User:Bridget O'Connor

This is the userpage of Bridget O'Connor, a postgraduate history student at Trinity College, Dublin. She is particularly interested in the history of the Anarchist Movement. She finds the coverage of anarchism on Wikipedia frustrating though. It is presented as some kind of ahistorical, vague, amorphous, crude anti-statism. In fact, it is a coherent, modern, rationalist, anti-authoritarian, socialist ideology born out of the Bakuninist faction of the First International in the nineteenth century. It is anti-statist, but it is not reducible to that.

Due to unsympathetic scholarship, and the marginalisation of the movement in the face of the apparent "success" of Marxism in bringing about socialist societies (which were in fact state capitalist), a lot of space was provided for totally unrelated movements to latch onto the anarchist label. Nonetheless, currents describing themselves as capitalist, primitivist, philosophical, individualist, etc. have no place in the movement. Wikipedia's coverage of anarchism is a case study in Okrent's law, that "the pursuit of balance [in this case through NPOV] can create imbalance because sometimes something is true". No matter how much a hyper-capitalist, or a primitivist, or whatever, may believe her/himself to be an anarchist, self-identification is not enough. It is the ideas, rooted in the movement's history, that matter.