In a pop-cultural sense, at least, the idea of anarchy has been characterized by either a middle-fingers-up, no-parents-no-rules punk attitude, or a panicky, more conservative outlook used by national and state sources to represent violent chaos and disorder. Today, we can see an extremely serious, radical leftist political philosophy on T-shirts at Hot Topic.

So what is anarchism? What do those people raising black flags and circling A’s really want? Here’s what you need to know:

What is anarchism?

Anarchism is a radical, revolutionary leftist political philosophy that advocates for the abolition of government, hierarchy, and all other unequal systems of power. It seeks to replace what its proponents view as inherently oppressive institutions — like a capitalist society or the prison industrial complex — with nonhierarchical, horizontal structures powered by voluntary associations between people. Anarchists organize around a key set of principles, including horizontalism, mutual aid, autonomy, solidarity, direct action, and direct democracy, a form of democracy in which the people make decisions themselves via consensus (as opposed to representative democracy, of which the United States government is an example).

“I would define anarchism as the nonhierarchical, nonelectoral, direct-action-oriented form of revolutionary socialism,” Mark Bray, a lecturer at Dartmouth College and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, tells Teen Vogue.

As the New York City-based anarchist group Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council (MACC), of which I’m a member, writes on its website it, “We demonstrate a vision for a society in fundamental opposition to the brutal logic of contemporary capitalism — a society based on mutual aid, cooperation, and radical democracy.”

Where did anarchism come from?

Anarchism has ancient roots, with the word itself stemming from the ancient Greek anarchos, or "without rulers," but it fully bloomed as a political philosophy in Europe and the United States during the 19th century. At the time, Communist thinker Karl Marx’s writings had become popular, and people were searching for alternatives to the capitalist system. The Paris Commune — a brief period in 1871 when Paris was controlled by anarchists and communists — helped spread the message of anarchism further, and inspired more young radicals to take up the cause, sometimes to violent effect when they embraced the philosophy of “propaganda by the deed.” By the early 20th century, anarchism had spread throughout the world, but government repression often made it difficult for anarchists to organize and achieve their goals.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is generally recognized as the first self-proclaimed anarchist, and his theories continue to influence anarchist thought today — if you’ve ever heard the phrase “property is theft,” that’s straight from Proudhon’s 1840 book What Is Property? But Proudhon was far from the only prominent thinker to advance the cause of anarchy. William Godwin’s 1793 treatise, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, is hailed as a classic of antistate, proto-anarchist thought. Other famous contributors to anarchism’s development include Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Voltairine De Cleyre, Max Stirner, Johann Most, Buenaventura Durruti, and Alexander Berkman. In addition to these names, countless others, whose identities have been lost to history, have helped refine and spread the ideology of anarchism. Today, anarchism is a fully global, intersectional philosophy, with particularly strong roots in Latin America, Spain, Germany, and, as of 2012, the Middle East, due to the 2012 Rojava Revolution in occupied Kurdistan.

How does anarchism intersect with other political philosophies?

Anarchism as a philosophy lends itself to many ideas. There is no one way to be an anarchist.