Great Anarchists

By Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper.

Read by Barbara Graham and Jim Donaghey.

Malatesta is the living link between the demise of the First International in 1871 and the start of the struggle against European fascism some forty years later. As an anarchist-communist and organisationalist, Malatesta rejected individualism as gestural politics, and while he advocated workers’ self-organisation, he was cautious about syndicalism. But he was pragmatic rather than doctrinaire, and stood in solidarity with his opponents within the anarchist movement. Spending long stretches of time in exile, dodging arrest and escaping jail, he travelled widely in Europe, as well as Egypt, the US and Cuba, with periods of settlement in Italy, Argentina and the UK. Wherever he happened to be, he always played a prominent role in Italian anarchist politics, editing a series of highly influential newspapers and writing numerous popular pamphlets. His stature in the anarchist movement was demonstrated during the campaign to stop his threatened deportation from the UK, which drew a crowd of 15,000 to a meeting in Trafalgar Square in June 1912.

Also available on YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giptp0zTJzQ

Download at Bandcamp - https://greatanarchists.bandcamp.com/

The Great Anarchists pamphlet series is published by Dog Section Press and Active Distribution. See: http://dogsection.org/press/malatesta and www.activedistribution.org for more details.

Music by Them’uns - https://soundcloud.com/user-178917365

By Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper.  

Read by Barbara Graham and Jim Donaghey.   

Godwin was an eighteenth-century radical writer and journalist and one of the leading participants in the debates sparked by the French Revolution. Godwin is sometimes credited with being the first philosophical anarchist, but this underplays the character of the philosophy he advanced and the active role he took in politics. Like many of his contemporaries, Godwin understood publishing as a form of activism, an intervention into public debate that was intended to shape it and which also entailed risk.  Today, Godwin is as likely to be remembered for his family connections as he is for his independent contributions to radical politics. He married Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797, was father to Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein), and his influence was felt strongly in the writing of his son-in-law, the Romantic revolutionary poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley.   

Also available on YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbAG8xUk7F8

Download at Bandcamp - https://greatanarchists.bandcamp.com/track/great-anarchists-william-godwin

The Great Anarchists pamphlet series is published by Dog Section Press and Active Distribution. See: http://dogsection.org/press/godwin and www.activedistribution.org for more details.    

Music by Them’uns - https://soundcloud.com/user-178917365

By Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper. 

Read by Barbara Graham and Jim Donaghey.   

Born to an enslaved woman in 1851, Parsons explored class conflict through the prism of the American Civil War. A keen advocate of independent labour organising in the late nineteenth century, Parsons was active in the Knights of Labor and the anarchist International Working People’s Association. In 1905 she joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). She wrote regularly for the anarchist-socialist press and lectured across America, refusing to be cowed by police bans or arrests for riot that followed as a consequence of her defiance. Parsons spearheaded the defence campaigns for the accused of the Haymarket Square bombing, and frequently referred to the injustice of the trial to spotlight the steeliness of capitalist ‘slavocracy’.

Also available at YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7I5Bot2GyU

The Great Anarchists pamphlet series is published by Dog Section Press and Active Distribution. See: http://dogsection.org/parsons and http://www.activedistributionshop.org/ for more details.

Music by Them’uns - https://soundcloud.com/user-178917365

By Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper. 

Read by Barbara Graham and Jim Donaghey.   

Proudhon is famous for two reasons. First, he is responsible for the immortal phrase ‘property is theft!’ Second, he has emerged as the ‘first’ anarchist. This accolade is explained in part by his provocative reclamation of ‘anarchy’. Until Proudhon published his critique of property in 1840 the term had only been applied pejoratively. Proudhon’s greatness is linked to his political economy and his advocacy of decentralised federation, namely, organising ‘from the bottom up’ and on the basis of free agreement or voluntary association. During the mid 1800s, Proudhon was one of the best known social philosophers of the age, often compared to Kant and Hegel.  

The Great Anarchists pamphlet series is published by Dog Section Press and Active Distribution. See: http://dogsection.org/ and http://www.activedistributionshop.org/ for more details.  

Music by Them’uns - https://soundcloud.com/user-178917365 

Pamphlet available to buy here:  http://dogsection.org/press/proudhon/

https://www.activedistributionshop.org/shop/pamphlets-booklets/4838-great-anarchists-proudhon.html

By Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper.

Read by Barbara Graham and Jim Donaghey.

Learning to love Stirner is not an uncomplicated task – as one of the most controversial anarchists, he is by turns celebrated as the seminal anarchist theorist and marginalised as a political philosopher only tangentially related to the anarchist movement. Stirner’s politics was anti-revolutionary and insurrectionary, and swathes of anarchist communists have accepted the Marxist critique of Stirner and effectively removed him from anarchism’s history. Stirner’s most vocal anarchist advocates have barely eased his rehabilitation. In the work of his followers, Stirner variously emerges as a neo-Hobbesian, hyper-liberal or joyful hedonist. Stirner’s greatness comes from the dilemma he creates for anarchists broadly attracted by his commitment to ‘ownness’ – his refusal to suspend individual judgment, and his positive endorsement that individuals discover themselves and recover their uniqueness.

The Great Anarchists pamphlet series is published by Dog Section Press and Active Distribution. See: http://dogsection.org/ and http://www.activedistributionshop.org/ for more details.

Music by Them’uns - https://soundcloud.com/user-178917365

Pamphlet available to buy here: 

http://dogsection.org/press/stirner/

https://www.activedistributionshop.org/shop/pamphlets-booklets/4773-great-anarchists-max-stirner.html

By Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper.

Scholar, poet, playwright, socialite and wit, Oscar Wilde is one of  those magnetic figures that everyone now seems to want to own a piece  of. His literary genius accounts for some of the competition, and 'The  Soul of Man Under Socialism', the essay he published in 1891, usually  puts him in the anarchist frame, typically as a kind of individualist.  But the vindictiveness of the reaction to his public disgrace as a  ‘posing sodomite’ is at least as significant for his story, and the  ferocity of the public outrage explains why liberals, libertarians of  all stripes, and especially gay rights campaigners are now eager to  declare him as their own.

By Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper.

Educator, poet, dramatist, novelist, movement historian, orator and  agitator Louise Michel rose to prominence during the Paris Commune  (1870-71) and  was one of some 4,500 Communards deported to New  Caledonia in 1872. Michel acquired a commanding public profile in the  last decades of the nineteenth century - her mere presence at a meeting  was enough to guarantee a large and enthusiastic audience and a 50,000  crowd turned out  for her funeral in 1905.

By Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper.

Bakunin was feted as a champion of libertarian socialism and he is still  celebrated as Marx’s most redoubtable adversary. Numbering Kropotkin,  Malatesta and Reclus among his adherents, he became the towering figure  of European anarchism in the late nineteenth century. Having survived  two death-sentences and brutal treatment at the hands of the Russian  state, Bakunin remained active in the nascent international anarchist  movement and managed to produce some of the most exhilarating, inspiring  prose in the anarchist back-catalogue.  

By Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper.

Voltairine de Cleyre was an essayist, educator, poet and advocate of  anarchy without adjectives. Voltairine’s anarchism bore the hallmarks of  free-thinking and abolitionism: the distrust of government and  authority, sensitivity to injustice, anti-clericalism and confidence in  power of individual reason. Carried into her anarchism, these ideas ran  through her critique of government as tyranny, her calls to revolt and  her view that social transformation depended on constantly challenging  accepted standards of justice, or what she called collective  consciousness.

By Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper.

Kropotkin has many claims to greatness. An important conduit for the  transmission of Russian revolutionary ideas into western Europe and a  powerful propagandist for revolution in Russia in the decades leading up  to 1917, he spent most of his life tirelessly promoting anarchism as a  distinctive political philosophy and revolutionary practice. He played  an instrumental role in two of the nineteenth-century movement's most  influential papers, Le Révolté and Freedom, and was generally credited  with being the founder of anarchist communism.