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Life Without Law

Highlights

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I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.
—Emma Goldman, 1931 🔗

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An anarchist is someone who rejects the domination of one person or class of people over another. 🔗

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There is no single perfect expression of anarchism, because anarchism is a network of ideas instead of a single dogmatic philosophy. 🔗

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You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.
—Octave Mirbeau, 1899 🔗

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if we don’t trust people to lead themselves, why do we trust them enough to put them in charge of everybody? 🔗

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An anarchist is one who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974 🔗

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anarchism is the marriage of responsibility and freedom. 🔗

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the people in this world who act with total freedom and no responsibility are those so privileged in our society so as to be above reproach, such as the police and the ultra-rich. Most of the rest of us understand that in order to be free, we must hold ourselves accountable to those we care about and those our actions might impede upon: our communities and families and friends. 🔗

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The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said “This is mine,” and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1754 🔗

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In economic terms, this is the central myth of capitalism: that everyone should try to get one over on everyone else all the time, and that if everyone does that, most people win. The people who want you to believe that myth are the people who do win: the people who already control everything. 🔗

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Capitalism does not, as is popularly misunderstood, mean an economic system in which people work for money that they can exchange for goods or services. Capitalism is, instead, an economic system in which people can leverage their access to capital to extort money from other people. That is to say, capitalism is the system by which people who own things don’t have to work and everyone else does. 🔗

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Some anarchists argue for communism, in which the means of production are held in common by communes. Others favor mutualism, in which means of production are owned by individuals or collectives and money is used but money can only be made through work, not through capital. Still others push for a system of gift economics, an organic system in which people give to one another freely and without compulsion, sharing when and what they would like with whom they’d like. 🔗

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Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.
—Leo Tolstoy, 1894 🔗

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We are opposed to government because we are opposed to being ruled, not because we are opposed to organizing amongst our peers for our mutual benefit. 🔗

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Amongst ourselves, we create organizing structures that allow for the full autonomy of every individual, wherein no person can be compelled to go along with the wishes of the group. 🔗

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When larger structures are deemed useful or necessary, various groups often form networks, which are horizontal structures for disseminating ideas and information and for planning complex operations. 🔗

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No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time.
—Emma Goldman, 1917 🔗

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We don’t feel the burden of proof is upon the oppressed to identify what they would like to replace their oppressor with. 🔗

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We are opposed to law because law is a way of understanding human conduct that was designed—and has been implemented—for social control rather than for the furtherance of justice. Laws are designed to be obscure yet rigid, creating a series of traps for those who are already disenfranchised by society. 🔗

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they hinder people’s ability to develop their own personal sets of ethics. They don’t help people learn to respect people for the sake of respecting people. 🔗

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This is the concept that, while it is impossible to repair the harm done by the perpetrator of an unjust act, one can work to help the perpetrator take personal responsibility for what they have done so as to prevent them from returning to such behavior in the future. 🔗

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I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.
—Mikhail Bakunin, 1871 🔗

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Mutual aid is a fancy way of saying “helping each other out,” and it’s one of the core anarchist beliefs. We believe that people can interact in meaningful ways by sharing resources freely, without coercion. 🔗

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Solidarity is a fancy word for “having one another’s backs.” Solidarity is the most powerful force that the oppressed can bring to bear upon their oppressors. 🔗

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Solidarity is, in some ways, the opposite of charity. Charity is a way of providing aid that reinforces the hierarchical relationship between groups. Rich people donating money to charity makes poor people even more dependent upon the rich. Poor people, however, organizing to share resources as equals, are acting out of solidarity. 🔗

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Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and tyrant, and I declare him my enemy.
—Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 1849 🔗

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Consent is a way of finding out what other people are interested in doing with you. Mostly, this just means asking people before you do things with them. 🔗

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the important thing is to not act without knowing if the other person is informed of the ramifications of an action, is in a headspace to make decisions, and is enthusiastic. 🔗

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On an individual level, we’re interested in practices based on consent. 🔗

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One tool we use for finding consent in larger groups is consensus. 🔗

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Consensus is a way of determining what everyone in a group is comfortable with doing. 🔗

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Some people mistake consensus to be basically the same as voting but where everyone agrees instead of a majority. This thinking however, is still built around voting, which is a form of competitive decision-making that is not designed to respect people’s autonomy. Consensus, instead of being a way to convince everyone to agree to the same plan, is a way of exploring what the logical limits of any given group are. If all members of a group cannot agree on a specific action, then it clearly needs to take place outside of that group, if at all. 🔗

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Anarchists know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals.
—Lucy Parsons, 1890s 🔗

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Anarchists do not want to reform the existing political system, we want its abolition. 🔗

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Direct action is a means by which we take control over our own lives, by which we regain the autonomy and agency that is systematically stripped away from us by governmental systems, by which we become self-thinking individuals. 🔗

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No system based on industrialization and capitalism is ever going to prioritize natural ecosystems over profit, so we won’t waste our time asking nicely. 🔗

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If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.
—Mikhail Bakunin 🔗

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To be an anarchist is at least as much about the ways in which you engage with the world and how you treat people as it is about what fantastic utopia you hope to one day live in. 🔗

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We’ve no interest in seizing power for anyone but ourselves, and we oppose anyone who thinks they ought to rule us, “revolutionary” or not. 🔗

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most anarchists accept that domination may occasionally need to be met with violent force in order to stop it. Our problem isn’t with violence itself, but the systems of domination that make use of it. 🔗

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An anarchist is anyone who denies the necessity and legitimacy of government; the question of his methods of attacking it is foreign to the definition.
—Benjamin R. Tucker, 1895 🔗

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The black bloc is a tactic by which we obscure our identities by wearing identical black clothing and then engage in various direct actions, usually in public. 🔗

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An anarchist strategy is not a strategy about how to make a capitalist or statist society less authoritarian or spectacular. It assumes that we cannot have an anarchist society while the state or capitalism continues to reign.
—Aragorn!, 2005 🔗

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The most famous strategy is that of revolution, in which a single, reasonably organized mass uprising allows for the oppressed classes to seize the means of production and take their lives into their own hands. 🔗

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A second strategy is that of advocating and participating in insurrections. Insurrections are moments of freedom and revolt, often occurring in times of crisis. These insurrections would, ideally, allow for areas to be liberated from state control and, if they came in increasing strength and frequency, allow for a generalized revolt that could break state power. 🔗

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A third strategy that anarchists have historically tried is syndicalism. This method is a “workerist” method that suggests destroying the capitalist state economy by means of workers taking direct control of their factories. 🔗

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Another strategy is referred to sometimes as the dual power strategy. This is a strategy of building up “counter-infrastructure” along anarchist lines to fulfill people’s needs and desires while simultaneously attacking the mainstream institutions that are destroying the world. 🔗

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The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
—Ursula K Le Guin, 1974 🔗

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The anarchists of revolutionary Spain would probably rather we fight our own struggles today than spend so much time discussing theirs! The Spanish anarchists were just regular folks, and they did exactly what we’ll do when we get the opportunity.
—Curious George Brigade, 2004 🔗

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Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who coined the term in 1840 and was the first to self-identify as an anarchist. 🔗

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In the 1880s, anarchists fighting against wage labor in the United States got caught up in the fight for the eight-hour work day. After a series of labor rights culminating in a fight in Haymarket Square in Chicago, eight anarchists were put on trial explicitly for being anarchists. Four were hanged and one killed himself in jail as a result. Their martyrdom changed labor history in the US, the eight-hour workday fight was won, and anarchism continued to be a strong voice in the labor movement. 🔗

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We fought for revolution in Russia for decades, only to be betrayed when the Bolsheviks turned around and murdered us in 1917. For three years, from 1918–1921, seven million Ukrainians lived as anarchists until the Bolshevik army betrayed an alliance and conquered us while we were busy fighting armies hired by the capitalists. 🔗

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We had another three-year go of it from 1936–1939, when syndicalist labor unions took control of Catalonia, a region in Spain, during the Spanish Revolution. Once again, while anarchists were busy fighting a right-wing invasion, the Bolshevik-controlled communist party opened fire on us and the country fell to fascists. 🔗

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Anarchism is not a concept that can be locked up in a word like a gravestone. It is not a political theory. It is a way of conceiving life, and life, young or old as we may be, old people or children, is not something definitive: it is a stake we must play day after day.
—Alfredo M. Bonanno, 1998 🔗

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In a society that has destroyed all adventure, the only adventure left is to destroy that society.
—Anonymous French Graffiti, 1968 🔗

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the most important things about being an anarchist are: treating other people with respect, as masters of their own lives; and taking control of your life, seizing freedom, but remaining responsible to yourself and those you care about. 🔗

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People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891 🔗

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Suggested films:
• If a Tree Falls
• Breaking the Spell
• Libertarias
• Land & Freedom• Was tun, wenn’s brennt? (What to Do in Case of Fire) 🔗

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Suggested fiction:
• The Dispossessed, by Ursula K Le Guin
• Bolo’bolo, by PM.
• The Fifth Sacred Thing, by Starhawk
• The Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy
• Just Passing Through, by Paco Ignacio Taibo II
• V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore 🔗

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Some cool historical anarchists to look up for fun include: Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, , Lucy Parsons, Nicola Sacco, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Ricardo Flores Magón, Jules Bonnot, Maria Nikiforova, Nestor Makhno, Noe Itō, Severino Di Giovanni, Renzo Novatore, Voltairine DeCleyre, Louis Michel, and Francesc Ferrer. 🔗