Individualist Anarchism in The United States - Since 1945

Since 1945

Murray Bookchin has identified post-left anarchy as a form of individualist anarchism in Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm where he says he identifies "a shift among Euro-American anarchists away from social anarchism and toward individualist or lifestyle anarchism. Indeed, lifestyle anarchism today is finding its principal expression in spray-can graffiti, post-modernist nihilism, antirationalism, neoprimitivism, anti-technologism, neo-Situationist `cultural terrorism,' mysticism, and a `practice' of staging Foucauldian `personal insurrections.'". Post-left anarchist Bob Black in his long critique of Bookchin´s philosophy called Anarchy after leftism said about post-left anarchy that "It is, unlike Bookchinism, “individualistic” in the sense that if the freedom and happiness of the individual — i.e., each and every really existing person, every Tom, Dick and Murray — is not the measure of the good society, what is?".

A strong relationship does exist with post-left anarchism and the work of individualist anarchist Max Stirner. Jason McQuinn says that "when I (and other anti-ideological anarchists) criticize ideology, it is always from a specifically critical, anarchist perspective rooted in both the skeptical, individualist-anarchist philosophy of Max Stirner. Also Bob Black and Feral Faun/Wolfi Landstreicher strongly adhere to stirnerist egoist anarchism. Bob Black has humorously suggested the idea of "marxist stirnerism".

Hakim Bey has said "From Stirner's "Union of Self-Owning Ones" we proceed to Nietzsche's circle of "Free Spirits" and thence to Charles Fourier's "Passional Series", doubling and redoubling ourselves even as the Other multiplies itself in the eros of the group." Bey also wrote that "The Mackay Society, of which Mark & I are active members, is devoted to the anarchism of Max Stirner, Benj. Tucker & John Henry Mackay...The Mackay Society, incidentally, represents a little-known current of individualist thought which never cut its ties with revolutionary labor. Dyer Lum, Ezra & Angela Haywood represent this school of thought; Jo Labadie, who wrote for Tucker’s Liberty, made himself a link between the american “plumb-line” anarchists, the “philosophical” individualists, & the syndicalist or communist branch of the movement; his influence reached the Mackay Society through his son, Laurance. Like the Italian Stirnerites (who influenced us through our late friend Enrico Arrigoni) we support all anti-authoritarian currents, despite their apparent contradictions."

As far as posterior individualist anarchists Jason McQuinn for some time used the pseudonym Lev Chernyi in honor of the Russian individualist anarchist of the same name while Feral Faun has quoted Italian individualist anarchist Renzo Novatore and has translated both Novatore. and the young Italian individualist anarchist Bruno Filippi

Egoism has had a strong influence on insurrectionary anarchism, as can be seen in the work of the American insurrectionist Wolfi Landstreicher.

Lansdstreicher writing as Feral Faun wrote in 1995 that:

In the game of insurgence—a lived guerilla war game—it is strategically necessary to use identities and roles. Unfortunately, the context of social relationships gives these roles and identities the power to define the individual who attempts to use them. So I, Feral Faun, became ... an anarchist ... a writer ... a Stirner-influenced, post-situationist, anti-civilization theorist ... if not in my own eyes, at least in the eyes of most people who've read my writings.

Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist and author of Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. Another important current mutualist is Joe Peacott. Contemporary mutualists are among those involved in the Alliance of the Libertarian Left and in the Voluntary Cooperation Movement. A recent mutualist collective was the Boston Anarchist Drinking Brigade.