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This lost classic was originally published in 1850 as a chapter of Herbert Spencer’s book Social Statics. When Spencer re-issued Social Statics late in his life he revised it to remove much of the most radical material, including this chapter.  However, earlier American facsimile editions continued to circulate, and the essay was widely read and discussed among American and English Anarchists, who republished the essay independently.  As Tucker wrote of his pamphlet edition, “Though Spencer, when in his later life he revised ‘Social Statics,’ suppressed this chapter, he never answered it, and it remains the best bit of political philosophy that ever came from his pen. It might well be called ‘The Right of Civil Disobedience,’ as a companion-work to Thoreau’s ‘Duty of Civil Disobedience.’ The two certainly constitute a pair of Anarchist classics… .” (Liberty XVI.6, p.1)

As a corollary to the proposition that all institutions must be subordinated to the law of equal freedom, we cannot choose but admit the right of the citizen to adopt a condition of voluntary outlawry. If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, then he is free to drop connection with the state—to relinquish its protection and to refuse to pay toward its support… .

Nay, indeed, have we not seen that government is essentially immoral? Is it not the offspring of evil, bearing about it all the marks of its parentage? Does it not exist because crime exists? Is it not strong—or, as we say, despotic—when crime is great? Is there not more liberty—that is, less government—when crime diminishes? And must not government cease when crime ceases, for very lack of objects on which to perform its function? Not only does magisterial power exist because of evil, but it exists by evil. Violence is employed to maintain it, and all violence involves criminality. Soldiers, policemen, and jailers; swords, batons, and fetters are instruments for inflicting pain; and all infliction of pain is in the abstract wrong… .

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One of de Cleyre’s key later essays, “Anarchism and American Traditions” (1909) offers a critical reflection on freedom, equality, government, and the American Revolution.

To the average American of today, the Revolution means the battles fought by the patriot army with the armies of England. The school children who attend our public schools are taught to draw maps, to know the general plan of several campaigns; required to remember the date when Wash­ing­ton crossed the Delaware on the ice; told to call General Wayne ‘Mad Anthony Wayne,’ and to execrate Benedict Arnold; and then they think they have learned the Revolution – blessed be George Washington! They have no idea why it should have been called a ‘revolution’ instead of the ‘English War:’ the name ‘American Revolution’ is held sacred, though it means to them nothing more than successful force, while the name ‘Revol­ution’ applied to a further possibility, is a spectre detested and abhorred. . . .

To the men of that time, the battles that they fought were the least of the Revolution; the stake they had in view, the real Revolution, was a change in political institutions which should make of government not a thing apart, a superior power to stand over the people with a whip; equal liberty is the political ideal. And yet even in the very days of the prophets, even with their own consent, the first concession to this later tyranny was made. . . .

What has Anarchism to say to the bankruptcy of Republicanism, this modern empire that has grown up on the ruins of our early freedom? That the sin our fathers sinned was that they did not trust liberty wholly. They thought it possible to compromise between liberty and govern­ment, and the moment the compromise was made, the whole misbegotten monster of our present tyranny began to grow. Anarchism says, Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free. Let the guarantee of free speech be in every man’s determination to use it, and we shall have no need of paper declarations. On the other hand, so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so. As to the American tradition of non-meddling, Anarchism asks that it be carried down to the individual himself. It demands no jealous barrier of isolation; but it teaches that by all men’s strictly minding their own business, a fluid society, freely adapting to mutual needs, wherein all the world shall belong to all men, as much as each has need or desire, will result. . . .

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To what extent should libertarians concern themselves with social commitments, practices, projects or movements that seek social outcomes beyond, or other than, the standard libertarian commitment to expanding the scope of freedom from government coercion?

Clearly, a consistent and principled libertarian cannot support efforts or beliefs that are contrary to libertarian principle—such as efforts to engineer social outcomes by means of government intervention. But if coercive laws have been taken off the table, what hsould libertarians say about other religious, philosophical, social, or cultural commiments that pursue their ends through non-coercive means, such as targeted moral agitation, mass education, artistic or literary propaganda, charity, mutual aid, public praise, ridicule, social ostracism, targeted boycotts, social investing, slow-downs and strikes in a particular shop, general strikes, or other forms of solidarity and coordinated action? Which social movements should they oppose, which should they support, and towards which should they counsel indifference? And how to we tell the difference?

Abstracting from the numerous, often mutually exclusive details of specific cultural projects that have been recommended or condemned in the name of libertarianism, the question of general principle has to do with whether libertarianism should be seen as a thin commitment, which can be happily joined to absolutely any non-coercive set of values and projects, or whether it should instead be seen as one strand among others in a thick bundle of intertwined social commitments …

In this article, individualist anarchist Charles Johnson lays out six different ways that libertarians might connect other forms of social transformation, such as feminism, anti-racism, labor radicalism, or environmentalism, to the struggle against state coercion — and argues that libertarians should see opposition to state coercion as one strand among others in a thickbundled of intertwined social commitments, aiming to resist multiple, interlocking systems of oppression.

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This lost classic was first published anonymously in 1902 by the Social Science Club of Philadelphia, whose members included Voltairine de Cleyre, Mary Hansen, Natasha Notkin, and other Mutualists, Individualists, and Communists from the Philadelphia social movement. The “Catechism,” drafted by Hansen and finished by the Club collect­ive­ly, presents a dialogue on the fundamentals of Anarchistic philosophy; discusses the commonality and the disagreements among Socialist, Indiv­id­u­al­ist, Com­mun­ist, and Mutu­al­ist forms of Anarchism; and offers a pluralistic, experimental vision of the free society, in which free people can try out any peaceful economic arrangement, and in which a wealth of Anarchistic economic systems peacefully co-exist, compete, and flourish side-by-side.

“What is Civil Authority? – That force which interferes with our daily actions, making and punishing criminals, commonly called government. How does Government make Criminals? – By fostering an unjust system of distribution, wherein one man is dependent on another for his subsistence; failing to secure it he is forced to resort to crime, for which, again, the govern­ment punishment. . . .

“How would the Abolition of Government effect Economic Justice?– The force which protects the owners of the great natural sources of production and means of exchange being removed, people would be free to experiment and discover what economic arrangement was best, instead of being compelled to accept the decision of the ruling majority or minority. . . .

“Does Anarchism teach Violence? – Anarchism is the negation of violence. By removing the causes, it would make the recurrence of acts of violence almost, and in time wholly, obsolete . . . .

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The query then naturally presented itself why all prices do not fall to labor cost: where there is any room for incomes acquired otherwise than by labor; in a word, why the usurer, the receiver of interest, rent, and profit, exists. The answer was found in the present one-sidedness of competition … Capital had so manipulated legislation that unlimited competition is allowed in supplying productive labor, thus keeping wages down to the starvation point, or as near it as practicable; … but that [through the state monopoly] almost no competition at all is allowed in supplying capital, upon the aid of which both productive and distributive labor are dependent for their power of achievement. …

Benjamin Tucker’s classic presentation of the case for laissez-faire socialism — against both the authoritarian violence of State Socialism, and the kleptocracy of corporate capitalism supported by government privileges for the Four Monopolies.

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Larry Page wants to ‘set aside a part of the world’ for unregulated experimentation

Google CEO Larry Page is holding a rare Q&A session with attendees of today’s Google I/O keynote, and he’s been offering up some pretty unfiltered answers. In response to a question about reducing negativity and focusing on changing the world, Page noted that “the pace of change is increasing” and said that “we haven’t adapted systems to deal with that.” Specifically, he said that “not all change is good” and said that we need to build “mechanisms to allow experimentation.”

That’s when his response got really interesting. “There are many exciting things you could do that are illegal or not allowed by regulation,” Page said. “And that’s good, we don’t want to change the world. But maybe we can set aside a part of the world.” He likened this potential free-experimentation zone to Burning Man and said that we need “some safe places where we can try things and not have to deploy to the entire world.” Google is already well-known for coming up with some pretty interesting ideas — the idea of seeing what Page could come up with in this lawless beta-test country is simultaneously exciting and a bit terrifying.

This booklet collects five essays from the individualist anarchist Benjamin R. Tucker on the nature of competition, labor, pay, stateless markets and the ideal of socialism. Included are: (1) “Socialism: What It Is,” (2) “Armies That Overlap,” (3) “Should Labor be Paid or Not?” (4) “Does Competition Mean War?” and (5) “Competition and Monopoly Confounded.”

“To-day (pardon the paradox!) society is fundamentally anti social.The whole so-called social fabric rests on privilege and power, and is disordered and strained in every direction by the inequalities that necessarily result therefrom. The welfare of each, instead of contributing to that of all, as it naturally should and would, almost invariably detracts from that of all. Wealth is made by legal privilege a hook with which to filch from labor’s pockets. Every man who gets rich thereby makes his neighbor poor. The better off one is, the worse off the rest are… .

“What’s one man’s meat must no longer be another’s poison; no man shall be able to add to his riches except by labor; every increase of capital in the hands of the laborer tends, in the absence of legal monopoly, to put more products, better products, cheaper products, and a greater variety of products within the reach of every man who works; and this fact means the physical, mental, and moral perfecting of mankind, and the realization of human fraternity… A large number of people, who see the evils of usury and are desirous of destroying them, foolishly imagine they can do so by authority, and accordingly are trying to abolish privilege by centering all production and activity in the State to the destruction of competition and its blessings, to the degradation of the individual, and to the putrefaction of Society. Their efforts are bound to prove abortive. But the very reasonable and just criticisms of the individualists upon State Socialism, when analyzed, are found to be directed, not against the Socialism, but against the State… . Liberty insists on Socialism — on true Socialism, Anarchistic Socialism: the prevalence on earth of Liberty, Equality, and Solidarity… .” — Benjamin R. Tucker

Benjamin Tucker (1854-1939) was an incredibly influential market anarchist active from the 1870s through 1908. He is best known as the publisher and chief writer for Liberty, a leading anarchist newspaper published at Boston, and for his work as a translator and publisher of avant-garde literature and radical texts from Europe. Tucker prepared and published the first English translations of key works by Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin and Stirner; he also played a major role in introducing the works of Ibsen, Hugo, and Nietzsche to American literary audiences.

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This essay, which first appeared in July 1968, is an influential statement of anarchist principles, a call for political decentralization, and a sympathetic but critical analysis of the New Left and global youth movements in the moment of the May days, the Columbia occupation, the Prague Spring and the crest of the antiwar movement. The essay offers a groundbreaking discussion of the libertarian impulses driving, and the anarchism emerging from, the practice of participatory democracy, college and job-site occupations, anti-establishment protest, counter-culture and nonviolent direct action.

“The wave of student protest in the advanced countries overrides national boundaries, racial differences, the ideological distinctions of fascism, corporate liberalism and communism. Needless to say, officials of the capitalist countries say that the agitators are Communists, and Com­munists say they are bourgeois revisionists. In my opinion, there is a totally different political philosophy underlying — it is Anarchism… . The protesting students are Anarchist because they are in a historical situation to which Anarchism is their only possible response… .

“Participatory democracy is grounded in the following social­-psychological hypotheses: People who actual­ly perform a function usually best know how it should be done. By and large, their free decision will be efficient, inventive, graceful, and forceful. Being active and self­-confident, they will cooperate with other groups with a minimum of envy, anxiety, irrational violence, or the need to dominate. And only such an organization of society is self­-improving; we learn by doing, and the only way to educate cooperative citizens is to give power to people as they are. Except in unusual circum­stances, there is not much need for dictators, deans, police, prearranged curricula, imposed schedules, conscription, coercive laws. Free people easily agree among themselves on plausible working rules; they listen to expert direction when necessary; they wisely choose pro tem leaders. Remove auth­ority, and there will be self­-regulation, not chaos… .”

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Modern industry and the accompanying economic conditions have arisen under the régime of status, — that is, under arbitrary conditions in which equal liberty had no place and law-made privileges held unbounded sway,—it is only to be expected that an equally arbitrary and unjust system of property should prevail. On one side a dependent industrial class of wage-workers and on the other a privileged class of wealth-monopolizers each becoming more and more distinct from the other as capitalism advances, has resulted in a grouping and consolidation of wealth which grows apace by attracting all property, no matter by whom produced, into the hands of the privileged, and hence property becomes a social power, an economic force destructive of rights, a fertile source of injustice, a means of enslaving the dispossessed. Under this system equal liberty cannot obtain… .

Can the millionaire capitalist, the labor-robbing idler who lives on interest, the rich thugs of today and their army of parasites, be taken as the outcome of private property? Surely not. They are the direct result of restrictions and privileges, of legal and governmental origin, — causes that render impossible the growth and diffusion of individual property among the mass of wealth-producers. Inequalities in possession exist not so much because of inequalities in the power of individuals to acquire wealth under free conditions, but because political, social, and economic arrangements have always tended to create artificial inequality, to foster and increase whatever natural inequality did exist … .

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C4SS Media presents Voltairine de Cleyre‘s “The Gates of Freedom”, read and edited by Nick Ford.

Gates of Freedom is probably one of Voltairine’s least known essays even though it’s probably one of her longer and more important ones. This essay is in much the same spirit of her classic essay, Sex Slavery but instead of talking about the general phenomenon, here Voltairine mostly focuses on arguments that justify this phenomenon. Add to that specificity a further specificity with it being about scientific arguments and not legalistic or theistic and you’ve got much of this essay. Past that Voltairine has a few notable passages, one imagines the life of a wife under later 19th century marriage and the terror and dread she routinely feels with a life that isn’t hers but her husband’s. Another passage laments the role of religion in women’s mind and the role religion has generally played in reinforcing women’s oppression at the hands of men. Add to this numerous references to Voltairine’s dislike of “natural rights”, references to Story of an African Farm and generally dispelling pernicious sexist and supposedly “scientific” ideas at that time and you’ve got a powerful essay filled with much of Voltairine’s inspiration for opposing the oppression of women.