Two anarchist pamphlets concerned, in very different ways, with what happens when anti-authoritarian politics confronts the problem of organisation.

Jo Freeman’s enormously influential The Tyranny of Structurelessness, first circulated through the women’s liberation movement in the early 1970s, attacks the fantasy that groups can simply abolish structure. Informal organisation, Freeman argues, does not eliminate power: it makes power harder to see, harder to contest and more likely to concentrate within friendship networks and unacknowledged elites. Her alternative is not bureaucracy for its own sake, but explicit, accountable and democratically controlled structures. 

Brian Oliver Sheppard’s Anarchism vs. Primitivism, originally published in 2003, comes at a different internal argument: the relationship between anarchism and anarcho-primitivism. Sheppard rejects the romanticisation of pre-industrial life and argues that opposition to capitalism, hierarchy and technological domination should not become an opposition to technology, agriculture or complex society as such. It is polemical, argumentative movement writing—the anarchist left arguing with itself rather than presenting a sanitised unified front.

Contemporary staple-bound pamphlet editions. Minor shelf and handling wear to covers; internally clean and unmarked, staples secure. Very good condition.