Anarchy - Quakers Who Swear a Lot

Cool article in the NY Times on an anarchist collective house in Greensboro, NC. I suspect Uncle Sam is not happy about this phenomenon:

In spite of the stigma attached to the word 'anarchist' and the scrutiny openly anarchist households receive, the number of such houses is growing. Anarchists are no longer just in college towns and big cities; there are now thriving anarchist communities and houses like ours in places like Lake Worth, Fla.; Machias, Me.; and Springfield, Mo. The online directory maintained by the Fellowship for Intentional Community lists more than 1,000 collective houses, ecovillages and co-ops in the United States, compared with about 400 in the 1990 directory. Although not all of them identify themselves as anarchist, more than half make their decisions by consensus. Even that number is clearly low: none of the five collective houses I know of in Greensboro, for example, are listed in the directory.

I'm glad I've gotten so into Chomsky these past few months. As a sort of leading light of the Anarchist community, he'd never wavered - that I've seen or read - from his anarchist beliefs. That's pretty hard core, as he mentions that during the 1920's and 30's when the U.S. government used to jail Communists, they used to murder anarchists. It makes complete sense why the U.S. government would feel so threatened to resort to just murdering anarchists. Communists, after all, still have elites - but not anarchists. That's why the elites were so threatened by the anarchists.

Anarchist FAQ. To me, that page is just too ugly and long-winded. We really need an Anarchy for Dummies book or something. It's interesting how the Dummies series doesn't have Anarchism, nor Communism, nor even Democracy books. I think if people found out about what any of those things were, the U.S. government would be in upheaval.

Just started to realize, once I read the Anarchism Wiki page, how closely related anarchism is with the women's rights movement. It seems the very first (though, undeclared) anarchist was William Godwin - husband of one Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary, of course, wrote one of the earliest feminists texts, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Before she wrote this book, though, she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men - a defense of the French Revolution (a response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France), which Thomas Paine then followed with his Rights of Men, and then Wollstonecraft followed with her most popular work, already mentioned, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Why did she have to go all singular on us?