ABSTRACT
Anarchism is an orientation toward social life and social relations that is ultimately no orientation at all. Anarchism might best be thought of as a disorientation; that is, an approach which openly values fractured, uncertain, and unrealized understandings and practices as the emerging essence of social life. Unlike most modernist intellectual orientations, anarchism and anarchist criminology don't bother pretending to incorporate reasoned or reasonable critiques of law and legal authority, either. Anarchist critiques of law and legality, and thus the roots of contemporary anarchist criminology, trace as far as anarchism itself. Capitalist law and order means law forced upon the workers by order of the capitalists." But beyond deception and defiance, the Wobblies and their allied unions also invented strategies that could successfully turn the turgidity of the law against itself, and thus win for them labor and political victories.
