anarchist insurrectionist, Alfredo M. Bonanno, and remains an example of a high-quality revolutionary anarchist publication which has a confrontational analysis coupled with lasting insight. (From : nostate.net.)
A collection of historic materials detailing Feminism, Women's Lib, and the Women's Movement. By understanding more about the past, we can better apply the principles we discover today.
"May a new spirit awaken and infuse this enslaved girlhood to dare and feel an age-long resentment and may it give her courage to speak and act." -- Margaret Sanger
A taste for rural scenes, in the present state of society, appears to be very often an artificial sentiment, rather inspired by poetry and romances, than a real perception of the beauties of nature. But, as it is reckoned a proof of refined taste to praise the calm pleasures which the country affords, the theme is never exhausted. Yet it may be made a question, whether this romantic kind of declamation, has much effect on the conduct of those, who leave, for a season, the crowded cities in which they were bred. I have been led to these reflections, by observing, when I have resided for any length of time in the country, how few people seem to contemplate nature with their own eyes. I have "brushed the dew away" in the morning; but, pacing over the printless grass, I have wondered that, in such delightful situations, the sun was allowed to rise in solitary majesty, whilst my eyes alone hailed its beautifying beams. The webs of the evening have sti... (From : Gutenberg.org.)
Or, the Wrongs of Woman“My father,” said Jemima, “seduced my mother, a pretty girl, with whom he lived fellow-servant; and she no sooner perceived the natural, the dreaded consequence, than the terrible conviction flashed on her—that she was ruined. Honesty, and a regard for her reputation, had been the only principles inculcated by her mother; and they had been so forcibly impressed, that she feared shame, more than the poverty to which it would lead. Her incessant importunities to prevail upon my father to screen her from reproach by marrying her, as he had promised in the fervor of seduction, estranged him from her so completely, that her very person became distasteful to him; and he began to hate, as well as despise me, before I was born. “My mother, grieved to the soul by his neglect, and unkind treatment, actually resolved to famish herself; and injured her health by the attempt; though she had not sufficient resolution to adhere to her project, or renounce it...
Why do you clothe me with scarlet of shame? Why do you point with your finger of scorn? What is the crime that you hissingly name When you sneer in my ears, "Thou bastard born?" Am I not as the rest of you, With a hope to reach, and a dream to live? With a soul to suffer, a heart to know The pangs that the thrusts of the heartless give?" I am no monster! Look at me -- Straight in my eyes, that they do not shrink! Is there aught in them you can see To merit this hemlock you make me drink? This poison that scorches my soul like fire, That burns and burns until love is dry, And I shrivel with hate, as hot as a pyre, A corpse, while its smoke curls up to the sky? Will you touch my hand? It is flesh like yours; Perhaps a little more brown and grimed, For it could not be white while the drawers' and hewers', My brothers, were calloused and darkened and slimed... (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, the drudg... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Sunday Morning [December 29.] You seem to have taken up your abode at H——. Pray sir! when do you think of coming home? or, to write very considerately, when will business permit you? I shall expect (as the country people say in England) that you will make a power of money to indemnify me for your absence. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — &mdas...