From Anarchy site. "Without some means of exact time keeping, industrial capitalism could not continue to exploit the workers."

Anyone who wrote an apology for his life while in prison, as Oscar Wilde did in De Profundis, cannot properly be called an anarchist. Yet as he so often did, Wilde condensed a credo into a single, brief dictum. “You may keep the law and yet be worthless,” he said. “You may break the law and yet be fine.” But if we were to take every nugget of wisdom from Wilde as the final word on a subject, we would have nothing left to discuss. | So let’s forget for a second that what he said is perfectly true and assume that anarchy is a wee bit more complicated than keeping the law or breaking it or than being worthless or fine. “Anarchy” means the absence of governmental authority or law, or at least that’s what it means to folks who aren’t anarchists. What one learns at the Anarchy Archives (http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/); an online research center on the history and theory of anarchism, is that the | movement (though that’s the rub, whether it’s a movement or an idea) is a bazaar where i all kinds come to peddle and browse an assortment of riffs on a more or less central theme.

The Anarchy Archives has its cynosure, and it’s a constellation rather than a single i guiding star. Here are names like William Godwin, Peter Kropotkin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Noam Chomsky. The word “anarchy” comes from the Latin, but its meaning as applied to a theoretical social state dates to about 1850. Mikhail Baking, the Russian radical who is profiled at the site, participated in the social revolutions of 1848, was arrested and sentenced to death, escaped to England, and spent the remainder of his life spreading his anarchistic views. Baking wrote “Appeal to My Russian Brothers” in response to the failed Polish uprising of 1867. In the public letter, he encouraged Russians to support Poland against the Russian government. “Friends and brothers,” he began (in what amounted to the obligatory preamble for radical addresses), “when, at the end of their patience, your unfortunate Polish brothers rise up, you will rise up as well, not to fight them, but to march with them; you will rise up in the name of the honor of Russia, in the name of your duty to Slavs, in the name of the national Russian cause, crying, ‘Long live Earth and Liberty!’ If you should succumb during this fight, if you should die, it will be a service to the common cause. And God knows! Maybe, contrary to all predictions, your heroism will be crowned with success.” The new tone here, the one that deviated from Socialist rhetoric, was the cynicism: “maybe...your success will be crowned,” but probably not, because if we’re successful there will be no crowns.

Also among the big shots here is Emma Goldman, who grew up in a “petit-bourgeois” (leave it to a site devoted to anarchy to make such a specific class distinction) Jewish family in the Baltic region of Russia. After emigrating to the United States when she was 16, she worked in a Rochester, New York, garment factory before settling in New York City in 1889. Already influenced in her youth by the radical culture of St. Petersburg, she soon joined the anarchist movement and advocated violence; she helped Alexander Berkman plot to assassinate Henry Clay Frick. As her thinking evolved, she later rejected terrorism in favor of tireless political organizing. Over the next three decades Goldman threw her energies into lecturing and mobilizing protests. She fought for free speech and civil liberties. Though expressing little interest in the suffrage cause, she critiqued the social and economic subordination of women and was an early advocate of birth control. No pushover, the United States government targeted “Red Emma” for her radical activities, jailed her on several occasions, and stripped her citizenship in 1908. In “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For,” Goldman outlined the objections to anarchy: “First, Anarchism is impractical, though a beautiful ideal. Second, Anarchism stands for violence and destruction, hence it must be repudiated as vile and dangerous.” Not so, Goldman explains: “A practical scheme, says Oscar Wilde [apparently one can wear nice clothes and still be considered a comrade], is either one already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under the existing conditions; but it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to, and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish.” Among the “bright but lesser lights” of anarchy, the site lists Gandhi, Tolstoy, and Lysander Spooner, the 19th-century Massachusetts abolitionist and a tireless advocate for inexpensive postage. In an obituary for Spooner that appeared on May 18, 1887, in the Boston Daily Globe, the author wrote, “If it be asked who is the ‘Father of Cheap Postage’ in this country, the answer is that the honorable title belongs to no man so much as to Lysander Spooner.” George Woodcock, the 20th-century Canadian author, also qualifies as a lesser luminary among anarchists. He first became active in politics in the 1930s when his family fled to England to escape poverty. For many years he edited the pacifist paper War Commentary and the anarchist gazette Freedom. Despite his antiwar leanings, Woodcock sought to raise awareness of the revolution in Spain and of the Spanish working class. For Woodcock, the defeat of the Spanish anarchist movement came as a bitter blow. One of his best essays was “The Tyranny of the Clock,” which appeared in War Commentary in 1944. “In no characteristic is existing society in the West so sharply distinguished from the earlier societies, whether of Europe or the East, than in its conception of time,” he argued. “To the ancient Chinese or Greek, to the Arab herdsman or Mexican peon of today, time is represented in the cyclic processes of nature, the alternation of day and night, the passage from season to season. The nomads and farmers measured and still measure their day from sunrise to sunset, and their year in terms of the seedtime and harvest, of the falling leaf and the ice thawing on the lakes and rivers.... Modern Western man,” by contrast, “lives in a world which runs according to the mechanical and mathematical symbols of clock time. The clock dictates his movements and inhibits his actions. The clock turns time from a process of nature into a commodity that can be measured and bought and sold like soap or sultanas. And because, without some means of exact time keeping, industrial capitalism could never have developed and could not continue to exploit the workers, the clock represents an element of mechanical tyranny in the lives of modern men more potent than any individual exploiter or any other machine.”

One of the primary questions students of Wilde ask is whether he should be celebrated as a man of ideas, of aesthetics, or as a man of action. The same question applies to anarchy. As one author asks at the Spunk Library: An Online Anarchist Library and Archive (www.spunk.org), “Anarchism: Ideology or Methodology?” Creed or Deed?