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Contemporary debates in anarchism, particularly the conceptual debates sparked by the development of post-anarchism and those surrounding the emergence of the anti-globalization movement, have brought an old question back to the table: what is anarchism? This study analyzes the canonical representations of anarchism as a political movement and political philosophy in order to reflect on the ways in which that critical question, 'what is anarchism?' has been answered in mainstream literature. It examines the way that the story of anarchism has been told and through a critical review, it discusses an alternative approach. For this purpose, two seminal canon-building texts, Paul Eltzbacher's The Great Anarchists, and George Woodcock's Anarchism have been identified and their influence is discussed, together with the representations of anarchism in textbooks describing political ideologies. The analysis shows how assumptions, biases, and hidden ideological perspectives have been normalized and how they have created an official history of a political movement. In challenging the official account, this study highlights the exclusions and omissions (third world anarchists, women anarchists, queer anarchism and artistic anarchism) that have resulted in the making of the core. The question of how to tell the story of anarchist past carries us to the shores of postmodern history where theoreticians have been discussing the relationship between past and history and the politics of representation. The anarchism offered in this study demands an engagement with a network-like structure of information rather than a linear, axial structure. Consequently, this study aims to show several layers of problems in the existing dominant historical representation of one of the richest political ideologies, anarchism; and then to discuss ways of representing the past and especially the anarchist past, to seek an answer to a principal question: what is anarchism?

The Diploma thesis titled 'The Development Of The Anarchist Press In The Czech Republic Since 1991' takes the examples of magazines A-kontra and Existence to examine not only anarchist media as the representatives of the alternative media, but also the anarchist movement itself and its thought foundations. It further examines the anarchist groups active on the territory of the Czech Republic since 1991 and the press published by them. The quantitative content analysis is used to further examine the anarchist media using the examples of the magazines of A-kontra and Existence, for instance in the area of topics, and to look for the common traits with alternative media.

At the moment of the founding of the Second Republic in April 1931, the labour movement in Spain was dominated by two organizations, namely the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and the socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT). The Second Republic marked the first period in which the two organizations had concurrently operated openly since the Primo de Rivera dictatorship had made the CNT illegal at the same time as the UGT had agreed to cooperate with the General’s corporatist project. With the founding of the Republic, a long-standing organizational and ideological hostility between the two organizations was exacerbated by the fact of the UGT actively participating in the reform project of the Republican-socialist government and the CNT increasingly opposing that project. However, the Republic progressively became polarized between left and right; as fascist regimes came to the fore across Europe, increasingly large sectors of the Spanish left called for a unity of their forces to prevent a similar occurrence in Spain. The outbreak of the Civil War in July 1936 made this unity even more imperative. This thesis focuses on interactions between the CNT and the UGT between 1931 and 1936 within this socio-political context, primarily from the perspective of the CNT. The thesis traces and analyses the evolution of CNT as a national actor’s overall position on the UGT from one of outright hostility to a stance of proposing a revolutionary alliance with it in 1936. The thesis also examines interactions between the two organizations in Catalonia, which was both the CNT's birthplace and stronghold and a region in which the UGT had historically garnered little support. In addition to highlighting the pivotal role that the Catalan CNT had in determining the CNT's national-level stance on the UGT throughout this period, the thesis explores how the anarcho-syndicalist movement in the region presented its socialist counterpart as the embodiment of a socialist- and state-sponsored project to destroy the CNT, and also examines the largely hostile encounters between CNT and UGT unions in workplaces and localities across the region.

This thesis examines the role played by intellectual dissidents in the French Communist Party from 1972 to 1981, focusing primarily on the philosopher Louis Althusser and the historian Jean Elleinstein, whose ideas in relation to the FCP were closer than previously thought. The introduction sets the background out in which the FCP evolved after the Second World War and brings us to the 1970s, the decade during which the FCP lost its steam against most expectations - as the thesis demonstrates it. The first chapter deals with the perception communist intellectual dissidents had of their Party’s internal organisation – an organisation which was deemed too rigid and too inflexible to encompass the plurality of opinion of its members. This rigidity was demonstrated by the Leadership’s refusal to recognise the right to create tendencies within the Party, as the second chapter of this thesis shows. In this context, the third chapter argues that communist intellectual dissidents felt suffocated by a Party which did not give them enough leeway, even more so since it claimed to be the Party of the working class – a position which threatened the Party’s adaptation to social change and which is developed in chapter four. However, this thesis also puts the criticisms expressed by Althusser and Elleinstein into perspective. Indeed, if these intellectual dissidents were free to express des idées libérales et avancées, this was not the case for the FCP leadership. The Soviet Union and its KGB had too strong a grip over the Party and its General Secretary, Georges Marchais, for the FCP leadership to be able to act freely. In that sense, if the FCP gave up the concept of dictatorship of the proletariat in 1976, as the fifth chapter shows, it could not criticise the Soviet Union too much, as chapter six demonstrates, nor get too close to the French Socialist Party as chapter seven shows, nor let its dissident intellectuals go on expressing des vues trop dérangeantes, as chapter eight concludes. Each chapter is set against the Party’s historical background and brings us to the modern times, which have seen the French Communist Party transform itself – a transformation which would have been welcomed by Althusser and Elleinstein back in the 1970s.

This thesis explores the resurgence of anarchism in the current context of Santiago through the use of ethnographic work. Research focuses on anarchism among university students and anarchists that did not grow up in the dictatorship, but either during or after the establishment of democracy. I argue that in conjunction with reflecting a larger trend of increased popularity of anarchism worldwide, anarchists in Santiago also are positioned to make a specific critique of authoritarianism and the continuities of state oppression between dictatorship and democracy. Interviews with anarchists from varied backgrounds and perspectives on anarchism provided an array of differing views on pertinent social and political concerns, but the common threads woven through contemporary anarchism in Santiago are formative experiences within the context of an emerging democracy that has fallen short of reinvigorating many Chileans with faith in the state. Anarchism provides a meaningful critique of the state as an institution that upholds oppression, regardless of who controls it. This provides a framework to understand the continuities anarchists view between Chilean dictatorship and Chilean democracy. Of particular note in this work is the use of the anti-terrorist law by the state to imprison anarchists. The law was passed under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet to prosecute political dissidents, and has been expanded upon after the shift to democracy in 1990. The use of the anti-terrorism law is of interest in this work both because it is a direct legal continuation of the practices of state repression from the dictatorship, and because its use against anarchists seems to have given credence to anarchist claims about the function of the state independent of what its current articulation may be. By analyzing the politicization of anarchists, their critiques of the current state of politics, and state use of the anti-terrorist law a more thorough understanding of political repression, the contradictions of democracy, and contemporary Latin American resistance movements can be attained.

Thesis. 1978. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES. / Includes bibliographical references. / Ph.D.

The year had opened with bright expectations, but 1914 quickly tumbled into disillusionment and violence. For John Purroy Mitchel, New York City's new "boy mayor," the trouble started in January, when a crushing winter caused homeless shelters to overflow and dozens of the city's homeless froze to death. By April, anarchist throngs had paraded past industrialists' mansions, and tens of thousands filled New York's Union Square demanding "Bread of Revolution." Then, on July 4, 1914, a bomb destroyed a six-story Harlem tenement. It was the largest explosion the city had ever known. Among the dead were three bomb-makers; incited by anarchist Alexander Berkman, they had been preparing to dynamite the estate of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., son of a plutocratic dynasty and widely vilified for a massacre of his company's striking workers in Colorado earlier that spring. More Powerful Than Dynamite charts how anarchist anger, progressive idealism, and plutocratic paternalism converged in that July explosion.

More than six decades after its occurrence, China's ‘peasant revolution' of 1949 remains an enigma. According to classical Marxism, peasants are passive ‘objects of history' who must be transformed into industrial workers before they can become agents of revolutionary change. This line of argument is reinforced by much extant Sinology and historical sociology, both of which have treated Maoism either as a disguised continuation of peasant exploitation, or as a failed emulation of Stalinism. Contra these interpretations, this thesis argues that China's peasant revolution was a real historical phenomenon which involved a previously unthinkable form of peasant political agency. To substantiate this argument, the thesis deploys Leon Trotsky's theory of Uneven and Combined Development (U&CD) which posits social development as a non-linear process constituted via multi-societal interaction. This reveals that the origins and specificities of the Chinese Revolution can best be understood with reference to a 'combined development' emerging from China's long-run and short-run interactions with variegated social forms. The first chapter of the thesis shows how China's ‘peasant revolution' remains an insurmountable paradox for the relevant literature, expressed in a shared problem of anachronism. Chapter 2 introduces Uneven and Combined Development as a theory of inter-societal causation that might overcome the problem by virtue of its non-linear conception of social development. Chapter 3 demonstrates how this inter-societal perspective is central to understanding the longue dureé ‘peculiarities' of China's development: the interaction of nomadic and sedentary societies made the Chinese peasants directly subject to a centralizing empire, configuring their political agency quite differently (and with quite different potentials) from that of their European feudal counterparts. Chapter 4 analyzes the specific intersection of the Chinese social formation with the universalizing dynamics of Western capitalism, an intersection which generated the context of China's modern combined development. Chapter 5 then provides a conjunctural analysis of how the revolutionary agency of the peasant came to the fore in China's revolution in terms of a pattern of combined development that substituted the peasantry for the weak bourgeoisie and nascent proletariat as the leading agency of a socialist modernization that fused anti-imperialist struggle and campaigns for rural restoration and national liberation into a single process aimed at overcoming China's backwardness. Finally, Chapter 6 shows how this argument resolves the Sinological debate on whether modern Chinese history is ‘China-made' or ‘West-made'; for it reveals how the interaction of China's premodern social forms with Western modernity co-determined the peculiarites of China's modern transformation. It also provides a critique of extant Marxist historical sociology, arguing that it is built upon a mode-of-production analysis that tends towards falsely unilinear, ‘internalist' explanations.

their rejection of classical anarchism, various postanarchist thinkers adopt a position of epistemological critique and reduce their metaphysics to a minimal conception of the self and broad, common knowledge statements about politics. Morality in the form of coercive rules or obedience to norms is rejected, whilst ethics in the form of guidelines or suggestions is taken to be desirable, and even necessary, for anarchist politics. The main argument of the thesis takes up the postanarchist critique of morality, taking seriously the concerns that essentialism, universals and representation are contestable and open to fallibility, and suggests that a further contradiction exists between anarchist principles and transcendent ethical systems. As long as postanarchist metaphysics appeal to transcendence, there is a possibility for anarchist ethics to become coercive. This work s original contribution to knowledge is the introduction of immanent metaphysics as a foundation for anarchist ethics. This is done primarily through the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and his critique of transcendence. The argument begins by outlining Deleuze s metaphysics of difference which are to underpin the rest of the discussion on anarchist ethics. Following this, the thesis draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari and others to explore the political and active aspects of immanent ethics. The final part sketches anarchist ethics in immanent modes of existence.