His belief in a self-regulating community entirely without government and his rejection of dictatorship are anarchist beliefs.

Blake's relevance for anarchists is a little different. It can only be created by the majority of the people, and only if they are inspired by ethics, love, and mutual self-sacrifice, what Blake calls “Mysterious / Offering of Self for Another” ( Jerusalem 96:20-21). To anticipate what I will say later, Blake answers Marxists and those influenced by Marxism by saying, straight up front, that a new world is not predestined by an inevitable historical process (in Blake's terms, a divine plan) and can't be created by a revolutionary minority or a benevolent state. Besides this fact, Blake's idea of Jesus contains his answers to questions about how to create and live in a free society that are crucial for anarchists-and decent Marxists and socialists-but which none of those groups has answered very well. What (a skeptical reader might ask) is an article about Jesus doing in a “Journal of Anarchism and Libertarian Socialism”? The most obvious answer is that an incomparably greater number of people live their lives-or try to-according to some idea of what Jesus thought, than according to any idea of what anarchists, Marxists, or socialists have thought. This article is about Blake's idea of Jesus and its relation to revolutionary anarchism. Blake's major poems-which are also beautiful artworks incorporating his own illustrations-include those collected in Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789-1794) short narrative works like The Book of Urizen, America a Prophecy, and Europe a Prophecy, all written in the 1790s and three long, complex narrative poems, The Four Zoas (1797-1807), Milton (1804-1818), and Jerusalem (1804-1820). The English poet and painter William Blake (1757-1827) left a body of breathtaking art and stirring, sometimes obscure poetry, much of it concerned with religion and much with the revolutionary struggles of his time-the American and French revolutions, the British radical movement of the 1790s, and later, the growing British labor and constitutional movement in the years 1810-1820.

Apocalyptic Empire by Chris Blake