The Anarchist Library

Author: Sara Blum
Title: Martyr Culture
Subtitle: Revolutionary Culture in Rojava
Date: June 2025
Notes: This essay was written by Sara Blum, an internationalist who spent several years with the YPJ in Rojava, to accompany and contextualize Orso: Wartime Journals of an Anarchist, published in July 2025.
Source: retrieved on 10/27/2026 from https://www.tangledwilderness.org/features/martyr-culture

I remain committed, until the end, to the struggle for liberation
and to the beauty and love it creates.

Abdullah Öcalan

Kurdish friends, upon meeting an internationalist, often ask about our decision to come to their homeland in Rojava, Kurdistan. When they’d ask how I first came into contact with the friends, I felt a bit embarrassed to say that, honestly, the first friends of the movement I met were those who helped me after I actually arrived in Mesopotamia. (Editor’s note: “The friends” is a colloquialism stemming from the literal translation of the word “heval” which has historically been used by members of the Kurdish liberation movement to refer to each other.) I told them I learned about the movement by reading articles on a few different anarchist websites and contacted the friends by email. In fact, I knew so little about the movement that I first emailed YPG (People’s Protection Units) instead of YPJ (Women’s Protection Units). The friends were often amazed at this, and in their generosity considered it some kind of bravery or indication of the depth of my belief in the revolution and the people, rather than of naivety or impulsivity. It’s a common story among internationalists from the so-called USA, because the Kurdish Freedom Movement doesn’t have a presence here like it does in many parts of Europe, where there is a bigger Kurdish diaspora. When I initially went, I planned to stay for six months or a year. I ended up staying for several years, and for most of that time I was with the autonomous women’s military defense forces, YPJ.

I decided to go in late 2018, and at that time it was hard to find much information about what to expect. Not much has changed in that regard. My dad told me to bring extra socks, and that before going I must read Che Guevara’s On Guerrilla Warfare. Other than that, most of the practical information about what to bring I received from an internationalist fighter whom I reached through an online message board. He said to bring all sorts of supplies, sent a packing list, and told me to bring a bunch of US dollars. He emphasized that I should bring water for border crossing across the mountains, which he said would be long and difficult, but to not share my water because the Kurdish comrades would pass it down the line until there was none left, and then I wouldn’t have water. The YPJ friend I was corresponding with told me I didn’t need much, and if it came to be that I needed something when I got there or along the way, comrades would sort it out then. This seemed to me rather casual at the time. I felt frustrated at the vagueness.

Packing and repacking my bag, researching the weather conditions, trying to prepare as much as possible for what could be the rest of my short little life, I wanted all the information I could find and there wasn’t much. I didn’t realize then that I was encountering the first contrast of revolutionary and capitalist culture: different modes of being. The internationalist from the message board, with his best intentions, showed me one way to go about struggle, while the YPJ comrade showed me another way of joining the revolution. Preparing myself as an individual by making sure I had all the right specific things on the one hand, and on the other, preparing myself to take on the same circumstances as whomever I end up with and to sort all my needs within the context of our collective needs. As an internationalist from the West, the tension between these tendencies has long lived in me. I find that it still does, but I have also found that being out of water together always seems to be better than having water while the person next to me doesn’t.

Before I left, I tried many times to write letters to my family, close friends, and comrades, which I would leave in the hands of a trusted friend so that, in the event of my death, they could be sent. I was determined to leave loved ones with some words of strength—I didn’t want to die, but since it was a distinct possibility, it was important to ensure that my death would not be a weight or darkness in their lives. I had made this decision for myself, but I realized as time went on that I’d also made a decision for many other people. My mother became the mother of a YPJ fighter defending the Women’s Revolution. My close friends in the U.S. became personally involved in the defense of the liberated territories as their loved one would be there. Telling my family I was leaving was one of the hardest things I’d done in my life until that point, but writing those letters proved to be much more difficult. I found that I couldn’t finish them. The hours I spent writing and re-writing them, however, were the first I’d ever spent thinking so much about my own death and its meaning. It’s easier to think of dying than it is to think about the meaning of my own death for the people left behind. I told myself I’d finish the letters during my basic training.

I arrived first in Southern Kurdistan. After a short while, I ended up with a couple of other internationalists in a refugee camp where we stayed as we waited for the opportunity to cross the border into Rojava. We spoke not one word of Kurdish, and only very few words in Arabic, which as it turned out were all completely useless in the area we were staying. We couldn’t read any signs, or documents, or understand the most basic hand gestures which were, to my surprise, completely different from the ones of my culture. Nobody mentioned that on any message boards. I never imagined it could be so difficult to establish a shared understanding of “yes” and “no.” I felt like an incompetent toddler. Incompetent, I specify, because around me were quite often dozens of Kurdish toddlers each of a higher degree of competence within the context of Kurdish life. This is all to say that when encountering the world around me in those first weeks, as I waited in Başur (Southern Kurdistan) to cross the border into Rojava (Western Kurdistan), there was often no way anything could be explained to me with language, and often also not with a gesture, even given the downright maternal levels of patience of our Kurdish hosts.

...

Title: Democratic Socialists of America & Libertarian Socialism
Subtitle: A Debate
Date: 1983
Notes: 1983 debate from the Workers Solidarity Alliance magazine ideas & action on whether or not anarcho-syndicalists and libertarian socialists should participate in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
Source: From ideas & action issue # 3, Spring 1983.
Retrieved on 10-27-2026 from libcom.org/article/democratic-socialists-america-libertarian-socialism
Editors’ Note/Introduction: Bureaucratic Utopianism?, by Tom Wetzel

The last few years have been a discouraging period for those in the U. S. who want fundamental change in the direction of freedom and equality. Though struggle against the powers-that-be goes on, as always, struggles in the last few years have tended to be episodic and isolated. It’s hard to find signs of a widespread willingness to fight the bosses and the government. This lack of movement among the mainstream of the population is, in all likelihood, the root cause of the general political drift to the right and, as well, the evolution towards social-democracy among so many leftists whose radicalism had been spawned by the movements of the late 60s and early ’70s. One evidence of this latter trend was the evolution of the New American Movement (NAM) away from the revolutionary New Left politics of its origin, culminating in its merger last year with Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) — a tiny social-democratic sect that had emerged from the break-up of the old Socialist Party in 1972. That split-up had been itself a reflection of the Vietnam War, since the Socialist Party of the 1960s had been firmly in the hands of the “State Department socialists” who thought the Communists were such a threat that it merited allying themselves with U.S. bosses, by supporting the U.S. government’s imperialist foreign policy. This fit in with the practice of cooperation with the bosses which characterized the union chiefs who controlled the Socialist Party in those days. The split in the SP created three groups — the majority formed the Social Democrats USA, made up of such class-collaborationist union leaders as Lloyd McBride of the United Steelworkers and Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers. They had no compunction about supporting U.S. imperialism in Indo-China (and anywhere else) right to the bitter end. In 1981, for example, Shanker’s AFT ran a major spread in the “American Teacher” supporting U.S. policy in El Salvador as a struggle for “democracy” (even while members of the Salvadoran teachers union were being tortured or hunted down by forces of the local dictatorship). Another outfit that came out of the break-up of the old SP was the group headed by ex-Milwaukee mayor Frank Zeidler which resurrected the name “Socialist Party “ for itself. This group opposed the Vietnam war but more on the basis of liberal pacifist than class-struggle grounds. And finally, the third fragment from the old SP was Harrington’s liberal group who had no consistently anti-militarist or anti-imperialist position (for example, they have supported U.S. military aid to Israel until just recently) but who simply followed the evolution of the liberal mainstream in its belated opposition to the Vietnam War. Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is the organization which resulted from the absorption of NAM by Harrington’s DSOC. Chris Nielsen, whose piece on “DSA and Libertarian Socialists” we are printing here, recommends the “democratic socialist” milieu — and specifically DSA — as an appropriate area for participation by anti-authoritarian socialists or anarchists. Though we disagree with Chris’ conclusion, we think he raises a number of issues worth discussing. Social democratic ideas are on the rise, and the sort of position Chris argues for is one that needs to be answered by libertarian socialists.

What is “social-democracy’’? Social-democracy is not unique in pursuing or supporting short-range changes to benefit working people — the revolutionary libertarian unions of the early decades of this century, such as the IWW in this country, used militant tactics for goals short of class emancipation. Social-democratic politics is typified by a reliance on electoral politics with the union bureaucracy providing the major base of support. Social-democratic tactics have traditionally led to a statist conception of what socialism is all about — socialist politics get defined in terms of what state policies the social democratic leaders will implement on our behalf once in office, and structure of socialism usually gets defined in terms of nationalization — and certainly this is the content of DSA’s politics. Of course, it is true that some people who have proposed the use of social-democratic tactics have not proposed statist solutions. There was the now-defunct People’s Bicentennial Commission (an off-shoot of NAM) which proposed the idea of “self-management” in a market framework, achieved through the electoral process. (An old idea, first advocated in the 1800s by LaSalle, the father of the German Social Democratic Party.) And then there are the tiny DeLeonist sects like the New Union Party and the Socialist Labor Party who propose to use the electoral process to abolish the state (eventually) and institute industrial self-management. Chris, on the other hand, is not recommending social-democratic politics for our participation because he wishes to defend the actual political content of social-democratic groups like DSA but only because he believes that such politics represent a necessary intermediate stage in the evolution of the consciousness of the American people towards a socialist future.

...

Author: Kevin J. Holohan
Title: Navigating Extinction
Subtitle: Zen Buddhism and Eco-Anarchism
Date: 2022
Notes: College of Education and Community Innovation, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI 49401, USA. Religions 2022, 13(1), 60; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13010060. This article belongs to the Special Issue Buddhist Practice for the Crises That Face Us.
Source: https://www.mdpi.com/
Abstract

What can esoteric knowledge and spiritual practices from the East teach us about the deep psychological roots of domination and hierarchy? In what ways have ancient Buddhist sages acted as anarchist exemplars and deep ecologists long before these traditions began in the West? How might these anarchistic spiritual traditions inform our approaches to work in education, expand our notions of community, help us navigate ecological collapse, and contribute to our efforts to sustain living systems and rekindle our connection to the myriad sentient inhabitants of the places we live beyond the reaches of capital and the State? This paper will examine the anti-doctrine doctrine of Zen Buddhism as a concrete and embodied system of thought and practice for seeing through the delusions of the ego and the psychological and cultural conditioning these delusions engender. What will also be acknowledged is the general lack of attention this spiritual tradition has given to the capitalistic, authoritarian, and anti-ecological systems that tap into and flow from these delusions. It will be argued that these experiential approaches to overcoming the tyranny of the ego have significant implications for loosening the grip of hierarchical thinking, capitalist hyper-consumption, centralized systems of obedience and command, and human destruction of the biosphere.

1. Introduction

“The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both.”

—Gary Snyder, Buddhism and the coming revolution, 1969.

What can esoteric knowledge and practices from the East teach us about the deep psychological roots of domination and hierarchy? In what ways have ancient Buddhist sages acted as anarchist exemplars and deep ecologists long before these traditions began in the West? How might these anarchistic spiritual traditions inform our approaches to work in the social foundations, expand our notions of community, help us navigate ecological collapse, and contribute to our efforts to sustain living systems and rekindle our connection to the myriad sentient inhabitants of the places we live beyond the reaches of capital and the State? This paper will examine the underlying premises of Zen Buddhism as a concrete and embodied system of thought and practice for seeing through the delusions of the ego and the psychological and cultural conditioning these delusions engender. What will also be acknowledged is the general lack of attention this spiritual tradition has given to the capitalistic, authoritarian, and anti-ecological systems that tap into and flow from these delusions. It will be argued that a refined set of principles and practices for overcoming the tyranny of the ego have significant implications for loosening the grip of hierarchical thinking, capitalist hyper-consumption, centralized systems of obedience and command, and human destruction of the biosphere. Transcending the ego and the direct recognition of a “community of all beings” has foundations-shaking repercussions and can be realized through the pursuit of a Buddhist Anarchism.

Many scholars, social critics, philosophers, and religious leaders have pointed out that the social and ecological crisis of which we are in the midst is, at root, a cultural and spiritual crisis (Berry 1988; Bowers 2001; Martusewicz et al. 2015). Taking this idea seriously, humanity is at a crossroads. One possible path represents the continuation of philosophical and cultural frameworks that posit humans as standing above and independent from natural living systems and the earth itself, a path of control and domination, of conquest and colonization of communities human and more-than-human, where the only possible solutions to the mess we are in lie in technological manipulation of the biosphere or escape to far-off worlds for those who can afford it. However, other possibilities exist and have been operating alongside the techno-industrial social order since its inception. One of these possibilities, an alternative that has been well-traveled by our paleolithic ancestors, past and present land-based cultures and communities, contemporary indigenous peoples, and eco-centric conscientious objectors who refuse to participate in the systems and institutions responsible for murdering the planet, points in the direction of scaling down and dismantling industrial civilization and creating communities the every action and decision of which is rooted in the recognition of interdependence, compassionate concern for all sentient beings, and a desire to end suffering. It would be naïve, and perhaps misguided, to think we could simply abandon the complex system of nation-states and economies and the deeply held cultural beliefs the undergird and perpetuate this system. However, we have living examples of those who have chosen to take an alternative path, and in the spirit of the old saying, to build a new world in the shell of the old. As will be argued, Zen Buddhism provides a map and compass for this path but leaves the walking to each of us.

...

Author: Gaëtan Pirou
Title: Proudhonism and Marxism
Date: 1919
Notes: Originally published as ‘Proudhonisme et Marxisme’ in La Grande Revue, No. 100 (August 1919), pp. 226–241. Translated from the French by Shaun Murdock.
Source: Retrieved on 23 October 2026 from Root & Branch – Proudhonian Sociology Portfolio (PDF edition)

A contemporary study of Proudhonian ideas might have one of two objectives. Either we will strive to retrace Proudhon’s historical physiognomy,{1} discover the guiding principles of his thought, and explain them by his heredity and temperament, the social circles he lived in, and the events he witnessed. Or else, concerned more with utility than with reconstruction, we will retain from Proudhonism only what may be used by scholars to understand today’s world and foresee tomorrow’s, and by reformers to build an effective, fruitful doctrine for action. Both methods are equally legitimate. The first is necessary for historians of ideas, for whoever wishes to restore Proudhon to us as he was. The second should be preferred if we seek less to describe the past than to shed light on the present and prepare for the future.

Depending on which of these two angles we approach it from, the relationship between Proudhonism and Marxism appears very different.

Historically, Proudhon and Marx are adversaries and constitute an antithesis.[1] After having maintained friendly and sustained relations in 1844 during Marx’s stay in France, and having spent whole nights discussing philosophy and political economy, they fell out irremediably when Marx replied to Economic Contradictions with The Poverty of Philosophy and disdainfully dismissed Proudhon as petty-bourgeois. The years passed without softening this animosity. In 1865, in his famous letter to the Sozial-Demokrat, Marx did not hesitate to judge Proudhon’s memoir in these terms, forgetting his past praise: ‘What Is Property? In a rigorously scientific history of political economy this work would scarcely be worthy of mention’, and he protested against Proudhon’s ‘scientific charlatanism’, ‘unbearable chatter’, and ‘imbecile cynicism’.[2]

In fact, between Proudhon and Marx the contrast of spirit and tendency is obvious. Whereas Marxist thought arose from the development of industrial life, from large-scale production concentrated and socialised in its technical forms if not in its legal regime, Proudhonian thought is fundamentally rural in origin and orientation: the social cell of the future society that Proudhon envisages is neither the factory nor the workers’ group, but the peasant family with austere morals and an individualistic life, whose property, founded on possession, takes on an absolute and sacred character. If Marx holds that the fundamental explanation of world history lies in variations of economic technique, according to Proudhon the guiding thread that enables us to find our way in the chaos of historical events is philosophical in nature: history is a long process of reasoning and society a metaphysics in action. And while for Marx only a change in the mode of production is capable of putting an end to economic instability and class struggle, Proudhon seeks the solution of the social problem in a reform of circulation and exchange, leading gradually to the disappearance of all usurious levies.

Opposed during their lifetime in personality and doctrine, Proudhon and Marx were opposed even after their death through the struggles between their disciples. The triumph of Marxism in the International after 1867 was accompanied by the decline of Proudhonism, and the Proudhonian renaissance at the beginning of the 20th century asserted itself all the more strikingly as the crisis and disintegration of Marxist ideas intensified. When Proudhon rises, Marx, by an almost automatic movement, falls. Those who extol Proudhon – a Fournière or a Rouanet – judge Marx lukewarmly, while orthodox Marxists – Charles Rappoport, for example – do not hide their contempt for Proudhon.

Finally, during the war, the antagonism was marked even more vividly and acutely than before, and some sought to elevate it to the height of a conflict between two national psychologies. Opposite Marx, profoundly German in his authoritarianism and materialism, Proudhon was held up as the symbol of the French mind through his intransigent liberalism and generous idealism. Summarising this thesis, Charles Turgeon wrote:

In this duel, where the antipathy of two minds is heightened by the incompatibility of two doctrines, it is permissible to see, above the antagonism of two exasperated prides, even above the clash of two doctrines and the opposition of two tactics [...] a more serious and more irreducible conflict, the conflict between the French mind and the German mind.[3]

I do not dream of denying that this way of presenting things is broadly accurate. If we wish to place Proudhon back within his historical context, synthesise his ideas faithfully, and characterise his past influence, we are necessarily led to bring to the foreground how Proudhonism stands opposed to Marxism.

Yet it is not at all the same when, moving on to the second point of view mentioned earlier, we focus primarily on the current scientific and practical value of Proudhonian thought. If we place ourselves deliberately on this terrain – as I would like to do in the following pages – we will be led to highlight certain Proudhonian ideas to which commentators, and perhaps Proudhon himself, have sometimes granted only secondary importance, but which, appreciated with the benefit of hindsight and experience today, prove to be singularly profound and eminently useful for the work of revision and reconstruction imposed upon us by the necessities of the present hour.

...

Author: Clare Maxwell
Title: Review: Constellations of Care: Anarcha-Feminism in Practice
Date: October 2026
Source: Retrieved on October 23 2026 from https://allegralaboratory.net/constellations-of-care/

Cindy Barukh Milstein. 2024. Constellations of Care: Anarcha-Feminism in Practice. London: Pluto Press.

Constellations of Care is an anthology of answers to a fundamental question: what do people do to survive and thrive from the margins of society? According to the volume’s editor, Cindy Barukh Milstein, the goal of state-based systems is not to provide prosperity and security for all. Rather, they strategically reserve material and political protections for those who conform to a masculine and heteronormative model of the ‘good citizen’. The various authors of this anthology, all members of various anarcha-feminist collectives, employ the praxis of anarcha-feminism to suggest that resistance to state-based exclusion depends first and foremost on the practice of care, sustaining and building relationships that give life to those without political and economic power or opportunities, who unwittingly or willingly do not conform to the standards desired by the state. Empowerment and social transformation are not driven by massive state projects, but by interpersonal and highly specific interventions managed by those who share the ontological experience of exclusion through inhabiting queer or feminine bodies.

What follows is a collection of histories, reflections, conversations, and artwork that reflect collective, anti-hierarchical, and locally organized efforts to care for a global network of the excluded. Whether written by underground abortion care providers in Poland, communal kitchen collectives that sustained anti-government protests in Colombia, or unhoused and precarious sex workers in Philadelphia who hold weekly needle exchanges, each of its thirty-seven entries offers an approach to creating communities by and for the marginalized.

In some ways, Milstein’s work sits at odds with a strictly academic style of writing. One of the first entries in the book, written by members of the Nightshade collective in Philadelphia, actively denounces the ability of formal academia to understand and advance anarchist theory, suggesting that academia is inherently hierarchical, focuses on creating grand universalist theory rather than accepting theoretical plurality, and gatekeeps legitimacy through economically restricting access to academic credentials (p. 24). Constellations of Care is based on the idea that theory is created, interpreted, and used not by researchers, but by the everyday stakeholders in the political processes that it analyzes. The book emphasizes alternatives to academic style in some of its editorial choices. For example, each section’s author biography veers away from listing degrees or institutional affiliations, and rather briefly chronicles the author’s skill sets and political positions, as well as their close relationships to both communities and geographies, often defined by a city or an Indigenous land designation, rather than a nationality. However, the main contribution of the book is to showcase/underscore/reveal both the vastness of anarcha-feminism’s theoretical considerations and approaches, as well as highlight the difficulties of living out radical politics on a day-to-day basis. The reader is constantly invited not only to explore the deep-seated reasonings that drive the book’s storytellers, but are also challenged to forget clean, academic theory and engage with the messy process of extending a hand to the people around them.

Queer/Feminist Alternatives to Both Historical Anarchism and State Systems

Anarchist organizing has often struggled with how to oppose hierarchical structures without simply reproducing their harms or coercive authority in less formalized ways. These anarcha-feminists often characterize state power with masculinized values and phenomena, including violence, individualism, and the influence of charismatic and ambitious political leaders who are willing or able to take public risks in the name of a cause. Two members of Food Not Bombs, a collective that gives away free meals to unhoused people and at protests, write that “emphasizing only the most visible, frontline, or confrontational forms of activism fails to acknowledge the massive amounts of labor carried out every day that…are part of the glue that holds us all together” (p. 348). This invisibilized labor is often only understood from the standpoint of those who are either doing the work of caring for the marginalized, a disproportionately feminine group, or who are outside of normative economic, familial, and domestic structures, a key part of the ontological experience of queerness.

This understanding offers a corrective course to both official marginalization and trends within social movements that prioritize direct action against a hostile authority over the daily needs of vulnerable people. What it doesn’t offer is a clear idea of where masculinity as a concept or masculine bodies reside in a framework of care. The book, like many of the collectives featured within it, is entirely the work of women and queer contributors, with a range of opinions from wanting to work in tandem with more ‘masculine’ political groups, to advocating for full autonomy of feminine and queer anarchists from cisgendered and heterosexual men as a strategy towards harm reduction. The argument is clear-cut that a theory of masculinity in line with the values of horizontal, communitarian care politics is the responsibility of men themselves, not women or gender queer people. At the same time, anarchism as inherently pluralist, inclusive, and non-hierarchical cannot simply condemn or disregard masculinities and move on. In presenting a gendered understanding of the division of roles in alternative and social movement spaces, Constellations of Care highlights the unclosed gap between a queer feminist politics of care and both institutional and radical politics that are understood to be masculine.

...

Author: Célestin Bouglé
Title: Variations on Marxism
Date: 1938
Notes: Originally published as ‘Variations sur le marxisme’ in Marianne, No. 286 (13 April 1938). Translated from the French by Shaun Murdock.
Source: Retrieved on 23 October 2026 from Root & Branch – Proudhonian Sociology Portfolio (PDF edition)

The philosophy of Marxism during my student days was exceedingly straightforward – or rather, simplistic. It was marked by fierce denials: the repudiation of anything resembling spiritualism, the rejection of anything smacking of idealism, the refusal to grant the slightest value or efficacy to doctrines, beliefs, or sentiments.

Should the Rights of Man or immanent justice be invoked, Paul Lafargue{1}, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, would rise to sweep aside these ‘metaphysical charlatans’. And he would sharply rebuke Jaurès, the conciliator, for attempting to wrap idealism alongside materialism in the folds of his orator’s toga, for daring to invoke Plutarch or Michelet in the same breath as Karl Marx. Had Marx himself not peremptorily declared: ‘It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness’?[1] What grand constructs can be hatched from that egg!

Hence the necessity of seeking in the modes of production that sustain life the underlying reason not only for ways of governing or legislating, but for modes of thought: not only must law and religion be explained, but literature and philosophy must henceforth be accounted for, like material products, by the progress of industrial technology and conflicts of class interest.

Hold on tight: if the mathematical physicists of the 17th century rose to the notion of a natural law of absolute value, it was because of the progress achieved before their eyes by royal absolutism. As for the hypothesis of the unity of cosmic forces, it was supposedly a salon product – a product of those 17th-century salons where the idle bourgeoisie sought to dazzle one another with ingenious comparisons.

Such examples suffice. They serve as warning signs, signalling a grave danger: the peril one runs when attempting to account for the highest creations of the mind – religion, science, art – by a single concurrent force of the social milieu, by the productive forces of economic life alone. The disproportion between the single cause invoked and the value, complexity, and variety of the effects is blatantly obvious to all. And the interpreter, persisting in his reductionism, takes on the air of a clumsy Sisyphus.

From this stems a recoil before the abyss among Marxist philosophers, a step backwards. They reread their master and realise that his theses have indeed been abusively simplified. Marx himself never intended that.{2} Did he ever truly claim, at bottom, to exclude every kind of idealism from the philosophy of history? He too set himself an end, striving to replace the realm of necessity with that of freedom, and remained, as Saragat{3} puts it, a ‘humanist’. In any event, he would have concurred with Engels in affirming that the economic factor operates only ‘in the last instance’.[2]

Ultimately, we find ourselves before a Marxism that should be called not diluted, but enriched and made more flexible – ready to tolerate, welcome, and seek out nuanced explanations that would have sent a Paul Lafargue shuddering with horror in my student days.

What is most curious is that Russia itself – Soviet Russia – is collaborating in this intellectual enrichment and flexibilisation. Such, at least, is the impression that emerges from G. Friedmann’s{4} thoroughly informed and nuanced book, From Holy Russia to the USSR.

He recounts an anecdote attributed over there to Stalin. Questioning his son one day about the history of England, Stalin heard him speak of ‘merchant capital’ and ‘the third phase of struggle between the landed nobility and the urban bourgeoisie’ – yet the child did not even know the name of Cromwell. Let Russian children therefore be given a more concrete, living history, in which human beings are seen living and acting. And let there be a truce to the abuses of this ‘merchant capital’, which had become the stock-in-trade of Pokrovsky’s{5} early books.

Let there be a truce, too, to all the efforts expended to force and lock great writers into a single class, to declare them incapable of seeing anything beyond or above the economic interests of their group, of which they are treated as mere automaton mouthpieces.

Reading our new literature textbooks, Yermilov{6} declares in Pravda{7}, one would think that ‘the Russian classics were nothing more than zealots solely preoccupied with the material welfare of their social group’. It is high time to recognise that they were able more than once, through the vigour of their personal thought, to break free from this infernal circle to attain human values. It is high time to proclaim that the unionised worker of the USSR also has the right to seek intellectual and moral sustenance in more than one author from the era of Holy Russia.

Bravo. And thank you for this breath of ‘humanist’ fresh air. In France as well – and Georges Friedmann knows this better than anyone – it could usefully sweep away a few remnants of ‘vulgar sociology’.

[1] K. Marx: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. S. W. Ryazanskaya, Progress Publishers, 1977, p. 21.

...

Author: Célestin Bouglé
Title: Two Resurrections
Subtitle: Saint-Simonism and Proudhonism
Date: 1918
Notes: Originally published as ‘Deux résurrections : Saint-Simonisme et Proudhonisme’ in L’Europe nouvelle, Vol. 1, No. 42 (24 October 1918), pp. 2005–2007. Translated from the French by Shaun Murdock.
Source: Retrieved on 23 October 2026 from Root & Branch – Proudhonian Sociology Portfolio (PDF edition)

Seemingly abandoned in favour of foreign doctrines, old French socialist thought nonetheless continued to shape the mindset of the working class and its activists. In recent years, we have seen it re-emerge, more or less consciously, but with unmistakable clarity.

It falls to the author of The Sociology of Proudhon[1] and of a forthcoming volume that will lead us Among the Socialist Prophets[2] to specify for the readers of New Europe[3] the signs by which this resurrection of the doctrines of ’48 may be recognised.

Anyone who combines a curiosity about present realities with some knowledge of the classical systems of social philosophy cannot help but seek a connection between these two domains. Among the doctrines constructed by our great socialist innovators, do not some correspond directly to the economic facts we are witnessing today? Could their resurrected ideas not serve as focal points for coordinating the many transformations spontaneously taking shape before our eyes? Principles capable of being revived to organise social life may, it seems, be found on the side of Saint-Simonism, and others on the side of Proudhonism – the one complementing or correcting the other.

***

Charles Rist recently wrote in the Political Economy Review:[4] ‘What we need is neo-Saint-Simonism.’ Merely wishful thinking? There is something more in the words of the economist-historian. He knows that facts are preparing the resurgence he envisions: by the very force of things – by the necessities of war – there is already, now more than ever, Saint-Simonism in the air.

Indeed, it is one of the paradoxes of the present hour: the war, which they detested more than anything in the world, has dragged these great pacifists behind its chariot, reopening the paths to their programme.

They believed in peace – a peace rendered almost inevitable by the very progress of industry. They had not foreseen that a nation would arise to synthesise two elements that they regarded as irreducibly hostile to one another: militarism and industrialism. Through this unexpected synthesis, the stage was set for a formidable explosion, potent enough to shatter the faith of the Saint-Simonians.

Yet if they were profoundly mistaken on this point, how often were they the first to speak the language that is becoming commonplace today? Their industrialism stands opposed to what they called constitutionalism. And their socialism gives priority to the concern for production.

This means that two problems lose their primacy in their eyes: that of forms of government, and that of the arrangements of distribution. Many minds today, coming from very different horizons, would agree that we have allowed ourselves to be overly fixated on these two sets of problems. ‘Less politics’ – to embrace this watchword is to recall, in keeping with the Saint-Simonian tradition, that what matters above all is the development of the nation’s resources.

To carry this task through, to prepare what Herriot calls the economic reorganisation of the nation, it is essential to attach less importance to the doctrinal formulas that could still divide parties yesterday. In our struggle with nature, we must preserve something of the union sacrée that resistance to the enemy imposed upon us. Could we not, asked Audibert[5] recently, found a party above all parties – a productivist party?

Productivist – this new word designates less a birth than a rebirth: the rebirth of the mindset of the forefathers of productivism. Lysis[6] repeats to us in every key: ‘Intensify production: distribution will take care of itself. That is the true formula of the new democracy.’ And to establish his thesis, he gladly denounces what he calls the French error. He overlooks only one point: the idea he is taking up is a French idea formulated long ago. The ground he is rediscovering is venerable French soil.

To transform the nation into a vast workshop, and, so that man may be less exploited by man, to focus first on better exploiting the globe – that is indeed, in the eyes of the Saint-Simonians, the ideal that takes precedence over all else. Their thought would progress by stages from liberalism to socialism. Yet their socialism would always remain, as one of their finest historians, Élie Halévy, tells us, a socialism of production.

To achieve this ideal, several of the methods extolled by the Saint-Simonians coincide precisely with those imposed upon us by the necessities of war.

The State has had to intervene in almost everything, though not without changing its ways. To the delight of Maxime Leroy, a jurist eager to welcome new developments, administrative action has assumed unprecedented forms. Faced with dwindling imports and multiplying needs, it became necessary to purchase for the nation, to allocate foodstuffs among provinces and raw materials among factories.

These were immense and complex tasks that could not possibly be carried through without the collaboration of experienced practitioners. Thus industrialists, merchants, bankers, and engineers were brought into regional committees, interministerial offices, and government councils. This was what Maxime Leroy calls ‘the administrative ascent of the producers’. Yet is not this ascent precisely what the author of the Letters from an Inhabitant of Geneva demanded? In the various ‘Chambers’ whose establishment he proposed in order to make politics truly industrial – chambers of invention, examination, and execution – he saw a means of securing political influence for those who had proven their economic competence. He carved out steps for the ascent of expertise.

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Author: Anonymous
Title: Line 5 Horizontal Directional Drill Destroyed
Subtitle: Water is Life
Date: 10/24/2026

In the early morning hours on Monday, Oct 12, we destroyed a horizontal directional drill (HDD) that Enbridge had been using to build its reroute of the Line 5 pipeline on Anishinaabe land in northern Wisconsin. We painted a message — Water is Life — before dissapearing into the night.

In love and solidarity with all those fighting for the land, water, and future generations, we join the chorus of voices saying no more desecration of the sacred, no more pipelines on stolen land. Fuck Enbridge. Fuck ICE. Free Palestine. Hold each other close in the face of evil. Never give up the fight. xoxo

https://www.enr.com/articles/6925-enbridge-faces-wisconsin-environmental-violations-as-third-fire-hits-line-5-construction-site

https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2026/10/13/enbridge-says-another-fire-destroys-drill-rig-on-line-5-project/

Author: Spencer Sunshine
Title: The Zen Already in Anarchism
Date: 2005
Notes: Fifth Estate # 368–369, Spring-Summer, 2005.
Source: https://www.fifthestate.org/

The combination of anarchism with spiritual or religious beliefs is almost always controversial, even in the pages of Fifth Estate. Opposition to church, state, and capital is the holy trinity of the “classical” anarchist tradition, and the movement’s anti-clericism was one of its appeals to the Spanish in the 30s. But there is also a long history of spiritual anarchism–which is not to say that those in this tradition always accepted being categorized this way. The most common hybrids are with the European religious traditions, such as Christianity (Tolstoy, Dorothy Day, Ammon Hennacy, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich immediately come to mind) or Paganism (Starhawk in particular).

But there is also a long-established connection with the Asian spiritual traditions, particularly Taoism. As early as Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist features of Laozi’s Daodejing were recognized. Ursula K. LeGuin, author of the anarchist sci-fi novel The Dispossessed, identifies as a Taoist-anarchist and made her own translation of the Daodejing. The influential punk band Crass–who promoted an innovative blend of pacifist, feminist, and individualist anarchism–cite Laozi multiple times in their booklet “A Series of Shock Slogans and Mindless Token Tantrums.” And Fredy Perlman in Against His-story, Against Leviathan invokes the Dao multiple times as a way of thinking which runs counter to Leviathan.

But not so readily acknowledged is the conjunction of anarchism and Buddhism, especially Zen. However, there is a good reason that should not be controversial: when Mahayana Buddhism spread from India to China, it seems to have fused with the existing Taoist traditions to create a new kind of Buddhism, called Ch’an–or, in Japanese, Zen.

The first wave of interest in Buddhism in the West was in the 1890s, when D.T. Suzuki and others came from Japan to explain and popularize it. He famously said in 1937 (in Zen and Japanese Culture) that Zen can be “wedded to anarchism or fascism, communism or democracy…” Art historian Allan Antliff, in Anarchist Modernism, mentions two anarchists of the pre-WWI period who were influenced by Buddhism: sexual liberationist Edward Carpenter and art critic and anti-imperialist Ananda Coomaraswamy. Historian Arif Dirlik notes that the Chinese anarchist Liu Shipei was influenced by Daoism and Buddhism.

The river of anarchism dried up following the Spanish Civil War and was revived after the sixties, but in between, two small streams kept it alive. The first was the pacifist movement, and it’s through this tributary that both avant-garde composer John Cage and poet Kenneth Rexroth became involved in anarchism. Cage was interested in Zen, while Rexroth’s work shows an affinity for it even while he identified more with other forms of Buddhism.

The other carrier was the Beat movement. Sympathetic to anarchism (Allen Ginsberg eulogizes the IWW in “Howl”) but also Zen, the Beats helped set the stage for the sudden expansion of Buddhism in the West in the 1960s. The original epicenter was the San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC), whose abbot was Shunryu Suzuki, the author of the influential Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.

Beat poet Diane di Prima was one of many who studied there; her grandfather, to whom she dedicated her sixties classic Revolutionary Letters, was an Italian anarchist and friend of Carlo Tresca. Another was Gary Snyder, who wrote the essay “Buddhist Anarchism” in 1961. Ken Knabb, translator and editor of the Situationist International Anthology, also started practicing there in the 1960s. (Ginsberg himself later became involved in Tibetan Buddhism and helped establish Naropa, the Buddhist university in Colorado where Peter Lamborn Wilson has taught on occasion). Another Beat generation writer, Kerry Thornley, co-author of Principia Discordia, wrote the beautiful short book Zenarchy.

It’s harder to find contemporary Zen anarchists, although writers such as Wilson, Max Cafard, and the late John Moore–all of whose work has appeared in this publication–do mention Zen and Daoism in their works. However, it is not uncommon to meet individual anarchists or other anti-authoritarian activists who identify with Buddhism.

But proposing a look at these potential affinities should not be taken as a call for anarchists to unreflectively join Zen Buddhist temples. Although Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Socially Engaged Buddhism” constitutes the political wing of Buddhism, most anarchists will probably find his Buddhist Peace Fellowship (as well as other groups like the Zen Peacemaker Family) to be a disappointingly weak tonic.

And we want to be the first to admit that Zen offers a message that can be read in many ways: as another cult to follow; as an apolitical spiritual practice; or as an exceedingly radical wake-up call to a consciousness that is as old as humanity and incompatible with our present way of life–one which dovetails very closely with anarchism. It is in the spirit of the latter that we wish to present the results of Max Cafard’s investigations.

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Author: Walter Benjamin
Title: The Moon
Source: Berlin Childhood around 1900

The light streaming down from the moon has no part in the theater of our daily existence. The terrain it illuminates so equivocally seems to belong to some counterearth or alternate earth. It is an earth different from that to which the moon is subject as satellite, for it is itself transformed into a satellite of the moon. Its broad bosom, whose breath was time, stirs no longer; the creation has finally made its way back home, and can again don the widow’s veil which the day had torn off. The pale beam that stole into my room through the blinds gave me to understand this. The course of my sleep was disturbed; the moon cut through it with its coming and going. When it was there in the room and I awoke, I was effectively unhoused, for my room seemed willing to accommodate no one besides the moon.

The first things that attracted my gaze were the two cream-colored basins on the washstand. By day, it never entered my head to dwell on them. In the moonlight, however, the band of blue that ran around the upper part of the basins was a provocation. It simulated a woven band encircling a skirt-hem. And in fact the brim of each basin was curled like a frill. Between the two basins stood pot-bellied jugs, made of the same porcelain with the same floral pattern. When I climbed out of bed, they clinked, and this elinking was communicated over the washstand’s marble surface to basins and bowls, glasses and carafes. As happy as I was to receive from my nocturnal surroundings a sign of life—be it only the echo of my own—it was nonetheless an unreliable sign, and was waiting, like a false friend, to dupe me at the very moment I least expected it. This was when I lifted the carafe with my hand to pour some water into a glass. The gurgling of the water, the noise with which I put down first the carafe and then the glass—it all struck my ear as repetition. For every spot on this alternate earth to which I was transported appeared wholly occupied by what once had been. Thus, each sound and each moment came toward me as the double of itself. And when I had endured this for a while, I would draw near my bed gripped by the fear of finding myself already stretched out upon it.

This anxiety did not altogether subside until I once again felt the mattress under my back. Then I fell asleep. The moonlight withdrew slowly from my room. And, often, the room already lay in darkness when I awoke for a second or third time. My hand would necessarily be the first to brave emergence from the trench of sleep, in which it had taken cover before the dream. And just as one sometimes falls prey to a previously unexploded shell even after a battle has ended, so my hand was constantly expecting to be overtaken on its way by a previously delayed dream. When the nightlight, flickering, then brought peace to my hand and me, it appeared that nothing more remained of the world than a single, stubborn question. It may be that this question nested in the folds of the door-curtain that shielded me from noise. It may be that it was nothing but a residue of many past nights. Or, finally, it may be that it was the other side of the feeling of strangeness which the moon had brought on. The question was: Why is there anything at all in the world, why the world? With amazement, I realized that nothing in it could compel me to think the world. Its nonbeing would have struck me as not a whit more problematic than its being, which seemed to wink at nonbeing. The moon had an easy time with this being.“

My childhood was already nearing its end when, at last, the moon seemed willing to assert its claim to the earth by daylight, a claim which previously it had made only at night.85 High above the horizon-—large, but pale-— it stood, in the sky of a dream, looking down on the streets of Berlin. It was still light outside. Gathered around me were the members of my family, their bearing a little stiff, like that of figures in a daguerreotype. Only my sister was missing. “Where is Dora?”I heard my mother exclaim. Suddenly, the full moon up in the sky began ever more rapidly to expand- Coming nearer and nearer, it tore the planet asunder. The railing of the iron balcony, on which we all had taken our places overlooking the street, broke into a thousand pieces, and the bodies which had been there flew apart in all directions. The funnel created by the moon’s approach sucked everything in. Nothing could hope to pass through it unchanged. “If there is pain now, then there’s no God,” I heard myself conclude, and, at the same time, I collected what I wanted to take across. I put it all in a verse. It was my farewell. “O star and flower, spirit and dress, love, grief, time, and eternity!”B“ But even as I hastened to entrust myself to these words, I was already awake. And only now did the horror which the moon had just inspired seem to grip me for all time, without any hope of reprieve. For this awakening set no limit to the dream, as others did, disclosed no goal, but instead revealed to me that its goal had escaped the dream, and that the sovereignty of the moon--which I had come to know as a child—had dissolved before another succession of the world.

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