Christie Books – anarchists, anarchism, libertarian ideas and history

Pierre-Joseph PROUDHON His revolutionary life, mind and works by Edward S. Hyams eBook £1.50 (see eBookshelf)

anarchism, Anarchism in France, Anarchist ideas, class war, Essays, Ethics, France, Government and Society Comments Off

Mar 022017

PROUDHON WAS BORN in the same year, 1809, as Charles Darwin, at about the moment when the reaction against the French Revolution, led by the old imperial monarchies and the British aristocratic oligarchy, began to triumph. That triumph was short-lived but at the time it was clear to only a very few men that Europe was facing a century of revolution.

It was in the half-century following Proudhon’s birth that a number of men of talent and two men of genius, Proudhon and Karl Marx, sought to give form and practical applicability to the social, political and economic philosophy to become known as socialism. Thus Auguste Blanqui, who when not fighting the monarchy and the bourgeoisie, was in prison working out the principles of communist trade unionism and was the father of the French Socialist Party, was only four years Proudhon’s senior; Alexander Herzen, the great publicist of socialism in Russia, was born in 1812, as was Louis Blanc who developed revolutionary socialism out of the idealistic proto-socialism of Saint-Simon. Michael Bakunin, the Russian anarchist and Marx’s most troublesome enemy, was born in 1814; Marx in 1818 when his master, Hegel, was not yet fifty; and Engels in 1820. Lassalle, founder and master of the formidable German Workers’ Party, was born in 1825.

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KILLING NO MURDER A study of assassination as a political means by Edward Hyams eBook £1.50 (see eBookshelf)

anarchism, class war, Essays, Ethics, Government and Society, Politics by other means, Power elites and brokers Comments Off

Feb 192017

‘… it is lawful to call to account a tyrant or wicked King and after due conviction to depose and put him to death… .’ — JOHN MILTON, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates

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First published in 1969, ‘Killing No Murder’ is a provocative and stimulating study dedicated to the memory of the tens of millions of war dead who, since the author’s birth, have sacrificed their lives for the score of leaders who might, at the cost of their own, have saved them. When should we or must we kill a politician? Churchill is said to have refused to sanction the assassination of Hitler—was he right to consider aerial bombing a more acceptable way of dealing with Nazism? If a racist, populist, wilfully ignorant, narcissistic, cynically scapegoating, truth-twisting and irredeemably self-serving and apparently irremovable political leader emerges, paving the way to civil strife, the breakdown of the social fabric, xenophobia, the dictatorship and possibly war — when, if ever, can we appeal to justice and common sense? How useful or ethical is assassination or tyrannicide as an expression of domestic or foreign policy? Edward Hyams here considers two classes: socially or politically motivated assassinations, and assassinations designed to advance or protect the interests of oppressed peoples. By what right do assassins judge, condemn and execute their victims? Is it the same right that legitimises the murder by politicians, air force and drone pilots of innocent civilians along with a randomly and arbitrarily selected adversary? Can a society that condones war morally condemn assassination? The conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq have shown, time and time again, how it is the ordinary man, woman and child, caught in the crossfire of the paranoid fantasies of political leaders, who suffer as a consequence. Would it not be logical and in the widest human interests if assassination could be accepted as a legitimate and highly preferable alternative to war itself ? These questions are central to the conclusions drawn in Edward Hyams’s book.

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Terrorists and Terrorism by Edward Hyams eBook £1.50 (see eBookshelf)

Anarchist activism, Anarchist resistance Comments Off

Feb 112017

Anarchist novelist, viticulturalist, garden writer, political scientist and historian, Edward Hyams* (1910-1975) argues that despite government and mainstream media homilies to the contrary, sustained political terrorism is often effective and no more nor less morally reprehensible than any other form of warfare. Where is the rationale for the absolute denial of military force to all but those “who happen to be the holders of political power?” Beginning with the the 19th century “theorists” of terrorism— Bakunin, Johann Most, Max Stirner and especially Nechayev, who created for himself the persona that was to become a literary archetype of the revolutionary fanatic (he was the model for Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed) — Hyams moves on to discuss, more generally, some of the “practitioners” such as the Carbonari, the Serbian “Black Hand,” the Narodnaya Volya and even the Mafia before concentrating his argument on the two most successful terrorist campaigns of modern times — those which established the independent states of Israel and Ireland. In 1918 it was not Lloyd-George’s sympathy with Irish and Welsh nationalist aspirations but the brilliant guerrilla tactics of Michael Collins which forced the British to rethink “the Irish question”. Similarly though the moderates took over the reins of power quickly enough, “it was the terrorists who gave Israel to the Jews.” Hyams concludes that terrorism will be with us so long as there are laws because: it is in law that social injustice is embodied and by law that it is sanctioned. Terrorism thus becomes nothing less than a “cathartic fever” endemic in civilization, which can only be eliminated by “pre-emptive, sustained counter-terrorism” of the leviathan state — which may be infinitely more brutal and oppressive than any band of brigands. A lucid, tough-minded, well-argued and disturbing book.

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* Hyams other works include: Killing No Murder. A study of assasination as a political means; Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: His Revolutionary Life, Mind and Works; The Grapevine in England; A History of Gardens and Gardening; and English Cottage Gardens (in which he describes how between 1760 and 1867 the English ruling class stole seven milion acres of common land, the property and livelihood of the common people of England, which he called a “gigantic crime, by far the grandest larceny in England’s history”.
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In The Struggle for Equality. The History of the Anarchist Red Cross by Boris Yelensky eBook £1.50 (see eBookshelf)

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Feb 042017

A fascinating first-hand account of the activists of the Anarchist Red Cross (later the Anarchist Black Cross — ABC) in the Russian revolutionary movement from 1905 through 1917, and the subsequent Leninist/Stalinist repression.

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The book contains a tribute to Yelensky from fellow Russian revolutionary M. Beresin: “When I arrived in the United States in 1911, a fugitive from a hard-labor sentence in Siberia, my first thought was to devise some means of extending aid to our comrades who were languishing in Russian prisons. I promptly proceeded to have a noticed inserted in the Russian language newspapers requesting any co-workers in our ideological movement who were located in Philadelphia… to come to a meeting. Among those who attended that gathering was Yelensky. Our first step was the … organization of the “Anarchist Red Cross” … Yelensky is one of the most ardent and dynamic workers in our Movement; he has not for a single moment deviated from his ideological course; He has not allowed himself to become assimilated… by the American Bourgeois spirit. This intransigence of his… was responsible for the fact that in time he became to be recognized as more than a person. He became a veritable `institution’“

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IN THE SOCIAL STORM. Memoirs of the Russian Revolution by Boris Yelensky. eBook £1.50 (see eBookshelf)

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Jan 302017

Boris Yelensky’s memoir charts the history of the Russian anarchist movement in the early years of the 20th Century. Told in prosaic yet detailed fashion, unadorned by romanticism, it is his personal account of the turbulent period leading up to — and after — the successful take-over of the Russian monarchy by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. He provides an alternative historical viewpoint as to the Russian anarchist experience of that momentous period.

In the Social Storm: Memoirs of the Russian Revolution is not only a critique of the Bolshevik modus operandi and why they willingly sacrificed the one great opportunity to implement the socialist ideals fleshed out over the previous half century or more. It is more than an analysis of the Bolshevik mindset. Yelensky illustrates how the anarchist movement and men such as Nestor Makhno played a vital role in the social forces and the massive political and social upheaval of the period.

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Yelensky (Russia, 1889 — USA, 1974) describes how the anarchists living and struggling within this maelstrom of change did their utmost to implement their ideas through the example of their everyday lives. The experiments in actual anarchist projects of which Yelensky was a part, and which he describes in detail, were attempts to redefine social organizations to make them fair and liberating to everyone involved. They had a short window of opportunity to show the positive aspects of their philosophy, one that promised a viable alternative social and industrial organization to the repressive, totalitarian, brutal state dictatorship of the Bolsheviks — and to that of the capitalists who, likewise, used a centralized authoritarian government system disguised as “democracy” to fulfill similar ends.

For anarchists and political researchers Yelensky’s book is a revealing account of anarchism in action. A first-hand description of the lives and the efforts of those who went to Russia in good faith, believing positive changes were at hand. Instead, they faced the grim reality there was no new utopia awaiting them; Russia had fallen into the hands of a cabal of ruthless Marxist ideologues who, with their dreaded cheka terror squads, were hell-bent on acquiring total power over one of the largest empires on earth — and, in the process, murdering anyone who stood in the way of their ambitions.

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ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM Theory and Practice by Rudolf Rocker. Translated by Ray E. Chase, Preface by Noam Chomsky, Introduction by Nicolas Walter. eBook £1.50 (see eBookshelf)

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Jan 282017

“The publication of Rudolf Rocker’s Anarcho-Syndicalism, after far too many years, is an event of much importance for people who are concerned with problems of liberty and justice. Speaking personally, I became acquainted with Rocker’s publications in the early years of the Second World War, in anarchist book stores and offices in New York City, and came upon the present work on the dusty shelves of a university library, unknown and unread, a few years later. I found it an inspiration then, and have turned back to it many times in the years since. I felt at once, and still feel, that Rocker was pointing the way to a much better world, one that is within our grasp, one that may well be the only alternative to the ‘universal catastrophe’ towards which ‘we are driving on under full sail’, as he saw on the eve of the Second World War. This catastrophe will be beyond the limits he could then imagine, as states have acquired the capacity to obliterate human society, a capacity that they will exercise if the current social order evolves along its present paths.

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THE RUSSIAN ANARCHISTS by Paul Avrich eBook £1.50 (see eBookshelf)

anarchism, Russia, Russian Revolution Comments Off

Jan 272017

Paul Avrich’s The Russian Anarchists records the history and ideas of Russian anarchism from the 19^th century through to its brutal suppression by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s. All the major personalities are discussed in detail: Bakunin, Kropotkin, Baron, Rogdaev, Chernyi, Makhno, Volin, Shapiro, Maksimov. The well-documented study includes comprehensive end notes, a chronology and an annotated bibliography. Part I focuses on the events and personalities leading up to 1905, while part II deals with the events following on from February 1917 to the Bolsheviks’ final suppression of the Russian anarchists in the early 1920s. Analysing the role of the anarchist movement in post-revolutionary period, Avrich traces its relations with the Bolsheviks and shows that most of them foresaw that the Marxist “dictatorship of the proletariat” would replace the tyranny of the tsars with the tyranny of commissars.

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ANARCHISM by Paul Eltzbacher eBook £1.50 (see eBookshelf)

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Jan 132017

Paul Eltzbacher (18 February 1868 – 25 October 1928) was a German law student whose professorial appointment was due, largely, to his PhD on anarchism, which became the basis for the present book, first published in English in 1907. ‘Anarchism’ is an overview consisting of seven chapters which deal, principally, with Eltzbacher’s academic take on the various elements and trends of anarchism as defined by the leading anarchist thinkers of the time: Godwin, Proudhon, Stirner, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tucker, Tolstoy.

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TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

Every person who examines this book at all will speedily divide its contents into Eltzbacher’s own discussion and his seven chapters of classified quotations from Anarchist leaders; and, if he buys the book, he will buy it for the sake of the quotations. I do not mean that the book might not have a sale if it consisted exclusively of Eltzbacher’s own words, but simply that among ten thousand people who may value Eltzbacher’s discussion there will not be found ten who will not value still more highly the conveniently-arranged reprint of what the Anarchists themselves have said on the cardinal points of Anarchistic thought. Nor do I feel that I am saying anything uncomplimentary to Eltzbacher when I say that the part of his work to which he has devoted most of his space is the part that the public will value most.

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A DOMINIE ABROAD by A.S. Neill eBook £1.50 (see eBookshelf)

Anarchist education, Germany Comments Off

Jan 112017

A.S. Neill’s experiences setting up a ‘Free school’ in the pre-Hitlerian Germany of the Weimar Republic. Dissatisfied with traditional schooling, with its lack of freedom, democracy, and self-determination, Neill searched for a place to establish his own school and to experiment with his developing ideas, gathering what was best in the educational systems of various nations. In 1921 he became a co-director of the Dalcroze School, part of an international school, called Neue Schule, in Hellerau, a suburb of Dresden, Germany. His first step was to buy a dictionary and start to learn the language, the next was to record his impressions. His difficulties were many. With cheery optimism the bohemian teacher overlooked the fact that he was in a community with definite laws on education; he also forgot the difficulties of finance and that his favourite tobacco was unobtainable within five hundred square miles.

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BAKUNIN’S LEGACY eBook £1.50 (see eBookshelf)

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Dec 282016

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What are these ideas that have proved so relevant in the twentieth century—more so, perhaps, than in Bakunin’s own time? Above all, Bakunin foresaw the true nature of modern revolution more clearly than any of his contemporaries, Marx not excepted. For Marx the socialist revolution required the emergence of a well-organized and class-conscious proletariat, something to be expected in highly industrialized countries like Germany or England. Marx regarded the peasantry as the social class least capable of constructive revolutionary action: together with Lumpenproletariat of the urban slums, the peasants were benighted and primitive barbarians, the bulwark of counterrevolution. For Bakunin, by contrast, the peasantry and Lumpenproletariat, having been least exposed to the corrupting influences of bourgeois civilization, retained their primitive vigor and turbulent instinct for revolt. The real proletariat, he said, did not consist in the skilled artisans and organized factory workers, who were tainted by the pretensions and aspirations of the middle classes, but in the great mass of “uncivilized, disinherited, and illiterate” millions who truly had nothing to lose but their chains. Thus, while Marx believed in an organized revolution led by a trained and disciplined working class, Bakunin set his hopes on a peasant jacquerie combined with a spontaneous rising of the infuriated urban mobs, a revolt of the uncivilized masses driven by an instinctive passion for justice and by an unquenchable thirst for revenge. Bakunin’s model had been set by the great rebellions of Razin and Pugachev in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His vision was of an all-embracing upheaval, a true revolt of the masses, including, besides the working class, the darkest elements of society—the Lumpenproletariat, the primitive peasantry, the unemployed, the outlaws—all pitted against those who throve on their misery and enslavement.

Subsequent events have, to a remarkable extent, confirmed the accuracy of Bakunin’s vision. It is small wonder, then, that contemporary historians have shown a new appreciation of the role of spontaneous and primitive movements in shaping history. From the work of Barrington Moore, who has recently investigated the relationship between modernization and agrarian revolt, as well as of Eric Hobsbawm, George Rude, E. P. Thompson, and others, we are coming to understand that most modern revolutions, like those of the past, have been largely unplanned and spontaneous, driven by mass movements of urban and rural laborers, and in spirit predominantly anarchistic. No longer can these naive, primitive, and irrational groups be written off as fringe elements to be ignored by the historian. They lie, rather, at the very basis of social change.

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