Anarchy Redux

I was chatting to a pianist from Moscow who seemed remarkably receptive to my views. He recommended I research "anarchy," which he said is legitimate school of thought. I would think that is very true if you are Russian. He was a wonderful pianist.

All I  knew was the guy who started WWI, in the comic book of history I learned, was an anarchist. That was the punch line and ended further inquiry. The Archduke Ferdinand story never made sense to me.  

The radical Marxists promoted anarchy and used it to take down the Czar. Then, they created a tyrannical state. It is a mistake to say communism is a form of anarchy - it is the opposite of forced collectivization. 

Expelled American anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were amongst those agitating in response to Bolshevik policy and the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising, before they left Russia. Both wrote accounts of their experiences in Russia, criticising the amount of control the Bolsheviks exercised. For them, Bakunin's predictions about the consequences of Marxist rule that the rulers of the new "socialist" Marxist state would become a new elite had proved all too true.^[94][117]

The standard cycle of history involves a good leader, dull sons, stupid and dangerous grandsons, revolution, new leader, etc.  The American republic was established to prevent the oligarchy from stealing from the people, so that revolution was not necessary, and provide basic structure. Too bad the republic is gone.

There is an interesting quote below. The anarchist understood the evil of government, but the real world always intrudes on political fancy. Curiously, property rights were found objectionable for some. Proudhon, below, came to understand property was the foundation of freedom.

Your property is being taken from you on a daily basis through taxes, fees, and devaluation. It is being done so intentionally.

From a Wiki:

Modern anarchism sprang from the secular or religious thought of the Enlightenment, particularly Jean-Jacques Rousseau's arguments for the moral centrality of freedom.^[70

William Godwin, "the first to formulate the political and economical conceptions of anarchism, even though he did not give that name to the ideas developed in his work".^[49]

William Godwin is generally regarded as the founder of the school of thought known as 'philosophical anarchism'. He argued in Political Justice (1793)^[72][74] that government has an inherently malevolent influence on society, and that it perpetuates dependency and ignorance. He thought that the spread of the use of reason to the masses would eventually cause government to wither away as an unnecessary force. Although he did not accord the state with moral legitimacy, he was against the use of revolutionary tactics for removing the government from power. Rather, he advocated for its replacement through a process of peaceful evolution.^[72][75]

His aversion to the imposition of a rules-based society led him to denounce, as a manifestation of the people’s ‘mental enslavement’, the foundations of law, property rights and even the institution of marriage. He considered the basic foundations of society as constraining the natural development of individuals to use their powers of reasoning to arrive at a mutually beneficial method of social organisation. In each case, government and its institutions are shown to constrain the development of our capacity to live wholly in accordance with the full and free exercise of private judgment.

----

The French Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is regarded as the first self-proclaimed anarchist, a label he adopted in his groundbreaking work What is Property?, published in 1840. It is for this reason that some claim Proudhon as the founder of modern anarchist theory.^[76] He developed the theory of spontaneous order in society, where organisation emerges without a central coordinator imposing its own idea of order against the wills of individuals acting in their own interests; his famous quote on the matter is, "Liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order." In What is Property? Proudhon answers with the famous accusation "Property is theft." In this work, he opposed the institution of decreed "property" (propriété), where owners have complete rights to "use and abuse" their property as they wish.^[77] He contrasted this with what he called "possession," or limited ownership of resources and goods only while in more or less continuous use. Later, however, Proudhon added that "Property is Liberty," and argued that it was a bulwark against state power.^[78]

When you are poor and in debt, you have no real property and no defense against the state.