anarchism

Max Stirner (Egoist)

• Argued for a society based on a ‘Union of Egoists’, established through voluntary association.

• Rejected revolutions, argued they inevitably create new, oppressive states.

• Argued that the state ‘tames, limits and subordinates’ the individual.

• ‘I am free in no state’.

• ‘The two of us, the state and I, are enemies’

Stirner’s vision of a future free stateless society is based on the creation of unions of egoists and the transformative process of insurrection. Self-interested people would form unions of egoists – voluntary cooperative groups that enable individuals to pursue their personal objectives in a mutual and orderly way.

The individual must be placed above all else and shouldn’t be controlled - authority, structure, system which limits freedom is negative, even morality shouldn’t necessarily be obeyed

In economic terms, egoism rejects both capitalism and the work ethic that underpins it. Stirner dismisses the capitalist system as ‘machine-like labour [that] amounts to the same thing as slavery’. Factory work leads to alienation and exploitation but employment should, Stirner asserts, be fulfilling and useful to the person concerned and allow the individual to enjoy the fruits of their labour. Egoistic property can be used by self interested individuals without contstraints.

Pierre-Joseph Produhon (Mutualism)

• Argued that the state interfered with the liberty and self-development of the individual.

• Argued that ‘property is theft’, as property enables exploitation and was a form of illegitimate power of one individual over another.

• Saw property as ‘the right to own without the need to occupy’.

• Rejected the idea that one human had the right to govern another.

• ‘To be governed is to be watched over, inspected and spied on by creatures that have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so’

• His ideas, known as mutualism, are based on a highly optimistic view of human nature, proposing that free relationships will result in an absence of exploitation.

• He influenced the cooperative movement and proposed subsistence forms of production in poorer societies.

• Believed that spread of mutualism would undermine capitalism, that the state would eventually become insignificant and that anarchism would evolve from the shell of the old system

• Was worried about individual being overwhelmed by the group so advocated ‘right to possession’

  Trade based on the value of labor input > inequality on trading, some trades and communities will have more valuable goods

Mikhail Bakunin

• Compared the state to a ‘vast slaughterhouse’ or ‘enormous cemetery’.

• Saw humans as rational and individual, but argued they are heavily influenced by the society they live in.

• Objected to the idea of a socialist state as ‘red bureaucracy’ which would become corrupted by authority, and predicted that ‘socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality’.

• Argued revolution should take place ‘from the bottom up and from the periphery to the centre’.

• Human nature: argued that ‘from his birth not a single human being is either bad or good. ‘Good’ can be developed in men only through upbringing and education’.

• Propaganda by the deed : specific violent political action, which would spark revolution and overthrow the state - such as the non payment of taxes, strikes, refusing the draft

• ‘Social solidarity is the first human law, freedom is the second law’

• ‘Freedom without economic equality is a lie’

Peter Kropotkin (anarcho-communist)

• Saw the state as a coercive institution, which ‘subjects the masses to the will of the minorities’.

• Argued that humans were altruistic but were corrupted by the state and capitalism.

• Highlighted that ‘competition is the law of the jungle; cooperation is the law of civilisation’.

• Human nature: argued that ‘The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that is has been maintained by mankind up to the present time’

• Absolute economic equality ‘all is for all’

  ‘Where there is authority there is no freedom.’ (Peter Kropotkin)

  ‘Don’t compete - competition is injurious!

Emma Goldman (Mutualism)

• Fiercely opposed the state, labelling it a ‘cold monster’.

• Argued the state was ‘the greatest criminal, breaking every written  and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment’.

• She argued for revolution rather than reform - argued that when women and the working class inevitably made their way into parliaments, they would become reformists as they were corrupted by authority.

• Argued capitalism encourages selfishness and competition, corrupting the good nature of people.

• ‘No real social change has ever come about without a revolution’.

• ‘If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal’

• She developed the concept of mutual love to replace the competitive world of capitalism. As such she was a romantic thinker.

• She advocated an individualist social order where society would be held together not by the state, laws or an economic system, but by mutual love and respect.