Anarchist Essays

In this essay, Lauren Golder looks at gendered interpretations of free love and sex radicalism through the life of American anarchist-feminist Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912). During the Gilded Age, anarchist men often interpreted free love as a path to personal fulfillment and sexual liberation, while anarchist women saw it as a way to achieve reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy. De Cleyre believed that anarchist free love was women's best hope for freedom from patriarchal oppression, a position which was reinforced by her experience of unwanted pregnancy and encounters with misogyny both within and outside of the anarchist movement. Lauren Golder teaches History and Gender Studies at Santa Monica College and Victor Valley College in California. Her research explores the intersections of American anarchism, gender, and intimate life, and she is working on a book tentatively titled Intimate Experiments: Free Love, Domesticity, and Feminism in the American Anarchist Movement, 1880-1920. For more information, see https://laurengolder.com/ Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns). Hear more at https://soundcloud.com/user-178917365 Artwork by Sam G: https://www.instagram.com/passerinecreations

In this essay, Alexander Aston investigates the relationship between urban ecology, social cognition and the emergence of the Paris Commune of 1871. He considers how an anti-cartesian process-anarchism might inform strategies for social transformation by examining self-organising dynamics of people, artefacts, and institutions during the Commune. Alexander lectures on Anthropology and Archaeology at Keble College, Oxford. His research explores how material culture shapes the evolution and development of human social cognition. His most recent publications are, How the Cycladic Islanders Found Their Marbles: Material Engagement, Social Cognition and the Emergence of Keros and Metaplasticity and the boundaries of social cognition: exploring scalar transformations in social interaction and intersubjectivity. Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns). Hear more at https://soundcloud.com/user-178917365 Artwork by Sam G: https://www.instagram.com/passerinecreations  

In this essay, Anders Sandström explores the history of accounting and argues for the need for accounting and bookkeeping also in a future anarchist economy without private capital owners. Anders Sandström is a trained accountant with a degree from Uppsala University and the author of Anarchist Accounting (Routledge 2020). Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns). Hear more at https://soundcloud.com/user-178917365 Artwork by Sam G: https://www.instagram.com/passerinecreations

In this essay, Deaglán Ó Donghaile discusses Oscar Wilde’s interest in and support for anarchism. Anarchism influenced Wilde’s literary writings enormously, yet he is still regarded by many readers as an apolitical writer. Drawing on research carried out for his next book, Revolutionary Wilde, Deaglán contextualises these works by relating them to Wilde’s openly professed radical beliefs, as expressed in his public lectures and now-forgotten newspaper writings. Deaglán Ó Donghaile is a British Academy Research Fellow based at Liverpool John Moores University. His latest book is Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle. Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns). Hear more at https://soundcloud.com/user-178917365 Artwork by Sam G: https://www.instagram.com/passerinecreations  

In this essay, Craig Clark explores the incompatibility of publishing that hopes to shape events and the publishing industry – and some anarchised alternatives. Craig Clark is a member of the Dog Section Press workers’ cooperative and an editor of DOPE Magazine. This essay draws on his experience of several years of involvement in various attempts to spread propaganda, with varying degrees of success. Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns). Hear more at https://soundcloud.com/user-178917365 Artwork by Sam G: https://www.instagram.com/passerinecreations

In this essay, Jack Saunders explores our complex relationship with the NHS, its staff and its history. Jack Saunders is Lecturer in modern British history at University College London. He is author of Assembling Cultures: Workplace Activism, Labour Militancy and Cultural Change in Britain's Car Factories, 1945-82 (2020) and has published widely on the history of work in post-war Britain. This essay draws on his research for the People's History of the NHS project, some of which will published in the forthcoming edited volume by Jenny Crane and Jane Hand, Posters, Placards and Prescriptions: Cultural Histories of the NHS. Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns). Hear more at https://soundcloud.com/user-178917365 Artwork by Sam G: https://www.instagram.com/passerinecreations

In this essay, Dani Spinosa reads the contemporary campus as a non-place for the precarious labourer. She considers the role of labour relations and the remote teaching of the pandemic to consider how and where the precariat can work against this dislocation.  Dani Spinosa is adjunct faculty at three different institutions in southern Ontario, Canada. She is the Managing Editor of the Electronic Literature Directory, a Fellow of the Electronic Literature Organization, and a co-founding editor of the feminist micropress Gap Riot. She is the author of Anarchists in the Academy (U of Alberta P, 2018) and OO: Typewriter Poems (Invisible Publishing, 2020). Her recent work considers feminist and anarchist themes in contemporary avant-garde and visual poetry, including studies of revisionist mythmaking and materialities of digital literary texts.  Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns). Hear more at https://soundcloud.com/user-178917365 Artwork by Sam G: https://www.instagram.com/passerinecreations

In this essay, Marcus Collins considers what the Beatles thought about anarchists and what anarchists thought about the Beatles in sixties Britain. He identifies curiosity and ambivalence on both sides, as anarchists sought to contend with the strange phenomena of Beatlemania, the counterculture and pop stars engaged in political campaigns. Marcus Collins is Senior Lecturer in Cultural History at Loughborough University. He is author of The Beatles and Sixties Britain (2020), Modern Love (2003), co-author of Why Study History? (2020) and editor of The Permissive Society and Its Enemies (2007). He is currently writing the second volume of his study of the Beatles (The Beatles’ World) and a short history of British documentaries about lesbians and gay men (Arrested Development: Broadcasting and Homosexuality from Wolfenden to AIDS) as well as embarking on a collaborative project on attitudinal change in the global sixties. Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns). Hear more at https://soundcloud.com/user-178917365 Artwork by Sam G: https://www.instagram.com/passerinecreations

In this essay, Geoffrey Swain looks at the impact of the Brest Litovsk Treaty (3 March 1918) on the fragile relationship between the Russian Anarchists and the Bolsheviks. The Russian Anarchists had welcomed Russia’s First Revolution of 1917, when the Tsar was overthrown; they were prepared to work with the Bolsheviks during the Second Revolution, the October insurrection which brought Kerensky’s Provisional Government to an end; however, they reserved the right to start a Third Revolution when the statism inherent in Bolshevik thinking became a threat to worker self-government. That moment came with Lenin’s decision to sign the Treaty of Brest Litovsk.  Geoffrey Swain is Professor Emeritus of the University of Glasgow and spent his career writing on the history of Russia and Eastern Europe. Major publications include The Origins of the Russian Civil War (1996) and Trotsky (2006), and a second edition of his Short History of the Russian Revolution will be published by Bloomsbury later this year. For more information see University of Glasgow - Schools - School of Social & Political Sciences - Our Staff - Prof Geoffrey R Swain.  Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns). Hear more at https://soundcloud.com/user-178917365 Artwork by Sam G: https://www.instagram.com/passerinecreations

In this essay, Tom Goyens takes a look at anarchist possibilities in the face of transnational militarism and fascism during the 1920s and 1930s through the largely forgotten figure of Frederico Kniestedt, a German-born anarchist and labour activist in Brazil who set out to fight the Kaiser and ended up fighting Hitlerism through peaceful direct action and the printed word.  Tom Goyens is an Associate Professor of History at Salisbury University in Maryland, USA. His research focuses on immigrant anarchism in the United States. He is the author of Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880-1914 (2007) and editor of Radical Gotham: Anarchism in New York City from Schwab's Saloon to Occupy Wall Street (2017). He is currently writing a new biography of Johann Most. For more information see https://txgoyens.wixsite.com/tomgoyens  Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns). Hear more at https://soundcloud.com/user-178917365 Artwork by Sam G: https://www.instagram.com/passerinecreations