We must get rid of the Anarchists! They are a menace to society. Does not Hearst say so? Do not the M. & M. and the gentlemaen of the Chamber of Commerce, who have also declared war on Labor, assure us that the Anarchists are dangerous and that they are responsible for all our troubles?…

David Cameron, the UK prime minister, has been caught pants down. His tie is not on straight and he begins his speech grasping for straws. “We do live in a dangerous world. We live in a world of terror and terrorism”, he says playing on people’s fear. He references a recent attack on a British…

The Conservative has long been marked, whether he knows it or not, by long-run pessimism: by the belief that the long-run trend, and therefore time itself, is against him. Hence, the inevitable trend runs toward left-wing statism at home and communism abroad. It is this long-run despair that accounts for the Conservative’s rather bizarre short-run…

An Evening with Karl Hess and Robert Anton Wilson The libertarian left has many luminaries, but few as quirky, thoughtful or influential as Wilson and Hess. Wilson brought us the SNAFU principle. Hess brought us our understanding of the left/right spectrum. And both brought us a shameless embrace of counter-culture and a playful interest in…

All men are created equal. When Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, set out to enunciate the philosophical principles underlying the American Revolution—the principles of ’76, as later generations would call them—that’s the one he put down first, as the foundation and justification of all the rest. Equality—not, as one might expect, liberty. The…

With the completion of the Voltairine de Cleyre Collection (at least for now…) I’d like to round up the links so it will be easier for people to find where they are located on this site and elsewhere. You can look up the collection itself if you search, “Voltairine de Cleyre Collection” and you can…

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

In the final speech Avrich collected in The First Mayday, Voltairine explains why August Spies and the martyrs all alike held the traits of the common-man and why this is an admirable trait. She goes at length admitting many so-called “faults” of the common-man but then reversing the dialogue and conversation and showing it as…

“I don’t try to make you believe something you don’t believe, but to make you do something you won’t do.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein “Over and over, you’re falling, and then catching yourself from falling. And this is how you can be walking and falling at the same time.” — Laurie Anderson I’ve written before about the importance of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions for left-libertarians. Here’s another…

Throughout most of this speech Voltairine recounts a recent article on the subject of the Haymarket Affair and both gives it limited amounts of praise and a lot more harsh critique where she thinks it deserves it. She points out that she didn’t believe Lingg’s lover at the time gave him the bomb and it’s…

Here, Voltairine recounts why the act that the martyrs did was noble and uses several biblical verses and references throughout to (ironically) prove or add to her points (this was a favorite rhetorical device of Voltairine’s throughout her writings). The end of this speech and the notation of “the judgement” reflects Voltairine’s continuing belief of…

This speech is notable for quite a few things. The beginning part in which Voltairine admits that she had, at first, openly dismissed the martyrs and cheered for their death to be had. This gives us the whole reason (or at least one of the major ones) for why Voltairine did these speeches: a matter…

In this speech Voltairine details the theoretical engagements Parsons and the rest of the martyrs were interested in (i.e. what they stood for and what they did not), what anarchism means and uses the stunning visuals of Olive Schreiner’s “Three Dreams in a Desert”, using her “Land of Freedom” and bridge metaphors specifically at a…

Voltairine uses much of the beginning of this speech to speak through the voices of the martyrs  to let their voices be heard (very much in the spirit of Spies’ last statements). So that should be noted when Voltairine speaks of communism as the one alternative to the crisis that capitalism creates. Past that Voltairine…

In this speech Voltairine recounts the events of November 11th and details why the trial and rulings were obvious shams. In doing this she speaks of the bomb as a “Vengence” (implying the police attacked first and that the bomb was therefore justified) but as we now know, the bomb was thrown before the police…

In the time after the Haymarket Affair it was most likely pretty common to have many big questions in the anarchist “scene” at the time about the incident. One of which was probably, “was the sacrifice worth it?” “how should we feel about it?” and in the first speech in this compilation de Cleyre tries…

Introception: An Introduction to an Introduction Paul Avrich was and still is an acclaimed historian of anarchism and for good reason. First beginning with his research of Russia and the time of the USSR he was fascinated by those who stood in opposition to the early rule and especially the anarchists. From there he would…

Today is May Day, or International Worker’s Day: an international day for celebrating the achievements of workers and the struggle for organized labor. You might have thought that the proper day was Labor Day, as traditionally celebrated on the first Monday in September. Not so; the federal holiday known as Labor Day is actually a Gilded Age bait-and-switch from 1894. It was crafted…

Carson: Capitalism may have many varieties, types or flavors, but they all have one thing in common – they have nothing to do with a free market.