The International Workingmen’s Association, 1868 The Rules and Program of the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy Founded in Geneva in October 1868 Written: by Bakunin, October 1868; Translated: (from French) by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism (Moscow). The socialist minority of the League of Peace and Freedom having separated itself from the League as a result […]

elements of the spanish revolution

the social revolution was the establishment of a libertarian socialist economy based on coordination through decentralized and horizontal federations of participatory industrial collectives and agrarian communes The economic changes that followed the military insurrection were no less dramatic than the political. In those provinces where the revolt had failed the workers of the two trade […]

Almost a century and a half ago Thomas Carlyle described economics as “the dismal science.” The term was to stick, especially as it applied to economics premised on a supposedly unavoidable conflict between “insatiable needs” and “scarce natural resources.” In this economics, the limited bounty provided by a supposedly “stingy nature” doomed humanity to economic […]

to you businessmen

from: the general idea of the revolution in the 19th century To you, business men, I dedicate these new essays. You have always been the boldest, the most skillful revolutionaries. It was you who, from the third century of the Christian era, drew the winding-sheet over the Roman Empire in Gaul, by your municipal federations. […]

reflections on decentralism

George Woodcock (1969) I was asked to write on decentralism in history, and I find myself looking into shadows where small lights shine as fireflies do, endure a little, vanish, and then reappear like Auden’s messages of the just. The history of decentralism has to be written largely in negative, in winters and twilights as […]

technology can crystallize dependence on natural world

Here, I shall try to show how the new technology can be used ecologically to crystallize man’s sense of dependence upon the natural world into the human experience, so we can contribute to the achievement of human wholeness. Town and Country Classical utopians fully realized that the first step in this direction must be to […]

toward a liberatory technology–statement

THE ECOLOGICAL USE OF TECHNOLOGY I have tried, thus far, to deal with a number of tangible, clearly objective issues: the possibility of eliminating toil, material insecurity, and centralized economic control. In the present section, I would like to deal with a problem that may seem somewhat subjective, but one which is nonetheless of compelling […]

Usufruct, in Roman-based legal systems, the temporary right to the use and enjoyment of the property of another, without changing the character of the property. This legal concept developed in Roman law and found significant application in the determination of the property interests between a slave held under a usus fructus (Latin: “use and enjoyment”) […]

Confederalism

Few arguments have been used more effectively to challenge the case for face-to-face participatory democracy than the claim that we live in a complex society. Modern population centers, we are told, are too large and too concentrated to allow for direct decision-making at a grassroots level…our economy is too global to unravel the intricacies of […]

what is justice?

The theologians answer: All justice comes from God That is true; but we know no more than before. The philosophers ought to be better informed: they have argued so much about justice and injustice! Unhappily, an examination proves that their knowledge amounts to nothing, and that with them — as with the savages whose every […]