Great Anarchists

These short introductions delve into the anarchist canon to recover some of the distinctive ideas that historical anarchists advanced about power, domination, injustice and exploitation, education, prisons and a lot more besides. The theoretical toolbox that this small assortment of anarchists helped to construct is there to use, amend and adapt. Agitate, Educate, Organise!

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Episodes

Great Anarchists - Errico Malatesta

By Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper. Read by Barbara Graham and Jim Donaghey. Malatesta is the living link between the demise of the First International in 1871 and the start of the struggle against European fascism some forty years later. As an anarchist-communist and organisationalist, Malatesta rejected individualism as gestural politics, and while he advocated workers’ self-organisation, he was cautious about syndicalism. But he was pragmatic rather than doctrinaire, and stood in solidarity wi...

Nov 02, 2020•18 min•Ep. 10

Great Anarchists - William Godwin

By Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper. Read by Barbara Graham and Jim Donaghey. Godwin was an eighteenth-century radical writer and journalist and one of the leading participants in the debates sparked by the French Revolution. Godwin is sometimes credited with being the first philosophical anarchist, but this underplays the character of the philosophy he advanced and the active role he took in politics. Like many of his contemporaries, Godwin understood publishing as a form of activism, an interven...

Oct 06, 2020•17 min•Ep. 9

Great Anarchists - Lucy Parsons

By Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper. Read by Barbara Graham and Jim Donaghey. Born to an enslaved woman in 1851, Parsons explored class conflict through the prism of the American Civil War. A keen advocate of independent labour organising in the late nineteenth century, Parsons was active in the Knights of Labor and the anarchist International Working People’s Association. In 1905 she joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). She wrote regularly for the anarchist-socialist press and lectur...

Sep 10, 2020•17 min•Ep. 8

Great Anarchists - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

By Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper. Read by Barbara Graham and Jim Donaghey. Proudhon is famous for two reasons. First, he is responsible for the immortal phrase ‘property is theft!’ Second, he has emerged as the ‘first’ anarchist. This accolade is explained in part by his provocative reclamation of ‘anarchy’. Until Proudhon published his critique of property in 1840 the term had only been applied pejoratively. Proudhon’s greatness is linked to his political economy and his advocacy of decentrali...

Apr 14, 2020•18 min•Ep. 7

Great Anarchists - Max Stirner

By Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper. Read by Barbara Graham and Jim Donaghey. Learning to love Stirner is not an uncomplicated task – as one of the most controversial anarchists, he is by turns celebrated as the seminal anarchist theorist and marginalised as a political philosopher only tangentially related to the anarchist movement. Stirner’s politics was anti-revolutionary and insurrectionary, and swathes of anarchist communists have accepted the Marxist critique of Stirner and effectively remov...

Mar 16, 2020•18 min•Ep. 6

Great Anarchists - Oscar Wilde

By Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper. Read by Barbara Graham and Jim Donaghey. Scholar, poet, playwright, socialite and wit, Oscar Wilde is one of those magnetic figures that everyone now seems to want to own a piece of. His literary genius accounts for some of the competition, and 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism', the essay he published in 1891, usually puts him in the anarchist frame, typically as a kind of individualist. But the vindictiveness of the reaction to his public disgrace as a ‘posing...

Feb 29, 2020•16 min•Ep. 5

Great Anarchists - Louise Michel

By Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper. Read by Barbara Graham and Jim Donaghey. Educator, poet, dramatist, novelist, movement historian, orator and agitator Louise Michel rose to prominence during the Paris Commune (1870-71) and was one of some 4,500 Communards deported to New Caledonia in 1872. Michel acquired a commanding public profile in the last decades of the nineteenth century - her mere presence at a meeting was enough to guarantee a large and enthusiastic audience and a 50,000 crowd turned ...

Feb 29, 2020•16 min•Ep. 4

Great Anarchists - Michael Bakunin

By Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper. Read by Barbara Graham and Jim Donaghey. Bakunin was feted as a champion of libertarian socialism and he is still celebrated as Marx’s most redoubtable adversary. Numbering Kropotkin, Malatesta and Reclus among his adherents, he became the towering figure of European anarchism in the late nineteenth century. Having survived two death-sentences and brutal treatment at the hands of the Russian state, Bakunin remained active in the nascent international anarchist ...

Feb 29, 2020•17 min•Ep. 3

Great Anarchists - Voltairine de Cleyre

By Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper. Read by Barbara Graham and Jim Donaghey. Voltairine de Cleyre was an essayist, educator, poet and advocate of anarchy without adjectives. Voltairine’s anarchism bore the hallmarks of free-thinking and abolitionism: the distrust of government and authority, sensitivity to injustice, anti-clericalism and confidence in power of individual reason. Carried into her anarchism, these ideas ran through her critique of government as tyranny, her calls to revolt and her ...

Feb 29, 2020•16 min•Ep. 2

Great Anarchists - Peter Kropotkin

By Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper. Read by Barbara Graham and Jim Donaghey. Kropotkin has many claims to greatness. An important conduit for the transmission of Russian revolutionary ideas into western Europe and a powerful propagandist for revolution in Russia in the decades leading up to 1917, he spent most of his life tirelessly promoting anarchism as a distinctive political philosophy and revolutionary practice. He played an instrumental role in two of the nineteenth-century movement's most ...

Feb 29, 2020•16 min•Ep. 1

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