578 research outputs found
Errico Malatesta
Get PDFMalatesta is the living
link between the demise of the First International in 1871 and the struggle
against European fascism which started some forty years later. After the ruckus
between Marx and Bakunin catalysed the separate development of revolutionary
socialist organisations, he joined both the anarchist Federalist International
and its Italian section. Spending long stretches of time in exile, dodging
arrest and escaping jail, he lived much of his life like the great white shark,
permanently on the move. Though there were periods of settlement in Italy,
Argentina and the UK, he travelled widely in Europe, equally in its northern
regions and along its Mediterranean shore, and made trips to Egypt, the US and
Cuba. Wherever he happened to be, he always played a prominent role in Italian
anarchist politics, editing a series of highly influential newspapers. He also
wrote one of the movement’s best loved pamphlets. Malatesta was present at the
key international gatherings of the period including the 1896 London meeting of
the Second International, where he reportedly delivered a ‘fiery speech’
protesting the decision to eject anarchists from its congresses. In debates between organisationalists and
individualists he sided with the former. Yet he stood in solidarity with his opponents
to help frustrate police actions. A communist, he was pragmatic rather than
doctrinaire and though he also advocated workers’ self-organisation, he was
cautious about syndicalism.......</p
William Godwin
Get PDFGodwin was an eighteenth-century radical writer and journalist and one of the leading participants in the debates sparked by the French Revolution. An ally of Tom Paine, he was also a critic of Edmund Burke, the Whig-cum-conservative author of Reflections on the Revolution in France. Godwin shared Burke’s abhorrence of The Terror but wholly rejected his glowing defence of aristocracy. At first enthusiastic about the Revolution, Godwin made two lasting interventions into revolutionary debates, the theoretical treatise Political Justice and the novel Caleb Williams.....
Max Stirner
Get PDFBorn Johann Kaspar Schmidt in Beyreuth
in 1806, Stirner is one of the most
controversial anarchists, by turns
celebrated as the seminal anarchist theorist and
marginalised as a political philosopher only
tangentially related to the anarchist movement.
The nineteenth-century commentator E.V.
Zenker billed Stirner as the German Proudhon,
one of the movement’s two intellectual
forerunners; Paul Eltzbacher listed him as one
of the seven exponents of anarchist philosophy.
His reputation has fared less well over time and
recently anarchist-communists have rejected him
from anarchism’s history...
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