Anarchism is the negation of authoritarian organisation, but obviously not of all organisation. It does not ignore the organic character of society, nor the gradual course of its development. However, while recognising the organic character of society, it does not follow that it is seen as an organism in the absolute sense of the word, i.e. an organism in which all the component organs obey, as slaves, the will of a central authority, as the supreme brain. The political organisation of society is an entirely different conception from the biological organisation. Society is an organisation without special organs and is founded solely by virtue of the mutual relations between individuals. What is the character of these mutual relations? It is up to political science to answer. What should be, or rather, what will be the character of these mutual relations in the future? Anarchism teaches that it will be libertarian, that these mutual relations, i.e., that the social organisation must be voluntary and not authoritarian.
Source: Some Misconceptions of Anarchism (1904)
[link] #478The individual does not owe obedience and loyalty to any person or group of persons. He is free, perfectly free, to join his efforts with those of his fellows, and for the ends and by the means which best please him, or to remain isolated and not to participate in the work and, consequently, in the benefits of any social enterprise. The principle of individual liberty is the right to secession, the right to separate oneself at any time from the constituted political organisation; the right not to do what one does not feel the need to do, the right not to conform to the decisions of the majority; it is, in short, the right to the absolute possession of one's own personality.
Source: Some Misconceptions of Anarchism (1904)
[link] #487The idea of archism, of the state, in all its manifestations and forms, is based on the theory that a portion of society - a minority in the oligarchic form of the state, a majority in the democratic form - has the right to compel all the rest to fulfil its wishes. All forms of state organisation deny in principle the right of their constituent members to secede, individually or in groups, from such organisation. No state accepts, within its jurisdiction, the existence of any other political organisation, independent of its authority. For the supporters of government, there is nothing more dangerous than a "state within a state". Anarchism holds a view diametrically opposed to that of the oppressive state. It advocates individual election, instead of the law of majorities; freedom from the orders of authority, in short, voluntary organisation instead of authoritarian organisation.
Source: Some Misconceptions of Anarchism (1904)
[link] #536About J. A. Maryson
Jacob Abraham Maryson (1866-1941) was a Jewish-American anarchist, doctor, essayist and Yiddish translator. Maryson was among the few Pioneers of Liberty who could write in English. He was among the Pioneers who launched the Varhayt in 1889, the first American anarchist periodical in Yiddish.
Maryson was the second editor of the Yiddish anarchist newspaper Fraye Arbeter Shtime in 1890, following Roman Lewis. He briefly returned to the editorship for a few months following Saul Yanovsky three decades later, but only lasted a few months after refusing to publish a pro-Communist article. Yanovsky had developed an opposition among anarchists for his disavowal of Leon Czolgosz's assassination of William McKinley, Maryson was among his detractors despite being more politically moderate than Yanovsky. In 1906, he advocated for anarchists to join in electoral politics to encourage governmental decentralization and counteract state socialism. Maryson sidestepped the Jewish radical community's debate over whether to endorse an autonomous, Jewish, socialist, self-governing territory.
Maryson contributed to a variety of other Yiddish publications and became known as "the Kropotkin of the Jewish anarchist movement". During Fraye Arbeter Shtime's hiatus in the late 1890s, Maryson assisted in the cultural and literary journal Di Fraye Gezelshaft. Beginning in 1911, he edited the anarchist periodical Dos Fraye Vort. Maryson organized the Kropotkin Literary Society to print Yiddish translations of European thinkers. Maryson handled some of the group's most challenging translations, including Marx's Das Kapital, Stirner's The Ego and His Own, and Thoreau's Civil Disobedience. He also translated John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. Maryson later wrote The Principles of Anarchism in 1935.
He married the intellectual and doctor Katherina Yevzerov, who became known for her writings on "the woman question" in the Yiddish radical press and on women's suffrage.
