Author Archives: jpeacott

Mind Forged Manacles: Further Thoughts on Psychiatry and Social Control

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I reject the pathology model of mental illness, as promoted by the psychiatric and medical community. There is something that strikes me as authoritarian in the notion that certain modes of thought are objectively sick. Ideally the notion of neuro-diversity should mean something more than begging for pity. This does not mean I don’t care about the plight of those labeled as mentally ill. Far from it. Continue reading →

Josiah Warren: A Communitarian Individualist

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The goal of every anarchist is the elimination of the state and all other forms of authority.  From this common starting point, however, libertarians then take off in many different directions.  Ideas about how people should or could interact with each other socially, economically, sexually or in any other way vary tremendously from person to person and from group to group.  Continue reading →

Benjamin Tucker: American Mutualist, Part One

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In an Individualist Mutualist market economy of Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker, or Stephen Pearl Andrews employers can indeed pay themselves more money than their employees for equal time worked. However, even though they can pay themselves more money than their employees for equal time worked they are still Mutualists and not Capitalists. Why is this? Continue reading →

Not My Presidents

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It has been entertaining to watch all the demonstrations and actions by anarchists and leftists since the election of Donald Trump.  These have largely been prophylactic interventions since Trump had not yet actually done much but talk and insult people, having failed to implement very many real changes.  It was unclear what the point of some of these marches was other than support for all good things and opposition to bad ones, presumably all of which were caused by Trump.  A recurring image has been a sign that reads “Not My President.”  Anarchists, one would hope, have never had a president but some of them seem to feel it is more important to point this out at present than it was under the regime of Obama. Continue reading →

A Gang of Individuals Against Totality

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All too often anarchism as a movement and a discourse is oriented towards collectivist ideology.  I mean this in a literal sense of an ideology.  Much of what is called anarchism seems to be more of a form of Hegelianism.  Possibly it becomes a way for Marxists to smooth out the more and more obvious contradictions of their ideology.  Continue reading →

Identity Fraud

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The word anarchist has long been used to label various people and movements that often are and have been quite different from each other in their approaches, ideas and goals.  People who have called themselves or been described by others as libertarians include individuals as diverse as Bakunin, Warren, Armand, Kropotkin, Michel, Stirner, Goldman, Mackay, Durruti, Arrigoni, Dolgoff, and Rothbard.  What made all of these folks anarchists was their opposition to the state, to governments of all kinds.  They all believed that the state was a pernicious force which crushed individual freedom and stood in the way of cooperation and mutual aid among equals.  But their ideas about how to destroy or circumvent the state and their actions intended to accomplish their goals varied tremendously.  Continue reading →

You Always Act for Yourself

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“… since expropriation is a way of getting away from slavery individually, the risks have to be borne individually, as well, and comrades who practice expropriation for themselves lose every right – if such a right even exists for anarchists, and I don’t believe it – to claim the solidarity of the movement when they fall into misfortune.”

Brand (Enrico Arrigoni)

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I took this quotation of Enrico Arrigoni (aka Frank Brand) from an article he wrote called “The Right* to Idleness and Individual Reappropriation” that appeared in his publication Eresia di oggi e di domani (Heresies of Today and Tomorrow – published in the mid to late 1920s). In the article, he didn’t only attack the doctrine of the “dignity of labor” then popular in radical circles, but also any moralistic conception of solidarity. Continue reading →

The Drug War is Hell

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Legalization of possession and use of marijuana is spreading gradually from state to state, but this should not be taken as a sign that the drug warriors have declared a truce in their murderous attempts to control what people smoke, ingest or inject. They have simply conceded one battle in this war, one that was becoming harder and harder to justify to the people of this country whose extorted tax payments fund this misguided adventure. Just as re-legalization of alcohol after prohibition was repealed did not lead to deregulation and free individual choice in when, where, and how people were allowed to imbibe, now-legal marijuana use is and will be regulated, controlled, limited, and taxed by those who feel it is their responsibility—no, right—to tell the rest of us how to live. Continue reading →

Enemies

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I am not your ally. We are not comrades. Leftism is merely another authoritarian ideology. Your very attitudes preserve the hegemony of the totality. You may try to redirect blame away from yourself, saying that we need to unite to fight the “real enemy.” Just because your leftist management and control strategy lost, & did not succeed in its attempt to dominate class society, does not mean that I am sympathetic to you. Nor do I feel pity. Merely disgust. Continue reading →