If someone asked you what your favorite emotion was, how do you think you’d answer? For many people, I suspect they would answer “Happiness”, “Joy'', or some variant of exclusively positive emotion. Someone may think more meticulously and answer with “Contentment”, which while a positive emotion has a lot of nuance attached to it. However my answer to that question is what I feel others would consider more orthodox: Bittersweet. Pleasure accompanied by suffering, not exactly most people’s first pick but from my perspective pain is necessary in order to enjoy the pleasure that life gives you. Perhaps I'm over-romanticizing but there’s something to desire from looking back fondly at times where you were hurting and seeing yourself in a better place in the present. Perhaps you finally have moved on from “The one who got away” and can look back on those times with fondness. Perhaps you are sharing stories of a friend or family member at their funeral and though they may never w
In fact, the Father of Anarchy, William Godwin, sought the abolition of the state only insofar as it served as a means of achieving his true end, the elimination of private property. Godwin’s immediate ideological successors largely agreed. Pierre Joseph-Proudhon, Josiah Warren, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau & Ben Tucker - all rejected the idea of private property to a greater or lesser extent.
Under the influence of these thinkers, several attempts at more "equitable" communal living were made; all of which now litter the dustbin of history. Some, like the New Harmony colony, Brook Farm, the Oneida colony, or the Amana colonies, were lucky & either closed or converted to market-friendly models. Other communes like Jamestown, tell a much darker tale.
But how much blame can we assign to these early anarchists for their economic shortcomings? If it’s true contemporary anarchists can see further than their predecessors, it’s only because they stand upon the shoulders of Murray Rothbard, who along with his teacher Ludwig von Mises, solved the problem of production & coordination.
Under the influence of these thinkers, several attempts at more "equitable" communal living were made; all of which now litter the dustbin of history. Some, like the New Harmony colony, Brook Farm, the Oneida colony, or the Amana colonies, were lucky & either closed or converted to market-friendly models. Other communes like Jamestown, tell a much darker tale.
But how much blame can we assign to these early anarchists for their economic shortcomings? If it’s true contemporary anarchists can see further than their predecessors, it’s only because they stand upon the shoulders of Murray Rothbard, who along with his teacher Ludwig von Mises, solved the problem of production & coordination.
Nevertheless, the early left anarchists had several distinct traits which they share exclusively with modern agorists.
First, they were peaceful. None of the anarchists mentioned thus far advocated for violent solutions to statism. Godwin proposed educational reform for example, whereas Thoreau famously advocated for civil disobedience. Tolstoy, who drew his inspiration from the Bible, took “turn the other cheek” quite literally. This in turn laid the groundwork for Gandhi’s counter-economic quest for satyagraha, which culminated in the removal of British forces from India.
First, they were peaceful. None of the anarchists mentioned thus far advocated for violent solutions to statism. Godwin proposed educational reform for example, whereas Thoreau famously advocated for civil disobedience. Tolstoy, who drew his inspiration from the Bible, took “turn the other cheek” quite literally. This in turn laid the groundwork for Gandhi’s counter-economic quest for satyagraha, which culminated in the removal of British forces from India.
Non-violence isn’t the only ideological trait we agorists inherited from the early left anarchists. We also share their preference for bottom-up solutions as opposed to top-down approaches. No early anarchist nor modern agorist seeks to achieve their goals within the existing political framework. Imagine Tolstoy making an appeal to the Russian Tsar the way some right-libertarians make appeals to republican politicians?
The early left anarchists may not have had the privilege of theorizing in the post-Rothbardian era, & perhaps should be forgiven for their naivety of complex economic phenomena. Yet their preference for non-violence & a bottom-up approach to confronting the state are ideological links that can only be found among their true heirs; agorists.
The early leftist anarchists were anything but peaceful. Wherever they existed they left a wake of assassinations and bombings. This is because anarchism is a weapon of the oligarchs who wield it to overthrow the natural authority inherent in the native institutions and cultures of western society so they can supplant them with top down centralized control.
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