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Title: Useful Notes on Anarchism
Author: TVTropes
Date: 2019; last accessed 2019-08-13.
Language: en
Topics: introductory, FAQ
Source: Retrieved on 2019-08-13 from https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/Anarchism
Notes: This is a copy of a wiki-type page. As such, the document it is copied from may have changed after it was copied here.

TVTropes

Useful Notes on Anarchism

Anarchy is, and always has been, a romance. It is also clearly the only

morally sensible way to run the world.

— Alan Moore [1]

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[2] to scary images of

Bomb-Throwing Anarchists[3] 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. [4]

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[5] and workplace self-management[6].

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

• associate the word democracy with representative government; and

• 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 centralised 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 decentralised and horizontalist basis.

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”,[7] 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 19^(th) and early 20^(th) 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[8], 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[9].

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[10], and a series

of introductory videos on social anarchist/left-libertarian ideas is

available here[11] and here[12]. 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.

(Note: As social anarchism is by far the majority tendency within

anarchism as a whole, most of the following article will address

primarily what social anarchists believe, but with occasional

explanations of what market anarchists desire when the two differ.[13])

Basic Values

The values of political anarchism emerged from the same Enlightenment

humanist milieu which animated most of the progressive movements of the

19^(th) century, and so the broad anarchist tradition adheres to the

same Enlightenment ideals of reason, progress, individuality, and social

justice, developing them in an anti-authoritarian direction. At the

political level, it can be seen as a kind of fusion of classical

liberalism and democratic socialism, thus its alternative name:

libertarian socialism. At the intellectual level, it draws its ethos

from an opposition to hierarchy and domination, and from support for

individual autonomy, mutual aid, and horizontal cooperation.

However, while anarchism as a political tradition only emerged in the

1800s, philosophically anarchist (or “anarchistic”) ideas and practices

can arguably be found in every era and every part of the world — from

indigenous tribal confederations to peasant revolts to urban social

movements — whenever people resist hierarchical domination and organise

on the basis of voluntary cooperation where power is decentralised to

each individual. Anarchist theorists have always tried to take account

of these struggles and work what people are already doing into a

coherent framework for future activity.

Anarchism as Method

In contrast to Marxists and liberals, who usually start at the abstract

level and come up with theories and practices for people to adhere to

apart from their own lived experiences, anarchists try to tease out what

anarchistic elements already exist in societies, and in what people are

doing in their struggles for freedom and equality; then try to work out

theories in which those elements could be pushed in a more explicitly

anarchist direction.

So while for Marxists and liberals, practice should follow theory, for

anarchists, theory needs to follow already-existing practice. As Ashanti

Alston explained, “One of the most important lessons learned from

anarchism is that you need to look for the radical things that we

already do and try to encourage them”. Anarchistic elements (called

“potentialities”) always exist within every social situation, like

“seeds beneath the snow” which can be grown into wider movements if

cultivated in the right way. And most anarchists as a rule don’t regard

it as crucial for people to call themselves anarchists as long as their

activities are anarchistic in their ethos.

Foundational Beliefs

At the baseline level, anarchists support the same triad of left-wing

values that animated the French Revolution of the late 1700s: freedom,

equality, and solidarity (the more gender-inclusive term for what’s

meant by “fraternity”), and believe that each of the three is a

necessary condition for the other two.

At the same time, they oppose what they call the “unholy trinity” of

authoritarianism: religion, capital, and the state, and believe that

each thrives of the existence of the the other two. “Religion” here can

also be understood to encompass authoritarian ideologies in general,

including: nationalism, ethnic supremacy, caste systems (like in the

Indian subcontinent), patriarchy, and heteronormativity, though this

doesn’t preclude the practice of non-authoritarian forms of spirituality

(as long as they don’t throw science and reason out the window).[14]

Anarchists tend to reject the traditional dichotomy of individualism vs.

collectivism as a false one. Instead, they promote what political

theorist Alan Ritter calls “communal individuality”: the view that the

free flourishing of the individual and self-realization are only truly

possible in a liberated society of equals, where the autonomy of one is

the precondition for the autonomy of all. For this reason, they see the

fights for individual freedom and for social justice as one and the

same.

They also tend to be extreme civil libertarians with regard to social

issues, stressing the sovereignty of the individual and advocating the

full freedom to do anything as long as it doesn’t interfere with the

equal freedom of others; valuing cultural unity-in-diversity and the

celebration of alternative and hybrid lifestyles. It should surprise no

one that anarchists were some of the first modern proponents of what’s

now called free love and polyamory[15]; as well as one of the first

political movements to support the inclusion of LGBT+ people. Unlike

many other libertarians and leftists, anarchists aren’t that concerned

with achieving same-sex marriage, but only because they tend to support

the abolition of marriage as a state-sanctioned institution.

Ethics

In terms of ethics, anarchists vary somewhat. While a minority adopt

ethical egoism and the belief that the only good is the satisfaction of

the individual will, most proponents of social anarchism gravitate

towards what are called consequentialist[16] ethics, and support

anarchism out of the belief that it would ensure the greatest freedom

and well-being for the greatest number of people.[17]

Peter Kropotkin, an anarchist philosopher and scientist, devised an

ethical system[18] that started from an evolutionary basis, and blended

elements of consequentialism with what would now be called virtue ethics

(virtue-consequentialism).[19]

What almost all anarchists would agree on, however, is that ethics

should be constructed on an entirely secular basis, with religion

playing no part in conceptions of what’s right and wrong. Indeed,

Mikhail Bakunin, arguably the theoretical founder of social anarchism,

claimed that all forms of hierarchical domination (rulership) in the

material world are ultimately rooted in supernatural beliefs. Some even

reject the use of the word “morality”[20], in the sense of an objective

standard of good and evil, and think that ethics is a separate concept;

supporting the creation of a “non-moral ethics” if you will. They also

tend to reject the concept of “rights” as a basis for ethics — as they

stem from either moral or legal fictions — in favour of freedoms and

equalities.

Roughly speaking, the principle of anti-domination serves as a grounding

for all other ethical considerations. Anarchists start from the premise

that it should be wrong to dominate others or to be dominated oneself,

then build the rest of their non-hierarchical modes of action from this

basic ethic. Mutual aid — voluntarily cooperating with others in ways

that benefit both the self and the one being helped — acts as the social

glue which binds anarchists together in their ethical commitments.

Also important to them on an ethical level is the concept of

prefiguration or “prefigurative politics”: the belief that the means

used to achieve an end must embody the content of that end in practice,

for the reason that means inevitably shape ends. It’s for this reason

that anarchists (usually) oppose the state-socialist tactic of taking

governmental power, as they hold that you can’t accomplish libertarian

ends via authoritarian means (though there are some anarchists who

advocate voting to prevent the state from becoming more authoritarian,

such as Noam Chomsky).

Human Nature

A common misconception is that anarchists believe Rousseau Was Right[21]

and that human nature is inherently good. On the contrary, one of the

main reasons they oppose large-scale concentrations of authority is that

they think the flaws in the human condition lead people to be corrupted

by too much power. This isn’t to say that they’re cynics about humans,

but they are cynics about hierarchical power and the effect it has on

people, fully agreeing with Lord Acton’s Dictum “Power corrupts.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Power over others that is, not

power over your own life. After all, powerlessness also corrupts.

Anarchists believe humans have two different tendencies running through

them as a result of their natural evolution: one that encourages people

to be selfish, egotistical jerks; and another that encourages them to be

sociable and cooperative.

• The Egotistic Tendency: Characterised by mutual struggle within and

between groups, dominative behaviour, and narrow self-interest.

• The Mutualistic Tendency: Characterised by mutual aid within and

between groups, solidarity, and enlightened self-interest.

They have a contextual view of human nature, believing that the

egotistic tendency or mutualistic tendency manifests itself more

depending on the environment people develop in, and that if you

structure the social environment in a more socialistic and cooperative

way, the mutualistic tendency is more likely to be nurtured than the

egotistic tendency. So anarchists are neither biological determinists

nor social constructionists but accept that humans are a product of both

natural evolution (first nature) and socialisation (second nature),

while holding to the normative belief that mutual aid proves more

beneficial to the human species than mutual struggle.

Long-Term Goals

Anarchism, meaning rulerlessness, could be summed up as a fully

horizontal plane of power relations, where each individual has maximal

freedom in the context of maximal equality and solidarity. The desire is

to decentralise (or “flatten”) power to such an extent that individuals

and groups can’t feasibly wield hierarchical authority over others, as

everyone’s power acts as a check on everybody else’s.

Most anarchists accept that a 100% egalitarian distribution of power is

probably impossible, but is still valuable as an ideal to continually

aspire to, dissolving hierarchy wherever it appears and pushing ever

closer towards complete liberation in all things.

The more specific institutional structures they see making up such a set

of social conditions are:

• A stateless participatory democracy, made up of voluntary

confederations of “free communes” (self-governing localities).

• A libertarian socialist “economy of the commons”, based on worker

self-management of enterprises, communal stewardship of resources, and

decentralised planning of the economy by both communities and

workplaces.

• A civil libertarian society in which anybody can do whatever they

want, as long as they’re not harming anybody else; embodying a spirit of

inclusiveness, justice, and unity-in-diversity.

Short-term and Mid-term Goals

While a stateless participatory democracy, libertarian socialist

economy, and civil libertarian society is their long term goal,

anarchists also have various short-term and mid-term goals which they

see as desirable both as a means of making life under capitalism/statism

more tolerable, as well as pushing society in a more liberatory

direction. These include things like:

• an unconditional Basic Income to replace existing welfare programs

• building a more unionised workforce

• creating more cooperatives

• localising/regionalising the production of goods (especially food and

manufacturing)

• creating alternative currency systems such as LETS

• pushing for interest-free banking to replace usury and fund

self-managed enterprises

• legalising recreational drugs

• legalising illegal forms of sex work and organising sex workers into

unions and cooperatives

• opposing intellectual property laws

• supporting animal liberation causes

• protecting natural environments from destruction

• supporting the replacement of fossil fuels with green energy

• reforming prisons and pushing for the release of political prisoners

• decentralising and ecologising the urban environment

• and reforming cultural attitudes that are sexist, racist, classist,

queerphobic, speciesist, or anti-ecological.

Key Principles

As a basic rule of thumb, political anarchism (despite its internal

differences) could be summed up in the following six principles:

• Individual Autonomy

• Voluntary Association

• Mutual Aid

• Self-Organisation

• Free Federation

• Direct Action

To clarify each of these principles in more detail ...

• Individual Autonomy

(Concerning persons as individuals)

The sovereignty of the individual person and their freedom to do

whatever they want as long as they’re not harming anyone else.

• Voluntary Association

(Concerning persons in relation to other persons and in relation to

groups)

The idea that all relations and institutions should be organised

voluntarily with the guarantee that any individual or group can

disassociate/secede from an association whenever they choose, and either

join another or found their own.

• Mutual Aid

(Concerning persons in relation to other persons and groups in relation

to other groups)

The practice of positive reciprocity; or helping others out just as they

help you out, building common bonds and providing the basis of

solidarity. Also called “mutuality” or “sociality” when described as a

concept instead of a practice. Contained in the principle is the

recognition that no act is fully self-interested (egoistic) or

self-negating (altruistic), but contains concern for both the self and

for others.

• Self-Organisation

(Concerning persons in relation to each other within groups)

Organising within associations being done through horizontal cooperation

and participatory decision-making by all members involved, also called

participatory democracy. While some anarchists have criticised what’s

commonly called democracy (i.e., representative government), they do

support decisions being made in a manner that is direct, participatory,

and autonomous. In fact, this is actually closer to what the word

democracy originally meant. Though this is only as long as the democracy

is on the basis of voluntary association and respects individual

autonomy.

• Free Federation

(Concerning groups in relation to other groups)

In keeping with their commitment to decentralisation of power,

anarchists support organising things on a large scale through

federations/confederations of voluntary, directly-democratic

associations, with each component unit remaining self-organising while

also being part of a larger whole that cooperates to take care of issues

that require a bigger geographical scope than local autonomous

associations allow.

• Direct Action

(Concerning individuals, groups, and all the ways they relate to each

other)

This means accomplishing tasks without mediation. Removing

representation and bureaucracy from activity, replacing both with

immediate (direct) self-activity of people doing stuff for themselves

and by themselves.

And all six could in turn be condensed into the formula:

Anarchism = Autonomy + Cooperation

Politics

The type of political system (polity) anarchists want to create could be

characterised as “democracy without the state”. Or more specifically, a

decentralised system of local-level participatory democracies. A

municipal-confederation in place of a nation-state.

The core unit of such a confederation is called a free commune, a

territorial entity just large enough to be an autonomous political body,

but small enough to be self-governing without the need for statist

bureaucracy; for example: a small town, a city ward, or a rural parish.

And each free commune would itself be composed of a variety of voluntary

associations, webbed together by mutually-agreed contracts into a larger

political-economic whole. In other words, an anarchist free commune is a

kind of “mini-republic” self-governed by its residents, where direct

participatory decision-making replaces political hierarchies.

The word “commune”, by the way, just means a local residential area

(roughly synonymous with “municipality”) and doesn’t have anything to do

with “communes” of the hippie or cult variety.

Autonomous Self-Organisation

While some older anarchist literature uses the word “political” as a

synonym for “statist”, later anarchists make a distinction between

politics (the collective administration of social affairs) and

statecraft (the monopolisation of politics by a centralised system of

rulership).

In the absence of centralised political power, anarchists desire

creating political structures which are autonomous — meaning voluntary

and self-organising — and where decision-making flows from the bottom-up

instead of the top-down.

While this can be characterised as democratic in the broad sense,

anarchists are not in favour of “democracy” in an uncritical capacity.

They support direct (face-to-face) forms of participatory democracy only

as long as they’re subordinate to the principle of autonomy, autonomous

democracy if you will. And some anarchists even dislike calling their

principles of decision-making “democratic” at all, owing to the

associations the word can have with majorities forcing their will on

minorities.

Still, since the 1960s, anarchists have used the word democracy in its

popular meaning as a shorthand way of describing how they want to make

collective decisions and coordinate things, as long as the process is

voluntary and respectful of the individual’s freedom to dissent and

disassociate.

This autonomous version of directly-democratic self-organisation takes

the form of:

• communal self-governance in politics

• workplace self-management in economics

• personal self-sovergnty in society

Anarchists also support decentralising decision-making power down to the

smallest and most localised scale possible, so as to ensure that the

maximum number of people are able to shape the political and social

policies that will affect them.

Free Communalism and Confederalism

The political dimension of anarchism is called free communalism – i.e.

free communes confederated together via mutually-agreed contracts. This

means replacing the nation-state and representative democracy with a

municipal-confederation and direct democracy; mainly organised through

local networks of participatory, face-to-face, neighborhood assemblies.

Each self-governing free commune (municipality) making up such a

confederation would be part of it voluntarily and free to secede from it

at any time. The desire is for “law” to become more a collection of

contractual agreements between residents of a given locality instead of

something externally imposed upon them by structural violence.

For taking care of issues that go beyond the local level, anarchists

propose creating inter-municipal “administrative councils”[22] made up

of mandated delegates (spokespersons rather than traditional

representatives in a parliament) who would communicate the wishes of the

community that sent them and negotiate the coordination of large-scale

projects, e.g., building a cross-country rail system.

The core “levels” of an anarchist confederation are:

• Municipal/Communal[23]

• Regional/Cantonal[24]

• National/Confederal.[25]

With an additional sub-level below the Municipal, the Local, made up of

the network of democratic assemblies. People at the Local level would

appoint spokespersons to a Municipal administrative council, the

Municipal council would then send one of its members to Regional

council, and so on; with regular rotations of the position to prevent

anyone becoming too comfortable in the job. Policy-making still lies

exclusively at the Local level, and is only ever done directly by the

people in popular assemblies, with administrative councils only having

the power to act as conduits for the decisions already made at the

ground.

Also, at the municipal scale, public utilities would be administered by

“commissions” organised by the particular service[26], e.g., sanitation,

telecommunications, transport, etc. The various “working groups” set up

around the General Assembly in Occupy Wall Street could be seen as a

small-scale version of this.

Historical Precedents

There’s actually some historical precedents for this kind of free

communalist polity, like the leagues of free cities and guilds that

existed in Europe during the Middle Ages (such as the Hanseatic

League[27]) which for a time looked like they could’ve represented a

decentralised alternative to the then emergent nation-states. [28] Other

examples would be the town hall democracy[29] that existed in much of

New England prior to American independence. That said, most anarchists

today would criticise these models for their religious basis, coercive

moral norms, and involuntary nature, and insist that all institutions in

an anarchist society should be established on the basis of voluntary

association, with the freedom to disassociate guaranteed to any

individual or group taking part.

More contemporary examples of anarchist(-ish) political systems are the

Zapatista[30] Councils of Good Government in southern Mexico — where

indigenous rebels seized rural and urban areas and declared them

autonomous from the Mexican government — and the network of communal

assemblies which have sprung up in the Rojava[31] (western Kurdistan)

region of North Syria; inspired[32] in part by the political theories of

anarchist Murray Bookchin. Other examples, which cropped up during the

twentieth century, occurred in Spain and Catalonia during the Spanish

Civil War[33], and in Ukraine (the Free Territory) roughly concurrent

with the Russian Revolution. Anarchist philosopher John P. Clark claims

that the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement in Sri Lanka is also roughly

anarchist in its principles, being inspired in large part by

philosophical anarchist Gandhi.

Affinity Groups

For socio-political concerns that are outside the scope of formal

politics and public deliberation, they support — in the present as well

as in the future — people forming what are called affinity groups[34];

small groups of no more than about twenty people who cooperate around a

specific issue or cause. Each affinity group does its own thing and

takes care of its own affairs, while also federating into “clusters”

(collections of affinity groups) who organise things through

spokescouncils made up of rotating spokespersons (or just “spokes” for

short).

Affinity groups usually start out as a collection of friends who unite

around a specific concern and attempt to build ties with other

like-minded groups based on mutual aid. In the present they tend to

focus more on struggles within communities than on workplace organising,

which tends to be the concern of trade unions.

Decision-making Principles

As for decision-making within such social or political institutions,

anarchists have a dislike for the notion that the majority should be

entitled to dictate to a minority about things, even a minority of one.

Having said that, most anarchists do support majority voting for

decisions as long as it takes place on a voluntary basis, with all

parties taking a vote agreeing in advance to be bound by the decision.

So again, for democracy, but only when it’s subordinate to individual

autonomy.

Some, however, are so opposed to the idea of “tyranny of the majority”

that they only support consensus decision-making, where even a single

person can veto a decision supported by 99% of the association. Most

anarchists today support a combination of consensus, majority voting,

and supermajority voting depending on the context.

According to anarchist theorist Michael Albert, the general principle to

hold to when making decisions is that each person should have

“decision-making input in proportion to the degree they’re affected by

the decision”. In other words, if you’re at work and want to put a

picture of your boyfriend on your desk, that’s a decision that only

affects you, thus only you should have decision-making input with regard

to that action. However, if you want to bring a boom-box to work and

blast anime theme songs at full volume, that’s a decision that affects

your co-workers, thus they should also get a say.

Forms of Power

Anarchists are often mischaracterised as being against all forms of

power and authority. With regard to authority, it would be more accurate

to say they’re always sceptical of authority, but are willing to accept

certain forms of it as justifiable as long as it is minimal, voluntary,

and above all, temporary. So a social directing committee set up during

an emergency and the parent/child or teacher/student relationships are

okay by anarchists, but permanent or even semi-permanent hierarchies of

command are not.

As for power, along with intersectional feminist theorists, anarchists

make a distinction between power-to(ability to do something) and

power-over (control of others), supporting the dissolution of the latter

so as to increase the amount of the former held by everyone — that’s

what “power to the people” means: decentralisation of power away from

centralised hierarchies to horizontal networks of individuals.

Anarchists wish to create situations in which power-to is equally

distributed so as no individual or group can be in a position to wield

power-over anyone else. There’s also a third form which anarchist Cindy

Milstein calls power-together, when people exercise their power-to

collectively as equals through horizontal cooperation. So the basic

anarchist view of power could be broken down as:

• Power-to: the basic sense of power as the capacity to affect reality.

The basis of individual autonomy.

• Power-over: power-to wielded as domination and/or manipulation of

others in hierarchical and coercive settings. The basis of rulership.

• Power-together (or “power-with”): power-to wielded as non-coercive,

non-hierarchical influence and initiative among people who view

themselves as equals. The basis of participatory democracy through

voluntary association.

Power Structures and the Ruling Elite

Power structures on the other hand are a slightly different matter. In

sociology and political science, “structures” are like the ingrained

habits of entire societies, constellations of relationships which shift

and alter themselves with changes in the distribution of power,

increases of knowledge, and changes in shared beliefs. Most methods of

studying a critiquing social structures could be classed as either

“methodological individualist” (or atomist, like most liberals) or

“methodological collectivist” (or holist, like most Marxists). The

former see personal agency as determining the social structure, while

the latter think the opposite is the case. Social anarchists take a kind

of middle path, seeing agency and structure as co-creating each other,

and placing the focus on the interrelations between individuals.

Anarchist eco-political theorist Alan B. Carter calls this approach

methodological interrelationism.

Anarchist sociologist C. Wright Mills claimed that the structure of

almost all societies was characterised by power being concentrated in

the hands of a social-political-economic ruling elite (though he used

the less specific term “power elite”). This goes beyond traditional

socialist conceptions of an economic ruling class. The ruling elite

includes the ruling class, but also those who wield other non-economic

forms of social power, like politicians, religious figures, celebrities,

public intellectuals, and media personalities. So while to be a member

of the ruling class means owning large amounts of capital (financial

wealth), you don’t necessarily have to be rich to be a member of the

ruling elite. Anarchists don’t believe that all groups comprising the

ruling elite have the same goals and use the same tactics to control

everyone else (many of them openly despise one another), but they are

united on certain key issues and their points of agreement are what

define the hierarchical structure of a society, and the dominant

ideology and ethos of the society which help reinforce the structure.

Anti-Bureaucracy

Despite anti-bureaucratic rhetoric nowadays coming from the right-wing,

anarchists have been staunch critics of bureaucracy as both an ideology

and practice since the mid 19^(th) century, and supportive of building

political structures that do away with it in favour of forms of

administration that rely upon direct participation, local autonomy, and

decentralised coordination.

Mikhail Bakunin attacked what he called the bureaucratic class (now more

often called the managerial class) and criticised Marxism out of the

belief that what it would bring about was not economic democracy, but a

“red bureaucracy”. In his essay God and the State he offered one of the

earliest theoretical critiques of what’s now called “technocracy” — rule

by an elevated class of experts. In the mid twentieth century, Colin

Ward lambasted the grey administrative rationality that pervaded much of

the post-war world after the construction of the welfare state (“which

trades social welfare for social justice”) and recommended bottom-up,

decentralist alternatives for organising society.

More lately, anthropologist David Graeber has outlined an anarchist

systematic critique of bureaucracy in his book The Utopia of Rules

(2015). He argues that contrary to neoliberal (market fundamentalist)

conventional wisdom, capitalist society has become more bureaucratic,

not less, with so-called free trade reforms and privatisation. The

organisational ethos of public and private institutions is now

indistinguishable, with both existing as part of a larger system for the

extraction of rents/profits for the benefit of a ruling elite; all of

which is backed up by an ever-increasingly militarised state system of

structural violence, saying, “Whenever someone starts talking about the

‘free market,’ it’s a good idea to look around for the man with the gun.

He’s never far away.”

Economics

If anarchist politics are “democracy without the state”, then anarchist

economics might be described as “democratic socialism without the

state”. While different visions exist among anarchist of what a

post-capitalist economic system should be like, a rough model they would

all agree on would be a decentralised network of horizontally-organised

enterprises — each one administering itself through worker

self-management. Differences emerge when it comes to issues like the

role of markets, the role of incomes and prices, and among social

anarchists regarding whether the economy should be primarily

worker-directed (by the democratic enterprises) or community-directed

(by the democratic popular assemblies), or some combination of the two.

Anti-capitalism

Economically, anarchists oppose capitalism (with the exception of

anarcho-capitalists), and instead advocate replacing private

corporations and wage-labour as the primary forms of enterprise with

self-employment, worker-run cooperatives, commons-based peer production,

and other economic institutions organised on a horizontal, rather than

hierarchical, basis. However, they are divided on what specific form a

post-capitalist, post-statist economy should take, as well as the best

means for achieving it — with some calling for the armed overthrow of

the state and corporations, and others calling for a nonviolent “dual

power” strategy in which federations of democratic cooperatives, popular

assemblies, affinity groups, and other institutions work together to

gradually replace hierarchical society by opting out of it.

The issue of capitalism might seem from the outside to be a divisive one

for anarchists, although this is only due to terminology. Most anarchist

literature, and most anarchists, define “capitalism” in the same way

Marxists do (the system of wage-labour, which according to Marxism is

exploitative). However, the term “capitalism” is also commonly defined

by non-anarchists as “free-market economics” (i.e., when all economic

activity takes place outside the state). Most anarchists consider the

two meanings to be separate concepts, with “capitalism” being used in

the same sense as Marxists and “free market” being used to refer to the

second definition.

For the remainder of this article, “capitalism” and “free market” will

be used with these definitions. Therefore, a person can be both

anti-capitalist and pro-market (i.e., arguing for a society of

self-employed people interacting and exchanging on a purely voluntary

basis; the mutualists and individualist anarchists share this position).

This was in common with classical liberalism. On the other hand, someone

can be pro-capitalist and anti-market by such definitions (arguably,

Mussolini-style corporatism fits this).

Hence, the anarchists from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon on were opposed

completely to what they called capitalism (i.e., the existence of

wage-labour, landlordism, and usury), with only the so-called

“anarcho-capitalists” supporting it. They find commonality, however, in

opposing the coercive mechanisms of the state, though often for

different reasons; and most anarchists don’t consider self-described

anarcho-capitalists (or “voluntaryists”, as they’re also called) to be

anarchists, considering the two terms to be mutually exclusive.

Class Analysis

In seeing themselves as part of an economic class struggle for

democratic, worker control of the means of production, anarchists place

strong emphasis on the importance of how economic classes affect human

society and shape the forms other trans-class hierarchies (race, gender,

sexuality, ecology) manifest themselves. They go beyond traditional

theories of class which see the primary classes as being the capitalist

class and the working class, seeing things more broadly as the ruling

class and the popular classes — which includes the traditional working

class but also every other economic category outside the ruling class.

Each “class” (singular) is itself composed of several smaller classes

(plural) which have at times competing interests with each other; such

as between public sector and private sector workers or between the

capitalist class and political class when it comes to the rulers.

Some anarchists also view class relations in triadic, not dualist,

terms, with three primary classes instead of two

• The Ruling Elite[35]

• The Managerial Class[36]

• The Popular Classes[37]

It’s the middle one, the managerial class, which have been traditionally

ignored by most class analyses. Their job is to manage the relations

between the ruling classes and the popular classes, and they often

occupy the most empowering forms of work relative to other forms of

labour done by the popular classes below them — which are most often

rote, monotonous, or dangerous.

Each of the classes have competing class interests and different desires

for what kind of economy and society they would like to create. The

ruling class want to maintain their position at the top, using

divide-and-rule tactics to keep everyone from uniting against them. The

managerial class want to push things in a more technocratic and

bureaucratic direction, putting themselves more at the forefront. The

popular classes want to unite worldwide, put aside racial, gender,

national, and religious differences, and create a economic system that

dissolves all economic classes and puts economic activity under popular

control.

The popular classes want economic equality. The managerial class wants

more equality (but not too much, as that would mean they would lose

their positions of privilege). While the ruling classes want to maintain

inequality as much as possible, only lessening in it when it threatens

to undermine the system itself.

Private Property vs. Personal Property

While frequently found criticising the institution of “private

property”, anarchists make what they see as an important distinction

between private property and personal property, opposing the former

while embracing the latter. The distinction is made when it comes down

to their standard of what should constitute legitimate claims to land,

dwellings, and personal items, which is generally guided by the

possession principle first laid out by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

Basically, if something is defined by (A) active personal use; (B)

consistent occupancy; and (C) with the provision that someone else isn’t

already doing so, you can claim it as your personal possession. For this

reason it’s also called the “use and occupancy” rule. (This doesn’t, by

the way, have anything to do with what’s called “homesteading”, which is

popular among many libertarian capitalists). So in other words,

anarchists fully support an individual’s ability to claim things like a

home, car, personal possessions, etc., but not large-scale productive

resources like factories, hard capital, or natural resources, which can

only be defined by absentee ownership.

In fact, this is why they argue — contrary to laissez-faire capitalists

who claim to be anti-statists — that capitalism couldn’t even exist

without the state, as its monopoly on the use of physical coercion is

what enables some people to claim private property rights over stuff

they don’t use or occupy themselves. A single individual could

theoretically defend their personal property with just a gun, while it’s

difficult to imagine how a businessman could defend his claim to a

factory or forest by himself without invoking the power of a state to

prevent people from taking over such resources themselves.

Common Ownership of the Means of Production

The productive resources in any given locality — the means of

production, distribution, and investment — anarchists claim, should be

“owned” (or rather stewarded) as commons[38] by all the residents of

that locality, then allocated to enterprises on a contractual basis,

with the resources they use reverting to being commons when the

enterprise is dissolved. This is called “usufruct”, in which the people

running an enterprise are not the owners of the resources they’re

employing, but are still granted user rights as long as they’re making

use of them. You could divide social anarchist categories of exclusive

use vs. open access into three levels:

• Commons: Stewarded by everyone in a locality. With two subdivisions,

open access (like forests) and zero access (like unused plant and

machinery)

• Usufruct: Still in common ownership but granted by the community to an

individual or group on a contractual basis for a particular purpose,

like to set up an enterprise. If the terms of the contract were broken

(say, if the enterprise used the resources it was given to wreck the

environment) then the property could be repossessed and put “back on the

commons”.

• Possession: Personal property defined by use and occupancy. Has two

subdivisions: inalienable (like arable land, which you can’t destroy)

and disposable (which you can destroy).

Social anarchists see these commons organised within each self-governing

community as forming part of a greater free commons (in contrast to a

free market) encompassing the entirety of the municipal-confederation.

Market anarchists, on the other hand, support these local commons within

the context of a larger free-market economy and tend to be more okay

with individual or worker ownership of enterprises rather than common

ownership.

Welfare State vs. Welfare Commons

It often confuses many libertarian capitalists how anarchists can claim

to oppose the state while still defending government-provided welfare

programs against cuts and privatisation. This is only because anarchists

tend to see the welfare state as it exists now as a lesser evil to a

potential corporate state in which almost everything is privatised and

the poor and marginalised are left without any kind of socio-economic

safety-net, which they see as an essential feature of any free

egalitarian society so as to give each person a baseline standard of

living — they call this the guaranteed minimum (or “irreducible

minimum”).

In the long term, however, they support providing this guaranteed

minimum through a network of voluntary associations nested in each

community rather than through a paternalistic state which ends up making

people dependent on it — i.e., a welfare commons in place of a welfare

state. This idea has its roots in the many forms of working class

self-help and mutual aid that existed prior to modern welfare programs,

such as friendly societies, mutual insurance, cooperatives, and trade

unions. In the short- to mid-term, anarchists are likely to support

proposals for a universal basic income over increases in public spending

on social programs.

They also see it as essential, in their long-term goal of dismantling

the state, to dismantle it in the right order, attacking first those

apparatuses of state power that prop up corporations and finance

capital, and leaving until last the aspects of the state that provide a

socio-economic safety-net.

Economic Analysis (Marxian Influences)

Unlike Marxism, there’s never really been a distinctly anarchist school

of economics — in terms of a systematic analysis and critique of

political economy — as most anarchists felt that Karl Marx’s critique in

Das Kapital was the definitive word on the subject. It’s worth pointing

out, though, that a lot of the ideas found in Marxian economics were

first articulated by the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, even if Marx

explored them more thoroughly. For this reason, many anarchists, while

opposing Marxist politics and sociology, still follow the Marxian school

of economics when it comes to critiquing capitalism. (One anarchist,

Wayne Price, has even written a whole book called Marx’s Economics for

Anarchists.[39]) However, they tend to do so with nuance, taking issue

with many of its more economic/technologically deterministic

conclusions. Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, Alexander Berkman, and

others also rejected the labour theory of value, claiming that the

question over what gives things value is so multi-faceted and complex

that it can never be adequately quantified.

Examining their writings on economic matters, the classical social

anarchists could be said to have had a (very rough) theory of value of

their own in which value and prices were co-determined by three

overlapping factors:

• Labour

• Utility[40]

• Power relations[41]

While some other economists of the time (eg: Alfred Marshall) argued

that both social labour and subjective utility (affected by supply and

demand) shaped value, rather than one or the other, one could argue that

the missing factor was power, which few but the social anarchists took

account of. The way the rough theory works is as follows: labour

contributions — mediated by various power relations — form the

“backbone” of value and the foundation for market prices, which then go

up or down slightly due to changes in supply and demand. And labour,

power, and utility each play a larger or smaller role than the others

depending on the context.[42]

Economic Analysis (Beyond Marxism)

In the late 20^(th) and early 21^(st) century, a few anarchist thinkers

attempted to develop economic ideas outside of Marxism. Michael Albert

and Robin Hahnel, in addition to creating a proposal for an anarchist

economic system called “participatory economics”, developed an analysis

of classes that differed from the Marxian Proletariat/Bourgeoisie

dichotomy. They claimed that there was also a third class in between

workers and capitalists called the “professional-managerial class” or

“coordinator class” that most leftists had failed to take into account.

They credit anarchist Mikhail Bakunin as one who did; he called it the

“bureaucratic class” and “aristocracy of labour”. Robin Hahnel

specifically also developed a critique of the capitalist

employer-employee relationship that doesn’t rely on the labour theory of

value or Marxian “exploitation theory”, but attacks it as unjust given

that it comes about due to an inequality of relative bargaining power

between workers and the owners of workplaces. Most of their theoretical

work is available on the website ZNet[43].

Greek political philosopher Takis Fotopoulos also developed a historical

analysis of capitalism and the market economy that views economic

systems as unified political-economic-social structures (just as

Kropotkin did), and claims that you can’t examine the economy without

also taking into account the political, social, and ecological factors

that shape economic behaviour. He also invented a theoretical social

anarchist political-economic system called Inclusive Democracy, which

blends the Social Ecology theories of Murray Bookchin with the ideas of

fellow Greek libertarian socialist Cornelius Castoriadis. His book,

outlining his core ideas, is available for free here[44].

The Mutualist writer Kevin Carson took the basic economic ideas of

Proudhon and the American individualist Benjamin Tucker and mixed them

together with elements of several economic schools into a synthesis laid

out in his book Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (available free

here[45]). In it, he devised a new version of the labour theory of value

(which incorporates aspects of the subjective theory of value) as well

as offering a history of capitalism that tried to show that it was the

state, not the market, that was the primary cause of most of the

problems with capitalism. In particular, he lays out how the state

subsidises and supports large-scale, centralised institutions instead of

smaller-scale, decentralist ones. He also put forward a vicious critique

of intellectual property laws (patents, copyrights, and trademarks),

which he claimed are the way states and corporations centralise power

today and create artificial scarcity where the Internet and new

technology could in fact create abundance.

David Graeber, in his first book Towards an Anthropological Theory of

Value, also developed a new version of the labour theory of value, which

expanded the traditional version of it by taking into account not just

so-called “productive” labour, but also the immaterial, symbolic, and

reproductive labour of persons and activities not generally regarded as

important to the formation of value; in particular the domestic and

caring labour of women — in a later essay[46] summarising this

formulation he renamed it the ethnographic theory of value. It places at

the centre of value-creation the social “production” of human beings

instead of the material production of consumables.[47]

In Debt: The First 5000 Years, he put forward an anarchist perspective

on the history of debt and money, arguing that in the modern era it has

become a excellent means for the 1% to keep control of the 99% by

keeping them subordinate under both financial and moral burdens (relying

on the maxim that “one must repay one’s debts”).

Incorporating Other Economic Perspectives

Social anarchists claim that the economic realm is really a subset of

the political realm, so most of what people think of as “apolitical”

economic issues are unavoidably embedded in political structures created

and backed up by state violence, almost always in the service of a

ruling elite. So economic realities are largely the product of political

realities, not the other way around as most neoclassical economists

claim. As anarchist historian Iain Mc Kay points out, Pierre-Joseph

Proudhon was one of the first economists to propose an endogenous theory

of money — that money has its origin in state systems — and so most

social anarchists have naturally incorporated modern monetary theory

(MMT[48]) into their analyses, which is most popular with the

Post-Keynesian school of economics.

Lately, especially among social anarchists, there’s been a lot of

support for the relatively new school of Green economics, which has much

in common with the Social Ecology methodology of Murray Bookchin and

makes many normative proposals that social anarchists find favour with,

like de-growth, a steady-state economy based on production-for-use

instead of for profit, localized production based on human-scale

technologies, and an unconditional basic income fulfilling the

guaranteed minimum.

More recently still, many social anarchists have taken on the ideas and

methodology of the power economics school of Jonathan Nitzan and

Shimshon Bichler, whose ideas have a remarkable similarity to the

economic theories of Peter Kropotkin. Their thesis is that there is no

real-world dichotomy between the economy and polity, and that capital

(self-expanding money) should be understood as commodified power,

symbolising the capitalists’ ability to creatively order and restructure

the world around them. [49]

The duo have even given a degree of critical support for social

anarchists in the wake of the Occupy movement, encouraging them to adopt

the capital-as-power[50] framework: “Anarchists imagine a world without

corporate/state organizations, nationalism, racism, institutionalized

religion and other xenophobic barriers to a humane society. And as

outcasts of a society besieged by all those ills, we share their

aspiration for direct democracy”. They’ve made their (very weighty) tome

encapsulating their theories available for free here[51].

A Social Anarchist Political Economy(?)

Peter Kropotkin said that while Marxian economics focuses on the

production process, and liberal economics focuses on the distribution

process, an anarchist economics should shift focus to the consumption

process, meaning that it should be oriented around how to best satisfy

people’s needs, maximising their biological, psychological, and social

well-being.

While no such school of social anarchist political economy (SAPE) was

ever developed, fragments of such a tradition can be found in the

writings of the social anarchists themselves on economics — focusing on

power, hierarchy, and ecology rather than just material conditions — and

there have been elements of other economic schools which approximated

social anarchist concerns, namely:

• Autonomist Marxism — examining processes of social production as a

whole, not just material production, and how class struggle (and social

struggle more broadly) is the main driver of socio-economic progress

• Post-Keynesianism — in particular its stress on debt and its theory of

money

• Green economics — in wanting to replace growth as a metric of economic

progress and view economies as embedded within ecological systems

• Capital-as-power — for its breaking of the dichotomy between politics

and economics and its examination of power relations at the roots of

economic realities

• Critical Realism — when applied to economics, Critical Realism tries

to analyse how people are both created by and co-creators of their

socio-economic circumstances

The first social anarchist essay anthology to explicitly focus on

economic issues The Accumulation of Freedom was released in 2012 and

encorporates insights from the above traditions as well as from social

anarchist theory generally. Another essay anthology focusing more

narrowly on participatory economics (a proposed social anarchist

economic model) called Real Utopia was released earlier. However, a

fully thought-out scholarly discourse with its own distinct class

analysis, theory of value, methodological framework, hypothesis of

socio-economic development, and other key elements remains to be

created, though the material described in the above section could

potentially provide the basis for one.

Social Issues

The view of anarchists on society is that most of its core problems are

rooted in interpersonal relations and institutional structures based on

unequal distributions of power (decision-making ability). In contrast to

Marxists, who see the primary problem as being “exploitation” (in the

economic sense), anarchists see the primary problem as domination (in

the wider social sense), with domination itself stemming from social

hierarchy.

Anarchists use the word “hierarchy” in a very specific sense, to mean

power relations in which one party is subordinate to the will of another

primarily to the higher party’s benefit; i.e., they aren’t opposed to

all systems which rank things one on top of the other, even though such

systems are often referred to as hierarchies. They view the amount of

freedom in a society as being in inverse proportion to the amount of

hierarchical power; pushing wherever possible for relations,

institutions, and structures characterised by horizontal cooperation and

individual autonomy. For this reason, anarchists regard a mere political

revolution (in institutional structures) to be insufficient, pushing for

a full social revolution in institutional structures, interpersonal

relations, and in social consciousness.

So in addition to opposing the power hierarchies of the state and

corporations, they also oppose the social hierarchies of racism, sexism,

queerphobia, ableism, colonialism, speciesism, and the domination of the

natural world for extractive purposes. Thus key components of anarchist

theory and practice are

• Anti-racism

• Anti-nationalism[52]

• Feminism[53]

• LGBT+ liberation

• Animal liberation[54]

• Radical environmentalism[55].

Lately, there’s also been broad support for the theory of

intersectionality[56], the idea that forms of oppression need to be

examined in relation to one another and how they “intersect” with one

another. In fact, many of the theories of anarcha-feminist Emma Goldman

and Eco-anarchist Murray Bookchin pioneered ideas which nowadays would

be called intersectional.

Of all the forms of hierarchy and domination, special importance is

given to class, which, while not being seen as the primary hierarchy, is

the all-inclusive hierarchy as economic exploitation affects everyone

subject to more particular forms of domination. So while anarchists

support uniting class-based campaigns for control over the means of

production with trans-class campaigns for inclusion and social equality,

they are opposed to “cross-class” alliances with members of the ruling

elite, even if they suffer some forms of non-economic domination (eg:

with gay or black members of the business class, with feminist female

politicians, or with corporate environmentalists).

The values of personal self-realisation and unity-in-diversity are very

important to anarchists. While they push for a democratic public realm

in which science and reason serve as the foundation for societal

organisation, their commitment to individual autonomy and civil

libertarianism means they also support a private realm in which people

are free to practice whatever kind of lifestyle or identities they want

as long as they’re not harming anyone else. Nudism, voluntary nomadism,

and exploration of alternative forms of sexuality have long been popular

among certain anarchists and supported by the broad anarchist movement

for their disruptive effects on conventional morality and authoritarian

social mores.

Communal individualism is seen as the personal and social ideal in place

of either individualism or collectivism as traditionally understood,

opposing both the commercialist egoism of market capitalism, and the

grey uniformity and group-think of authoritarian socialism. Other more

recent terms for this ideal are collective autonomy and participatory

culture. Overcoming the tension between self and society and the

manufactured conflict between the two is an issue anarchists have always

placed strong emphasis on. As Emma Goldman put it, “There is no conflict

between the individual and the social instincts, any more than there is

between the heart and the lungs: the one the receptacle of a precious

life essence, the other the repository of the element that keeps the

essence pure and strong. The individual is the heart of society,

conserving the essence of social life; society is the lungs which are

distributing the element to keep the life essence — that is, the

individual — pure and strong”.

Also, in contrast to libertarian capitalists (especially anti-state

voluntaryists who follow the Austrian school of economics) anarchists

are not approving of any social relations at all just because they’re

“voluntary”. Something being voluntary is regarded as necessary, but not

sufficient, to be considered anarchist; the other necessary component is

non-hierarchy. To put it as a formula:

• Anarchism = voluntary association + horizontal organisation

• Voluntaryism = voluntary association + any form of organisation

Some anarchists would go further and posit that without a

non-hierarchical structure, an arrangement cannot be truly voluntary due

to the unequal negotiating positions of the parties involved. After all,

members of the working class must eat, and without a job, their ability

to do so in a capitalist society is vastly decreased, so they are in a

fundamentally weaker negotiating position than their employers.

Conception of History

Historical Naturalism

Marxists have a particular analytical method they use to study history

and human society called historical materialism. To give a brief

synopsis of the theory, it says that human society is composed of

• A material/technological/economic Base (basically a society’s

technology and economic set-up) which determines the shape of its ...

• Ideological/cultural/legal Superstructure (basically, culture,

religions, laws, and the state).

Think of society as a cake with icing on top. The icing (Superstructure)

may make it look like it’s made of one thing, but when you peel the

icing away you see the real substance of the cake (its Base). And the

type of cake (Base) you have will always determine what kind of icing

(Superstructure) is on top for people to see.

The general idea is that if you want to figure out what’s really going

on in a society, you need to look at the nature of its technological and

economic infrastructure, and examine the interests of its ruling class,

drawing out the inherent contradictions latent within. Historical

materialism was developed in part as a reaction to the the philosophy of

idealism associated with GWF Hegel in 19^(th) century Germany, which

claims that it is primarily collections of ideas, not material forces,

which shape historical progress. Marx and Engels agreed that history

proceeds along a mostly linear path in different stages, but thought

that it was primarily technology and economics that drove this process,

with ideas largely being conditioned by material factors.

Many latter day scholars of Marxism argue that what’s now called

historical materialism was more Engels’ creation than Marx’. Marx was

more focused on the dialectical components of their theories and Engels

with the materialist parts.

While a few anarchists also use this method, the mainstream find it

tends to reduce social phenomena to economic relations and subordinates

non-economic forms of social struggle to class struggle. Peter Kropotkin

remarked that claiming human social behaviour was caused by economics

was like saying botany was “caused” by heat, ignoring every other

factor. Rudolf Rocker devotes the first chapter of his Nationalism and

Culture to attacking historical materialism and suggested the

will-to-power among humans was just as important to the development of

societies. Murray Bookchin used the same dialectical method as Marxists

to claim that material determinism was self-contradictory, stressing

that ideas were just as important to how people behaved, and that social

hierarchies couldn’t simply be reduced to economic classes. David

Graeber now claims that historical materialism is itself “a crude kind

of idealism” as it denies the material force ideal activities have, as

well as the ideal nature of material activities, with the

Base/Superstructure model itself being remarkably undialectical. So for

most social anarchists:

• material conditions are central, but not primary, to conditioning

human society and how it develops

• the relation between material conditions people live in and their

social consciousness is reciprocal, instead of the former determining

the latter

• non-economic power hierarchies (racism, sexism, queerphobia,

speciesism, ecological domination) are shaped by economic class

relations but are not reducible to them

• the drive of people to gain social power in general over others is at

least as important as the drive of ruling classes to gain economic

leverage over the producing classes

• human progress doesn’t proceed along a fixed path with a linear

trajectory

• changes in social consciousness can precede (and cause) changes in

material conditions

While this social-ontological perspective — in between idealism and

materialism — was never given a formal name, anarchist anthropologist

Brian Morris has used the term historical naturalism to describe it.

Meaning they accept the naturalist (non-supernatural) and realist view

of reality, and see economic factors and classes as vital to

understanding how the world works, but also place importance on

ecological and ideological forces as shapers of human behaviour and

development; in particular the effects of hierarchical power on both its

wielders and those subject to it. The drive of humans to have power over

others — from primeval foragers to modern nation-states — is seen as at

least as important a force of social development as the material

conditions they exist in. Jesse Cohn explains the anarchist conception

of history as being akin to working with clay: humans shape and reshape

the world using the material and ideational resources at their disposal,

equal parts created by and creators of their social evolution.

The historical materialist method is to “scientifically” draw out the

contradictions in capitalism and locate the most advantageous things for

proletarians (those subject to capital) to do. Historical naturalists on

the other hand also criticise capitalism (and all forms of domination)

on an ethical level. They see in human history that two organisational

forms have always been in tension with each other: the authoritarian

form (hierarchical and centralised) and the libertarian form (democratic

and decentralised). A historical naturalist then would attempt to tease

out the most libertarian elements (called “potentialities”) latent in a

society’s economic, social, and cultural make-up, and try to push them

to the forefront, driving the society in a more anarchistic

direction.[57]

This differs from Hegelian dialectical idealism and Marxian dialectical

materialism in that both of these see historical progress as proceeding

along a predetermined track, and concluding in a final stage or “end of

history” (Absolute Spirit for Hegel, stateless communism for Marx).

Historical naturalism would claim there is no final stage, and that

there are always paths not taken in history depending on whether or not

certain potentialities are actualised. Humanity could just as well

regress backwards into barbarism as achieve a utopia.

Many anarchists also combine historical naturalism with another approach

called complementary holism[58] (see the Philosophical Origins section

for more info on this), using both as tools for social analysis. Both

tend to be more “bottom-up” methodologies while Marxism tends to be

“top-down”.

Organic Society

Early forms of human community are generally believed to have been

mostly non-hierarchical and egalitarian by anthropologists and

archaeologists. Anarchists call this early form of humanity “organic

society” due to its connection to nature prior to its integration into

urban environments, which on one hand dissolved many tribal/ethnic

divisions that existed among different bands of humans, but on the other

led to some of the first solidified class divisions and the emergence of

debt, commercialisation, and made possible large-scale organised warfare

and imperialism. This dual-nature of the city is illustrative of the

dialectical tension between the “legacy of freedom” and “legacy of

domination” in human history, as the two are usually wound up together

like the double helix structure of DNA.

This move from organic society to civilisation (city-based culture)

created a kind of rift between the natural world (first nature) and

human activity (second nature), as the relation of humans to the natural

world gradually came to be seen as one of hierarchy — in line with the

increasingly hierarchical relations of humans towards each other — in

which ecology was increasingly seen as as mere “resources” to be

extracted from. Though this didn’t become a major environmental problem

until the coming of the imperialist nation-state and capitalism, where

human alienation from the natural world became even more pronounced,

especially seeing as the ruling classes overseeing this extractivist

process were insulated from the ecological consequences of their actions

— which often happened to indigenous populations of other countries, who

often rebelled violently to defend their natural environments. Because

of their rootedness in the natural world, organic societies could be

said to have more of a connection to nature, and more likely to defend

it from spoiling.

Anarchist political scientist James C. Scott argues that many organic

societies existing in the present — like the people of Zomia[59] in

South-East Asia — far from not having discovered the state and

commercial civilisation, consciously resisted integration into them, as

every part of their social structure seems consciously designed to keep

the state at arms length. This tends to be part of a recurring theme in

human social evolution, for “hill people” to prefer organic society and

“valley people” to build cities and states. Not to say that organic

societies are inherently less dominative than city-dwellers. Many

hunter-gatherers and hunter-horticulturists are very patriarchal and

violent towards other tribes, while some archaeological evidence

suggests that the earliest cities may have been quite egalitarian.

The Emergence of Hierarchy

Mikhail Bakunin, Rudolf Rocker, and Murray Bookchin all linked the rise

of social hierarchies with supernatural beliefs (religions, gods, and

demons) which created what the latter called “epistemologies of rule”:

conceptions of the universe itself being structured along hierarchical

lines. The first physical-world hierarchies believed to have arisen were

either age-based or sex-based, followed by chiefdoms, then with the rise

of agriculture and cities came formal monarchies and oligarchies. With

these also came the rise of economic classes (ruling classes, popular

classes, with managerial classes in the middle) which encompass all

other existing hierarchies of age, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality.

Elisee Reclus tried to make clear that ecological and geographic factors

played a large part in conditioning how a society would evolve, and that

social development wasn’t a one-way street in which humans start out as

non-hierarchical bands of hunter-gatherers and end up as centralised

states with market economies. This is largely imposing the particular

way in which European societies evolved (unique to the temperate zone of

the Earth) upon the rest of the world, which has entirely different

ecological conditions and geographical layouts, and thus different

conditions for human development. Because hierarchy and centralised

political power came to define Western Europe, many historians and

social scientists tend to look at such organic societies as “backwards”,

seeing their own cultures as the image of what they need to “catch up”

to.[60]

Murray Bookchin offered an anarchist account of the development of human

societies from a social-political and ecological perspective in his work

The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy.

David Graeber put forward a similar account from an economic perspective

in Debt: The First 5000 Years. Earlier accounts can be found in Mutual

Aid: A Factor in Evolution by Peter Kropotkin and Nationalism and

Culture by Rudolf Rocker. What they all have in common is viewing

hierarchy and domination as sources of violence and misery, and seeing

individual autonomy and horizontal cooperation as liberatory

alternatives. They also see the relationship between material forces and

social ideas/consciousness as reciprocal (co-creating each other) rather

than the Marxist view of the former determining the latter.

None of them try to romanticise organic societies of the past or

present, or say that the coming of civilisation wasn’t a positive

movement. Merely that the linear view of history associating the

emergence of hierarchy and centralised power with progress is

wrongheaded, arising from a largely Eurocentric worldview. The state may

have been a “historically necessary evil” if we wanted to have

intellectual and technological advancement, but there there may also

have been less hierarchical paths that could have been taken had

conditions been different or different forces prevailed.

Money, Markets, and Market Economies

The conventional narrative about the origin of money and markets in

liberal political economy (the neoclassical, Keynesian, and Austrian

schools) is that early humans started out bartering their goods with

each other (“I’ll give you three chickens for a goat/five apples for a

bag of eggs”), from which they then invented money to make exchanges

more convenient, followed by the spontaneous emergence of markets and

complex credit systems to accompany them.

• Communal economies/Barter —> Money/Markets —> Credit (then states)

The problem with this narrative is that there isn’t a shred of

archaeological or anthropological evidence to support it. As David

Graeber outlines in his anarchist history of debt and money, most early

organic societies actually had “gift economies” in which land and

resources were communally owned. Barter only tended to occur between

people who didn’t know each other, sometimes even enemies. Far from

states being antithetical to markets, the first markets were in fact

created by early states in Mesopotamia (and probably Mesoamerica) as a

way of breaking up and “de-cluttering” bureaucratic administration.

Credit systems in early cities and states preceded both formal monetary

and barter systems. Official money originally emerged from the

commercialisation of war debts from imperial conquests. Barter, far from

being a form of proto-money, is in fact an attempt to replicate money

among people who are already used to market-monetary structures. So a

more accurate picture of economic history would be:

• Communal economies/Credit —> (then states) Markets/Money —> Barter

What this narrative also reveals is that when people are left alone,

they tend to gravitate to commons-based economic structures (sometimes

horizontal, sometimes hierarchical), while market-monetary calculation

only tends to become the organising principle of the economy and society

when the threat of violence is present, such as from a band of raiders

or a state.

Also, markets are not exactly the same thing as market economies.

Markets have existed as parts of economies for as long as state-like

structures have existed, but always within wider social economies

subject to political and communal regulations. For example, the Islamic

Caliphate had, by today’s standards, very open markets, but in the

context of a social-economic system in which usury (making money off of

money without producing anything) was expressly banned on moral grounds.

It was only with the enclosures of the commons[61] that the market

(singular instead of plural) became the central organising factor in

national economies, when European states “nationalised” the dispersed

local markets that were embedded in broader communal economies. These

national market economies later became internationalised via imperial

conquest and colonial subjugation of indigenous populations, trying to

integrate them into the global state-market system that was being

established in the Age of Empires.

This age was also the beginning of the growth imperative, (also called

extractivism) which associated progress with increased commercial

expansion and the enlargement of industrial output. This also had

ecological implications as growth increasingly came to be associated

with the conquest of nature and treating it hierarchically as both an

inexhaustible well of resources and a dumping ground for any negative

externalities. Takis Fotopoulos documented this process and the ideology

underpinning it in the first part of his Towards an Inclusive Democracy.

The Nation-State vs. The Municipal-Confederation

Contrary to Marxists, who view the coming of the nation-state and

capitalism as inevitable and “progressive” relative to feudalism, social

anarchists view them as neither. Before the nation-state and capitalism,

there existed alternative political and economic forms which anarchists

think could have provided a decentralist alternative. For example, the

free cities and communes (both kinds of autonomous “municipalities”)

that existed outside feudal authority in medieval Europe, which often

formed into leagues/confederations with each other — such as the

Hanseatic League[62] and city-republics of Italy. Also the independent

guilds of artisans and other workers, and the systems of commons which

allowed rural populations to sustain themselves without wage-labour.

Similar structures existed in Africa in the form of tribal leagues and

among the indigenous peoples of North America, especially the Iroquois

Confederacy.

Peter Kropotkin’s long essay The State: Its Historic Role[63] offered an

anarchist analysis of these institutions and the historical “path not

taken”.

The ascendant nation-states (made more powerful from 1500 on through

colonialism outside of Europe) and the municipal-confederations for a

time existed in tension with one another. Through a mix of economic

strangulation and military coercion through raids and wars, the

nation-state won out over the municipal-confederations. This provided

the political ground for capitalism to be born through the enclosures of

the commons, which threw peasants off the land they collectively

managed, forcing them to seek a living through wage-labour in the

industrialising towns and cities. And of course the conquest of the

Americas and Africa[64] forced the native peoples of those regions into

the European nation-state model and the early forms of capitalism and

landlordism. This destruction of commons-based forms of economy[65] and

their replacement by commercial ones was the first form of what’s now

called the accumulation of capital (financial wealth).

Peter Kropotkin objected to the Marxist term for this process,

“primitive accumulation”, as it implied that it only happened in the

past. In reality, state and capitalist dispossession of the commons is a

continual and ongoing process which continues to this day, especially in

more agrarian parts of the world like India and South America.

Gender Liberation

The first person to call himself an anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,

had some pretty nasty sexist views. However, virtually every single

self-identified anarchist after him has rejected his patriarchal beliefs

and argued that they were actually in contradiction to everything else

he stood for as a proponent of a non-hierarchical society. Since the

19^(th) century anarchists have been at the forefront in pushing for the

equality of women with men, liberty in sexual affairs, and freedom of

gender expression; most often in conflict with dominant mores and even

with other radicals.

Anarcha-feminism

While the term “anarcha-feminism” was only coined in 1975 by the

second-wave feminist Peggy Kornegger, in the sense of advocating full

gender equality anarchism has arguably been feminist in its ethos since

at least the 1860s. Emma Goldman was one of the first anarchist writers

to specifically address gender issues and the plight of women in her

essays and activism, and was also one of the first to attack homophobia

and the persecution of non-heterosexual people. Unlike the first-wave

feminists however, early anarcha-feminists like Goldman, Lucy Parsons,

Louise Michel, He Zhen[66], and Voltairine De Cleyre saw little point in

getting votes for women, as they believed that statist representative

democracy would only continue women’s subordination but with women’s

complicity. Early anarchist feminists examined women’s lack of freedom

not only in relation to their legal inequality to men and patriarchal

cultural attitudes, but to their lack of economic self-reliance, as most

of the labour traditionally done by women — domestic work, raising

children, emotional support — wasn’t remunerated, leaving almost all

women economically dependent on men. The first explicitly feminist

anarchist group, La Voz de la Mujer (“The Voice of Women”) was founded

in Argentina in 1896[67].

During the Spanish Civil War, a famous anarchist women’s group called

the “Mujeres Libres” (“liberated women”) was founded to push for female

equality within the context of the emergent anarchist society, as most

male anarchists at the time still harboured sexist attitudes[68],

despite their radicalism in other areas; combined with the problem of a

lot of them using the free love[69] (polyamorous) ethos of anarchism as

an excuse to bone just about any girl in sight, then getting mad when

the girls did the exact same thing in reverse. (Sound familiar?[70]).

Although there has always been a feminist current in anarchism as a

whole, it’s only lately that anarcha-feminism has made progress at the

theoretical level. Within the wider feminist movement, anarcha-feminists

advocate[71] what’s called intersectionality, the view that women’s

domination must be seen as part of an intersecting web of different

hierarchies such as class, race, and sexuality, and that there may be

areas where women are actually at an advantage relative to men. They

also tend to oppose “sex-negative” forms of feminism which want to ban

pornography, prostitution, and BDSM. Hardline criticism also comes in

for anti-transgender forms of feminism like radical feminism and

political lesbianism.

Queer Anarchism

Anarchists were also some of the first political voices to push for the

equality of LGBT+ people. The first ever gay magazine Der Eigene (The

Unique) was started by individualist anarchist Adolf Band and inspired

by the philosophy of Max Stirner. German anarchist psychoanalyst Otto

Gross also wrote extensively about same-sex sexuality in both men and

women and argued against its discrimination. Male anarchists such as

Alexander Berkman, Daniel Guerin, and Paul Goodman also discussed their

gay and bisexual experiences in their writings. Lately, the famous queer

theory scholar Judith Butler has identified as a “philosophical”

anarchist and contributed material to anarchist essay anthologies.

Anarcha-queer people and writers are critical of the institution of

marriage, seeing it as a restrictive institution historically tied to

female subordination. By contrast, they tend to be highly supportive of

polyamory, which has long been a part of anarchist practice under the

term “free love”, and encourage people to stop viewing romantic and

sexual relationships through both a heteronormative and mononormative

lens — the former means viewing things as if heterosexual,

heteroromantic, and cisgendered relations are the the only legitimate

forms of sexual/romantic/gender expression. The latter means viewing

things as if monogamy is the only legitimate type of sexual/romantic

relationship.

For those who were into monogamy, anarchists proposed the idea of “free

unions” which weren’t sanctioned by state legality. The idea being that

people could still hold a ceremony to solidify their long-term romantic

commitment and refer to each other as husband or wife, but their union

wouldn’t be a legal practice, so there would be no such thing as divorce

other than people agreeing to split up.

Race and Nationality

From the late 1800s, anarchism has been a wordwide movement which tried

to unite the popular classes of the whole world across national

boundaries with the goal of replacing capitalism, statism, and hierarchy

generally with an international confederation of confederations of

libertarian socialist societies. It thus naturally opposes all forms of

racism, ethnic supremacy, nationalism, colonialism, and imperialism (the

subjugation of a people by an external state).

It takes account of how non-white peoples are made into “the Other”

(with a capital-o) and sees as an essential component of social

revolution the dissolution of white supremacy as both an

institutionalised and mentally internalised form of hierarchy —

especially by those who may not realise they have internalised it.

Differences in race and nationality are commonly weaponised by ruling

elites as a means of dividing people who would otherwise have common

cause in opposing their rulership. These differences are made to form

the basis of hierarchies as part of a divide-and-rule tactic. For

example, the category of “the White race” was only invented in the 1600s

as a way to prevent African slaves and European indentured servants in

the American colonies from joining together to overthrow the colonial

ruling class.

As a case in point of just how artificial the concept of “whiteness” is,

when it was first devised, it only applied to people from European

Protestant countries. It specifically excluded the Irish, Polish, Slavs,

Spaniards, Italians, and Jewish people — all of whom were only admitted

into the White race in the 1800s with the influx of Catholic and Jewish

migrants to North America, which served to prevent them making common

cause with Black, Native American, and East Asian workers. Hispanic

people even went back and forth in the government’s eyes from being

non-White, to White, then back to non-White again depending on the

political and economic situation.

Similar divide-and-rule tactics were historically employed in Latin

America, Australia and New Zealand, and in Southern Africa (witness the

legacy of Apartheid).

Race and Colonialism (Historical)

Anarchists have attacked all forms of racism since very early on, and as

labour organisers were founders of some of the first trade unions to

organise across racial lines, when most other unions at the time were

only interested in uniting workers of their own ethnicity. They

organised multi-racial unions of blacks and whites in South Africa,

Korean immigrant workers with native Japanese in Japan, blacks, whites,

and mixed workers in Brazil and Argentina, whites and Amerindians in

Peru and Mexico, Afro-Cubans and Euro-Cubans in Cuba, whites, blacks,

and indiginous peoples in the US and Australia (under the IWW) and in

Europe tried to organise Jewish people with Gentiles when so much of the

subcontinent was fervently anti-semitic.[72]

As a result, anarchism and syndicalism tended to thrive in the late

19^(th) and early 20^(th) century among immigrant populations and in

more agrarian (colonised) parts of the world, what would now be referred

to as the Global South.

The reason it had the leg over Marxism at this period in history was

that Marxism tended to think socialism could only be established in

heavily industrialised countries (eg: the U.S., Britain, Germany) and

that imperial conquest of the Global South was a progressive development

— as it would bring industrialisation and centralised governance, which

in turn would make socialism feasible. Anarchists rejected this view,

and also saw revolutionary potential in agrarian populations which

hadn’t yet been industrialised.

This changed however when Lenin took power in Russia, who, as well as

establishing the first so-called example of “socialism” on a national

scale, changed traditional Marxist theory to advocate a “two-stage”

theory of revolution, in which nationalist attempts to throw off

imperialism in the Global South were okay as he believed capitalist

imperialism had now reached a stage in which it was no longer

progressive, and thus no longer useful for creating socialism. And so

many peoples in the Global South who would have previously supported

anarchism and syndicalism started to gravitate to Marxism and

nationalism.

Race and Colonialism (Today)

Where it still had a presence in the Global North, anarchism tended to

be an overly white political movement, while still being hostile to all

forms of legal and cultural racism. In the last few decades however,

anarchist people of colour[73] (POC) [74] have been coming more to the

forefront and working out means of struggle[75] which challenge both

white supremacy along with capitalism, the state, and all other forms of

domination.

African-Americans in particular have formed a distinct tendency known as

Black anarchism, which integrates traditional anarchist analyses of

class and hierarchy with strategies unique to the African-American

experience. They oppose the notion that oppressed races/nationalities

can simply put aside their identities in favour of a broad “class

solidarity” which fails to acknowledge the extra privileges white

workers enjoy. Ashanti Alston[76] opined “Every time I hear someone talk

about my people as if we are just some ‘working class’ or ‘proletariat’

I wanna get as far away from that person or group as possible,

anarchist, Marxist, whatever”. Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin has written a book

outlining a distinctly African-American version of the social anarchist

project called Anarchism and the Black Revolution[77].

It’s essential to take account of the fact that oppressions are

contextual, and while white people are the most dominant racial group in

the Global North, other ethnicities occupy that position in different

parts of the world. In most of the Middle East, for example, Arabs enjoy

the position of dominance relative to Kurds, Yezidis, and other groups.

Similarly, in Tibet the dominant racial group is Han Chinese, with

Tibetans in particular facing vicious discrimination.

In India, the religious and status-based hierarchies of the caste system

fulfil most of the same criteria for racism in other parts of the world

and function as a similar means of “racialising” people into divided

ranks based on heritage, leading to discrimination, exclusion, and

violence. The levels of oppression and exclusion suffered by the Dalit

(“untouchable”) caste in India could in many ways put Jim Crow laws and

Apartheid to shame.

Decolonisation

An issue that’s become pressing for anarchists in recent years is the

plight of indigenous peoples[78] in the Americas and Australia, who

often live in wretched economic conditions and are treated as virtual

aliens on the land masses their people have spent millennia on.

Recognising the (mostly unacknowledged) privileges being classified as

white brings someone — especially in parts of the Global North where POC

are ethnic minorities — is something white anarchists have to try to

come to terms with and try to work against in terms of how they relate

to people of colour — especially if they happen to live on colonised

land.

Nationhood and National Liberation

Anarchists are opposed to nationalism, both because it encourages

national chauvinism and xenophobia, and because it is inevitably tied to

establishing a nation-state in which the popular classes and ruling

classes are seen as having shared interests. A nation-state is not the

same thing as a sense of nationhood however. German anarchist Gustav

Landauer said that a nation could simply be thought of a “a community of

communities” and didn’t necessarily have to be tied to a state. So while

anarchists have the long-term goal of erasing all national borders which

divide one state from another, they still think nations would continue

to exist as a shared collective identity among people — but without the

“us and them” mentality that pervades the concept now.

Nor is national liberation synonymous with nationalism, although the two

most often have been tied together. National liberation refers to the

struggle of a people — who consider themselves a nation — to emancipate

themselves from colonial rule by an imperial power. Unlike nationalism,

this doesn’t necessarily involve a wish to set up a separate

nation-state with a native ruling class to replace foreign rule. It has

the potential to be anti-statist, anti-capitalist, and internationalist

in its aspirations. Most anarchists have recommended working within

national liberation struggles and trying to push them in an anarchistic

direction from inside them. They remain very sceptical of anything

relating to nationalism or any ideology which venerates one group of

people above another.

Ecology

Most of the classical anarchists didn’t place a huge focus on ecological

issues, but some — most notably Peter Kropotkin[79] and Elisee

Reclus[80] — explored ideas and raised concerns in their geographical

and scientific writings which today would be regarded as

proto-environmentalist and expressive of an ecological worldview. Reclus

in particular deserves credit for being pretty much the first person to

espouse an unambiguously green perspective in his scholarship.[81]

Since the late 1960s, when green concerns became more of an issue on the

world stage, new trends in anarchism emerged which added an

environmental focus to its anti-authoritarian ideas, eventually leading

to a new tendency called eco-anarchism or green anarchism.

Eco-anarchists were early advocates of replacing fossil fuels with green

energy, protecting wilderness, animal liberation, localising food

production, and ecologising urban landscapes. Many also find that

viewing the lived environment in terms of its bioregions[82] instead of

nation-states is a good way of reorientating oneself to an ecological

worldview: non-hierarchy, mutual aid, conservation, and decentralism.

Social Ecology

“Social Ecology”[83] was coined by Murray Bookchin, whose book Our

Synthetic Environment was released six months before the more famous

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, the book widely credited with

kickstarting the modern environmentalist movement. Social Ecology takes

the anarchist perspective of seeing social problems as stemming from

hierarchy and domination and applies it to humanity���s relation to

nature: seeing the negative way humans treat the environment — such as

pollution, landscape spoiling, and animal cruelty — as being rooted in

the negative ways humans treat each other. As a solution, Social

Ecologists seek to utilize technology for ecological rather than

profit-driven ends and to decentralize institutions into small-scale

eco-communities operating through direct-democracy.

At the theoretical level, it views the world as divided into:

• First Nature (the natural world) The wilderness landscapes humans

first emerged from and non-human animals; usually thought of as simply

“nature” as distinct from “culture”.

• Second Nature (the human social milieu) Everything created by human

efforts: cultured landscapes, farm land, gardens, and cities; usually

thought of as being separate and distinct from nature but in fact

existing within it.

The problem, Bookchin claimed, was that humans developed ways of living

together that were based on hierarchy and domination instead of

democracy and cooperation. This in turn meant that they applied this

same hierarchical logic to first nature, treating it as something to be

dominated and extracted from instead of treated in a mutualistic manner.

The goal therefore should be to restructure second nature (human

society) in a a libertarian and egalitarian way so as to reintegrate it

with first nature, forming a dialectical synthesis of the two he called

“free nature”.

Other Social Ecologists besides Bookchin include political scientist

Takis Fotopoulos, anthropologist Brian Morris, political activist Janet

Biehl, philosopher John P. Clark, anarcho-syndicalist Graham Purchase,

and several Scandinavian activists associated with the online journal

New Compass[84], though the latter tend to see themselves as

non-anarchists while still remaining libertarian socialists.

Social Ecology tends to be sceptical of other green schools of thought

who blame humans as a whole for environmental problems instead of

hierarchical social structures, as well as the more “mystical” forms of

Eco-philosophy which conceive of nature in religious, as opposed to

rational terms.

An introductory essay by Bookchin is available here[85].

Others

Other green anarchist movements such as Deep Ecology and

anarcho-primitivism came later and see ecological problems lying not in

the authoritarian ways humans treat each other, but in humanity itself

as a species. While Social Ecology was developed within the social

anarchist movement, Deep Ecology was developed outside it by the

Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess and then caught on among many green

anarchist activists in the Pacific Northwest. Deep Ecologists believe

that all life forms have a right to existence apart from or even in

opposition to human needs, and society must be radically restructured to

accommodate this.

Primitivists move even further, believing the human population must be

significantly reduced, with the few humans that remain going back to a

hunter-gatherer way of life, leaving behind all technology more

sophisticated than those found in the neolithic era. As you might

expect, Social Ecologists and primitivists do not like each other, with

most social anarchists contesting[86] the claims of primitivists to even

be anarchists.

While primitivism exerted a large influence upon anarchist activism in

the 1990s and early 2000s, it has seen a decline since then [87] with

Social Ecology coming back in popularity after Bookchin’s death in 2006.

It has exerted a large influence on the social-political thought of the

Kurdish revolutionaries in Turkish and Rojava (Syrian) Kurdistan,

especially its focus on confederated municipalities running themselves

through direct democracy, and on their aspirations to redesign their

urban areas as Eco-cities composed mostly of green spaces.

Technology

Despite some more contemporary tends among anarchists towards

technophobia and neo-Luddism, the broad anarchist tradition has been

largely enthusiastic and supportive of the liberatory potential of

technology to remove needless toil from work, automate production, and

enhance communication and transport among regions. They have no love,

however, for the kind of centralised, mass production systems of

technology which have dominated economies since the Industrial

Revolution. Peter Kropotkin, in his book “Fields, Factories, and

Workshops”[88], recommended radically decentralising the scale of

technologies, localising production so as to move closer to communal

self-sufficiency, and integrating mental and manual labour.

Later, in the 1960s, Murray Bookchin claimed that decentralist and

human-scale technology was the only means to provide a high standard of

living while maintaining ecological balance. Social anarchists think one

of the main problems of capitalism regarding technology is that it

actually holds technological innovation back, channelling its

development into producing destructive military weapons and planned

obsolescence in consumer goods instead of building things to last and

eliminating dull, dirty, and dangerous forms of labour with automation.

Nowadays there’s a lot of anarchist support for micro-manufacturing,

small-scale shop production, the open-source hardware movement[89], and

of course enthusiastic support for the Internet and especially the free

software movement[90]. There’s also considerable crossover with the

Peer-to-Peer[91] (P2P) movement as well, in which the non-proprietary

sections of the Internet are viewed as an actually-existing free

commons, whose principles of decentralised cooperation, horizontal and

networked association, and participatory organisation should be expanded

to the so-called real world.

Technological Evolution

In line with the anarchist conception of history (see above) that for

every form of progress achieved through hierarchy and centralisation

there was a horizontal/decentralist “path not taken”, anarchists apply

this same analytic to technology. Just as Kropotkin believed it may have

been possible for politics and economics to evolve through

municipal-confederations instead of nation-states, he also thought it

may have been possible to avoid the brutal, polluting, and centralised

shape the industrial revolution took under capitalism; that it may have

been possible to have had “industrialisation from below” led by guilds

and small-scale shop production had federative and commons-based forms

prevailed. He wrote a book, Fields, Factories, and Workshops[92], laying

out a decentralist, cooperative, and ecological alternative to

capitalist and statist kinds of technology.

Inspired in large part by Kropotkin, American left-libertarian theorist

Lewis Mumford put forward a roughly historical naturalist history of

technology, or more broadly speaking, “technics” — this analysis was in

turn taken up by social anarchists like Murray Bookchin and market

anarchists like Kevin Carson. Technics comes from the Greek techne,

which refers to both techniques and technologies, basically ways of

doing things (by human or machine hands) which can be formalised and

systematised. This view of technological evolution hypothesises three

phases in the development of technics since the Middle Ages:

• The Eotechnic Phase[93]

• The Paleotechnic Phase[94]

• The Neotechnic Phase[95]

With the coming of the Internet and computerisation one could argue that

we are now in a fourth phase which could be called the Cybertechnic

Phase, which, like the neotechnic phase, is structurally decentralist,

but is being used by centralist institutions for hierarchical purposes;

with artificial scarcity created by intellectual property when

cybertechnic technology offers the possibilities for real abundance.

Murray Bookchin claimed in the 1960s that the then new cybertechnic

technologies and eco-technologies provided the preconditions for a

post-scarcity economy if only they were developed in a decentralist,

democratic, and liberatory direction.

Technics and Metis

James C. Scott takes a similar views of technics, also stressing the

importance of another kind of knowledge called “metis” (another Greek

term).

• Technics: (Techniques and technologies) Knowledge and practices which

can be formalised and systematised.

• Metis: More nuanced knowledge and practices which can’t be boiled down

to a set of formal rules. Basically practical, on-the-ground methods of

getting stuff done that exist only a series of “shorthands” between

working people.

Scott claims that while states and other centralised institutions

require metis to get stuff done, their very function is ironically

premised on its lack of importance. They justify their existence on the

idea that decentralised, commons-based forms of organising are inferior

to centralised hierarchies, while at the same time relying on people to

“go beyond the rulebook” and take practical initiative (metis). Colin

Ward said similar things regarding how the “formal economy” is dependent

upon the workings of the “informal economy” like unpaid labour by women

and forms of cultural creativity which are co-opted for commercial

purposes. This, anarchists claim, represents the contradictions inherent

in centralised hierarchies and the superiority of decentralist and

directly-democratic alternatives.

Social Institutions

Changing the overall ethos of society and culture in intellectual terms

isn’t regarded as sufficient for building a directly democratic world

and anarchists see the need for social institutions (that aren’t

strictly political or economic) to solidify non-hierarchical and

libertarian relationships.

Education

Anarchists have always placed a strong emphasis on education, in

particular self-education and teaching tailored to the needs to the

individual learner. For this reason they tend to support democratic

schools[96] in which students themselves collaborate with teachers in

forming the curriculum and the school environment functions more to

facilitate self-education than to proscribe a fixed standard that each

student should adapt themselves to. Francisco Ferrier and social critic

Ivan Illich wrote a lot about pedagogy from an anarchistic point of

view.

Housing

With regard to housing, anarchists tend to disagree with others on the

left, especially welfare state supporting social democrats, that

publicly-owned housing is a good thing. While they would agree that each

person should rightly have a home to live in, they want direct tenant

control over living arrangements instead of them being handled by

external authorities.

Sociologist Colin Ward wrote a book, Housing: An Anarchist Approach, in

which he praised attempts at self-built homes and community-based

projects like Community Land Trusts and housing co-ops. He claimed, in

opposition to Labour Party supporters against the buyout of councils

flats by co-ops, “I believe in social ownership of social assets, but I

think it a mistake to confuse society with the state. Co-operative

ownership seems to me to be a better concept of social ownership than

ownership by the state”.

Ward also laid out a set of general principles for building and

architecture processes, saying that while professional architects and

civil engineers may be necessary to draw up the plans for how buildings

will look, the people who use the buildings, whether tenants or other

users, need to be the ones who drive the process, though coordinating

meetings and a rigorous process of consultation.

A lot of anarchists are also heavily involved in the squatters’ movement

and promote the occupation of disused buildings so as to make use of

them, often setting up intentional communities organised on

non-hierarchical principles.

Crime and Judicial Matters

As for judicial and criminal issues, this is one area where anarchist

literature is somewhat scant. Anarchists don’t imagine that all crimes

will magically disappear once an anarchistic society is constructed, but

they do like to point out that the vast majority of crimes are either

crimes against the state or crimes against private property, and that if

you eliminate statism and capitalism, you eliminate these entire

categories of crime, with only crimes of individuals against each other

remaining.

How to deal with these offences is a topic of dispute among anarchists.

James Guillaume in his pamphlet Ideas on Social Organisation recommended

that such offenders as murderers, rapists, and thieves be placed in a

“special house” rather than a jail and prevented from leaving until the

rest of the community deems them fit to re-enter society, while Peter

Kropotkin recommended setting up institutions of voluntary arbitration

to settle disputes rather than criminal courts, hoping that social

censure would help eliminate violent and coercive elements among people.

Defence and Security

As for collective self-defence, anarchists are obviously opposed to any

military or standing army. Anarchists of a more pro-market persuasion

propose setting up cooperative defence agencies which members of a given

locality pay dues to in exchange for security and protection.

Anti-market anarchists, on the other hand, tend to support locally-based

militias staffed by volunteers and neighbourhood watch committees

instead of a traditional police force.

They are somewhat divided on whether people should be armed or not.

Market anarchists (hailing mostly from the U.S.) as a rule tend to be

very pro-gun and oppose absolutely all forms of gun control. Social

anarchists tend to be a bit more sceptical, while still opposing bans on

gun ownership in every situation, bringing them into conflict with most

others on the left. The social anarchist political scholar Jason Royce

Lindsay criticised American gun culture, claiming it deludes people into

believing they have more power over the state than they really do.

Finance

Democratising finance is one of the oldest components of the anarchist

economic vision, first being suggested by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon;

finance being the “means of investment” under capitalism. The early

mutualists sought to create “mutual banks” which would be used to fund

the creation of worker cooperatives and other self-managed economic

institutions to gradually replace capitalist and state enterprises, and

to eliminate usury (charging interest for loaned money).

The social anarchists from the First International on went further in

seeking the full socialisation of investment in the hands of local

communities. Many also suggested replacing traditional money with

“labour vouchers” (nowadays these would take the form of digital credit

points on debit cards) which unlike conventional currency, would be

created at the point of receiving income and would cease to exist upon

purchase of an item; in much the same way as frequent flyer miles or

restaurant loyalty points work. Participatory Economics and Inclusive

Democracy both support such proposals.

Other anarchists go even further in their long-term goals in wanting to

replace all forms of money, incomes, and prices completely by creating a

gratis-based gift economy in which people can take goods freely from

stores “according to need”. Though most would concede that this would

only be workable on a large scale once certain preconditions are met —

such as the production of food and manufacturing being as decentralised

and localised as possible (near or total communal self-sufficiency) with

a great deal of labour automated away by technology.

Arts and Entertainment .

With regard to the creation of art in the contemporary world, anarchists

are fond of pointing out that the only reason that every single movie,

tv show, video game, book, album, etc. couldn’t be made available right

now for free through the Internet is the existence of intellectual

property laws (patents, copyrights, and trademarks), as all of the above

could in theory be distributed gratis for downloading and streaming due

to there being little-to-no material cost involved. They feel that

abolishing IP laws (especially copyrights) would unleash a multitude of

creative endeavours as people would be able to use all the non-material

resources available (including editing software) to improve upon and

create their own works of art and entertainment, distributing it online

as part of a participatory culture[97]. It’s for this reason that

there’s a lot of overlap between anarchists and the free software

movement[98].

The anarchist art critic Herbert Read argued that every good artist (and

by extension entertainer) needed three things in order to be able to

create good art:

• appreciation, that is, peer recognition

• patronage, or a source of income so as to be able to earn a living

from their work; and

• liberty in their creative endeavours.

The problem is, he claimed, the second (funding) often conflicts with

the third (creative freedom), as the sources of an artist’s income often

have a vested interest in the kind of art they create supporting (or at

least not offending) their economic or ideological agenda. In the Middle

Ages, the problem was Church funding and not being able to offend

religious sensibilities. In the modern day, the problem is corporate and

state funding, and not being able to offend commercial capitalist

interests. Read believed that a return to a kind of guild system for

artists could offer a solution, where artists themselves controlled

their investments and were insulated from commercial pressures and

external political interests.

While not an anarchist himself, the fantasy novelist China Miéville[99]

suggested a system that most anarchists would find appealing, where

authors (and other artists and entertainers) are paid salaries for doing

creative work rather than being paid per the profits for their

individual products, as they could be distributed for free online. While

this would obviously mean that most of the big-name artists and

entertainers could no longer make millions, he pointed out that for most

struggling artists it would actually be a pay upgrade, allowing them to

devote themselves to their craft full-time. An anarchist entertainment

industry could therefore be based on cooperatives (based on location)

and democratic guilds (based on art form), where big-scale

art/entertainment projects like blockbuster movies would be greenlit

based on perceived quality instead of potential profitability.

Additional Concerns

Anthropology

Of all the social sciences, anarchists have been most consistently drawn

to anthropology. Contemporary anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber

believes that this may be because, as proponents of a stateless and

non-hierarchical society, anthropology shows that such social set-ups

are indeed possible; given that anthropologists devote their careers to

studying them.

Anthropological elements are found in the works of classical anarchists

like Peter Kropotkin and Elisee Reclus, by twentieth century anarchists

Murray Bookchin and Colin Ward, and by modern-day anarchists who are by

profession anthropologists like Brian Morris and the aforementioned

David Graeber. Jeff Shantz has argued that auto-ethnography[100] in

particular — people from marginal groups giving first-person accounts of

their lives and experiences — can be regarded as an especially

anarchistic form of anthropology.

There’s also a lot of mucking about in anthropology by so-called

“anarcho-primitivists” like John Zerzan, though their works tend to

suffer from selective reading and romanticisation of hunter-gatherer

lifestyles. Most anarchists admire certain features of such communities

— mutual aid, reciprocity, communality, ecological stewardship — but

have no desire to regress back to such states of affairs, abandoning all

sophisticated technology. It’s important to keep in mind that many

(perhaps most) hunter-gatherer societies are in fact very hierarchical

and patriarchal.

David Graeber has written a broad outline for an anarchist school of

anthropology available here[101].

Psychology

In their views on social psychology, anarchists believe that social

hierarchies create “lopsided relations of the imagination” which make

both the highers and the lowers in the hierarchy stupid, uncaring, and

violent but in different ways. Hierarchies also make it so that the

lowers (the working classes, women, people of colour) are always more

psychologically empathetic towards the highers (the rich, men, whites)

than the other way around. This is because those on the receiving end of

hierarchical power have to understand how their masters’ minds and

social environments operate in order to get by in life, but those on the

top don’t have to know much about the worlds of their subordinates[102].

Anarchists hold that society can only achieve genuine psychological

well-being through creating conditions of material equality, personal

freedom, and social relations built upon horizontal cooperation,

communal caring, and mutual aid.

With regard to personal psychology, anarchists stress the importance of

interdependence, but also individual self-reliance and autonomy,

encouraging persons to chart a middle way between collectivist

groupthink and rugged individualism in their quests for self-fulfilment

and self-realisation. It’s considered a bad idea to try to analytically

separate a person with psychological problems from the social conditions

in which they develop, and an even worse practice to try to adjust them

to a negative environment, as negative environments are seen as the main

cause of messed up mental states in the first place; especially

relations and institutions characterised by authoritarianism, cut-throat

competition, and repression. They have long attacked sexual repression

in particular as damaging both to the individual in their

self-development, and to wider society. Alex Comfort, author of the

famous erotic liberation manual The Joy of Sex, was himself an

anarchist.[103]

American anarchist Paul Goodman co-created a psychological method called

Gestalt Therapy[104], which blends western clinical approaches with

aspects of eastern philosophy, in particular Buddhism and Taoism (both

of which tend to be popular with anarchists for psychological/spiritual

reasons). It is focused on bringing the patient/practitioner into the

“present moment” and helping them to regain self-determined direction

over their own lives.

Today, psychologist Dennis Fox has outlined a specifically anarchist

psychological approach here[105]. There’s also an anarchist-inspired

form of psycho-physical group therapy called somatherapy[106].

Media Analysis

One of the most famous anarchists of the last few decades is Noam

Chomsky, who places a special focus in his work on how mass media is

used by states and corporations to create the illusion of popular

agreement with what those powerful forces do to the public. With Edward

S. Hermann, he developed an anarchistic approach to studying mass media

called the propaganda model[107]. It holds that state and corporate

media are structured in a way which imposes a rather uniform perspective

with the aim of shaping general opinion along certain lines. A number of

factors condition this hegemonic worldview and how its gets expressed:

• Ownership of the medium

• Funding sources of the medium

• Sourcing of content for the medium

• Flak by states, businesses, special interest groups, and other mediums

• Fear of a perceived “enemy”.[108]

Also, while most media sources do compete with and disagree with each

other, at the same time they have a certain set of common aims and

interests on which they align to reinforce the status-quo in popular

consciousness and push the agenda of the ruling elite. Anarchists have

always tried to establish their own non-profit, alternative forms[109]

of media to enable marginalised voices an outlet they are routinely

denied in the mainstream, attempting to create an anti-authoritarian and

democratic counter-narrative to the dominant ideology.

Urban Planning

Social anarchists have a long history[110] of association with town and

city planning, stressing the importance of decentralised scale over the

gigantism of the megalopolis, ecologising the urban environment by

making it majority green space and powered by renewable energy and

eco-technologies, and neighbourhood designs which emphasise communal

self-reliance over the atomisation of modern city life. They loathe

urban sprawl, suburbanisation, urban congestion, and especially car

culture.[111] Paul Goodman even once wrote an (only half joking) article

proposing to ban private cars from Manhattan.

The proposals of anarchist urbanists like Elisee Reclus, Paul Goodman,

and Murray Bookchin were very similar to what’s now called New Urbanism

and New Pedestrianism, and similar to utopian city-planners like

Ebenezer Howard and the Garden cities movement. Colin Ward was an urban

planner by profession and wrote extensively about the subject.

Spirituality

While anarchism has always been extremely hostile to religion in general

and organised religion in particular, most anarchists view spirituality

as a separate concept and feel that the need to feel part of something

larger than oneself is an essential part of the human condition that

needs to be nurtured. So while promoting a public realm in which science

and reason are the basis of managing social affairs, they also support a

private realm in which individuals and voluntary associations are free

to pursue self-realisation through whatever means feel right, as long as

they accept the consensus on the scientific method and rationalism as

the primary means of solving collective problems.

Early anarchists were drawn to American transcendentalist philosophy for

its communal individualism and libertarian ethos, and to the more

esoteric traditions of major Abrahamic religions while still remaining

secularists: Gnostic Christianity[112] and Sufism for example. Since the

twentieth century, anarchists have gravitated towards the more

anti-authoritarian tendencies of Eastern philosophy, especially

Taoism[113] and Buddhism[114]. Many even consider the dialectical Tao Te

Ching[115] to be a proto-anarchist text. Leo Tolstoy[116] is sometimes

regarded as an anarchist (though he never described himself as one) and

his panentheistic, pacifist form of Christianity provided much of the

influence behind a tradition calling itself “Christian anarchism”, as

did elements of the American Catholic Workers Movement. Because of

anarchism’s opposition to religion with its belief in supernatural

authority, there’s some debate as to whether this can be regarded as a

form of anarchism or merely “anarchistic”.

Robert Anton Wilson[117] and Alan Moore[118] — both of whom were secular

agnostics — promoted a playful, pick-and-mix approach to spirituality

and mysticism, incorporating elements of Western Esoteric traditions

(Gnosticism, Kabbalah[119], Tarot[120], Chaos Magick) with Eastern

mystical traditions (within Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism[121]) and other

arcane practices (from paganism, shamanism, and Wicca[122]) into an

aestheticised form of personal psychology for personal self-realisation.

John P. Clark has attempted something similar under the pseudonym “Max

Cafard”, supposedly a snarky Cajun wizard with an interest in

bioregionalism and French Situationism.

Anarchist philosopher Simon Critchley has spoken of the necessity for

anarchists to recapture a religious sensibility while remaining without

religious faith, as that dimension of human experience usually occupied

by faith is a vital part of the personality and of community, even if

the supernatural beliefs that go along with it are not.

Strategies for Change

Direct Action and Electoralism

In wanting to transition from the current hierarchical society to one

based on voluntary cooperation without rulership, the question of how to

get from “here to there” is one that has been of crucial concern to

anarchists of different stripes from day one. However, it’s also an

issue which has divided them, though they would all at least agree that

the strategy of taking state power and strengthening it to bring about

libertarian socialism is out of the question. As a consequence, they

tend to oppose taking part in electoral politics both on principle and

out of the belief that it’s ineffective compared to direct

action(grassroots activity unmediated by formal political institutions).

However, some anarchists like Noam Chomsky recommend what’s called

“defensive voting” (using your vote as a form of self-defence against

the state) in situations where a certain candidate or party winning an

election could be catastrophic, like a fascist coming to power or a war

being launched.

A few others support what’s called “destructivist” voting (named by an

obscure 1870s anarchist called Paul Brousse). This means taking part in

municipal elections (though never national elections) so as to devolve

the powers of local governments to directly-democratic neighbourhood

assemblies, and to municipalise enterprises before turning them over to

worker self-management. It was recommended by several anarchists in the

First Internarional for a time (even, briefly, Bakunin and Kropotkin),

and was later pushed by Murray Bookchin as part of his broader strategy

of “libertarian municipalism”. Though this is a minority position, with

most anarchists being against taking part in any form of electoral

politics, believing it to be useless at best and counterproductive to

movement-building at worst.

In general, direct action and grassroots self-organisation are the

primary methods anarchists recommend for accomplishing their goals. That

means resisting all the different forms of hierarchical power through

popular social struggle, as well as trying to create contrete examples

of anarchism in a positive sense, namely associations which run on the

basis of free cooperation and egalitarian self-ordering by their own

participants.

They don’t put much faith in even a well-meaning government to do the

right thing by the socially oppressed, relative to the oppressed

themselves through bottom-up forms of collective self-help. Though

that’s not to say they oppose making demands on the government from the

outside, through protest and civil disobedience, and this usually

entails (1) demanding the state reduce its own authority over people,

and (2) redirect it’s resources (as long as it has them at all) towards

helping the general population rather than the ruling elite.

Anarchist Approaches to Revolution

In contrast to other self-described “revolutionaries”, anarchists have

always stressed that they want more than just a political revolution (a

change in governments), but a more all-encompassing social revolution –

that is, a transformation in political, economic, and societal

structures, changing people’s social consciousness as well as

institutions. They also stress that revolution (transformation) is a

process, not an event, and that the word doesn’t just refer to erecting

barricades and storming government buildings. The Industrial Revolution

being just as transformative as the French Revolution.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first person to self-identify as an

anarchist, foresaw social revolution involving the gradual exodus of the

people from the capitalist state system through the construction of

alternative institutions: cooperatives, credit unions, interest-free

banks, and confederations of free communes. He imagined that the new

libertarian socialist order would chip away at the old order, which

would shrink as more people became part of the non-capitalist

counter-economy. This strategy of exodus and dual power is still a

popular strain in anarchist thought, later being elaborated by thinkers

such as Gustav Landauer, Paul Goodman, and Murray Bookchin.

When movement anarchism became a thing however – in the 1860s and 1870s

– the set of strategies shifted from the gradual withdrawal from

capitalist-statism to a destructive break with it, advocating (like

republican and nationalist movements of the time) a popular uprising

which would smash the existing system and usher in the new one.

At first, inspired by the Paris Commune of 1871, this involved

recommending acts of collective insurrection, leading many anarchists to

try taking over small municipalities in Italy and Spain, with the

intention of turning them into free communes. The idea being that this

would cause a domino effect of the people in other parishes, towns, and

cities becoming inspired to mirror such actions, turning their local

areas into free communes with libertarian socialist economies. This was

called propaganda by the deed: belief that living examples of socialist

revolution proved more effective than writing pamphlets or making

speeches; that is, written and oral propaganda. And just to clarify, the

word propaganda back then didn’t mean brainwashing (as it mostly does

today), was a term roughly synonymous with what’s now called public

relations (PR): getting your message out there.

After a string of failures however, and the successful assassination of

Tsar Alexander the 2^(nd) in Russia, focus shifted to acts of individual

insurrection, targeting royals and businessmen in the hope that this

would give the masses the confidence to rise up and overthrow the

governments and the structures of private property.

This didn’t work either. In fact, the violent acts of individual

attentats (political assassins) only served to alienate the general

population, leading to the now-popular image of anarchists as

bomb-throwers in black trenchcoats. A lot of these attentats also,

probably, looked to have serious mental health problems given the

description of their personalities and behaviour. Others came from

extremely deprived and brutal backgrounds, turning to such actions out

of desperation and misplaced thirst for vengeance. Anarchists, who had

bad press to begin with, started really getting a bad rep when targets

expanded to include random members of the wealthy or royalty who hadn’t

even done anything.

Attention then turned to the growing labour movement as a possible

channel through which revolution could be catalysed. The spread of

capitalism around the world meant that more and more people were being

turned into wage-workers (as opposed to self-reliant farmers), and thus

hostile to the poor conditions they were placed in while doing unhealthy

industrial work. While critical of the tendency of many unions to pursue

parliamentary politics, anarchists saw potential in strikes and labour

struggles to:

• Get people organising along anarchistic lines, practicing worker

self-management and socialist distribution of resources; putting in

place the underlying structure of the future society, making the

transition easier.

• Turn the modest demands of mainstream unions (higher wages, shorter

hours, better conditions) into opportunities to confront capital and the

state directly, eventually turning strikes into riots and riots into a

full-blown popular uprising.

This strategy was already discussed by Mikhail Bakunin and others in the

First International in the 1860s and 1870s. But it became really

relevant in the 1880s through to the 1910s, as the labour movements of

the world became more and more successful and relevant. This lead to the

birth of anarcho-syndicalism as a distinct strategic approach which

centred the workplace, the industrial working class, and trade unions

(“syndicates” in French) as the primary vehicles of revolution. Though a

lot of anarchists, such as Errico Malatesta and Emma Goldman,

discouraged people from emphasising syndicalism too much, arguing that

focusing on economic issues alone could cause anarchists to neglect

political, societal, and individual-level issues.

For example, at the 1907 Amsterdam Congress of anarchists, some

expressed the idea that the strategy of revolutionary syndicalism (trade

unionism) was “enough in itself” to realise anarchist goals, and that

anarchists should dissolve themselves into the wider labour movement.

Errico Malatesta came out staunchly against this view, claiming that

while workers’ struggles were important, they were (by themselves)

conservative unless they were pushed in a more social libertarian

direction, and that specifically anarchist political organisations would

be necessary, not just anarchists working within trade unions. This came

from his view, contrary to Marxism, that mass struggle has as much to do

with will(fighting for a chosen ideal) as with material interest

(reacting to the mechanical processes of the economy).

Such anarchists also cautioned against the idea that “revolution” would

involve dispatching the old order in one fell swoop, claiming that the

whole process would take years. Emma Goldman went as far as claiming it

would take literally hundreds of years before the world was fully

anarchist in a meaningful sense, stressing the stickiness authority had

in relation to human beings.

In other parts of the world (outside the industrialised regions),

anarchists were involved less with industrial syndicalism and more with

other popular movements closer to their particular circumstances. These

included peasant uprisings (eg: Ukraine), and national liberation

struggles (eg: Korea and Manchuria). Today, anarchists who focus

excessively on the industrial working class and trade unions are

referred to by the derisive term “workerism”; which means fetishising

workers and the workplace as a site of struggle.

The most sucessful example of an attempted anarchist social revolution,

Spain in the years 1936–37, involved both trade unions and a popular

uprising by anarchists, as well as attempts to transform culture and

kinship relations at the societal level, with libertarian education and

anarcha-feminist organising being crucial.

Evolution and Revolution

Elisee Reclus claimed that evolution and revolution were two variants of

the same process, with evolution being the incremental changes which

occur on a continuous basis, and revolutions being moments of sudden

rupture, preceded by a long period of evolution beforehand.

Even those anarchists who saw social revolution as involving a popular

uprising (like the French Revolution) didn’t think libertarian socialism

would just spontaneously establish itself. They held that while the

abolition of the state and subsequent devolution of power to localities

would open up the necessary space/opportunities for creating anarchism,

the actual process itself would take several years of hard work. This

would entail the constructive efforts of spreading anarchist ideas and

practices among the general population, reorganising the polity and

economy along decentralised and horizontalist lines, as well as the

defensive work of making sure the state, capitalism, or hierarchy in

general don’t reemerge from the remnants of the old order. In other

words, anarchists should focus on “evolution” both before and after

“revolution”

Peter Kropotkin claimed that social revolution should be conceived in

three stages, not a simple two stage “before and after” framework:

• Preparation

• Fermentation

• Transformation

Nowadays, while the tactics of syndicalism and insurrectionism are still

considered important, the anarchist strategic toolkit has expanded to

include: societal revolts against repressive cultural and kinship

relations; ecological struggles for defence of the environment and for

animal liberation; communalist initiatives to build networks of popular

assemblies in neighbourhoods; and technological campaigns involving

projects against state/corporate surveillance and intellectual property,

and for the internet being made into a digital commons, also involving

the constructive use of decentralist eco-technologies as positive

elements in an anarchist economy of the commons.

A minority of anarchists don’t actually believe that transition to a

full anarchist social order is possible, or at least not on a large

scale. Instead, they view anarchism more as a set of practices for the

here-and-now, as a way to realise autonomous spaces of freedom and

autonomy in a sea of authoritarianism, as well as a politics of

“permanent protest” against every form of hierarchy and domination. They

view anarchism as primarily evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

People like Colin Ward and James C. Scott fall into this camp.

This came close to becoming the default version of anarchism in the mid

20^(th) century – after the (anarchist) Spanish Revolution and World War

II, but before the revival of anarchism in the New Left of the 1960s –

as establishing a completely stateless non-hierarchical world seemed

ever more impossible. This position was called “resistencialism” by its

detractors, meaning concerned only with resistingauthoritarianism

instead of dissolving it.

Sites of Struggle: The Commune (Municipality) and the Workplace

A “site of struggle” in socialist discourse refers to a place – physical

or institutional – where people contest the powers-that-be and try to

transform that place into something more liberatory.

For anarchists, there are many different sites of struggle, owing to the

many different sites of hierarchical power. Though two in particular

stand out as primary to anarchist attempts at social transformation:

• The Commune: (aka Municipality) The local territory where people live,

corresponding to small towns, city districts, or rural parishes.

• The Workplace: The enterprise where people work, producing things for

consumption and providing services, whether public utilities or

recreational.

The goal is to transform statist municipalities into liberated free

communes, self-governed by their own residents through autonomous

directly-democratic processes; and to turn capitalist corporations into

liberated cooperative enterprises, self-managed by their own workers

through workplace democracy. Plus transform broader societal relations

in culture (race, nationality, religion) and kinship (gender, sexuality,

disability) by means of creating an anarchistic counter-culture which

prefigures the liberatory and inclusive values of the future society.

While early on, during the the mid-to-late 1800s, there was an even

balance in focus between the commune and the workplace, over time the

workplace started to hold a more and more important place in anarchist

attention, especially with anarchist involvement in the workers’

movement and the rise of revolutionary syndicalism (trade unionism), and

later by anarcho-syndicalism in the 1920s. Though the commune retained

its importance for anarchists organising in more agrarian parts of the

world, where the people were united more by their community in the

countryside than by their trade in the city.

There was a little bit of tension early in the 1870s and 1880s over

whether a post-capitalist economy should be organised primarily through

self-governing communes or self-managed syndicates, but these tensions

between pro-commune and pro-syndicate factions became a lot more

pronounced in the early 20^(th) century, especially after the brith of

anarcho-syndicalism – a fusion of social anarchism and revolutionary

syndicalism – in the 1920s.

Confusingly, the commune-oriented group – the “communalists” – tended to

call themselves “anarcho-communists”, even though many of them also

supported revolutionary syndicalism as a tactic.

While the worker-oriented group – the “workerists” – tended to call

themselves “anarcho-syndicalists”, even though they tended to support a

free communist economy.

This dual meaning of “communist” within anarchism – organisation through

communes and a moneyless commons economy – has befuddled both anarchists

and non-anarchists, hence the reason that the use of communism to mean

commune-ism is often retroactively referred to as communalism.

Those who focused more on the commune tended to see revolution coming

about from a popular uprising which would seize the means of governance

from the state, then reorganise things on free communalist lines. They

also tended to support a post-capitalist economy which was

community-directed by the self-governing communes.

Those who focused more on the workplace tended to see revolution coming

about from a general strike, where militant trade unions keep amping up

the struggle against capitalists until finally an economy-wide lockdown

was declared, forcing the ruling classes to abdicate control over the

means of production to the workers. They also tended to support a

post-capitalist economy that was worker-directed by self-managed

enterprises and federations of industrial syndicates.

In the early twentieth century, there was often a conflict of ideas and

practices between these two tendencies.

• Anarcho-Syndicalists (workerists) generally wanted a free communist

economy – no state, no markets, no money – but wanted to achieve it via

industrial proletarian class struggles through trade unions.[123] They

also wanted the future society to be organised with the self-managed

workplace at the centre of things, with the economy being composed of

federations of worker-run enterprises.

• Anarcho-Communists (communalists) generally supported taking part in

syndicalist struggles, but saw them as only one tactic among many, not

as the primary locus of social struggle.[124] They also wanted the

future society to be organised with the self-governing commune as the

centre of things, with the economy being composed of confederations of

directly-democratic communities.

In Japan in particular, the two tendencies fought bitterly with each

other from the 1920s onwards. The pro-commune anarchists came to see

their tradition as representing “pure anarchism”, while regarding

pro-syndicate anarchism as a deviation from the philosophy’s

anti-hierarchical ethos, believing that making the industrial workplace

the centre of a stateless society would replicate capitalism’s structure

instead of dismantling it. Indeed, Japanese thinkers like Shuzo Hatta

made some of the only original contributions to the pro-commune school

of social anarchism after Kropotkin, while the rest of the anarchist

movement moved closer to a pro-syndicate position, barely mentioning the

free commune at all.

As the twentieth century progressed, social anarchism grew more and more

towards “workerism” rather than “communalism”, possibly due to the world

becoming more industrialised, and thus industrial workplaces becoming

more important as sites to spread anarchist ideas and fight against

capitalists.

However, in the second half of the century, some anarchists, such as

Murray Bookchin, argued for focusing more on the commune, claiming that

in the era of the welfare state, the working class and trade unions had

been bought off by reforms and no longer had the potential to dismantle

capitalism and the state; attacking anarcho-syndicalism as too

class-centric and too accepting of the “work ethic” found in both

capitalism and state socialism. Transformative change should therefore

be waged by a convergence of oppressed social groups (women, people of

colour, LGBT+ folks) and focus more on creating democratised communities

rather than trying to organise workers into radical trade unions.

While there is a historical conflict between these two tendencies, later

alliances between class-based and trans-class forces in events like

Occupy may mean that some of the balance between the two sites of

struggle could be restored. Many social anarchists today even use

“anarcho-communist” and “anarcho-syndicalist” as interchangeable,

through the latter is still preferred among those of a more traditional

worker-centric school of class struggle.

In terms of post-capitalist economic models, there’s a general agreement

that it should be both community-directed and worker-directed, with

popular assemblies in free communes and workers’ councils in cooperative

enterprises forming a symbiotic relationship with each other.

Getting Stuff Done: Anarchist Organisation

Despite popular belief, no anarchists are opposed to organisation

(adjective), because this is pretty much impossible anyway, given that

even two people working together is organisation in the most basic

sense. However a minority have occasionally voiced criticism of formal

“organisations” (noun).

Owing to social anarchism’s birth out of the debates within the First

International during the 1860s and 1870s, in which they were booted out

and deceived by the Marxists, many anarchists felt scared by the

experience, and developed a suspicion of formal organisations. As a

result, they advocated only organising in small affinity groups and

clusters of such groups, largely out of fear of succumbing to the

bureaucracy and betrayal of the First International under Marx and his

followers.

The majority of anarchists however argued that the problem was only with

centralised and hierarchical organisations, not formal organisations as

such. Following this hypothesis, they tried to build political

organisations and trade unions which were as decentralised,

participatory, and anti-bureaucratic as they could, structuring them on

the basis of federalism – which in anarchist parlance means the

association of autonomous (organisational) units on a lateral basis, so

that each component part retains independence while also being united as

a larger whole.

This split over strategy and tactics turned into two rough approaches

over how to achieve anarchistic aims in the short term, and how to

transition to an anarchist society in the long term:

• Mass Anarchism: Trying to turn anarchism into a mass movement of the

people; educating, agitating, and organising the oppressed through

building political organisations, trade unions, and cooperatives which

were run on anarchist lines, as well as working within broader

liberatory movements.

• Insurrectionary Anarchism: Trying to catalyse the oppressed into

revolutionary action through “propaganda by the deed”, performing

spectacular acts of violence and property damage to instil a sense of

popular confidence that a large-scale uprising was possible.

Aside from the question of how to bring about a social revolution to

transform things into anarchism, there remained divisions within

anarchism over what kind of post-capitalist economy there should be –

eg: free collectivism or free communism. This sometimes led to arguments

within organisations as to whether they were really fighting for the

same thing. Support for anarchist communism (a moneyless economy with

distribution “according to needs”) ended up becoming the majority

tendency in most countries, though anarchist collectivism (an economy

which retained incomes and prices with distribution “according to

deeds”) became the majority in Spain, anarchism’s main centre of

activity. Support for free collectivism was also a minority position

among anarchists in countries where free communism was the default

position of anarchists.

A possible solution to this problem was advocacy of “anarchism without

adjectives”, where the question of free collectivism vs free communism

was left to each individual free commune in the post-statist society,

recommending that anarchists shouldn’t be divided over the future when

they needed to remain united to dismantle capitalism and the state.[125]

In the first half of the twentieth century, and especially after the

destruction and betrayal of anarchists during the Russian Revolution,

disputes also arose over what kinds of formal organisations anarchists

should try to build, in particular over how strict the organisation

should be. Out of these debates came:

• Platformism and Specifism: These two approaches developed

independently of each other (platformism in East Europe, specifism in

South America), but came to most of the same conclusions, such as the

need for anarchist political organisations which were tightly

structured, had a general agreement on ideas and practices, and had an

ethos of collective responsibility among its members rather than a loose

“anything goes” attitude to what members did. One of the main points of

unity being that each organisation should only espouse one

post-capitalist economic system, namely anarchist communism.

• Synthesis Anarchism: (aka Synthesism) This approach developed in

opposition to platformism, which was felt by some to be too doctrinaire

and against plurality in anarchist thought and action, in particular its

position on only allowing one kind of post-capitalist economic model.

Synthesism instead tries to “synthesise” different anarchist schools in

one organisation, enabling every kind of anarchist to work together.

To this day, advocates of the synthesis approach argue that platformist

organisations are too strict and aren’t able to attract enough members

because of their insistence on getting everybody to agree on everything.

Platformists/specifists in turn argue that synthesist organisations may

have larger numbers, but aren’t able to do much in practice due to their

members constantly disagreeing with each other. Synthesists claim

platformists lack pluralism, while platformists claim synthesists lack

standards.

Organisational Dualism

In setting up anarchist organisations to accomplish aims and goals,

anarchists have proposed a twofold strategy. On one hand, setting up

groups and federations which are specifically anarchist in their

principles and which espouse a particular form of anarchism (eg:

communist anarchism or collectivist anarchism), on the other, working

within more mainstream groups (like trade unions and grassroots

organisations) to push them in a more anarchistic direction from the

inside. This is called organisational dualism. Both specificly

(especifismo) anarchist groups and anarchists working within

non-anarchist groups create links with each other to tackle issues on

both fronts.

The strategy of organisational dualism conceives of social struggle in

terms of two “levels”: (1) the Political Level, which is specifically

anarchist and made up of anarchist activists with a consistent set of

ideas and practices; and (2) the Social Level, which is the general

non-anarchist population. Anarchism will always be held by a militant

minority of the the people at the political level, rather than the mass

of the people at the social level, so anarchists see the need to

organise both as political anarchists, and as part of broader coalitions

of popular social forces. In practical terms, this entails two

approaches:

• Specifism (Political Level): Having specifically social anarchist

political organisations, with a general agreement on theory and

strategy.

• Social Insertion (Social Level): Anarchists getting involved in more

mainstream social movements, both to help them accomplish common goals,

and to act as an anarchistic influence, pushing such movements away from

centralism and hierarchy and towards decentralism and horizontal

cooperation.

When operating within more mainstream organisations, most often

collaborating with people who aren’t political anarchists, it’s

understood that it’s not a top priority to get everyone else to declare

themselves an anarchist as long as they’re practicing forms of direct

democracy, mutual aid, and voluntary cooperation. Most anarchists

acknowlege that if society is transformed along libertarian socialist

lines, it probably won’t be under the name anarchism, but that this

doesn’t really matter as long as anarchism itself is what’s being

practiced.

Social Transformation

Anarchists agree with most other radical socialists that class struggle

(of the popular classes against the ruling elites) is a necessary part

of social transformation, though they tend to disagree with many,

especially Marxists, who see economic class as the only/primary form of

oppression, with others — like race, gender, sexuality, nationality,

ecology — being secondary or at worst a distraction.

Rather, they see it as necessary to integrate class struggle with

trans-class forms of struggle[126], unifying them in a way that makes

purely class-based issues (like workplace organising) complement

non-economic concerns (like fights against gender or ethnic oppression,

or defence of the environment) as part of an intersectional social

struggle against all forms of hierarchy and domination, whatever the

specific tactics used for achieving an anarchist society.

Furthermore, social struggle in the traditional sense is just one form

of social transformation which anarchists have used to realise their

aims. Others include militant attempts to destroy authoritarianism

rather than struggle consistently against it, and more pacific attempts

to reform societal and institutional relations through gradual changes

in behaviour, culture, kinship, and the types of economic structures in

the society.

To offer a brief run down of the various strategies that have been

proposed to dissolve hierarchical society and bring about libertarian

socialism, they are:

Insurrection

Destruction of the dominant powers though militant uprisings

This means armed struggle to violently overthrow the state and private

capital, and then set up a confederation of worker councils and popular

assemblies in their place. The tactic of “propaganda by the deed”, which

was popular in the second half of the 19^(th) century, involved

committing acts of violence against ruling elites in the hope this would

incite the working classes to rise up and get into insurrection mode. As

the now common image of the Bomb Throwing Anarchist[127] terrorist

proves, this didn’t work. In fact, it only served to alienate most

working people by associating anarchism with mindless terrorism.

What few proponents this tactic has today at least agree that they need

to get popular support for the uprising before committing any acts of

violence, and that isolated acts of terrorism don’t do much besides turn

people off their cause.

Though, to be fair, propaganda by the deed first referred to armed

struggle in a collective sense, such as militias taking over a small

town and turning it into an autonomous territory, not assassinations or

bombings. When seen in this context, the idea seems more appropriate and

likely to inspire further popular uprisings.

Struggle

Confrontation with the dominant powers through mass organising

This is social struggle (of which class struggle is the main part) in

the more familiar sense. Mass organising by anarchist groups and other

transformative forces to push against existing forms of domination, with

the intention of winning enough victories against capital and the state

to trigger the downfall of the capitalist state system.

Varieties of the this approach are platformism and specifism and the

more famous tactic of anarcho-syndicalism. While many have (somewhat

inaccurately) used this term to refer to a certain type of social

anarchist economic system,[128] it’s actually a strategy of achieving

libertarian socialism through the use of trade unions.

Anarcho-syndicalists propose setting up anarchist syndicates (unions),

as well as establishing an anarchist presence in mainstream unions, so

as to get as many working people organised as possible and eventually

declare a general strike (or “general lock-out of the capitalist

classes”) to shut down the capitalist economy until the capitalists and

landlords agree to sign over control over the means of production,

distribution, and investment to the federation of syndicates that would

have been established, who would then reorganise the economy on the

basis of decentralised worker self-management.

Anarcho-syndicalism, as a strategy, is still very popular today despite

having been developed over a century ago in very different economic

circumstances. It’s also the one that’s been most successful thus far,

winning many labour victories through trade unions in the early 20^(th)

century with the Spanish Revolution of 1936[129] successfully

establishing a libertarian socialist economy for a short time (before

being suppressed by Marxists on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil

War).

Creation

Escaping from the dominant powers and constructing a positive

alternative to them; prefiguration of the liberated world to come

This involves escaping the capitalist state system by creating

counter-institutions to it — like worker cooperatives,

directly-democratic popular assemblies, affinity groups, democratic

schools, interest-free banks, intentional communities — and then linking

them all together into a confederated network, so as to contest the

power of corporations and governments over the administration of

society.

This creation of positive alternatives is called dual power, or

sometimes counter-power. Strategists of dual power see this process of

“exodus” from hierarchical society as creating an anarchist

transfer-culturewhich will prefigure the forms the new

social-institutional structure will take “within the shell of the old”.

It also entails conscious changes in personal (kinship) and cultural

behaviours, prefiguring the kinds of mutualistic relations which will

characterise a post-hierarchical world. This is often done through arts

and aesthetics, creating a counter-culture as part of the broader

transfer-culture mentioned above.

Most want this whole endeavour to be as nonviolent as possible, while

still defending the use of self-defensive violence as a last resort to

prevent the dual power structure from being dismantled by state or

corporate power. It was originally devised by Proudhon and is the

primary strategy recommended by market anarchists, though several social

anarchists like Gustav Landauer, Paul Goodman, and Murray Bookchin have

supported it as well.

Some even see the politics of creation (dual power) as compatible with

the politics of struggle (including anarcho-syndicalism), with trade

unions and other popular organisations confronting capital directly (and

defending workers from its effects) while the dual-power institutions

try to route around it, offering people an escape from capitalism and

from the state.

Philosophical Origins

Philosophical Anarchism

Anarchistic ideas and notions have arguably existed throughout most of

human history, with traditions such as Taoism[130], Buddhism[131], and

Ancient Greek Cynicism containing many notions with anarchist

characteristics. Many tribal societies from pre-history to the present,

such as the Nile Valley Nuer or Iroquois Confederacy, also had or have

methods of non-hierarchical organisation which mirror the anarchist

ideal of a society without rulership or centralised political authority.

Early forms of what were later called “mystical anarchism” can be found

in many radical religious movements throughout the Middle Ages. In Islam

with sects like the Kharijites, the Najdiyya, and the Muzzalites. In

Christianity with movements like the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit,

John Ball in the English Peasant Uprising, the Taborites, and Thomas

Müntzer in the German Peasants Uprising, who after snapping from torture

screamed his belief “All things should be held in common!” Most of these

mystical movements adhered to a set of ideas called “millenarianism”,

where the common people conceived of the “world turned upside down” with

their rulers dispossessed and the Kingdom of Heaven was established

materially on Earth.

Also worth mentioning is the late medieval essay Discourse on Voluntary

Servitude (1576) by Étienne de La Boétie, which has been admired by

every anarchist since for how it explains the ways rulership secures its

power not just by brute force and coercion, but by convincing the ruled

that it is in their own interest to let others dominate them.

The words “anarchy” and “anarchism” themselves arose in the mid-1600s

during the English Civil War as an insult hurled at fringe radical

groups. While this epithet for the most part had no basis in fact, two

groups which were active at the time — the Diggers and the Ranters — had

ideas and practices which were quite close to anarchism. (The Diggers

have their own folk song[132] which expressed many of their

proto-anarchist sentiments.)

Some view the English radical William Godwin as the first modern

philosophical anarchist, from his work Enquiry Concerning Political

Justice (1793) in which he espoused proto-anarchist views about the

state and the then-emerging economic system of capitalism in

England.[133] A few decades later in Germany, an obscure girls school

teacher wrote a book called The Ego and its Own under the pseudonym Max

Stirner. While largely ignored at the time, it was later rediscovered in

the 1890s (along with William Godwin’s book) and praised by anarchists

for its anti-authoritarian individualist philosophy.

Other movements of the same period with philosophical anarchist ideas

were the French revolutionary faction the Enragés (enraged ones), who

felt the revolution wasn’t going far enough, pushing for direct

democracy and economic equality; and the American transcendentalists of

the early to mid 19^(th) century: Henry David Thoreau[134], Walt

Whitman[135], and Ralph Waldo Emerso[136]n being the most famous.[137]

Finally, Robert Owen and the cooperatives movement in the early 1800s

laid the ground for a lot of the theoretical and practical directions

socialism and anarchism would take as the century wore on. Irish

cooperativist William Thompson penned an in-depth critique of capitalism

long before Marx did, and they also attempted to form communalit

settlements which brought their ideas into practice, similar to what

would later be called the dual power strategy. British Owenites notably

proposed an prototypical form of what would later be called syndicalism.

Political Anarchism

However, while philosophical anarchism can be be identified in many

places and in almost every time period, political anarchism did not

emerge as a self-aware school of thought until the 19^(th) century in

Europe. According to German anarchist Rudolf Rocker, anarchism could be

seen as the confluence of two earlier social and political philosophies:

liberalism and socialism, or more accurately, classical liberalism and

democratic socialism. Thus, the alternative term for anarchism,

libertarian socialism.

Intellectually, it can be thought of as an outgrowth of the

Enlightenment ideals of humanism, reason, progress, and individuality

developed in an anti-authoritarian and socialist direction.

French writer and politician Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the first

thinker to call himself an anarchist with the book What is Property?

(1840), from which came the famous slogan: “property is theft”. It’s

important to note that Proudhon did not mean all forms of what we could

call “property” by this, only those not defined by personal possession.

In other words, he supported personal property (defined by use and

occupancy) but opposed “private” property (when defined by absentee

ownership), which he felt was based on theft of others’ personal

property.

While Proudhon and a few other thinkers called themselves anarchists in

the 1840s and 1850s, anarchism didn’t really get organised as a cohesive

movement until the mid 1860s within the famous socialist group the IWMA

(International Working Men’s Association), also called the “First

International”, as there’s been at least three others that came after

it. Although the First International is most well-known today because

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were members, for a time it actually

contained more anarchists than Marxists — until, that is, they were

expelled in the early 1870s by Marx himself.

Relationship to Marxism

Having developed out of the same European socialist movement that Karl

Marx was a part of, anarchism’s relationship to Marxism has always been

ambivalent. While many anarchists accepted Marx’s critique of capitalism

and (with nuance) the Marxian school of economics, they strenuously

rejected Marx’s politics, in particular the tactic of taking state power

as a way to bring about socialism. For anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin

(Marx’s rival in the First International), the state was inherently an

institution of class rule, and could never be used to bring about a

classless society, as it would just corrupt whatever group laid their

hands on it. (Bakunin’s view is generally regarded as having been

Vindicated by History[138] in light of what happened in the Soviet

Union[139] and other nominally Communist countries).

They also tended to reject the Marxist conception of history —

historical materialism — which claims that economic and technological

factors are the fundamental driving force of human development.

Anarchists saw this perspective as reductionist and ignoring important

social factors that weren’t directly related to economics — their own

conception of history might best be termed historical naturalism.[140]

Also, while Marxists see the proletariat (the urban industrial working

class) as the fundamental agents of revolution, anarchists also saw

revolutionary potential in the rural peasantry and social outcasts (the

lumpen-proletariat), which Marxists tend to dismiss as “backwards”. They

also feel that it’s important to appeal to those subject to hierarchy

and domination as “the people” and not just as an economic class. So you

could say that Marxists interpret class struggle to mean “worker

struggle”, while social anarchists interpret it as “popular struggle”.

New Left Philosophy

During the New Left era, Michael Albert, Robin Hahnel, Noam Chomsky and

others attempted to develop an anarchistic alternative[141] to the

methodology of economistic Marxism called complementary holism[142].

Instead of the Marxian model of an economic base determining an

ideological superstructure, complementary holism conceived of human

society being made up of four accommodating and co-reproducing “social

spheres”:

• the political sphere[143]

• the economic sphere[144]

• the kinship sphere[145]

• the cultural sphere[146]

With each of the four spheres existing in an ecological context,

incorporating Murray Bookchin’s theory of Social Ecology[147] — which

also developed out of the sixties counter-cultural environment.

They came up with this model in large part due to what they felt was

Marxism’s inadequacy when it came to addressing issues of race and

gender in a United States context. At the time, many in the black

power/Chicano movements could at times act as if racial oppression

(cultural sphere) was the most important hierarchy to get rid of, or how

the nascent feminist movement emphasised gender inequality (kinship

sphere) as the most pressing problem. Marxists tended to be dismissive

of race and gender struggles as distractions from the workers’ class

struggle (economic sphere), while a few anarchists could at times act as

if taking down the state should be the main focus of oppositional

campaigns (political sphere). All of these movements, it was claimed,

needed to stop thinking of domination in monist terms and examine how

their oppressions relate to each other in holist terms.

In other words, they were countering what’s called the “linchpin” view

of oppression: the idea that there’s one main form of oppression (e.g.

class or patriarchy) which, if gotten rid of, will cause all other

oppressions to crumble, like a lynchpin causing something to unravel if

pulled loose.

The four spheres are used for social analysis and examining how

different social factors affect one another. For example, how

patriarchal gender relations (kinship sphere) are reproduced in the

workplace (economic sphere), or how racial, ethnic, or religious

discrimination (cultural sphere) is heightened further and reproduced

through oppressive state laws (political sphere).

But at the same time these hierarchies can also be transformed within

each sphere, leading to co-transformation in the other spheres. Like how

removing anti-queer discrimination in the kinship sphere can force the

political, economic, and cultural spheres to catch up; or how devolving

political power to communities of colour transforms both spheres at the

same time.

The complementary holist model also stresses the importance of a the

“third class” in-between the ruling classes and the working classes

called the managerial class (or coordinator class) whose ideal is

neither capitalism nor worker self-management but a kind of left-wing

bureaucracy. It is this class, they claim, who is best served by

traditional state-socialism and social democracy. A broad outline of

these ideas is available here[148].

Also developed around the same time, by the Combahee River Collective,

were the ideas of intersectionality, a framework for examining how

different social oppressions interact with each other, which has a broad

overlap with the complementary holist model and has since become a

staple of social anarchist theory.

Relation to Other Philosophical Ideas

Over the last century, anarchism has had a complex set of relationships

with other philosophies too. Repression of much anarchist political and

labour organising in the late 19^(th) and early 20^(th) century meant

that a lot of anarchist thinkers ended up channelling their ideas into

more intellectual pursuits. For instance, anarchism (especially

individualist anarchism) had a large influence on the development of

early Modernism, Dadaist art, and surrealism in the early years of the

20^(th) century. From the end of World War II to the rise of the 1960s

counter-culture, anarchists helped influence various American and

European bohemian movements, such as the Beats and hippies, informing

their philosophy of trying to live outside the boundaries of “the

system”.

In the later years of the same century it also blended with certain

forms of postmodernism[149] and poststructuralism to create a hybrid

many started calling “post-anarchism”.

However, many anarchists, such as the ecological theorist Murray

Bookchin, lambasted these developments as moving away from anarchism’s

roots in rationalism and support for the liberatory power of scientific

realism. At around the same time, Bookchin himself developed his own

philosophical approach called dialectical naturalism, which blends the

dialectical thought of GWF Hegel, Karl Marx, and Mikhail Bakunin with

his own theory of Social Ecology.

There’s also something of an affinity between anarchism and American

pragmatism[150], with both supporting a “whatever works” attitude to

solving problems, with the US writer Paul Goodman inspiring many a

student radical with his common sense, pragmatic approach to anarchism.

Lately, there’s been a drift in anarchist thinking towards the

philosophy of Critical Realism[151] (originally devised by Roy Bhaskar)

– which is a sort of middle-way between scientistic positivism and

postmodernism. The famous anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, fellow

anthropologist Brian Morris, and literary critic Jesse Cohn have used

Critical Realism to elucidate their theoretical work, finding that it

chimes well with the overall social anarchist approach to

philosophising. Roy Bhaskar’s Critical Realism has a lot in common with

Bookchin’s philosophy, though the two were unfamiliar with each other’s

work during their lifetimes.

Main Schools of Thought

Views on economics among anarchists could be divided into four different

but overlapping schools of thought, each of which developed at different

times in response to different economic and social circumstances.

Mutualism

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who started writing in 1840, argued that

property, except when based in personal possession (i.e. occupancy and

use), was theft. His reasoning was laid out exhaustively in What is

Property?, with most if not all anarchists accepting it. Opposition to

“private property” (anything besides actual possession) in addition to

the state is near-universal to anarchism, though some have used the term

in a positive way to support property that is the product of one’s own

labour. Along with this, most opposed sexism, racism, homophobia,

classism and social hierarchy generally. Proudhon did not in fact oppose

the concept of a free market, supporting workers’ associations

(cooperatives) and mutual banks (similar to modern credit unions) to

compete away industrial capitalism. His school of thought is termed

mutualism. While it fell out favour for a long time, it has recently

been revived by the economic theorist Kevin Carson, who has integrated

it with elements borrowed from the thought of other left-wing,

pro-market writers.

Collectivism

Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian noble turned radical writer who was

imprisoned for his politics, escaping into exile, followed Proudhon and

broke with him on many issues, supporting collective work without

markets and workers’ self-management. Bakunin also linked opposition to

religion, especially organized, hierarchical forms, to his view of

anarchism, seeing God as the ultimate authority. He turned a saying of

Voltaire’s[152] on its head: “If God really existed, it would be

necessary to abolish him.” He was a strong rival of Marx in the First

International, and the two fought a long war of words over control of

the organization until Bakunin’s followers were expelled from it by

Marx’s. Bakunin’s school of thought is called anarcho-collectivism, and

could be considered a sort of middle way between mutualism (markets but

with cooperatives instead of corporations) and communism (in which

markets and even money would be abolished).[153] The best outline of how

a collectivist anarchist economy would work in practice is the pamphlet

Ideas on Social Organisation[154] by Bakunin’s friend James Guillaume.

Participatory Economics (Parecon) and Inclusive Democracy (ID) could be

considered contemporary forms of collectivist anarchism.

Communism

Peter Kropotkin, a Russian prince who, like Bakunin, gave it all up for

radicalism[155], advocated full libertarian communism on the principle

“from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”,

favouring abolition of money in favour of free access to

communally-owned goods, although with voluntary, direct democratic

participation: communist anarchism, or later anarcho-communism.[156]

Many on first impression may find the term communist anarchism odd,

given the modern day associations of the word Communism with the

statist, centrally planned economies of the former Soviet States.

However, in the 19^(th) century, the word communist simply referred to

any economic system that lacked both a state and money, where goods were

distributed according to need. It is this original sense of the word

that anarchists refer to when talking about communism. Kropotkin

provided a general outline of anarchist communism here[157].

Individualism

Meanwhile, in the United States, a very different brand of anarchism

emerged. American writers such as Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner,

William Green and others set out an ideal very close to Proudhon’s, with

even more emphasis upon an “anti-capitalist free market”, in which

self-employed craftsmen, artisans or farmers were paid their “full wage”

and land title was possession-based only. In short, individualist

anarchism argued for a society where every individual was a “capitalist”

(in the Marxist sense, i.e. an owner of capital). Essentially, they held

to the Labour Theory of Value along with support of free markets — “cost

is the limit of price” was among their key slogans. Their ideal was a

stateless economy made up mostly of self-employed artisans and

shopkeepers. This school of thought began slowly dying out in the late

19^(th) century as social anarchism (collectivist or communist) took

over, with immigrants from Europe such as bringing it to the forefront

of US anarchism.

Social Anarchism & Market Anarchism

As they stand today, the four main economic schools mentioned above

could be grouped into two categories:

Market anarchism (containing mutualist anarchism and individualist

anarchism), which seeks a non-capitalist free market made up of

self-employed professionals and worker-run cooperatives, and ...

Social anarchism (collectivist anarchism and communist anarchism), which

seeks to replace the market with a free commons involving decentralised,

directly-democratic planning of the economy, either by community

assemblies or worker councils; or some combination of the two.[158]

While differences in terms of desired outcomes do exist between these

two tendencies, most anarchists don’t have a problem with each

self-governing free community in an anarchist confederation deciding for

itself what particular economic system they want to have. Ericco

Malatesta, although himself a social anarchist, conceived of various

different municipalities practising collectivism, communism, mutualism,

and individualism all existing side-by-side. Likewise, Benjamin Tucker,

although viciously opposed to anarcho-communism, conceded that local

communism was okay by him as long as it was voluntary. So a free commons

and free market are not necessarily at odds with each other as their

proponents both accept “voluntary, non-hierarchical cooperation” as a

basic principle of organising things.

Other Tendencies

The following are not so much independent schools of thought like the

four economic traditions listed above, but more tendencies with regard

to specific issues that find expression across each of them. The

tendencies listed after syndicalism aren’t considered part of the

anarchist mainstream, as they lack a philosophical connection to the

historical anarchist movement, and many don’t regard them as anarchist

at all (especially the last three).

Egoism

At around the same time Proudhon was penning his socialist attacks on

property and the state, another writer, Max Stirner, wrote a similar

attack on these and other authoritarian institutions from a more

individualist perspective in The Ego and Its Own (1845).

Stirner did not label himself an anarchist, but his rejection of the

state, capitalism, and, well, basically all institutions means he has

been counted with them. He believed that rights, property, the state,

conventional morality and God were all “spooks” holding back the

individual from themselves, since all these are placed above them. It’s

worth noting that Stirner, while believing the individual’s right to act

was unlimited, advised that it would be best if they respected each

other as individuals, to let each flourish, even saying people could not

have their full self-expression absent communion with others, so they

could join together voluntarily in a way he called the “Union of

Egoists”, which was similar in principle to what most anarchists now

call voluntary association, but less formalised. Here is a classic text

by the Situationist International, advancing a socialist form of egoism.

Stirner denounced authoritarian communism of his time, but a kind which

respected individuals and lent them full expression of themselves is

viewed to be compatible with his ideas. Even the anarcho-communist Emma

Goldman was a big fan, and saw Stirner’s ideas as fully compatible with

her own.

Pacifism

In the late 19^(th) century Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy[159] (who, like

Bakunin and Kropotkin, was a Russian noble who renounced his title)

embraced a form of Christian, pacifist anarchism — though like Stirner

and Godwin before him, he didn’t use the label anarchist himself. Unique

among anarchist trends for its total rejection of violence, even in

self-defense or defense of others, Tolstoy advocated essentially the

same ideas as Bakunin or Kropotkin, his countrymen and more famous

anarchists, but with complete pacifism. His work deeply influenced

Mohandas K. “Mahatma” Gandhi[160] (who knew Indian anarchists in London

early in his activism, while disagreeing with them over the issue of

using violence) in addition to Civil Disobedience, by Henry David

Thoreau[161]. Critics argued his ideas were fit only for saints (though

many think Gandhi was such). Another prominent anarcho-pacifist was the

American public intellectual Paul Goodman, who became a kind of go-to

guy for student radicals in the 1960s opposed to the Vietnam war. While

initially supportive of radical youth movements, he later became

critical of them for abandoning nonviolence and decentralist organising

for militant action and Marxist-Leninism.

Syndicalism

The turn of the 20^(th) century saw another trend, which advocated for

revolutionary unions to overthrow capitalism and the state using

militant industrial organizing, sabotage, general strikes and overall

working-class solidarity. This is called anarcho-syndicalism, from the

French word for labour union — “chambre syndical.” It was less a

separate school of thought than tactical view, since followers were

invariably social anarchists in the collectivist or communist mould. The

Spanish Revolution[162], often pointed to as their greatest (albeit

doomed[163]) triumph by social anarchists, utilized this in the CNT

(Confederación Nacional del Trabajo- National Confederation of Labour),

which organized a worker’s revolt in 1936 following the military coup

led by Francisco Franco against the elected Spanish Popular Front

government. The CNT and FAI (Federación Anarquisto Ibérica — Iberian

Anarchist Federation) ran much of northeast Spain, centred in Catalonia,

along anarchist lines with no small success for the next three years

until the revolution was crushed by a combination of Stalinists and

Francoist forces.

It is important to note, however, that while syndicalism is typically

associated with anarchism, this does not mean that all syndicalists are

anarchists; some of them are actually very authoritarian. Mussolini in

fact called his economic model National Syndicalism, as did Franco,

though this meant something completely different, as fascist

“syndicates” were government-created trade associations which ran

industry[164]. It’s like a Venn diagram, in that there are non-anarchist

syndicalists and non-syndicalist anarchists who favour other tactics for

achieving libertarian socialism.

Propaganda of the deed

Like anarcho-syndicalism, this isn’t a school of thought, but rather the

tactic prominent in the last decades of the 19^(th) century of killing

powerful figures in society, both to avenge their perceived abuses but

also to inspire revolt through such “attentats” (acts that would draw

attention). Needless to say, this backfired spectacularly, allowing the

anarchist movement to be painted as mindless terrorists. A few made this

even worse by targeting random people. Heads of state assassinated

included the President of France, the Empress of Austria, the King of

Italy, and the President of the United States in 1901, around the time

propaganda of the deed ended. Almost no anarchists today actually

advocate this, so it could be considered something of a Discredited

Trope[165] in philosophy, though a lot of self-described

“insurrectionary anarchists” of the present day (the kind who tend to

break shop windows at protests) would seemingly like to see this tactic

restored and are highly critical of nonviolence as an ideology, claiming

it “protects the state”.

Lifestylism

“Post-left” and “lifestyle” anarchism has become widespread in modern

times, something Murray Bookchin and others disapproved of. Lifestylism

could be summed up as viewing anarchism more as a means of personal

rebellion in the here-and-now than transforming all of society in the

long-term. These are marked by a tendency to reject classical social

anarchism’s left-wing, working-class organizing and goals or at least

complement them with ecological or animal rights issues. Veganism and

dumpster diving (combined as “freeganism”-eating only food that is

reclaimed after being discarded) have become common for such lifestyle

anarchism, in addition to using the system (especially where it has an

ecological impact) to the lowest degree possible. The group

Crimethinc[166] are the most prominent exponents of this brand of

post-left/lifestyle anarchism.[167]

Primitivism

Primitivists emerged from the nascent green anarchist milieu in the

Pacific Northwest in the late 20^(th) century and are heavily inspired

by both Deep Ecology and anti-civilisation ideology. They view all forms

of complex technology as corruptive and wish to abandon it in favour of

a hunter-gatherer way of life, significantly reducing the human

population as a necessary stage in this goal. Some even reject language

(at least in a written fashion), counting, and acknowledging the passage

of time as oppressive — which they consider remnants of “symbolic

culture”. Primitivists cite that tribal groups don’t have

domestication[168] (i.e. farming) tend to be more egalitarian than those

with domestication[169]. Some argue that while technology itself isn’t

inherently oppressive, the structures that it requires to exist are. An

example can be seen in weapons. In an primitivist society,

theoretically, everyone would have access to stone or wood based

weapons, or at the very least, could use their own body as a weapon,

putting them on a mostly even playing field. When advanced technology

comes into play, those with access to the means to create more powerful

weapons will have an advantage against those who do not. (i.e., a person

with a wooden spear would either be killed by, or have to submit to a

person armed with a firearm.) Whereas if everyone had access to the same

type of weapons, this playing field would force people to at least

attempt to work together in a more voluntary fashion.

They are heavily criticised by social anarchists[170] as a source of

great embarrassment for their association with the a-word. Like

voluntaryists, most social anarchists don’t consider primitivism[171] to

be a form of anarchism and regard it as a separate ideology. Lately,

many primitivists have agreed, and have begum to regard their ideas as

distinct from anarchism[172].

“National Anarchists”

Ugh. Let’s just say the less said about this crowd the better.

Anarchism and the arts

Art Theory

Anarchists have long seen great potential in the arts for expanding

people’s consciousness in a liberatory direction, stressing the

importance of “social art” — that explores social, political, and

intellectual concerns — over the idea of “art-for-art’s-sake” favoured

by the Romantic school of thought. The literature professor Jesse Cohn

has argued[173] that anarchists hold to a critical aesthetics[174] that

views the value of art/entertainment in terms of its anti-hierarchical

ethics; appreciating a work in terms of how it supports vs. challenges

the established order based on hierarchy and domination.

He also proposes what he calls an “social anarchist hermeneutic” (method

of interpretation) for the purposes of textual analysis (oh, and by the

way, in literary theory, a “text” refers to anything that can be

analysed, not just the written word).

The anarchist hermeneutic proposes that meaning lies neither entirely in

the text being analysed, nor entirely in the mind of the person doing

the analysing. Rather, meaning is what emerges from the interplay

between the two, so finding out meaning — especially in art — is as much

a process of creation as of discovery.

When trying to figure out the meaning of a movie for instance, it’s not

enough to take into account just what the writer/director intended or

just what significance the movie has to you based on your

personal/cultural history. You need to see the meaning as a process of

“negotiation” (or dialectic) between the text itself and you, the

audience. This is why meanings can alter over time (as the

semiotic/cultural signifiers of audiences change) but the texts remain

largely the same. So meaning always exists in that tension between the

text itself and the person(s) enjoying it/reflecting upon it.

In his book Underground Passages (2015), Cohn traces the history of

anarchist “resistance culture” around the world and the kinds of

arts/literature/entertainment admired by and produced by anarchists.

Classical anarchists greatly admired what nowadays would be termed “high

art”, especially works that blended high concepts and important issues

with popular folk traditions, and tended to dismiss most examples of

romanticism and mass culture as sentimental, decadent, and escapist. In

other words, they liked art/entertainment that was “accessible but

thought-provoking”, which made the audience think critically about what

was wrong with hierarchical society and work out liberatory alternatives

to the status-quo.

They hoped that liberatory art could help create an anarchistic

transfer-culture which would help transform society as it existed in the

present — by teasing out what was already liberatory/progressive in the

existing culture — and transition people from the authoritarian world to

the libertarian socialist one.

In terms of art appreciation, Herbert Read, in his collection of essays

To Hell With Culture, argued against seeing art “culture” as a distinct

sphere of human society, saying that we should view it as embedded in

everyday practice instead of putting it on pedestal above ordinary life,

summing his attitude up as “the quality of a society should be judged by

how good its pots and pans are”. So the cultural goal of the anarchist

could be conceived as making even the mundane into (what’s now

considered) high art.

Also, Rudolf Rocker in his magnum opus Nationalism and Culture argued

that every artist and work of art should be looked at as “Of their time,

not of their place”. He claimed that there was no such thing as national

art, given that artists borrow and meld influences from all parts of the

world. note Instead, he saw the necessity of viewing art as a global,

international phenomenon that should ideally try to draw out the spirit

of the times the artist lived in, and how all the epochs that came

before worked their way into it. In other words, viewing art as a

commons.

Art Practice

The neo-Impressionists, who were a group of late 1800s painters inspired

by anarchism, claimed that there ought to be three functions of

anarchist art:

• Propagation of the anarchist cause

• Documentation of the real conditions of the oppressed

• Envisioning of positive alternatives to the present order of things

The first of these was intended to bring people over to social

libertarian causes and ways of thinking; the second was meant to awaken

people to the problems created by statism, capitalism, and social

hierarchy in general, exposing them as irrational effects of a flawed

system; and the third was supposed to help people see beyond the

confines of authoritarian society, showing that a more rational and

humane alternative was possible and necessary. As well as Impressionism

and neo-Impressionism, painting styles which anarchists have been drawn

to include futurism, dada, surrealism, (infrequently) abstract

expressionism, and collage art.

In music, there’s a long tradition among anarchists of taking popular

songs (including religious hymns and national anthems) and rewriting

them with radical far-left lyrics, “Imagine a revolutionary, libertarian

socialist version of “Weird Al” Yankovic[175] and you’ll get the idea”.

Japanese anarchists for example wrote a song called “Anarchist Melody”

that was set to the tune of “Oh Christmas Tree” and several anarchist

rewritings of the French national anthem and popular folk-diddys exist.

The association of anarchism with punk music and punk culture is

well-known, with bands like Crass, Subhumans, and Chumbawamba pushing

anarchist, pacifist, anti-fascist, and pro-queer messages in their

lyrics. Even punk movements who weren’t explicitly anarchist frequently

had anarchist influences, like Riot Grrrl and Pussy Riot. For the

record, despite their famous song “Anarchy in the UK”, the Sex Pistols

were about as close to anarchism as Pluto is to the Sun. They merely

appropriated the iconography of actual anarcho-punk bands like Crass

without taking the “anarcho-” part seriously, viewing it as little more

than a rebellious-sounding chant. Though another form of “punk” most

don’t realise has anarchist roots, in fact, is steampunk[176].

Visual art has been a popular means by which anarchists disseminated and

explored anti-authoritarian ideas. Wall murals, graffiti, single-panel

satirical cartoons, and most recently image memes are used to attack

various forms of domination and to highlight the positives of autonomy,

solidarity, and horizontal cooperation. Comics and sequential art more

generally are also praised by anarchists. Alan Moore, perhaps the most

renowned comics writer of his generation, is himself an anarchist and

frequently explores anarchistic themes in his work (most notably V for

Vendetta[177]).

In novels, there’s a long association with works that take a critical or

satirical look at existing society and point out its hypocrisies and how

its problems mostly originate in relations, institutions, and beliefs

founded on centralised power, greed, and unquestioned authority. They

particularly appreciate stories that focus on the plight of oppressed

and marginalised groups of people — women, people of color, indigenous

peoples, queer people, anthropomorphised animals, the working classes —

told from their point of view. There’s also a great appreciation for the

science-fiction and fantasy genres and utopian fiction, especially works

like those of Ursula K. Le Guin, William Morris, Ken Macleod, Kim

Stanley Robinson, and Iain M. Banks, who use fantastical and imagined

settings to explore alternative visions of how societies might work. The

purpose being to paint hierarchical society as it exists at present as

unreal and absurd compared to a more rational and liberated anarchistic

ideal.

Anarchist theorists themselves also frequently wrote about art and

literature on the side after discussing issues like politics and

economics.

• Peter Kropotkin wrote a book about Russian literature.

• Emma Goldman wrote a book about the revolutionary potential of modern

drama, which was huge in her day, much like movies are today (she was a

massive fan of Henrik Ibsen[178]).

• Gustav Landauer part-timed in his early days as a literary critic.

• Voltairine de Cleyre wrote of the importance of a “double reading” of

books: the first reading for pleasure, examining the book in the spirit

it was intended by the author, and the second reading to pick it apart

and examine it critically for what it says about the society it came

from and how it might say things that the author didn’t intend.

• Rudolf Rocker devoted a long chapter of his massive theoretical work

Nationalism and Culture to art history.

• David Graeber arguably invented Buffy Studies by writing the first

academic essay[179] examining Buffy the Vampire Slayer[180], and has

since written anarchist analyses of fantasy fiction and, notably,

superheroes[181].

• Paul Goodman and Erich Mühsam wrote that the goal of good art

(specifically poetry for the former and theatre for the latter) should

be to make people realise the affinities they have with one another,

breaking down their alienation, and bring them together as a community —

or more accurately, a counter-community with shared values opposed to

those of the existing hierarchical society.

Paul Goodman also stressed the importance of theatre, which in the late

19^(th) and early-to-mid 20^(th) century was a key means of spreading

anarchist ideas to working class audiences. In his own day he was

involved in the famous Living Theatre[182] in New York City, which was a

sort of haven for playwrights of an anarchist and radical pacifist

sensibility.

In contemporary times, as noted by anarchist academic Jeff Shantz,

there’s a lot of anarchists involved in DIY forms of artistic

production, especially since the advent of the Internet. Anarchists tend

to view culture itself as a sort of commons which should belong to

everyone — viciously opposing all intellectual property, especially

copyrights — with the practice of fan labour (fanart, fanfiction, fan

songs, and the like) actually being very in-keeping with the anarchist

ethos, as is the practice of sampling in hip-hop.

Also, the tradition of taking existing works and repurposing them with

radical messages continues. One anarchist even did a graphic novel where

Tintin starts a social revolution called Tintin: Breaking Free. Comedy

memes have also become a favoured method of spreading anarchist ideas,

such as “Pictures of Kanye, Words of Noam”; in which Kanye West is

depicted espousing the anarchistic sentiments of Noam Chomsky.

Writers, artists, and entertainers who openly declared an affinity with

political anarchism are somewhat rare, although a few notable ones are:

Oscar Wilde[183], James Joyce[184], George Orwell[185] (in his early

days), Charlie Chaplin[186], Ursula K. Le Guin[187], Michael

Moorcock[188], Robert Anton Wilson[189], Alan Moore[190], Grant

Morrison[191], and (uh...) Woody Harrelson[192].

A partial list of works inspired by anarchism can be found at the bottom

of the Political Ideologies[193] page.

Glossary

Like many political and philosophical discourses, anarchism has its own

assortment of key terms. Some of which are more familiar terms but used

in a somewhat idiosyncratic way compared to other political traditions.

The most important ones are as follows.

Anarchy: From the Greek anarchos, meaning “without rulership”.

Anarchists frequently point out that the term actually means “without

rulers, not without rules”, and that what they seek is not chaos or

disorder, but voluntary, decentralised, non-hierarchical order. What

most people are really referring to when they use the word anarchy

(rulerlessness) would more accurately be defined as anomie

(orderlessness). Because of the negative association of the noun, most

anarchists today only ever say anarchism and avoid using the word

anarchy.

Atheism: A key intellectual foundation for anarchist thought, with

anarchists viewing religious authority and unquestionable supernatural

beliefs in general as the root of all other forms of hierarchy and

domination. This is because they promote, in the words of Murray

Bookchin, “epistemologies of rule” in which nature/reality itself is

conceived as having a natural hierarchical order where the strong are on

top and the weak obey or are destroyed for the benefit of the strong.

While there have been a few philosophical anarchists who were

religious[194] (for example Leo Tolstoy[195] interpreted the teachings

of Christ as being compatible with anarchism, and several anarchists

have argued the Tao Te Ching[196] is a proto-anarchist text), the broad

anarchist tradition has been almost entirely anti-theistic and

supportive of science, rationalism, and critical thinking[197] as

enemies of authoritarianism.

Authority: Contrary to popular belief, anarchists are not against all

forms of authority. Mikhail Bakunin once said “Does it follow that I

reject all authority? Far from such a thought. When I need shoes, I

defer to the authority of the boot maker. When a bridge needs to be

built, I defer to the authority of the architect. But I allow neither

the boot maker nor the architect to impose his authority upon me.” In

other words, anarchists, while always at least sceptical of authority as

a concept, are okay with certain forms of it as long as they are (1)

voluntary; (2) temporary; and (3) minimal. So temporary and minimal

forms of authority like the relationships between parent/child,

teacher/student, doctor/patient (all of which ideally exist for the

benefit of the one subject to authority and not the wielder) are okay by

anarchists as long as they’re organised in as equitable a way as

possible. They are, however, opposed to all forms of authoritarianism,

forms of authority that are involuntary, permanent, or maximal.

Autonomy: While most often used to mean independence or self-reliance,

the etymological root nomos(from which the “nomy” part comes) means

“order” or “law”. So what autonomy more fully means is more along the

lines of “self-ordering” or “self-determination”; with its opposite

being heteronomy(other/external-ordering). This can be collective as

well as individual and this more specific meaning — self-ordering free

of external determinations — is the way anarchists use the word.[198]

Autonomism: A form of anti-authoritarian Marxism with a lot of

similarity to social anarchism. Adherents of each philosophy frequently

cooperate with each other. Like social anarchists, autonomists want a

stateless participatory democracy and libertarian socialist economy, and

are also against using the state as a way to bring this about. Unlike

social anarchists, they root themselves at the theoretical level in Marx

and Engels’s writings instead of Bakunin and Kropotkin’s. They’re also

still very much committed to the theory of historical materialism (which

many anarchists find reduces social issues to economic ones), though

unlike most Marxists who use the methodology, they don’t see forms of

social struggle relating to race, gender, sexuality, or ecology as less

important than class-based struggle. This is because they see capitalism

as having fundamentally changed since the decline of industrialism and

the coming of the internet, with “immaterial labour” (the provision of

services and creation of non-material products) having replaced

material/manual labour as the most important form of work to the running

of capitalism. Thus, they see the primary “site of struggle” against

capitalism as no longer being the factory/workplace (like when

industrial capitalism reigned), but the city/metropolis — anarchist

Murray Bookchin felt the same way, though he thought the city, not the

workplace, should always have been seen as the primary site of

struggle.[199]

Balanced Job Complexes: Where people in a workplace do a variety of

tasks, sharing and rotating both the enjoyable and dirty work, instead

of the ultra-specialisation that pervades capitalist and state

enterprises. Many anarchists see these as a good way of avoiding

managerialism, as people would take it in turns to be managers instead

of having management be a fixed layer of the workplace above ordinary

workers.

Capital: Self-expanding money. Or more specifically, financial wealth

which can be used to create more financial wealth, usually through

buying and trading stocks and bonds.[200] While capital originally

referred to finance and only finance, the term later came to refer to

other forms of wealth, both tangible and non-tangible. Such as plant and

machinary (hard capital), natural resources (natural capital), and even

social skills and group relationships (social capital). Though the

proper meaning only refers to intangible finance. Anarchists cite the

capitalisation non-economic phenomena like social relations as evidence

of just how much the logic of capitalism is penetrating everyday life.

Capitalism: Used by anarchists to mean an economic system characterised

by (1) primarily private ownership of the means of production,

distribution, and investment; (2) production-for-profit rather than

production-for-use; and (3) wage-labour as the main form of legal work.

They don’t agree that capitalism should be defined as simply “voluntary

exchange” (as this has existed for thousands of years before the birth

of capitalism) or the presence of markets (as many anarchists support

markets, just not private businesses). And unlike both Marxists and

(funnily enough) libertarian capitalists, they view capitalism as

inherently statist and argue that without a state or state-like entity

to enforce (absentee-owned) private property, capitalism couldn’t even

exist.

Class: Economic hierarchy. Different classes are defined in anarchism

not so much by income differences, but how they relate to the means of

production. The ruling class (part of the ruling elite) owns the means

of production, while the working classes (the plural form is important

here) — or popular classes — operate them. Unlike in Marxism — in which

there are only two key classes — many anarchists claim that there is an

important third class in between the rulers and the workers/popular

classes called the “professional-managerial class”, or just managerial

class for short. This class coordinates relations between the rulers

above and the workers below, monopolising important information and

empowering forms of work. It includes (obviously) managers, university

professors, doctors, lawyers, and most people in professional

occupations. While all anarchists would generally agree that class

formations are important, unlike most Marxists they don’t think

everything can be reduced to class or economics, and they also think

that appealing to people as “the people” is just as important, if not

more so, than appealing to them as workers (so that they’re not just

reduced to their economic function).

Commission: Used by the social anarchist James Guillaume to refer to

local institutions tasked with carrying out various operations in a

locality, usually public services like sanitation, transport,

communications, and others. The various “working groups” set up within

Occupy Wall Street could be seen as a small-scale version of these.

Commons: A collective pool of resources (physical or intellectual) which

anyone can partake of or contribute to, some of which are open-access,

while others are cooperatively managed by their users. Forms an

important part of contemporary anarchism, in which the goal is seen as

the creation of a widespread free commons (in contrast to a free market)

administered via decentralised, horizontal cooperation. The trope of

“tragedy of the commons” is frequently cited as a case against such a

set up. Anarchists argue that the real problem with the tragedy of the

commons is the selfish and profit-driven behavior, not the fact that

there’s a common pool of resources. The commons can be seen as the

“third way” of economic organisation beyond both state (public property)

and market (private property). Commons are stewarded rather than

“owned”. Making temporary exclusive use of common resources is called

usufruct, which is only granted to certain individuals or groups with

the understanding that their user rights over the resources will

dissolve after an agreed time has elapsed or goal accomplished.

Commune: What social anarchists see as the central political/social unit

of an anarchist polity. A self-governing territorial area of no more

than about 15,000 people. The word commune in most European languages

simply means a small-scale local area — like a small town, rural parish,

or city ward. However, in English, the word has (perhaps unfortunate)

associations with hippies and even cults. For this reason, in English

the word municipality tends to be used instead to mean the same thing;

with a voluntary confederation of communes/municipalities being the core

structure of an anarchist society. With each commune/municipality

administering itself through a local network of directly-democratic

popular assemblies and other voluntary associations.

Communism: Used in two different ways by anarchists depending on how the

word is spelled. With a capital-c, Communism has come to refer to the

totalitarian regimes ruled by Marxist-Leninists in the twentieth

century. With a small-c, communism refers to an economic system that

operates without a state, markets, or money and things are organised on

the basis “from each according to ability, to each according to need”.

The small-c definition is in fact older than what Communism has come to

mean in mainstream political discourse — which is actually the exact

polar opposite of what late 19^(th) century radicals used the word to

mean. The weird thing is, not even the Marxist governments of the time

referred to the economic system they had as communism, which they

believed was still yet to be achieved. The confusion arose because all

such governments were ruled by Communist Parties, so westerners came to

associate the term “Communism” with the centrally planned economic

systems they had — even though the Communist Parties themselves never

called them that.

Cultural Anarchism: Spreading anarchistic ideas and values throughout

general culture; part of trying to create an anarchist transfer-culture

that will raise people’s consciousness of non-hierarchical, democratic,

and cooperative alternatives to the status quo. Coined by communitarian

anarchist and Social Ecologist John P. Clark.

Decentralism: The idea that, wherever possible, institutions should be

decentralised, devolved, localised, and otherwise scaled down to a

smaller and more immediate scale, so that people are better able to

directly participate in and manage them.

Democracy: Used to mean direct, participatory democracy rather than

representative democracy. In fact, most anarchists would regard

representative “democracy” as a contradiction in terms, as democracy

(which means “people power” in the original Greek) for most of its

history was thought of as by definitiondirect and without

representation. Representative government, they find, is a more

appropriate term. It should be noted that anarchists didn’t always use

the word in a positive sense, with the classical anarchists still mostly

equating it with representation and majority rule. Since the 1960s,

however, most anarchists have reclaimed the word to refer to the

participatory decision-making processes they always supported anyway.

Dialectic: An important part of much anarchist philosophy, concerned

with how opposing forces interact with each other and shape future

developments by becoming synthesised. Also a form of analysis in which

social structures are critiqued in terms of how they internally

contradict themselves (for example, if a society founds itself on the

ideal of equality, but doesn’t realise it in practice), with progressive

changes being regarded as the “working out” of these contradictions;

like a knotted piece of rope unraveling itself.[201]

Direct Action: Grassroots actions and forms of organising that are

unmediated by formal political institutions. What anarchists promote as

a means of getting stuff done in place of electoral politics and

capturing state power. Not the same thing as protesting. Protesting is

about challenging existing authorities to do something, whereas a

direct-actionist approach is to bypass the authorities, start doing it

yourselves without their approval, then basically saying “come at me

bro” if they ask you to stop.

Domination: Being subject to centralised/hierarchical power and unable

to act autonomously (self-determining). The core thing anarchists are

opposed to; used synonymously with “rulership”. Domination is somewhat

broader than oppression, as the word oppression tends only to be used

for persons while domination can also apply to non-human animals and to

the natural world, which anarchists see as also being subject to

hierarchical domination. Along with prefiguration (means-ends

consistency) the principle of anti-domination is the most pervasive

ethic in anarchist theory and practice; “I will neither be dominated nor

dominate others myself”.

Ecology: Means more than just environmentalism. Environmentalism refers

to concern for the environment, while ecology also includes how humanity

relates to the natural world while being a part of it. As a philosophy,

ecology could be thought of as environmentalism + an examination of

humanity’s role in the environment. The word later came to refer to the

science of studying the natural world, being closely linked to biology.

Social Ecology[202] is perhaps the most significant ecological

perspective developed within anarchism, though Deep Ecology (developed

outside of anarchism by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess) also has a

strong presence, especially among lifestyle anarchists.

Ethics: While there is no single set of anarchist ethics, different

schools of anarchism do tend towards several of the main ethical

traditions. Social anarchists tend towards consequentialist ethics and

virtue ethics, while market anarchists tend towards deontological ethics

(based on natural law theories) and ethical egoism. Not actually the

same thing as morality, even though the two are often thought of as the

same thing. Morality refers to objective standards of good and evil,

while ethics refers to codes of behaviour. Some anarchists (like Emma

Goldman) reject the notion that good and evil can have an “objective”

basis outside of human interactions, and thus oppose “morality” while

still supporting their own brand of ethics. Most settle on a few basic

principles like non-domination, prefiguration (means-ends consistency),

inclusiveness, and voluntary association as a must for all human

relations.

Federation/Confederalism: These terms are normally employed to mean

systems of government in which some powers are devolved to more local

component parts. Anarchists, however, use

federation/federalism/federative to mean decentralised forms of

organisation in which autonomous groups cooperate with each other on a

horizontal basis. Confederalism is somewhat more recent (though the idea

isn’t) and refers more specifically to the large-scale voluntary union

of free communes/municipalities in an anarchist society.

Feminism: As a theory of sexual equality and gender liberation, feminism

is an essential component of anarchist theory and practice, along with

masculism (men’s liberation) when it’s supportive of feminism. Emma

Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre are seen as key figures in the history

of both anarchism and feminism. There’s been a close association between

anarchism and the more left-wing varieties of feminism since the 1960s,

with many of the consensus-based decision-making practices anarchists

now use having been pioneered in feminist circles. Anarcha-feminists

tend to be critical of so-called “sex-negative” schools of feminism and

anti-transgender feminists.

Freedom: Anarchists understand freedom to mean more than just the

absence of coercion (called negative freedom or formal freedom) and hold

that one needs to have the capabilities for self-fulfillment and

self-realisation if one is to be called free in any meaningful sense

(called positive freedom or effective freedom). They think effective

freedom is only possible in practice in conditions of equality and

solidarity, where each individual has a guaranteed minimum (in terms of

their economic needs). “My freedom ends where yours begins” is a

frequently used phrase to emphasise the complementarity of freedom with

equality. As Mikhail Bakunin put it “I can only be truly free when all

those around me are equally free”.

Guaranteed Minimum (also called Irreducible Minimum): The ethic that

each individual, simply by virtue of being a living person, should be

entitled to a basic minimum standard of living and capabilities for

satisfying their needs, whether or not they engage in socially valued

work. Anarchists want to provide this through a voluntary,

horizontally-organised welfare commons instead of a centralised welfare

state. They find a Basic Income is a better way of providing this in

present society than state welfare programs.

Growth: In economic terms, the expansion of GDP (gross domestic

product), which is basically like the profit of an entire national

economy measured through the amount of economic transactions that take

place and how much capital (self-expanding money) is accumulated. Since

the birth of the modern market economy — as distinct from markets

(plural) — this growth imperative, or “grow-or-die” logic, has been the

central organising principle of all major economies, both capitalist and

even state-socialist. Anarchists want to replace economic growth as the

way progress is measured with needs-satisfaction and increased

well-being of people and the planet, moving from production-for-profit

to production-for-use and from a growth-based economy to a needs-based

economy.

Hierarchy: Originally derived from an older Greek term for “holy

rulership”, the term is used in a more specific (somewhat idiosyncratic)

way by anarchists to refer to relations and institutions in which one

party is subordinate to another party primarily for the higher party’s

benefit. As a result, they aren’t necessarily against all forms of

“hierarchy” in the more mainstream sense, such as ranking systems and

taxonomies, only hierarchies of power.

Horizontalism: Organising things on a decentralist and lateral basis

where all parties involved share power equally. The opposite of

hierarchy.

Human Nature: Anarchists have a contextual view of human nature and

human social development. They don’t agree with many postmodernists who

think human nature is an artificial social construct that biology and

evolution play no role in. But neither do they agree with biological

determinists who think that there are a fixed and static set of

behaviours that all humans end up succumbing to regardless of

environment. Instead, they view human beings has having two main

tendencies in their biological and social evolution: the egotistic

tendency and the mutualistic tendency. They believe that an environment

that promotes sociality, personal freedom, unity-in-diversity, love, and

equality will better bring out the mutualistic tendency, even if the

egotistic tendency can never be expunged entirely.

Intersectionality: A big word but a fairly simple idea: that when

examining different forms of social hierarchy/oppression, they can’t be

examined in isolation from each other (or have one be given primary

status as the only important one) but need to be analysed in terms of

how the overlap and intersect with one another. Examples include how

gender intersects with class or how sexuality intersects with race. A

woman will experience class relations in different ways from a man and a

black gay person will experience discrimination in a different way to a

white gay person. While the term was only coined in the late 1980s, and

is associated mostly with feminism, anarchists, in critically examining

different forms of hierarchy, have arguably always been intersectional

in their theory. Emma Goldman and Murray Bookchin in particular stand

out as exemplars of proto-intersectional thinkers.

Libertarian: Synonym for “anarchistic” or “anti-authoritarian”. Despite

being most often used in English-speaking countries today to mean

“laissez-faire capitalist”, the word libertarian was first used in a

political context by anti-capitalist anarchists all the way back in the

1850s (though it tended to be used as an adjective, not a noun).

Something could be described as libertarian in character, but the term

libertarian-ism was only coined when American pro-capitalists adopted

the word for their own beliefs.

Managerialism: The ideology of the professional-managerial class (or

just managerial class for short), the class in between the ruling class

and working classes who manage the relations between the two. Mikhail

Bakunin called it the “bureaucratic class” and the “aristocracy of

labour”. Strives to make the administration of things hierarchical and

bureaucratic, claiming ordinary people can’t do it for themselves due to

not having the right information, and capitalists can’t do it right due

to being too greedy. Thus, everything needs to made technocratic and

centralised for the people’s own benefit, with an enlightened group of

well-educated managers on top. This, anarchists claim, is the class the

statist left (Marxists and left-liberals) have always represented the

interests of, not the working classes.

Market(s): There’s a crucial difference to be made between markets

(plural) and the market (singular). The former have existed in most

organised societies throughout human history, while the latter is only

about 200–300 years old. The difference is that while markets have

usually formed a component part of economies, they were never the

central organising factors of economic activity, always being subject to

social controls and embedded within a social context. That started

changing with the enclosure of the commons, in which dispersed local

markets were “nationalised” by European states to form a single national

market, which later via imperialism became an internationalised (and now

globalised) market economy — in which all non-market means of organising

economic activity become subordinated to the market logic of the growth

imperative, the profit-motive, propertarianism, and rugged

individualism.[203] Many anarchists see no issue in supporting markets

while opposing the market economy — also called the cash nexus. The

problem, as they see it, is that markets (plural) and the market economy

(singular) tend to be conflated, just as nationality is often conflated

with nationalism.

Means of Production: Large-scale, physical and tangible resources that

are used to produce things in the economy. “Big stuff that can be used

to create smaller stuff — and to assemble that smaller stuff into big

stuff”. Usually refers to factories, heavy machinary, transportation,

communications centres, and (sometimes) land and natural resources.

Social anarchists want the means of production to be socialised into the

common property of confederated, democratic communities, while market

anarchists want them to be under worker ownership or individual

ownership by self-employed professionals. Neither want private or state

ownership of productive resources.

Mutual Aid: Voluntary cooperation without hierarchy in which one party

helps another, forming a bond in which the receiver would help out the

giver when they’re in need. As an ethical practice, mutual aid goes

beyond the traditional dichotomy of egoism vs. altruism, as it is

neither entirely selfless nor entirely self-serving. It deliberately

avoids quantifying obligations people have to each other, helping each

party when they need assistance according to need.

Neoliberalism: (Also called market fundamentalism) The most prominent

economic ideology since the late 1970s and early 1980s. Believes that

the market economy is the natural state of human affairs and that state

“intervention” in the economy always makes things worse.[204] Wants to

privatise as many things as possible and wants to cut state-provided

social programs out of the belief that they make ordinary people lazy

and that getting rid of them would encourage them to go out and get

jobs. Anarchists have no love for the welfare state and managerialism,

but see it as a lesser evil to the kind of society neoliberalism wishes

to create.

Pacifism/Pacificism: Anarchists have a long history of association with

anti-war, anti-militarist, and peace movements, and aside from a few

isolated individuals who committed bombings and assassinations in the

late 19^(th) century, anarchism could actually be considered one of the

least violent political philosophies in terms of body count. Pacifism

means avoiding violence in absolutely all cases, even in self-defence or

the defence of others from being hurt and killed. Pacificism[205] on the

other hand is like pacifism with exceptions. It rests on an ethical

aversion to war, militarism, and violence in general, while still

allowing for the use of violence in self-defence when no other possible

alternative is available to prevent more people from being hurt or

killed. The broad anarchist tradition tends to be mostly pacificist,

rather than pacifist (at one extreme) or insurrectionist (at the other).

While there does exist a prominent anarcho-pacifist school of thought —

associated at the theoretical level mostly with Gustav Landauer and Paul

Goodman — even those two would more accurately qualify as pacificist,

rather than pacifist in the strict sense. One example of an anarchist

who actually was an Actual Pacifist[206] is Leo Tolstoy[207].

Politics: The collective organisation of social affairs, which

anarchists want to be directly democratic and organised from the

bottom-up, starting with the local community through popular assemblies.

Distinguished by anarchists from statecraft, for which the word politics

is occasionally used as a synonym.

Popular Assemblies: Face-to-face meetings of people where they make

decisions about issues that affect them (directly and without

representation) through participatory democracy — using either majority

voting or consensus decision-making, or a combination of the two. These

have existed for most of human history as mechanisms of collective

self-rule outside of the state, though the word democracy has not

usually been applied to them, even though what they do is far closer to

what the word democracy originally meant (in ancient Athens) than modern

representative democracy.

Power: Roughly, “decision-making ability”. While the distinction exists

in other languages (like in French with pouvoir and puissance) social

power is really two different, albeit related, things. To make this

distinction, the best way is to hyphenate the word. The first kind of

power is power-to — which simply means the effective ability to do

something. The other kind is power-over — which refers to having control

over others and being capable of getting them to do things they

otherwise wouldn’t do, usually by means of coercion. Anarchists seek to

dissolve oppressive forms of power-over and disperse power-to equally to

each individual, so that no person or group is able to wield power-over

to lessen the freedom of others.

Prefiguration: Forms of action and organisation which prefigure the

shape of a future libertarian socialist society — autonomy, voluntarism,

participatory democracy, decentralisation, nonviolence (unless one is

directly attacked), and ecological stewardship. Also the ethic of

means-ends consistency. Along with the anti-domination principle,

prefiguration is the most pervasive ethic in anarchist theory and

practice.

Ruling Elite: Those who wield the most hierarchical power in society.

Includes the ruling (economic) class, but also politicians, important

religious figures, media/cultural figures, and certain powerful

intellectuals. Unlike the ruling class, you don’t necessarily have to be

rich to be a part of the ruling elite, in which social/political power

is counted along with economic power.

Socialism: Perhaps no other word in political discourse causes more

confusion and misunderstandings than the word socialism when used by

anarchists. Many today, especially Americans, are baffled by how

anarchism can be a form of socialism when they associate the term

“socialist” with statism and collectivism (in the negative sense of the

word). This is because anarchists use an earlier definition of the term

(from the 19^(th) century) which referred to several potential economic

systems in which economic institutions were administered without bosses

through worker self-management. In fact, most anarchists don’t regard

government-directed economic systems to be socialist at all, merely

“state-capitalist” — as the economy is still premised on profit and

growth (at the national level), people still work for wages instead of

controlling their own workplaces, and class stratifications still exist.

In other words, the economy is still technically capitalist (by their

definition), only directed by a centralised state instead of polycentric

private businesses. It is worth noting that anarchism has existed for

longer than most other forms of socialism, including Marxism. Chinese

anarchist Ba Jin even regarded anarchism as the most “pure” form of

socialism.

Statism: The existence of the state and the ideology of believing the

state is good and should exist. Anarchists make a distinction between

state and government, with a state being used to mean an institution of

class rule with a “monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force”

(Max Weber), and government meaning the apparatus that controls the

state. Different governments can control the same state, much like

different people can wield the same sword, but the sword (state) remains

constant and distinct. In other words, anarchists are not necessarily

opposed to “government” (or more accurately governance), just

centralised state government which relies on structural violence. The

goal of anarchism is to dissolve the state and decentralise government —

so that it becomes participatory self-governance of autonomous

communities.

Vegetarianism/Veganism: A key aspect of contemporary anarchist life and

ethics, with most anarchists adopting vegetarian or vegan diets out of

their support for animal liberation. Most, however, don’t believe that

changing one’s eating/spending habits is likely to have any real impact

on the meat industry, and are critical of so-called ethical consumerism,

which they see as the co-optation of animal/environmental causes. Only

by replacing capitalism and statism do they see animal liberation as

being fully possible. The classical anarchist and proto-Social Ecologist

Elisee Reclus was one of the first modern western intellectuals to

advocate vegetarianism on secular ethical grounds.

Voluntarism: The principle that relations and institutions should exist

on the basis of voluntary association, with the freedom of any person or

component unit to disassociate or secede. While anarchists see voluntary

association as an essential feature of social organisation, they think

that it is fundamentally incomplete unless accompanied by non-hierarchy.

In other words, they don’t agree that forms of hierarchy or centralised

power are okay just because those subject to them give their formal

consent. In fact, many view such forms of “voluntary” rulership as being

more insidious than overtly coercive forms, as they present themselves

as existing on the basis of formal equality between ruler and

subordinate, when in reality the disparity of bargaining power between

the two makes the subordinate’s “consent” little more than a ruse, as

they can’t effectively choose an alternative in which they would retain

their autonomy. Voluntarism is not synonymous with voluntaryism, which

is another (more accurate in fact) term for the philosophy of

“anarcho-capitalism”.

Worker Self-Management: (Also called workers’ control, economic

democracy, or just self-management) Where enterprises are organised from

the bottom-up by their workers through democratic assemblies and

councils instead of being administered through a hierarchy of bosses and

managers. Cooperatives, commons-based peer-production, and

self-employment are examples of worker self-management that already

exist which anarchists would like to see expanded to the whole economy.

[1]

tvtropes.org

[2]

tvtropes.org

[3]

tvtropes.org

[4] Other terms for “archism” which anarchists use to describe what they

oppose include: authority, hierarchy, power (as in power over others),

domination, oppression, governmentalism, and heteronomy (the inversion

of autonomy). These are not used as synonyms however. Each of the above

describe different types of rulership (archy/archism) which apply more

or less depending on the context.

[5]

roarmag.org

[6]

libcom.org

[7] See here[208] for some basic info on what’s meant by “commons” in a

modern context.

[8]

libcom.org

[9]

www.aljazeera.com

[10]

anarchism.pageabode.com

[11]

m.youtube.com

[12]

m.youtube.com

[13] Because of its predominance and significance in contrast to the

other schools of thought, some have argued that social anarchism should

be considered the only form of anarchism and the sole legitimate users

of the A-word, with the other self-described anarchists merely being

“anarchistic” or left-libertarian. This article doesn’t say this

position is the correct one, but it does grant social anarchism, as the

mainstream tradition, the privilege of being the only tradition referred

to simply as anarchism without prefixes or suffixes. So from here on,

social anarchism is referred to as just “anarchism”, while market

anarchism (the other political anarchist school) and philosophical

anarchism always have a qualifying term before them.

[14] Rudolf Rocker, in his “anarchist bible” Nationalism and Culture,

claimed every state and ruling elite require some kind of religion in

order to maintain their grip on power. While supernatural beliefs are

the most common ideology to justify “natural hierarchies” between rulers

and ruled, in the twentieth century, he argued, nationalism and its

offshoots had become the new religion used to control people. In the

early twentieth century, many anarchists would say that neoliberalism —

belief in rugged individualism, materialistic consumerism, and

self-actualisation through the “free market” — has taken its place.

[15]

tvtropes.org

[16]

www.raikoth.net

l][web.archive.org]]

[17] Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta put it like this: “The end

justifies the means. This maxim has been greatly slandered. As a matter

of fact, it is the universal guide to conduct. One might better express

it thus: each end carries with it its own means. The morality or

immorality lies in the end sought; there is no option as to the means.

Once one has decided upon the end in view, whether by choice or by

necessity, the great problem of life is to find the means which,

according to the circumstances, will lead most surely and economically

to the desired end. The way in which this problem is solved determines,

as far as human will can determine, whether a man or a party reaches the

goal or not, is useful to the cause or—without meaning to—serves the

opposite side. To have found the right means is the whole secret of the

great men and great parties that have left their mark in history”.

[18]

theanarchistlibrary.org

[19] A family of ethical systems in which the greatest good for the

greatest number over the longest time is best realised through adherence

to various virtues. Unlike deontological ethics (where ethical

principles must be adhered to irrespective of consequences),

virtue-consequentialism allows one to bypass what virtues may be

appropriate in certain contexts in favour of considering the direct

consequences an action may have and acting accordingly.

[20]

www.positiveatheism.org

[21]

tvtropes.org

[22]

theanarchistlibrary.org

[23] the core “levels” of an anarchist confederation are

[24] Made up of of federated municipalities/communes.

[25] Made up of federated regions/cantons.

[26]

theanarchistlibrary.org

[27]

www.britannica.com

[28] Well, there was one which did survive, Switzerland; which was

formed as a communal confederation of independent cantons. While it

later took on most of the characteristics of a traditional nation-state,

its more decentralist political structures and history of direct

democracy have always made it attractive to social anarchists as a

“halfway house” between the nation-state and the stateless

communal-confederations they have in mind.

[29]

new-compass.net

[30]

roarmag.org

[31]

roarmag.org

[32]

vimeo.com

[33]

tvtropes.org

[34]

shawnewald.info

or

shawnewald.info

l][web.archive.org]]

[35] A constellation of powerful classes which includes the economic

ruling class — the owners of the means of production — but also those

who wield other forms of social power who don’t necessarily own means of

production, like politicians and religious figures.

[36] Managers, professionals, the police, university professors,

journalists, doctors, lawyers, writers, and public intellectuals. Also

called the professional-managerial classes, the coordinator class, and

the “New Class” (by Marxists).

[37] The traditional working classes (or “proletariat”) plus the rural

peasantry, the unemployed, and basically everyone else who isn’t a

memeber of the above two classes.

[38]

www.youtube.com

[39]

theanarchistlibrary.org

[40] Conditioned by supply and demand

[41] Such as monopoly shares of the market, class inequalities, and

social hierarchies.

[42] Labour would have played the largest role of the three in feudal

and early capitalist societies. Power played the biggest role in the

centrally planned economies under Marxist regimes. While utility perhaps

plays the largest role in certain non-material products nowadays in the

age of the Internet and computerisation. But all three factors matter,

even if one (or two) contributes more to value than the other(s).

[43]

zcomm.org

[44]

www.inclusivedemocracy.org

[45]

www.mutualist.org

[46]

www.haujournal.org

[47] In Marxian economics, it’s the other way around: material

production is placed at the centre of analysis as the primary form of

value-creation, while the social production of human beings is given

secondary status as “reproduction”. Graeber argues that this perspective

should be flipped, with material production being seen as emergent from

social production.

[48]

neweconomicperspectives.org

[49] Particular importance is placed upon the ability of capitalists to

control “expected future earnings”; with their “power” consisting chiefy

of being able to capture future revenue streams, not how much money and

stuff they own in the present. After all, finance (what’s been

capitalised) is itself based upon speculation on future outcomes.

[50]

dissidentvoice.org

[51]

www.jayhanson.org

[52] However, nationalism is not synonymous with national liberation,

and most would still support the national liberation struggles of

colonised peoples, which can in fact be potentially anti-statist in

character; like the recent anarchist support[209] for the anti-statist,

anti-capitalist Kurdish struggle in Turkey (North Kurdistan) and Syria

(West Kurdistan or “Rojava”).

[53] and masculism when it’s supportive of feminism.

[54] This is a particular focus of anarchists who follow the Deep

Ecology school of thought. More traditional social anarchists, while

virtully always supporting animal rights to a degree, tend to be more

moderate about it (i.e. very few traditional social anarchists would

oppose owning a dog or they may be willing to accept some animal

experimentation as a “neccesary evil” when it comes to medicinal

research).

[55] Though the type of environmentalism supported differs among

different strains of anarchism. Social anarchists tend to be closer to

the rationalist, humanist, pro-technology environmentalism of Social

Ecology. “Post-left” types gravitate more towards technophobic and

mystical ideas found in Deep Ecology and in the anti-civilisation

ideology of primitivism.

[56]

www.wsm.ie

[57] Bookchin created a particular version of this approach called

dialectical naturalism within his Social Ecology philosophy. It stresses

the importance of a non-hierarchical view of nature, an ethics of

unity-in-diversity, and the realisation of freedom as something to be

achieved through “actualising potentialities” latent in societies. He

used the word potentiality in an idiosyncratic manner to refer only to

positive, anarchistic elements, and the word “capabilities” to refer to

other latent possibilities which could also be actualised. In other

words, if a society has within its structure the possibilities to

achieve either libertarian socialism or fascism, only the former is a

“potentiality” while the latter is only a capability.

[58]

zcomm.org

[59]

www.boston.com

[60] Jared Diamond, in his book Guns, Germs and Steel, expresses a

similar perspective, explaining that western Europe didn’t develop the

way it did because of any innate superiority in the European “race”

(races don’t even exist as biological differences) but because its

position in the temperate zone gave it an abundance of resources which

it used to its advantage. Especially horses (for travelling across long

distances), sheep (for an easy source of material for making clothes

with), and cows (for food and leather). Unlike Reclus, he thinks statism

and capitalism are positive developments.

[61]

anarchism.pageabode.com

[62]

www.historytoday.com

[63]

theanarchistlibrary.org

[64]

theanarchistlibrary.org

[65]

www.youtube.com

[66]

libcom.org

[67]

anarchism.pageabode.com

[68]

theanarchistlibrary.org

[69]

tvtropes.org

[70]

tvtropes.org

[71]

anarkismo.net

[72] Yes, Europe is a subcontinent (like India) not a continent. It’s

part of the exact same landmass as Asia, which together are known as

Eurasia. Realising you’re on the same piece of land as the Chinese,

Indians, middle easterners, and others is something that immediately

de-centres how you look at the world and the people in it. Europeans and

people of European descent thinking of themselves as the centre of the

whole world is something that needs to change pretty damn quickly as far

as anarchists are concerned.

[73]

www.coloursofresistance.org

[74] A term used to refer to everyone who isn’t racialised as white.

Very important to not confuse this term with “colored”, an old US term

for African-Americans

[75]

zinelibrary.info

[76]

m.youtube.com

[77]

theanarchistlibrary.org

[78]

intercontinentalcry.org

[79]

zabalazabooks.net

[80]

theanarchistlibrary.org

[81] Anarchist philosopher John P. Clark has even claimed that he not

only anticipated nearly every important facet of the 20^(th) century

green movements, but was in fact the best anarchist theorist[210] ever

in terms of the quality of his ideas; his influence was not as great as

that of Bakunin, Kropotkin, or Goldman due to most of his thought being

espoused through very long scholarly works in which his political

philosophy was dispersed throughout rather than laid out in condensed

form for a general audience.

[82]

www.cascadianow.org

[83]

www.social-ecology.org

[84]

new-compass.net

/

[85]

www.kurdishquestion.com

[86]

shawnewald.info

[87] Many primitivists have even renounced connections to anarchism and

consider primitivism to be a separate and distinct ideology.

[88]

c4ss.org

[89]

en.m.wikipedia.org

[90]

www.infoshop.org

[91]

p2pfoundation.net

[92]

c4ss.org

[93] Roughly 1100–1750. Characterised by the first complex pulley

systems and early mechanical devices. (Decentralist)

[94] Roughly 1750–1900. The coming of steam power and industrialisation.

Characterised by the enclosure of the commons, the birth of the factory

system, mass production for profit, and hierarchical divisions of

labour. (Centralist)

[95] Roughly 1900–1990. The discovery of electricity and its many

applications. Had the potential to move beyond the centralised

industrialism of the paleotechnic phase and encourage more decentralist

alternatives based on small-scale workshop production and home

manufacturing. Ended up getting channeled into paleotechnic forms of

mass production instead. (Decentralist)

[96]

www.youtube.com

[97]

en.m.wikipedia.org

[98]

www.fsf.org

[99]

tvtropes.org

[100]

www.strath.ac.uk

[101]

theanarchistlibrary.org

[102] Notice how ordinary people know a lot about the lives of the rich

and famous, but the rich and famous frequently don’t even know what the

minimum wage is. Likewise how women tend to be more savvy on the lives

of men than men are on the lives of women.

[103] Something he once remarked he would preferred to be remembered

for, being far more proud of his anarchist and pacifist works than his

one book on sexuality.

[104]

psyclassics.com

[105]

theanarchistlibrary.org

[106]

backalleyradio.wordpress.com

[107]

beautifultrouble.org

[108] The big “enemy” in the west used to be Communism, but since the

fall of the Berlin Wall and later 9/11, the “enemy” has been designated

as Islam.

[109]

www.wsm.ie

[110]

www.occupiedlondon.org

[111] Which as well as being a source of pollution, only exists to the

extent that it does because of state subsidisation of the auto industry

and the state construction of motorways to help facilitate their growth,

shutting out possibilities for more ecologically sound public transport;

and making the urban landscape evolve along automobile-centric lines.

[112]

tvtropes.org

[113]

tvtropes.org

[114]

tvtropes.org

[115]

tvtropes.org

[116]

tvtropes.org

[117]

tvtropes.org

[118]

tvtropes.org

[119]

tvtropes.org

[120]

tvtropes.org

[121]

tvtropes.org

[122]

tvtropes.org

[123] However, a few went even further and attacked syndicalist

organisation, claiming it replicated the logic of the capitalist

workplace instead of

[124] However, a few went even further and attacked syndicalist

organisation, claiming it replicated the logic of the capitalist

workplace instead of

[125] The term “anarchism without adjectives” at first only included

social anarchists – supporters of free collectivism or free communism –

but was later expanded to include forms of market anarchism. Some market

anarchists even use the term today to describe a situation in which a

“free market”, rather than a confederation of free communes, is the

basis of the future social order. A lot of social anarchists are not

happy with this, and so sometimes specify that they’re only for “social

anarchism without adjectives.

[126]

www.afed.org.uk

[127]

tvtropes.org

[128] One which would be worker-directed (by federations of worker

councils and syndicates) rather than community-directed (by popular

assemblies and confederated municipalities).

[129]

tvtropes.org

[130]

tvtropes.org

[131]

tvtropes.org

[132]

www.youtube.com

[133] It is perhaps worth noting that Godwin himself acknowledged a

large debt to Edmund Burke for his A Vindication of Natural Society.

Burke himself later claimed that the work was satire, but some

commentators have argued that he meant it in earnest and felt it

necessary to disavow it for political reasons.

[134]

tvtropes.org

[135]

tvtropes.org

[136]

tvtropes.org

[137] Academic Ziga Vodovnik claims that the transcendentalistts could

even be regarded as the first modern exponents of cultural

anarchism[211], a term coined by anarchist philosopher John P. Clark to

describe the “cultural struggle” of challenging dominant values based in

authoritarianism and replacing them with liberatory values based in

autonomy, egalitarianism, and communal individualism; trying to achieve

a cognitive transformation in people as well as a political-economic

transformation in institutions. They certainly had a big impact on

anarchists in America, such as Emma Goldman, during the 19^(th) century.

[138]

tvtropes.org

[139]

tvtropes.org

[140] his means that they accept the naturalist (non-supernatural) view

of the world that sees science and reason as the best means for

achieving knowledge, but don’t accept the idea that everything that

happens in a society is ultimately caused by economic/technological

conditions. Indeed, the anarchist David Graeber has argued that

historical materialism, in a way, isn’t materialist enough, in that it

denies the materiality (and thus material significance) of

intellectual/affective forces, as well as the idealist components of

so-called material forces.

[141]

www.walkingbutterfly.com

[142]

[143] The means of governance, jurisprudence, and coercion. Comprising

the state, government, legal system, and military.

[144] The means of production, distribution, and investment. Comprising

workplaces, shops, physical infrastructure used for making things which

can be consumed, arable land, natural resources, transport, and

electricity-generation.

[145] (Personal social identities) Comprising gender, sexuality,

disability, and family relations.

[146] (Collective social identities) Comprising racial, ethnic,

national, geographic, and religious relations.

[147]

www.kurdishquestion.com

[148]

www.afreesociety.org

[149]

tvtropes.org

[150]

www.anarkismo.net

[151]

international-criticalrealism.com

[152]

tvtropes.org

[153] It’s important to note that the term collectivism here is purely

an economic term, not a social one. It refers only to the

collectivisation of industry, not giving priority to the collective

interest over that of the individual.

[154]

theanarchistlibrary.org

[155]

tvtropes.org

[156] The terms anarchist communism and anarcho-communism originally

meant different (albeit related) things. The former referred to a

society structured without a state, markets, or money, while the latter

term was (confusingly) used in the early 20^(th) century to refer to

those who wanted a community-directed economy rather than a

worker-directed economy (which is what most anarcho-syndicalists were

pushing for). The terms sounded so similar that people ended up using

them as synonyms.

[157]

www.fourmilab.ch

[158] Some would consider Mutualism to also belong to this tradition,

though the way it has been developed by other thinkers besides Proudhon

means that its modern version now has more in common with individualism

than with collectivism and communism, hence the reason for separating it

from social anarchism in this article.

[159]

tvtropes.org

[160]

tvtropes.org

[161]

tvtropes.org

[162]

tvtropes.org

[163]

tvtropes.org

[164]

tvtropes.org

[165]

tvtropes.org

[166]

www.crimethinc.com

/

[167] Though their more recent writings and activities have seen them

drift more towards social anarchism, focusing more on social change than

personal rebellion. However they still tend to reject the label

“leftist” to describe their politics.

[168]

www.psychologytoday.com

[169]

discovermagazine.com

[170]

propertyistheft.wordpress.com

[171]

libcom.org

[172]

www.thewildernist.org

[173]

www.academia.edu

[174]

www.infoshop.org

[175]

tvtropes.org

[176]

steampunkanarchist.wordpress.com

/

[177]

tvtropes.org

[178]

tvtropes.org

[179]

mikeholt.tripod.com

[180]

tvtropes.org

[181]

thenewinquiry.com

[182]

www.livingtheatre.org

[183]

tvtropes.org

[184]

tvtropes.org

[185]

tvtropes.org

[186]

tvtropes.org

[187]

tvtropes.org

[188]

tvtropes.org

[189]

tvtropes.org

[190]

tvtropes.org

[191]

tvtropes.org

[192]

tvtropes.org

[193]

tvtropes.org

[194]

en.wikipedia.org

[195]

tvtropes.org

[196]

tvtropes.org

[197]

www.infoshop.org

[198] The Greek libertarian socialist philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis

was perhaps the main theorist of autonomy/heteronomy as concepts and

their importance to social change.

[199] Anarchist and anthropologist David Graeber, while supportive of

autonomism for other reasons, has criticised the idea that the

importance of “immaterial labour” to the economy is a new thing, saying

that if you look at human history, it’s always been important. The only

reason it doesn’t tend to get as much focus as manual labour is, he

claims, simple sexism, as most of what’s now termed “immaterial” work in

history was done mostly by women.

[200] While the stock market is often talked about as the centrepoint of

the capitalist system, it’s really the bond market that matters most to

how the whole framework functions.

[201] While normally associated with the German philosophers G.W.F.

Hegel and Karl Marx, many Eastern philosophical traditions — especially

Taoism[212] and Zen[213] — are also highly dialectical, as they deal

with the interplay of opposite forces (eg: Yin and Yang) and how they

create new totalities as a result of one negating the other, then the

negation itself being negated. The formula of dialectic is typically

phrased as “thesis-antithesis-synthesis”, though the terms Hegel used

were the more cryptic “identity-negation-totality”.

[202]

www.kurdishquestion.com

[203] And as David Graeber explains in The Utopia of Rules, contra the

rhetoric of pro-privatisation neoliberals, increasing marketisation is

almost always accompanied by increasing bureaucratisation. In Poland for

instance, the number of public and private bureaucrats increased ten

years after the fall of state-socialism.

[204] There’s really no such thing as state/government “intervention” in

the economy for two reasons: (1) the state is part of the economy; (2)

the state establishes the boundaries of the (legal) market economy in

the first place.

[205]

en.m.wikipedia.org

[206]

tvtropes.org

[207]

tvtropes.org