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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...)

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Dyer Lum was a 19th-century American anarchist labor activist and poet. A leading anarcho-syndicalist and a prominent left-wing intellectual of the 1880s, he is remembered as the lover and mentor of early anarcha-feminist Voltairine de Cleyre. Lum was a prolific writer who wrote a number of key anarchist texts, and contributed to publications including Mother Earth, Twentieth Century, Liberty (Benjamin Tucker's individualist anarchist journal), The Alarm (the journal of the International Working People's Association) and The Open Court among others. Following the arrest of Albert Parsons, Lum edited The Alarm from 1892–1893. Traditionally portrayed as a "genteel, theoretical anarchist", Lum has recently been recast by the scholarship of Paul Avrich as an "uncompromising rebel thirsty for violence and martyrdom" in the light of his involvement in the Haymarket Riot in 1886. (read more...)

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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.

Did you know?

... that the Russian anarcho-syndicalist newspaper Golos Truda (header pictured) relocated from New York to Petrograd when its entire editorial staff decided to move to Russia following the February Revolution?
... that Pierre Monatte was one of the few French trade-unionists and members of the French Left to oppose the Union sacrée national bloc during World War I?
... that the Situationist pamphlet On the Poverty of Student Life accused French students of taking refuge from their ideological subservience in miserabilism and bohemianism?
... that there were two unrelated Jewish anarchists named Alexander Schapiro active in Russia during the civil war, one in the Bolshevik government and the other leading a cadre of anarchist revolutionaries against it?
... that post-anarchism theorist Saul Newman saw the publication of volume one of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas as a sign of a resurgent interest in anarchist philosophy?

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“ I heartily accept the motto,—"That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—"That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men and women are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure. ” —Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1849

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Anniversaries for January 22

1975 - The first issue of Portugal's Voz Anarquista appears.

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