Clearly the anarchist dream is utopian. The anarchist must have faith that people are not inherently bad, that there is not a socially fatal genetic characteristic that drives people inevitably to commit violence on others. So-called "human nature", in the anarchist view, is not the problem. This is perhaps the bedrock belief to which anarchists anchor our conviction that it must be possible to achieve humane social organization. Of course this point deserves much consideration, and I intend to return to it to try to "make the case."

      It seems necessary, if we want to make a healthy world for all people, to begin by asking some very basic questions. Some of them we will not be able to answer definitively, but by asking them we will at least help keep them in our active consciousness. For example, questions about human nature are among the most important when considering the kind of society towards which we can reasonably strive, but they are among the most controversial questions. Other questions, such as what is needed in order for a person to be sustained in a physically healthy state, are much easier to answer with greater certainty.

      Among the questions I want to raise are the following:

• What is the social role of secrecy?
• Is coercive power socially desirable?
• Is hierarchical structure consistent with the well-being of all people?
• How ought people be valued?
• What is the meaning of reality, and is it unique?

1. On the Need for Anarchism, a paper given April 6, 1995 at the Panel on Language, Culture and Domination at the Third Biennial conference on Culture, Technology and Change in the Americas, at the University of South Florida, Tampa.

2. Why Grade Students?, expression of viewpoints by "respectable" people a quarter of a century ago (more precisely, in May 1972), when it was "cool" to say such things. The ideas are still correct, but now university administrators are parroting other, reactionary ideas, swimming with the tide, as always.

3. Renewing the Call to Resist, a brief note, published in slightly edited form in the February/March 1997 issue of the RESIST newsletter. This is the original (unedited) note.

4. The conspiracy against Latinos, a note critical of so-called "identity politics," emphasizing the common humanity of all peoples.

5. The harmfulness of the drive for profits was distributed as an addendum to the 2/18/98 "appeal to my colleagues in science." It consists of the last two subsections of the 4/6/95 paper "On the Need for Anarchism," however, the arguments are sufficiently self-contained to stand alone.

6. Poor taste, pornography, and obscenity, on the flap over internet pornography stirred up at the University of Massachusetts at Boston after the Mass Media article in the November 20, 1997 issue (of the campus newspaper).

7. Science for Everyone, the same note as the following appeal to science colleagues, but slightly recast to address not just scientists. It was printed in the student newspaper at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, the Mass Media , issue of February 26, 1998.

8. An appeal to my colleagues in science, a brief note of February 18, 1998 questioning whether perhaps we ought to resurrect, on a larger scale than previously, the organization Science for the People, making use of the internet. Science for the People exists again!

9. The Best of Times, The Worst of Times, a broadside calling for faculty unionization at UMass/Boston, Nov 25, 1976. Some added remarks 21 years later.