User talk:NonZeroSum
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.
Contents
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.[1][9][10]
Enthusiasm to work on the website can also be traced back broadly to an enthusiasm on the left for book clubs and library cataloguing.[11] Organizing a library on the internet for discussing niche ideology was especially valuable for those people who lived very rurally or who are disabled.[12]
The project had archived 7,000 texts by 2020,[4] and by July 2025, it had expanded to include 16,000.[13]
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.[14] The library takes particular pride in archiving texts on contemporary anarchism[14], primitivism and anti-technology ideology.[15][16][9][17]
Legacy
Influence(s)
This project has helped in the creation of many other language anarchist libraries such as the Southeast Asian Anarchist Library.[18]
Fairmont University recommends The Anarchist Library as a useful resource for studying anarchism.[19] Its collection of texts related to the Spanish Civil War was noted by the anarchist newspaper Fifth Estate.[20] In 2019, Ruth Kinna noted the library as a 'reference work' on contemporary anarchist thought.[14]
The library is also credited by Luke Ray Di Marco Campbell, lecturer at the University of Glasgow,[21] for flouting copyrighted laws and thus challenging the monopoly of the publishing industry.[22]
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.[23] According to The Anarchist Library itself, editors attempt to achieve the most correct state of texts possible, but this is a time-consuming process.[24]
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.[15][16] Critics argue that the editorial collective places disproportionate emphasis on anti-technology writings at the expense of other anarchist perspectives.[15][16][9][17][25] 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.[15][16][9][17][25]
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.[22] 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.[22] 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.[22]
