The anarchist Bible

HE ANARCHIST BIBLE

(From Messianic Troublemakers: The Past and Present Jewish Anarchism
Jesse Cohn, in Zeek April 05 http://www.zeek.net/politics_0504.shtml)

Indeed, Lazare believed, “anarchy” was implicit in the First Commandment: if we are to have no other master before God, “What authority can, then, prevail by the side of the divine authority? All government, whatever it be, is evil since it tends to take the place of the government of God; it must be fought against."
--19th-c. anarchist journalist Bernard Lazare

Consequently, from 1894 on, anarchists emphasized positive, constructive activism, organizing clubs, neighborhoods, workers’ cooperatives, experimental schools, collective farms, mutual-aid societies, and anarcho-syndicalist labor unions. Far from being allergic to organization, anarchists advocated a kind of organization “from below,” in the words of Voline. They sought to replace coercive institutions with cooperative ones, to find ways of building a working society in a democratic, egalitarian, and decentralized fashion, using frequent face-to-face meetings of small groups to make decisions – rather like a kibbutz.

Jewish anarchists “They carried a very Jewish sense of righteousness, and rejected the idea of a life organized in pyramids of power and status, with a few Pharoahs on the top and masses of slaves underneath.”

Landauer spoke for many when he wrote in 1907:

One can throw away a chair and destroy a pane of glass; but . . . [only] idle talkers . . . regard the state as such a thing or as a fetish that one can smash in order to destroy it. The state is a condition, a certain relationship among human beings, a mode of behavior between men; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another . . . We are the state, and we shall continue to be the state until we have created the institutions that form a real community and society of men. We are the state. We do it to ourselves, all of us, all the time, by obeying much and resisting little, by settling for a piece of the pie in exchange for our dignity, by accepting subordination in exchange for domination over the even less fortunate. If this ugly tangle of social relationships is “the state,” then all the gaudy regicides in the world can’t buy us our freedom. Revolution, these anarchists argued, begins in our hearts and in the space between us. Among the anarchist books translated into Hebrew and circulated in Jewish Palestine by the 1920s was Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, which argued that the dominant concept of Western politics, Thomas Hobbes’s vision of the “state of nature” as a “war of all against all,” was a scarecrow designed to justify the existence of the authoritarian state. Just as “natural” as competition for survival, Kropotkin argued, was cooperation for survival. Anarchism, in Goldman’s words, it is “the philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.”

What Landauer calls “spirit” is not a supernatural force, but as the shared feelings, ideals, values, language, and beliefs that unify individuals into a community. The State only exists, he says, because the spirit that creates community has weakened: the community has fractured and turned against itself.