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Title: What Is Anarchism?
Author: Ben D.
Language: en
Topics: introductory, syndicalist
Source: Retrieved on January 1, 2005 from http://www.cat.org.au/aprop/whatis.txt

Ben D.

What Is Anarchism?

Anarchism is a social philosophy which says that every individual has

the right to make decisions for her or himself about things that affect

her or him. Consequently, it is also a social philosophy which opposes

every intrusion of the principle of authority into relations between

people.

Anarchists oppose the principle of authority — the principle of

command-and-obey, of leaders and led, or of masters and slaves — because

they see people’s capacity to control the course of their own life as

the precondition for realising their humanity — their “selves” or “who

they are”, in everyday language. Anarchists believe that people for whom

this capacity is denied (by some other person, for instance) are simply

slaves, since they are executing the will of some other individual, not

their own.

The ability of every individual to utilise their inborn capacities for

critical, logical and rational thought is the foundation of their

self-awareness. It is simply the idea that “I think, therefore I am”.

Those who do not think do not live in the proper sense, although they

might walk, talk, eat, drink, breathe, go to the toilet, as well as a

million other things. This is because it is possible to be physically

alive as well as spiritually dead at the same time. To live means to

participate in life, means to have some impact on the surrounding

environment.

Anarchists believe that no individual has the right to issue orders to

another. We are all capable of rational thought; we should therefore all

be capable of getting things done through collective decison-making

processes, rather than through social systems where someone orders and

someone obeys.

Anarchists extent the above principle to its logical conclusions, and

therefore favour the abolition of those social insitiutions founded on

the principle of authority: capitalism and the state. Capitalism is the

system whereby some monoplise social wealth, thus impoverishing the

majority and making them dependant on them for survival. Capitalism is

also the system whereby the majority of people are exploited by the rich

be being paid less in wages than the true value of their labour — a fact

disguised by the wages system. There is therefore two classes in

society: the producing class, or the workers, who survive by undertaking

physical or mental labour in return for wages, and the parasite class,

the rich, or the capitalists, who survive by exploiting human labour.

The State, meaning the sum total of the police, the law courts, etc and

not society, is the system whereby the right of the capitalists to

monopolise social wealth (the social wealth that should be owned

collectively and managed equally by all) is consecrated in law. Respect

for the law being maintained by means of state violence, through the

police the army, and so on, the state thus becomes a mechanism of social

control, a mechanism for oppression the people for the benefit of the

rich.

In a nutshell, Anarchists view the state as a institionalised,

coordinated, systematic apparatus of terrorism, directed against those

who threaten the social privileges of the rich and powerful. Any good

that the state does, such as protecting society against mad people, is

only done in order to retain a monopoly over authority.

In the place of capitalism and the state, anarchists desire a social

system that would ensure social freedom and material equality. They

believe that such a system would be based on the principle of free or

voluntary association and on the principle of “from each according to

their ability, to each according to their needs”. Instead of being

forced to work through need, people would be able to work where they

chose or where they were needed, participating in decicion-making

processes and free of domination and exploitation by their employer.

Alternatively, they would be able to work for themselves as

individualists, so long as they didn’t hire workers to exploit.

Anarchists call the system by which they would have society organised

Direct Democracy, meaning self-management of the various parts of the

social organism by those involved. More precisely, anarchists would have

society organised through a dual system of federated communes and

federated industrial unions. Workers in each industry would undertake

production on the basis of worker self-management, coordinating

production in the interests of the community through

industrially-organised unions, within which decision-making power flowed

from the bottom up. Decisions would be made by general assemblies of

workers within the individual workplaces, and coordination between

different workplaces would be carried out by mandated, recallable

delegates. Rather than the government of people, society would be based

around the administration of things. There would be no need of police,

because class divisions in society would disappear with the abolition of

private property, and so any rational need to compete against other

human beings.