Recently discovered that Benjamin Tucker translated Chernyshevsky's What is to be done? and then serialized it, giving it plenty good pages of the most-read anarchist paper in the states. He reported on nihilists as much as on communists, but focused his attacks on the latter.
And, of course, Voltairine de Cleyre has met some Nihilists.
Today, the worst critic of nihilism (and of Aragorn! relocating anarchism) would claim their anarchism to be roughly in Tucker's and de Cleyre's tradition. The louder "market anarchism" voices on reddit would have believe a similar incompatibility of nihilism and (American type) individualism.
And things complicate when you entertain the idea that the Russian nihilist's materialism, being revolutionaries, and love for science, at its core shares a language with communism.
But what you see today is mostly anti-civs, and make total destroy insurrectionaries picking it up. Claiming it.
There's plenty complexity in the history and the many ways you could map it all out, a good amount of which I have no clue about. But nonetheless, it's fascinating how anarchism keeps throwing me these twists and turns at me. Nihilism makes for wild encounters in anarchism.
stagn wrote (edited )
Ther are some anarchist illegalist and nihilist that already a century ago were very close to "modern" concepts like: "anti-civ", "pure negation"... An example is renzo novatore , some is stuff are similar to the "modern" anarcho-nihilism and clearly have heavily influenced it.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/renzo-novatore-toward-the-creative-nothing