Anarchy

"Anarchy is, and always has been, a romance. It is also clearly the only morally sensible way to run the world."

— Alan Moore

Of all the political philosophies that have existed throughout history, anarchism is perhaps the most misunderstood. With general impressions ranging from the idea that Anarchy Is Chaos to scary images of Bomb-Throwing Anarchists from popular fiction, what most probably don't realise is there's actually a wealth of complex and multilayered ideas associated with anarchism that have had an impact on radical politics, the arts, and even mainstream culture.

The definition of anarchism to most people means "belief the state is bad and shouldn't exist." However, while all anarchists are anti-statists, it is not the only or, in most cases, even the primary part of their ideology.

Anarchism is the belief that rulership as a whole, not just the state, should not exist – as indicated in its Greek roots, an- [no] -arkhos [ruler] – and that people should instead organize their social relations and institutions though voluntary cooperation without hierarchies of power. So what characterises anarchism is not anti-statism so much as anti-authoritarianism. ^note

This means that most anarchists would not welcome a reduction in state power if it meant an increase of other kinds of authoritarianism as a result. For example, privatising a public health service may weaken the state, but increase the power of corporations, and thus anarchists would probably oppose doing so. Though generally speaking, they don't support state or private management of things. Instead, anarchists push for voluntary, localised, and cooperative institutions organised from the bottom-up through decentralised networks and run via processes of participatory democracy and workplace self-management.

Another way of thinking about anarchism is that it's "democracy without the state" or "socialism when it occurs on a voluntary basis". This tends to confuse many who

1. associate the word democracy with representative government; and

2. especially those who associate the word socialism with statism.

In fact, the word democracy originally meant direct democracy, like in Ancient Greece. And the word socialism originally referred to a number of economic systems in which economic institutions were run by those who actually worked in them. It's the earlier meanings of both words that anarchists use when talking about them. This also applies to their use of the word libertarian. Which, despite its modern Anglo-American use to mean laissez-faire capitalist, was actually first used by anarchist socialists to mean "anti-authoritarian". A frequently used synonym for social anarchism is libertarian socialism.

In addition to the systems of centralized power found in statism and capitalism, anarchists also support dissolving all forms of social hierarchy and domination (i.e., rulership) - such as sexism, racism, queerphobia, ableism, speciesism, and the domination of nature - and restructuring society on a decentralized and horizontalist basis.

• FAQs

  • r/Anarchy101 - reddit forum that has diverse answers to most common questions
  • An Anarchist FAQ - Semi-advanced reading, very through

• Has there ever been a real life enactment of Anarchy?

  • The Communes of Rojava
  • The Paris Commune
• How Could it work?
  • Imperative Mandate
  • Leveling Mechanisms
  • Participatory Politics
  • Workplace Democracy
  • Democratic Education
  • Restorative Justice

Anarchism in a nutshell

• Anarchism is a social movement that seeks to abolish oppressive systems. Anarchists advocate a self-managed, classless, stateless society where everyone takes collective responsibility for the health and prosperity of their community.

• Anarchists are against coercive hierarchy. Anarchists believe that power corrupts, and that everyone should be treated equally.

• Anarchists seek to reduce or even end violence and oppression. The increasingly frequent misrepresentation of anarchism by the media to be about violence, nihilism, or disorder is completely false.

• All anarchists are anti-capitalism and anti-state. Capitalism is the economic system where investors and landlords are allowed to extract wealth from the economy without contributing goods or services back. Under capitalism, actual workers have little autonomy, or control over themselves. Instead, they are controlled by politicians and bankers.

  • So called "anarcho"-capitalists are not truly anarchists, it is a right wing ideology that has very little in common with anarchism, apart from the name, which they co-opted.

• Anarchists advocate socialism instead of capitalism. Under socialism, workers have direct control of the means of production, or the land, factories, and offices. Through democratic organization, anarchists seek to remove the abusable systems of power that bosses and politicians leverage today to unjustly rule over society. Anarchists want to give everyone complete control over that which affects them.

• Most anarchists are communists, and advocate a "classless, moneyless, stateless, society." Others are mutualists, and advocate "free market socialism". Anarchist society has no central authority, but instead consists of interconnected communities that use direct democracy (specifically, consensus) to organize themselves without rulers or bosses.

Excerpt from Anarchy Works by Peter Gelderloos

To read the FAQs of anarchy, how it would work, etc. click here

What exactly is anarchism?

Volumes have been written in answer to this question, and millions of people have dedicated their lives to creating, expanding, defining, and fighting for anarchy. There are countless paths to anarchism and countless beginnings: workers in 19^th century Europe fighting against capitalism and believing in themselves instead of the ideologies of authoritarian political parties; indigenous peoples fighting colonization and reclaiming their traditional, horizontal cultures; high school students waking up to the depth of their alienation and unhappiness; mystics from China one thousand years ago or from Europe five hundred years ago, Daoists or Anabaptists, fighting against government and organized religion; women rebelling against the authoritarianism and sexism of the Left. There is no Central Committee giving out membership cards, and no standard doctrine. Anarchy means different things to different people. However, here are some basic principles most anarchists agree on.

Autonomy and Horizontality: All people deserve the freedom to define and organize themselves on their own terms. Decision-making structures should be horizontal rather than vertical, so no one dominates anyone else; they should foster power to act freely rather than power over others. Anarchism opposes all coercive hierarchies, including capitalism, the state, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

Mutual Aid: People should help one another voluntarily; bonds of solidarity and generosity form a stronger social glue than the fear inspired by laws, borders, prisons, and armies. Mutual aid is neither a form of charity nor of zero-sum exchange; both giver and receiver are equal and interchangeable. Since neither holds power over the other, they increase their collective power by creating opportunities to work together.

Voluntary Association: People should be free to cooperate with whomever they want, however they see fit; likewise, they should be free to refuse any relationship or arrangement they do not judge to be in their interest. Everyone should be able to move freely, both physically and socially. Anarchists oppose borders of all kinds and involuntary categorization by citizenship, gender, or race.

Direct Action: It is more empowering and effective to accomplish goals directly than to rely on authorities or representatives. Free people do not request the changes they want to see in the world; they make those changes.

Revolution: Today’s entrenched systems of repression cannot be reformed away. Those who hold power in a hierarchical system are the ones who institute reforms, and they generally do so in ways that preserve or even amplify their power. Systems like capitalism and white supremacy are forms of warfare waged by elites; anarchist revolution means fighting to overthrow these elites in order to create a free society.

Self-Liberation: “The liberation of the workers is the duty of the workers themselves,” as the old slogan goes. This applies to other groups as well: people must be at the forefront of their own liberation. Freedom cannot be given; it must be taken.

There are two main categories of political anarchist thought, divided chiefly by what kind of economic system they want to build.

• Market Anarchists want a stateless free market economy made up of producer and consumer cooperatives and self-employed professionals instead of private corporations and wage-labour. While once very popular, especially in America, market anarchism has ended up becoming a minority in the larger anarchist canon.

• Social Anarchists, on the other hand, want what could be called a "free commons", ^note in which systems of decentralised and localised planning of the economy (by directly-democratic popular assemblies and worker-controlled enterprises) replace traditional market relations. In terms of numbers, this is by far the most prominent anarchist tradition and is what most people are referring to when they talk about "anarchism" without prefixes.

Both of these in turn are sub-divided into four overall proposals for different economic systems, each associated primarily with a different anarchist "founding father", with the first two being forms of market anarchism and the later two social anarchism:

• Mutualist anarchism (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon)

• Individualist anarchism (Benjamin Tucker)

• Collectivist anarchism (Mikhail Bakunin)

• Communist anarchism (Peter Kropotkin)

Despite their differences, they all share a social commitment to the ideal of organising things on the basis of "voluntary, non-hierarchical cooperation".

Anarchism was extremely popular in labour movements around the world in the late 19th and early 20th century, so much so that for a time it surpassed Marxism as the principal philosophy of working class struggles. Historian Benidict Anderson makes the case that anarchism was in fact the first "anti-systemic" movement that was fully global in scale, having influence in areas Marxism didn't reach for decades, like Japan, the Philippines, Latin America, Egypt, and Southern Africa.

Its popularity waned somewhat after the Russian Revolution in which Marxists took power for the first time. Then after a last hurrah in the late 1930s, in which there was an anarchist revolution in Spain and Catalonia, it flickered out in terms of appeal in the Global North except for occasional influences within environmental, anti-war, and student movements, though it still maintained an active presence in other parts of the world.

After a long time in a relative political wilderness, anarchism has seen something of a resurgence in worldwide political and social movements since the 1999 World Trade Organisation protests in Seattle over corporate-led globalisation policies, and especially since the 2011 "squares movements" around the world like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street.

The anthropologist David Graeber has opined that most social movements in the present day - structured through horizontal networks of cooperation rather than top-down hierarchies - are basically anarchist in their principles, even if they don't necessary use the word to describe themselves.

For those new to anarchist ideas, there's been a massive project aimed at explaining everything about (social) anarchist theory, practice, and history called An Anarchist FAQ available at this link, and a series of introductory videos on social anarchist/left-libertarian ideas is available here and here. Some good book-length intros can be found in Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall, Anarchy in Action by Colin Ward, Red Emma Speaks by Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Its Aspirarions by Cindy Milstein, and A Living Spirit of Revolt by Ziga Vodovnik.