Anarchist Studies |
This essay explores the prospect of attaining a non-coercive morality that could enable the simultaneous realisation of maximal individual freedom and stable community, through the exposition of an anarchist theory premised on a subjective 'conscience-ethic', an inherent tendency toward sociality and 'mutual aid', and normative 'usufruct' in property. Part of the project entails the development of a reflexive synthesis between the two seemingly contradictory ends of 'individual' and 'community', concluding that only an anarchist 'social order' integrating self, society, and nature can resolve this apparent tension. In this regard, an argument is advanced here for a commonly-held materiality (deriving from the 'state of nature') that sets the framework for a normative view of property and possession. The essay concludes with an assessment of the efficacy of an accord between anarchist moral theory and poststructuralism.
In the postwar period anarchist aesthetics have undergone a profound transformation. This essay provides an overview of the major recent debates about the nature and possibilities of anarchist art. Herbert Read challenged the status of art-as-commodity in the immediate aftermath of the second world war. But the acceleration of post-artistic anarchist thought really takes off in the 1960s with the Situationists' notorious demand for the suppression and realisation of art. Subsequent debate consists of working through the implications of the Situationist position and in some instances proceeding beyond it. Two broad strategies for developing post-Situationist aesthetic praxes are examined: the abandonment of the textual space for the 'lived poetry' of revolutionary activity, and hence a dissolution of the boundaries between art and lived experience; and the development of forms of art which enact revolution and thus push textuality to its limits.
A glossary of writers and movements is provided in the appendix.
The paper examines debates concering the anarchism of Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi. Part I divides anarchism into three overlapping sets of distinctions, and then examines and refutes the objections to classical Daoism as anarchism, concluding that early Daoism was a type of anarchism. In Part II, the neo-Daoists are examined and explicitly compared to Western anarchists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The paper concludes that these later Daoists grounded their ideas in the philosophy of Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi, and were thoroughly anarchist.
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