An Anarchist Credo /Larry Gambone

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http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/polin/polin190.htm

 

An Anarchist Credo

 

Larry Gambone

 

Larry Gambone grew up in logging towns on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. He received a degree in Sociology from Simon Fraser University in 1970 and has been active in anti-war and ecology movements since 1965. This essay appeared in the Autumn/Winter 2003 (Vol. 4, No. 1, p. 13) issue of Total Liberty and is reprinted by kind permission of both the author and the editor, Jonathan Simcock. The Total Liberty website can be found at http://mysite.freeserve.com/total_liberty1..

FOR LIFE, LIBERTY AND PROPERTY

· Anarchism is not terrorism or violence and anarchists do not support, aid or sympathise with terrorists or so-called liberation movements.

 

· Anarchism does not mean irresponsibility, parasitism, criminality, nihilism or immoralism, but entails the highest level of ethics and personal responsibility.

 

· Anarchism does not mean hostility toward organisation. Anarchists only desire that all organisations be voluntary and that a peaceful social order will only exist when this is so.

 

· Anarchists are resolute anti-statists and do not defend either 'limited states' or 'welfare' states.

 

· Anarchists are opposed to all coercion. Poverty, bigotry, sexism and environmental degradation cannot be successfully overcome through the State. Anarchists are therefore opposed to taxation, censorship, so-called affirmative action and government regulation.

 

· Anarchists do not need scapegoats. Poverty and environmental destruction are not ultimately caused by transnationals, IMF, the USA, the 'developed world', imperialism, technology or any other devil figure, but are rooted in the power to coerce. only the abolition of coercion will overcome these problems.

 

· Anarchism does not posit any particular economic system but only desires that the economy be non-coercive and composed of voluntary organisations.

 

· Anarchists are not utopians or sectarians, but are sympathetic to any effort to decrease statism and coercion and the replacement of authoritarian relations with voluntary ones.