C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Dyer D. Lum’s “On Anarchy” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Dyer D. Lum’s “On Anarchy“.
$1.50 for the first copy. $0.75 for every additional copy.
This plea for Anarchism by Dyer D. Lum was published as articles in the Chicago revolutionary paper, The Alarm, and then reprinted, in 1887, as part of Albert R. Parson’s anthology, Anarchism: Its Philosophy & Scientific Basis, prepared by Parsons during his imprisonment, and published by his wife, Lucy Parsons, in 1887.
“Modern society, monarchical, parliamentary, and republican alike, cries with one voice: Law and order first and foremost, liberty and progress secondary and resultant. Anarchy says: Not so; law must not deny liberty, order must not precede progress; they are causes, not results. It proclaims progress first, to which order must adapt itself; liberty at all times, over which law has no control. . . . .”
“Anarchy is freedom from artificial regulation and restriction; and in freedom, the farmer, as well as the artisan and all the classes into which society is now divided, will find that wider scope to activity will bring increased comfort; and in freedom to use of land and to organize credit, rent, interest, and profits will disappear together like bats before the dawning light; and in co-operation find full security for wealth attained and opportunity for its application. . . .”
“In anarchy labor and capital would be merged into one for capital would be without prerogatives and dependent upon labor, and owned by it. The laborer would find that to produce was to enjoy and the nightmare of destitution banished. The artisan would find in co-operation that nature alone remained to be exploited. . . .”
Dyer D. Lum (1839-1893) was a revolutionary market anarchist, a labor organizer, and a pioneer of mutualist economics. He became involved in the labor movement through his trade as a bookbinder, and came into contact with Anarchists such as Albert Parsons and August Spies in Chicago. He was closely involved with support for the Haymarket martyrs during the 1880s – he took up the editorship of Albert Parson’s newspaper, The Alarm, after Parson’s death, and it was Lum who smuggled a dynamite cap to Louis Lingg in prison (which Lingg used to commit suicide ahead of the noose). A collaborator and lover of Voltairine de Cleyre’s, and a prolific writer of both books and articles for Anarchist papers such as Twentieth Century, Liberty, and The Alarm, Lum’s Anarchism combined the radical individualism and anti-capitalist market anarchism of the Boston Anarchists, with an emphasis on worker ownership, radical solidarity, and the militant labor organizing of his Chicago revolutionary milieu.
