Jim Higgins

Inveresk Street and SIAW have already posted news of the Jim Higgins archive at the Marxist Internet Archives. In particular, let me recommend the concluding chapter of his book More Years for the Locust. It's the first time I've encountered any recognition, among socialists of a particular inclination, that we live in a post-Trotskyist age (we Anarchists, of course, never had to live in a Trotskyist age at all; we were either too well read or else we never went to college at all).

Higgins doesn't go quite as far as to advocate an anarchistic approach to movement building, but he at least has the sense to recognize that socialist arguments and analyses have to change to take account of conditions that Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky could not have foreseen and, because of their prejudiced and incorrect first premises, never could have.

I hesitate to recommend this as compulsory reading - not very anarchistic, is it? - but I think there's no harm in a categorical imperative now and then. Reading it is the morally correct thing to do.