Anarchist Studies

Andy Chan

A mature state of anarchy is synonymous with decision-making and dispute resolution free from coercion, force or violence. At what point should anarchists renounce violence? The ideological consistency of the tool of force (in revolution) with the goal of nonviolent society remains a fundamental problem for anarchists. Pacifist anarchists argue that violence and anarchy are irreconcilable opposites; that violent revolution not only defiles the goal of anarchy, but that it also makes its actualisation impossible. Some question whether ‘revolution’ is even an appropriate word to use when discussing paths to anarchy. Non-pacifist anarchists have retorted that, when faced with the arsenal of the state, nonviolent methods are insufficiently potent; that eschewing violence in revolution ensures defeat. Thus persists a possible ‘strategic paradox’, one insufficiently addressed by anarchist theorists. This paper seeks to navigate a consistent ideological route through this morass.

Literature and Politics in early twentieth-century Argentina: The Anarchist Modernism of Roberto Arlt

Glen S. Close

This article uses recent theories regarding the impact of anarchism on modernist literary culture to analyse the novels of Argentine Roberto Arlt (1900-1942), who is now recognized as one of the pivotal Latin American writers of the twentieth century. My examination of Arlt’s work highlights his vital awareness of Argentina’s prominent anarchist movement and his textual engagement with anarchist ideas. I focus on Arlt’s literary treatment of criminal and revolutionary conspiracy in order to situate his texts in a transnational modernist corpus, positing the impact of Arlt’s ‘fictitious revolutionary body’ in current Argentine literary discourse and its relevance to our understanding of a transatlantic anarchist modernism.

Carnival against capital: a comparison of Bakhtin, Vaneigem and Bey

Gavin Grindon

Since the mid 1990s, many anarchists and Marxists, drawing on the writings of Hakim Bey, the Situationist International and Mikhail Bakhtin, have increasingly articulated the concept of 'carnival' as a valuable form of resistance that merges the political and the aesthetic. This essay looks at these writings and the cases they make, and examines the extent to which they form a coherent body of thought. The central texts under discussion will be Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life and Hakim Bey’s TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism.

`A Mighty, Reckless, Shameless, Conscienceless, Proud – Crime’: Re-evaluating The Criminal in Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own

James Ward

The figure of the criminal features prominently in Stirner’s Ego and his Own. This paper debates whether this figure is intended as a portrayal of an actual criminal or whether it should rather be seen as a vehicle for Stirner’s critique of Hegel’s and Feuerbach’s ideas.

In crime, the egoist has hitherto asserted himself and mocked at the sacred; the break with the sacred, or rather of the sacred, may become general. A revolution never returns, but a mighty, reckless, shameless, conscienceless, proud – crime, does it not rumble in distant thunders, and do you not see how the sky grows presciently silent and gloomy?

The criminal, so central to Max Stirner’s project in The Ego and Its Own is, on the face of it, one of the most sensational figures ever to be promoted in a significant political work. For some, it is so sensational, it cannot be taken seriously: the first edition of Stirner’s work was seized by the censor, but quickly released when the Saxon Minister of the Interior decided it was ‘too absurd’ to constitute a danger. Needless to say, this assessment has not been shared by everyone. James Huneker, in a one of the first texts to treat of Stirner in English, said The Ego and Its Own was `the most revolutionary book ever written … [Stirner] has left behind him a veritable breviary of destruction, a striking and dangerous book. It is dangerous in every sense of the word – to socialism, to politicians, to hypocrisy."

Much of this kind of assessment is down to the fact that the criminal is lauded as a social and psychological type in The Ego and Its Own, and a recognition that this constitutes a radical break with the main lines of political thought since Plato. Even Machiavelli in The Prince condemns the criminal, while Nietzsche nowhere considers the criminal in conjunction with the Superman, and would probably have considered criminality as an example of the ‘unsublimated’ will to power. However, in this essay, I will argue that Stirner’s criminal has all-too-often been (mis)understood in isolation from the role it has to play in the economy of The Ego and Its Own. Understood in context, it emerges as a polemical tool, a means of responding to the thinkers that Stirner was most concerned to distance himself from: Hegel and Feuerbach. As an actual criminal, the figure described in The Ego and Its Own is not very convincing.