Revision as of 17:51, 3 August 2025

Natural language version of the The Anarchist Library wikipedia page I co-authored and expanded to be a bit more critical.

The Anarchist Library

The Anarchist Library is an online anarchist library and archive founded around 2007 by Aragorn!, Marco and other anarchists. The project is donation driven, volunteer run and no element of the site is pay-walled. The far-reaching goal is to gather almost all quality English-language anarchist literature and anarchist literature translated into English, with an emphasis on collecting primitivist & other forms of anti-technological texts. Through collecting thousands of publications related to anarchism and uniformizing the formatting, it hopes to create a nicer reader experience for people who don't want to have to read for example badly photo scanned zines, plus to challenge the monopoly of publishing houses by offering free access to many copyrighted documents.

While valued for its accessibility and for being mostly a pluralist project, it has drawn criticism for the archiving ethos skewing towards including some anti-tech and anti-leftist writings authored by people who see themselves as in conflict with anarchists. Plus, rejecting some texts which critique these anti-tech & anti-left ideologues. Also, whilst the open-submission model helps with acquiring 1000s of texts, this sometimes leads to editorial oversight, where in some cases uploads contain errors or are incomplete.

History

The online library was founded by Aragorn!, Marco and other anarchists around 2007.^[1][2][3][4] Another anarchist website that preceded the library and competed for significance was An Anarchist FAQ which praised collective action and downplayed the importance of individualist anarchism.^[5] So, Aragorn! and others ran The Anarchist Library partially to push back against this tendency by opening the boundaries of what anarchism meant to include anti-tech individualists like Ted Kaczynski and Individualists Tending to the Wild (ITS) who neither showed signs of really understanding anarchist history or ideas and acted in conflict with anarchists projects.^[6][7][8] This reached a breaking point in 2018 when out of embarrassment with some of these texts being archived and being unable to convince the other librarians to stop publishing them, one of the original founders Marco and others left to establish another project, seeking a multiplicity of small anarchist libraries rather than a single one.^[9][10][11]

Enthusiasm to work on the website can also be traced back broadly to an enthusiasm on the left for book clubs and library cataloguing.^[12]  Organizing a library on the internet for discussing niche ideology was especially valuable for those people who lived very rurally or who are disabled.^[13]

The project had archived 7,000 texts by 2020,^[14] and by July 2025, it had expanded to include 16,000.^[15]

Goals and organization

It aims to collect a wide variety of anarchist publications, plus some texts related to anarchism in English, and to enable the establishment of archival work for anarchist textual resources such as new translations.^[16] The library takes particular pride in archiving texts on contemporary anarchism^[17], primitivism and anti-technology ideology.^{[18][19][20][21]}

Legacy

Influence(s)

This project has helped in the creation of many other language anarchist libraries such as the Southeast Asian Anarchist Library.^[22]

Fairmont University recommends The Anarchist Library as a useful resource for studying anarchism.^[23] Its collection of texts related to the Spanish Civil War was noted by the anarchist newspaper Fifth Estate.^[24] In 2019, Ruth Kinna noted the library as a 'reference work' on contemporary anarchist thought.^[25]

The library is also credited by Luke Ray Di Marco Campbell, lecturer at the University of Glasgow,^[26] for flouting copyrighted laws and thus challenging the monopoly of the publishing industry.^[27]

Criticisms and internal debates

Some of the texts present on the website are criticized for being inaccurately transcribed or incomplete when compared to special collections archives.^[28] According to The Anarchist Library itself, editors attempt to achieve the most correct state of texts possible, but this is a time-consuming process.^[29]

In 2018, internal conflicts arose within The Anarchist Library over its inclusion of texts by Individualists Tending to the Wild (ITS) and debates about whether such content should be included, or if so, whether long warning notes should at least be added at the top.^{[30] [31]} Critics argue that the editorial collective places disproportionate emphasis on anti-technology writings at the expense of other anarchist perspectives.^{[32][33] [34][35][36]}  They contend that this focus, particularly in a project that identifies as an anarchist archive, risks legitimizing authoritarian ideologies and blurring the distinction between anarchists and their opponents.^{[37][38] [39][40][41]}

Di Marco Campbell argues it's nice that anarchists have desired put so much time into archiving all these English language anarchist texts, however because of colonial legacies and structural inequalities in global publishing it'd also be nice if more people with the time and resources put the effort into learning another language and archiving other language anarchist texts, then more other language people could engage with anarchist ideas and join the discussion.^[42] The reliance on unpaid labor and the absence of commercial incentives often mean that speakers of less globally dominant languages must either translate texts themselves or resort to reading in English or French—languages historically privileged through colonial and economic dominance.^[43] While The Anarchist Library hosts materials in over two dozen languages, Campbell notes that linguistic disparities persist, and that the burden of addressing them often falls on under-resourced communities.^[44]

Bibliography

• Kinna, Ruth (2012), The continuum companion to anarchism (PDF), Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN 978-1-4411-7212-9

Discussion Page

Critique of anti-tech archiving ethos bias

Here are some links and quotes that might be useful towards discussing criticisms of the way the library is run:

• A text dump on various library publishing ethoses
• Some of The Anarchist Library’s Controversially Published, Deleted & Rejected Texts
• My recommendations for different amusewiki libraries

This author acknowledged never reading up on anarchism before calling himself an anarchist. Ted for a while kept his true feelings private on subjects like quite liking how some tribes were male dominated, so playing down his own vanguardist politics where he wished anti-tech groups focused only on advocating the destruction of technological society. Later he disavowed any identification as an anarchist.

Some social anarchists created a big Anarchist FAQ book & website which re-wrote history in favor of collective action and was scornful of individualist anarchism.

As far as I'm aware, Aragorn! and others ran The Anarchist Library in the way that it has been partially due to a personal desire to push back against this tendency by opening the boundaries of what anarchism meant to include people like Ted K and ITS who neither showed signs of really understanding anarchist history and ideas.

Aragorn! came to regret the level of support he offered Atassa, he deleted his interview with Abe, and stopped identifying as a nihilist after the way he saw it get used by ITS and people he met at the 'Green Scare bookfair' event that was put on.

So, perhaps putting a warning note on Ted K & ITS texts would be a positive step forward, whilst staying true to the archiving ethos that has been contributed to by past librarians.

Anarchy: Deep in the Woods

The controversy over Atassa and ITS also appears to have resulted in a split among the admins of ‘The Anarchist Library’, which hosts a number of ITS writings. See: Anarchist Librarian From North America / 10 Years Later, A Reflection And A Response / On An English Language Anarchist Library Project (August 28, 2018) | ‘About’, AnarchistLibraries.net.

When the people based in the United States involved in the library project decided to publish so-called eco-extremist material, despite the objections which were raised, existing problems and divergences came to light. What to publish? Where is the line drawn? Who decides and on what ground? With whom does one want to work? The U.S. group decided that they are the library and they have the final word.

At this point, I’m not comfortable anymore with the English speaking library claiming to be THE anarchist library and being the project’s flagship: anarchistlibraries.net was born. This name should better express the spirit of the project (a net of anarchist libraries) as I’ve always seen it.

Each library has always been its own project, regardless of the domain name. Each library takes responsibility for its publishing choices.

I think that idea of building THE anarchist library is flawed. I prefer the idea of having smaller libraries (or even sites) loosely connected, even in the same language but maintained by different people, than having THE library. The global search function provided by this site is a step forward in this direction: let’s keep the sites (and the folks) separated, but keep them together for the comrades searching for anarchist texts.

LBC’s decision to publish Atassa, Anews’ publication of ITS manifestos, their continued hosting on AnarchistLibrary.org and as audio recordings on Free Radical Radio are obviously beyond the pale in the same way that nazi or tankie texts would be. Not because anarchism cannot survive forbidden readings — although it is shameful we’ve done such a poor job enunciating and defending our values that somehow a small number found ITS’ inane perspective to have resonance — but because such publication legitimizes a profound watering down of anarchist values and basic norms.

Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that the present essay, along with an ITS-authored response called “Against the World-Builders,” disappeared without explanation for several months from the catch-all archive site The Anarchist Library, before very recently being restored under pressure. In the ITS response, the proponents of Eco-Extremism double down on their rapey psychopath stances, and misrepresent the arguments of the present essay. For example, they claim that the author, like Scott Campbell, has defined ITS as a “eco-fascist” phenomenon, and suggest, comically, that any such critic must be an adherent or defender of Christianity and/or pacifism. A careful reading of the essay and its substantial discussions of fascism, morality, and violence will see that these charges are the inaccurate, self-serving, hamfisted pronouncements of opportunists.

Yet, we must ask why many other reactionary texts remain on the Library’s catalogue for reasons we cannot guess. Take, for example, “The Poverty of Feminism” by Dominique Karamazov, which describes rape as the “consequence” of “irresponsible” women’s attention-seeking behavior, among other things.[30] Or Bob Black’s “Feminism as Fascism,” which describes rape as something feminists “insist has been inflicted on them (or rather, as it usually turns out, on some other suppositious ‘sister’: the typical radical feminist has it pretty good)” — the implication being that feminists’ claims about rape are fabricated, the victims “suppositious.”[31] Or take the communiques of ITS,[32] a group heavily criticized by anarchists for claiming credit for the femicide of 22-year-old Lesvy Rivera, promoting rape and reveling in misogyny, and even attempting to bomb an anarchist squat.[33] Or “The Ideology of Victimization” by Feral Faun, a.k.a. Wolfi Landstreicher, an anti-feminist reaction produced after Landstreicher saw some graffiti reading “men rape.”[34] Articles in praise of infanticide and elevating mass shooter[35] Adam Lanza for his acts of top-down authoritarian, adult-supremacist violence against children and youths remain in the Library’s catalogue,[36] and it is our personal experience that, (as usual when anarchists reject this style of pseudo-radical top-down oppressive rhetoric, especially misogynistic, transphobic, and adult-supremacist rhetoric,) those who see it as a problem are sneeringly dismissed as moralists, hysterical prudes, and so on. In the case of Bob Black, at least the author — snitch[37] though he may also be — is known as an anarchist writer. So also Wolfi Landstreicher. In the case of the communiques of ITS, one can imagine these documents are part of anarchist history and thus important to preserve (though a disclaimer of some kind would be in order, in our opinion.) But we are entirely at a loss why a text like Dominique Karamazov’s “Poverty of Feminism” should ever have been published on an anarchist archive in the first place, let alone remained there long after it was removed from other publications like LibCom. There is almost no part of this text that is not in some way explicitly reactionary, from the rape apologia to the anti-abortion rhetoric in lines like “The problem of abortion is also the problem of the woman’s acceptance of her role as a mother.” “Dominique Karamazov” is a pseudonym used by French left-communist Dominique Blanc, the primary contributor to the ultra-left journal in which the text is originally published, La Guerre Sociale — a journal known for supporting historical negationism and Holocaust denialism.[38] (Dominique Blanc is also published on the Anarchist Library under his real name.) It is not at all clear to us why this document ought to be granted the legitimacy as an “anarchist” text which its listing on the Anarchist Library seems to lend it.

1. ↑ "Anarchist Libraries | About this project". anarchistlibraries.net. Archived from the original on 2025-07-15.
2. ↑ Collective, CrimethInc Ex-Workers (2021-02-13). "CrimethInc. : Remembering Aragorn! : A Zine, a Video, and a Poem". CrimethInc. Retrieved 2025-07-06.
3. ↑ "Aragorn! A Provocation Even in Death". anarchistnews.org. Retrieved 2025-07-06.
4. ↑ "The Anarchist Library talk at 2020 London Anarchist Bookfair | The Anarchist Library Bookshelf". bookshelf.theanarchistlibrary.org. Archived from the original on 2025-03-27. Retrieved 2025-07-06.
5. ↑ "A few comments on Post-Left Anarchy – Anarchist Writers". 2012-08-06. Retrieved 2025-07-28.
6. ↑ "A Comment on Anarchists". The Ted K Archive. Retrieved 2025-07-28.
7. ↑ The Politics of Attack.
8. ↑ Does the Unabomber have any relevance to anarchism?.
9. ↑ "Anarchist Libraries | About this project". anarchistlibraries.net. Archived from the original on 2025-07-15.
10. ↑ "AnarchistLibraries.Net". 325.nostate.net. Archived from the original on 2018-07-03. Retrieved 2025-07-06.
11. ↑ "About this library". Library.Anarhija.Net. Retrieved 2025-07-28.
12. ↑ Cornell, Andrew (2019). "Archival Parties and Parties to the Archive: Creating and Recovering Anarchist Resistance Culture at the Interference Archive". American Periodicals. 29 (1): 21–25. ISSN 1054-7479. JSTOR 26729241.
13. ↑ Malenfant, Jayne (2018). "Anarchist Youth in Rural Canada: Technology, Resistance, and the Navigation of Space". Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures. 10 (2): 126–151. doi:10.1353/jeu.2018.0020. ISSN 1920-261X.
14. ↑ "The Anarchist Library talk at 2020 London Anarchist Bookfair | The Anarchist Library Bookshelf". bookshelf.theanarchistlibrary.org. Archived from the original on 2025-03-27. Retrieved 2025-07-06.
15. ↑ "Full list of texts". The Anarchist Library. Retrieved 2025-07-20.
16. ↑ Kinna, Ruth (2013). "Anarchism". obo. doi:10.1093/obo/9780199756384-0059. ISBN 978-0-19-975638-4. Retrieved 2025-07-06.
17. ↑ Kinna, Ruth (2013). "Anarchism". obo. doi:10.1093/obo/9780199756384-0059. ISBN 978-0-19-975638-4. Retrieved 2025-07-06.
18. ↑ "AnarchistLibraries.Net". 325.nostate.net. Archived from the original on 2018-07-03. Retrieved 2025-07-06.
19. ↑ "Anarchy: Deep in the Woods". slackbastard. 2018-12-16. Retrieved 2025-07-06.
20. ↑ "Of Indiscriminate Attacks and Wild Reactions: An Anti-Civ Anarchist Engages with ITS and Atassa, their Defenders and Their false Critics". ICD.
21. ↑ "On No Platform and ITS". ICD.
22. ↑ "Q&A with a Librarian of Southeast Asian Anarchist Library". anarchistnews.org. Retrieved 2025-07-06.
23. ↑ Reference, Library. "Fairmont State University Library: Anarchy: Internet Resources". library.fairmontstate.edu. Retrieved 2025-07-06.
24. ↑ "Spanish Revolution Resource Page - Fifth Estate Magazine". Retrieved 2025-07-06.
25. ↑ Kinna, Ruth (2013). "Anarchism". obo. doi:10.1093/obo/9780199756384-0059. ISBN 978-0-19-975638-4. Retrieved 2025-07-06.
26. ↑ "University of Glasgow - Schools - School of Education - Our staff - Mr Luke Campbell". www.gla.ac.uk. Retrieved 2025-07-06.
27. ↑ "Article: Intellectual Property is Theft – Towards an Anarchist Culture of Knowledge Sharing & Translation – AnarchistStudies.Blog". Retrieved 2025-07-06.
28. ↑ Fleming, Sean (2024). "Searching for Ecoterrorism: The Crucial Case of the Unabomber". American Political Science Review. 118 (4): 1986–1999. doi:10.1017/S000305542300148X. ISSN 0003-0554.
29. ↑ "About Us". The Anarchist Library. Archived from the original on 2010-03-05. Retrieved 2025-07-06.
30. ↑ "Anarchy: Deep in the Woods". slackbastard. 2018-12-16. Retrieved 2025-07-06.
31. ↑ "Of Indiscriminate Attacks and Wild Reactions: An Anti-Civ Anarchist Engages with ITS and Atassa, their Defenders and Their false Critics". ICD.
32. ↑ "AnarchistLibraries.Net". 325.nostate.net. Archived from the original on 2018-07-03. Retrieved 2025-07-06.
33. ↑ "Anarchy: Deep in the Woods". slackbastard. 2018-12-16. Retrieved 2025-07-06.
34. ↑ "Of Indiscriminate Attacks and Wild Reactions: An Anti-Civ Anarchist Engages with ITS and Atassa, their Defenders and Their false Critics". ICD.
35. ↑ "On No Platform and ITS". ICD.
36. ↑ "The Elephant in the Room". ICD.
37. ↑ "AnarchistLibraries.Net". 325.nostate.net. Archived from the original on 2018-07-03. Retrieved 2025-07-06.
38. ↑ "Anarchy: Deep in the Woods". slackbastard. 2018-12-16. Retrieved 2025-07-06.
39. ↑ "Of Indiscriminate Attacks and Wild Reactions: An Anti-Civ Anarchist Engages with ITS and Atassa, their Defenders and Their false Critics". ICD.
40. ↑ "On No Platform and ITS". ICD.
41. ↑ "The Elephant in the Room". ICD.
42. ↑ "Article: Intellectual Property is Theft – Towards an Anarchist Culture of Knowledge Sharing & Translation – AnarchistStudies.Blog". Retrieved 2025-07-06.
43. ↑ "Article: Intellectual Property is Theft – Towards an Anarchist Culture of Knowledge Sharing & Translation – AnarchistStudies.Blog". Retrieved 2025-07-06.
44. ↑ "Article: Intellectual Property is Theft – Towards an Anarchist Culture of Knowledge Sharing & Translation – AnarchistStudies.Blog". Retrieved 2025-07-06.