It has been said that anarchists are born and not made. Perhaps my own personal history serves as evidence to support such a claim. I still remember quite vividly the moment when I first came to understand that there really were people who stood for the abolition of the state and who seriously claimed the label of “anarchists” for themselves. I was a high school student at the time, about sixteen or seventeen years old. My senior level English literature textbook contained a brief biographical feature on the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley which mentioned that Shelley had been the son-in-law of William Godwin and that Godwin was an anarchist. I was instantly intrigued. The idea that there was actually a movement of those committed to anarchism as a philosophy and whose ranks included serious scholars and intellectuals was something that I found fascinating. Though I had never before heard of the concept of anarchism, it somehow felt very familiar as though I had discovered something that had already been a part of my life on a subconscious level all along. I had experienced similar feeling a short time earlier in the very same English literature class when I first encountered Thomas Jefferson’s often-cited quote from a letter to James Madison concerning Shay’s Rebellion, “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing.”
Though my fascination with the notion of anarchism was immediate, it would be several more years before I would give the matter any serious reflection. For as a teenager living in a small town in the American state of Virginia in the early 1980s I was far more concerned with psychoactive substances and rock music than I was with philosophy or politics. My own early life was about as far removed from the world of the anarchist radical that I would later become as it could be. I came from an entirely conventional middle class American family and my own parents held impeccably conservative attitudes. The cultural revolution that Western civilization experienced during the 1960s had barely touched the Virginia community where I spent my 1970s childhood. Indeed, I was at the time part of the far fringes of the Christian fundamentalist subculture that looked with abject horror at the changes that were then transpiring in the outside world. The subculture from which I came attempted to isolate itself from that world and I spent my earliest years as a pupil under the tutelage of evangelical Protestant ideologues.
Being an obstreperous adolescent and rebellious young man, I was soon enjoying quite a career as an up-and-coming delinquent that led ultimately to experiences involving crashed cars, encounters with the police, and time spent behind bars. I graduated from high school only because of the generosity of the school administration and their probable desire to be rid of me, and began to attend college only for the sake of avoiding working for a living. But it was during my early years in the world of academia that I began to take ideas seriously and there was no idea that I took more seriously than the political philosophy of anarchism. I was an anarchist before I ever met any other actual anarchists and my earliest sources of information on anarchism were generic ones such as encyclopedias. It was through time spent in my college library that I first encountered names such as Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, and terms such as syndicalism and mutualism. It was a short time later when, after transferring to another college and relocating to another city, I attended my first meeting of real life anarchists in the spring of 1988. I found them to be a strange lot indeed with their bizarre fashions, body piercings, and hairstyles, and orientations towards alternative lifestyles such as veganism, squatting, gender-bending, and habitual vagrancy.
It was through the anarchists that I was introduced to the subculture of the radical Left as it was in the United States of the 1980s. It was a subculture that in many ways seemed to be the polar opposite of the subculture in which I had spent my childhood and adolescence. The popular left-wing causes of the time were the growing environmentalist movement, the various expressions of identity politics and the related attitudes that later came to be known as “political correctness,” and opposition to intervention by the United States in the civil wars that were then raging in the Central American nations. It was only the latter of these that ever made any particular impression on me. For it was through reading the works of leading critics of American imperialism from the time and, more importantly, hearing the personal stories of refugees from the US-backed regimes in Central America that I came to understand the true nature of the American empire and its impact on the poor nations of the earth. I became a committed revolutionary and have remained one ever since.
For a number of years in the late 1980s and early 1990s I was a hardcore participant in the radical left-wing movement though always with a strictly anarchist orientation. I regularly engaged in intense arguments and debates with Communists at leftist events. My weekly routine consisted of meetings, demonstrations, community projects, teaching at an alternative school, and writing articles for radical newsletters to the point where I was not able to remain in college and I would not complete my degrees until many years later. Meanwhile, I found myself having to arrange my radical activities around keeping a steady enough job to pay the rent. I also devoted myself to an intense study of anarchist history and theory. I became ever-more fascinated with the many varying sects of anarchism and related philosophies. The more my knowledge deepened the more dissatisfied I became with both the actually existing anarchist movement itself and the wider radical left-wing subculture. I came to believe that most leftists spoke in platitudes that lacked genuine substance, much like the Christian fundamentalists in whose company I had spent my earliest years. And I came to regard most anarchists as a collection of ne’er-do-well youth whose overall level of theoretical sophistication and competence as political organizers and activists was shabby beyond belief.
I began to distance myself from the left-wing circles I had previously been involved with and retreated into an ever-greater amount of private study. Meanwhile, I became increasingly concerned about the domestic American police state that began to rapidly expand itself during the 1990s under the guise of the wars on drugs and crime. It was during this time that the American patriot and militia movements began to develop and I found myself becoming increasingly interested in the growth of this indigenous American populist movement with a solidly anti-state bent. Through attending the events and reading the literature of these people I came to realize that many of them were anarchists in practice if not in name. I began to develop plans for a new anarchist movement that could move beyond the clichéd leftism and pretentious counter culturalism of the anarchist “establishment” towards an anarchist-led anti-state populism with an ever-more militant stance.
Fortunately, the advent of the internet provided me with a platform for the dissemination of my own ideas. I established the AttacktheSystem.Com website in January of 2001, the same month that George W. Bush assumed the presidency of the United States. In its early years AttacktheSystem.Com was primarily devoted to criticizing the massive police state expansion and imperialist aggression of the Bush regime. The name was originally suggested to me by a nineteen-year-old college student I met at a libertarian gathering. The nineteenth-century American individualist-anarchist Benjamin R. Tucker called his landmark work Instead of a Book: By a Man Too Busy to Write One. Likewise, I suppose I could refer to Attack the System. Com as Instead of a Magazine: By a Man Lacking the Resources to Publish One. For the past twelve years, AttacktheSystem.Com has served as a de facto online journal through which I have been able to communicate with an ever-growing audience. In the meantime, I have been published in an ever-greater number of other forums, from literary compilations to online webzines. I have also more recently begun to engage in audio broadcasting through the internet and am increasingly invited to speak at academic conferences or to be interviewed by the international media. I am very grateful for the opportunities that have been granted to me in recent years to expound upon my own ideas and the movement that I wish to advance.
This anthology is a collection of twenty-six essays that were written between 2001 and 2013. My purpose in producing these works has been to create the theoretical foundation for a twenty-first-century anarchist movement that will constitute a third wave of anarchism that advances beyond the first wave classical anarchist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and the second wave of anarchism that emerged from the New Left in the late twentieth century and which continues to be the mainstream of anarchism at the present juncture. I have also sought to establish not only a theoretical basis for a new wave of anarchism but also a comprehensive strategic orientation for such a movement.
This work is divided into four parts, with each of these containing original writings dealing with the core issues that I wish to address. The first part considers the question of what the appropriate philosophical foundations for twenty-first-century anarchism might be. Like Emma Goldman, I find the philosophy of Nietzsche to be highly relevant to the anarchist struggle and I regard Nietzsche rather than Marx as the truly great radical thinker of nineteenth-century European intellectual culture. The introductory essay, “The Nietzschean Prophecies,” addresses the existential crisis facing Western civilization and in which a twenty-first-century anarchist movement will necessarily be taking place. The second essay, “Our Struggle Is Neither Moral Nor Intellectual, But Physical,” simply seeks to apply the philosophy of Max Stirner to the struggle ahead. It was Stirner more than any other of the great anarchist thinkers who really understood the nature of human existence and its philosophical implications. The final essay in the first part, “Ernst Jünger: The Resolute Life of an Anarch,” examines the career of the legendary German soldier from the First World War and literary figure during the interwar period. Jünger is acknowledged as an ideal prototype for the model psychological makeup for a contemporary anarchist warrior.
The second part contains two essays which examine the enemy we face in contemporary times, the international plutocratic order and the American empire which upholds it. The first work, “Philosophical Anarchism and the Death of Empire,” was written in 2003 as George W. Bush’s war in Iraq was just beginning. It examines the role of the neoconservatives in escalating military aggression by the American regime and presciently argues that the neoconservatives would eventually be eclipsed by a more overtly internationalist liberal humanism and progressive imperialism of the kind now exhibited by the Obama regime. The second work, “Anti-Imperialists of the World, Unite!,” calls for anarchists to reclaim their role as the leading resistance forces to imperialism which they held in the nineteenth century and reiterates the call for a worldwide anti-globalist struggle outlined in the previous essay.
The third part outlines the general theoretical framework for a new anarchist movement for the twenty-first century. The first writing, “Against the State,” draws heavily on the “synthesist” tradition within classical anarchism and calls for a unified revolutionary front of anti-state radicals against common enemies. The next two pieces, “Why I Am an Anarcho-Pluralist,” parts one and two, provide a practical discussion of the problems involved in reconciling the many contending schools of anarchism. The fourth essay, “Anarcho-Pluralism and Pan-Secessionism,” attempts to clarify my general theoretical framework of “anarcho-pluralism” and the related strategic concept of “pan-secessionism” by examining misconceptions that have been associated with these.
The fourth and final part deals more broadly with strategic matters. The first essay in this part, “Liberty and Populism,” was written in 2006 and is the most comprehensive exposition on my general strategic outlook that I have yet to produce. The second piece, “Smashing the State,” was written in 2003 and at the time provided an initial introduction to my strategic paradigm as I was developing it. “Propaganda by the Deed, Fourth Generation Warfare, and the Decline of the State” examines how the armed wing of the classical anarchist movement were in many ways the originators of modern “terrorism” and how the model of non-state warfare they developed has since been adopted by other movements to the point where the state is losing its traditional monopoly on war. The final essay in the anthology, “Armed Struggle Against the State,” provides an abstract discussion of how an armed insurgency might unfold in a modern society.
I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge those persons who have made this work possible through their contributions to my various endeavors over the years. I wish to thank my mentors during my early days as an anarchist nearly a quarter century ago, Ed Jahn and Jarama Bernstein, as it was they who provided me with the basic training in radical political organizing. I do not know if they would agree with every position I hold today, but I am in their debt nevertheless.
I wish to thank those, anarchists and non-anarchists alike, who have graciously published my various articles and essays over the years or endeavored in other ways to bring my ideas to a wider audience, especially Jeremy Sapienza, Lew Rockwell, Richard Spencer, Troy Southgate, Welf Herfurth, Dr. Paul Gottfried, Dr. Sean Gabb, Robert Stark, and Dr. Tomislav Sunic. I also wish to thank my current publisher, Karl Winn. I wish to thank the past producers of my internet radio program, Mike Conner and Matt Parrott. I am especially grateful to Matthew Peters for his diligent and meticulous efforts at editing and proofreading this work. His contribution to this project has been enormous. In particular I wish to thank my comrades at AttacktheSystem.Com, especially R. J. Jacob, Jeremy Weiland, Vince Rinehart, Miles Joyner, Rodney Huber, Craig Fitzgerald, Peter Bjorn Perls, Daniel Acheampong, Lawrence J. Patti, and Michael Parish for their ongoing labor and support over the years. I am sure there are others whom I have neglected to mention and I apologize for any such omissions.
Lastly, I wish to thank all anarchists, libertarians, and anti-state radicals everywhere, whether they agree with my perspective or not, for their contributions to the struggle, large or small. You are all soldiers in the army of liberty.
Keith Preston
September 1, 2013