Tag Archives: anarchism

It’s the holiday season, a time of encounter with religious traditions even for the most secular people. This year, the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of Black men and women by police has highlighted socio-economic inequity, the violence of the state, and the need for new forms of life that do not rely on police, prisons, and social violence. As …

In 1936, twenty-two-year-old Muriel Rukeyser, who had just won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book Theory of Flight, was suddenly (almost accidentally) in Spain as a journalist to cover the Olimpiada Popular, or People’s Olympiad, a protest event against the 1936 Berlin Olympics presided over by Hitler and the Nazi Party. Intended to take place in Barcelona, …

Francisco Ferrer, whom the New York Times called a “philosophical anarchist,” was executed in Spain in 1909 for suspicion of insurrection against the Spanish King and he quickly became an international martyr to the cause of free thought in opposition to religious dogma and compulsory education at the hands of the state and the church. In the wake of his …

The public school exists to make automatons and to reproduce class hierarchies and authoritarian power dynamics. How different is 2019 from 1906 when Emma Goldman was writing in “The Child and Its Enemies” that schools drive children to become foreign to themselves and to each other, arranged into files, classified, and numbered with quality giving way to quantity. And we …