On August 25th, 2020, during the George Floyd Uprising’s Hot Summer, rebels in Kenosha set a used car dealership ablaze. And as those Civics, Camrys, and Altimas bathed in flame, white teenagers nationwide felt a stinging in their brains, as a feeling of immense moral sentiment activated at the sight of charred F-150s. It was...
This essay was written in the fall of 1991, six months before the Los Angeles uprising, for a New Politics symposium on the question “Is There Life after the AFL-CIO?” In it, Ignatiev considers how white supremacy has shaped American social democracy and fragmented the revolutionary potential of the American working class. The editors of...
The Limits of Communalism When Abad de Santillán read the Confederal Declaration of Libertarian Communism in 1936, he was critical. The Leonese thinker believed it confused communism with communalism: “[The Declaration] speaks to us about everything, and in part with excessive detail, except for the organization of labor.” In the anarcho-syndicalist spirit of the time,...
As the Protestant Reformation swept through Europe, John Wyclif’s teachings inspired Jan Hus, a Czechoslovakian, to initiate reform in his own country. During the years of 1415–1419, Jan Hus organized the Czechoslovakians in a movement that would be known as the Hussite Revolution. Hus, in turn, inspired several others including Martin Luther and Peter Chelcicky...
This piece is a continuation of a series of articles that seek to articulate Asian anarchism. To briefly reiterate, Asian anarchism aims to unite Asian and Asian diasporic thought under a lens of anti-hierarchical analysis as we look toward a liberatory future. As Asia is extremely diverse, there will be a plurality of viewpoints, and...
Anarcho-Communist Monthly #1 Selected Articles Tell Workers This world is a capitalist world. What is capitalism? This is when capitalists monopolize all production tools and production items, use the monetary system, and force us workers to be their wage slaves. We workers were forced by hunger and cold, so we sold our precious labor to...
People! No more governments.Governments! No more prescriptive laws.Laws! Protection, naturalness, and no more confusions or sophisms.Such is the triple condition of social regeneration.–Rhodakanaty, 1877 Introduction As we spoke to a Special Collections worker at the BYU Library, another worker—a clean cut young man—overheard our conversation with the elderly woman who was helping us. “Yes, he...
Introduction: Rethinking Ungovernability At the Praxis 13/13 Seminar event on October 3 discussing the Invisible Committee’s Now, discussion among panel participants seemed to run aground on the term ungovernable, which marked for some panelists a space beyond coherent praxis. Yet despite the frustration of academic critics, the insistence upon becoming ungovernable as a trajectory for...
The following was written as part my studies at SOAS between 2015–2016 for a class entitled “Nationhood and Competing Identities in Modern China” by Dr Lars Laamann. This piece is meant to be a simple introduction to a complicated and fascinating phenomenon. I’ve added references at the end of the post for those of you...
Tolstoyans, also known as “Free Christians,” were devout followers of the Russian literary genius Leo Tolstoy. They opposed the Russian Orthodox Church because of its perceived corruption and its relations with the tsarist regime. Instead of practicing Russian Orthodoxy, the Tolstoyans followed a “ pure” religion through the “revelation” of Tolstoy. Tolstoy did not form...
For people who are not familiar, what is a basic definition of Christian Anarchism? Leo Tolstoy said that “Christianity in its true sense puts an end to the State. It was so understood from its very beginning, and for that Christ was crucified.” The basic idea behind Christian anarchism is that when it comes to...
Tábor, Czech Republic Editor’s Notes Why have I bothered to do this? I became interested in Petr Chelčický when I read Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You, in which he laments Chelčický’s obscurity and exposes the “conspiracy of silence” that surrounds the Gospel’s message of nonviolence. I found and transcribed all of the...
Something is clearly not working. If we look beyond our glass cages, it’s evident that our technology-driven,online-based civilization (or “on-life,” as some call it) has become overly complex and unsustainable. Depression,new forms of poverty, ecological destruction, the demise of old dreams, and the dismantling of the welfare state, all interspersed with wars, artificial intelligence, and...
“For always in thine eyes, O Liberty!Shines that high light whereby the world is saved;And though thou slay us, we will trust in thee.”John Hay. On Picket Duty. That witty and philosophical tramp, “Radical Jack,” who writes for the Chicago “Labor Enquirer,” addresses the following question to Frank Foster, Henry George, Lawrence Gronlund, and other...
His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while...
