http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/Anarchism

The Circle-A . The most common symbol of Anarchism



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

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

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

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

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

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

associate the word democracy with representative government; and especially those who associate the word socialism with statism.

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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", note See here for some basic info on what's meant by "commons" in a modern context.

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

Mutualist anarchism (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon)

Individualist anarchism (Benjamin Tucker)

Collectivist anarchism (Mikhail Bakunin)

Communist anarchism (Peter Kropotkin)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(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.note 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.)

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Basic Values

The values of political anarchism emerged from the same Enlightenment humanist milieu which animated most of the progressive movements of the 19th 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).note 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. 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; 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 ethics , and support anarchism out of the belief that it would ensure the greatest freedom and well-being for the greatest number of people.note 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. Peter Kropotkin, an anarchist philosopher and scientist, devised an ethical system that started from an evolutionary basis, and blended elements of consequentialism with what would now be called virtue ethics (virtue-consequentialism).note 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. 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" , 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 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 ... 1. 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. 2. 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. 3. 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. 4. 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. 5. 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. 6. 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" 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: (1) Municipal/Communal note The level of the "free commune" (city ward, small town, or rural parish) numbering about 10,000 - 20,000 people

(2) Regional/Cantonal note Made up of of federated municipalities/communes.

(3) National/Confederal. note Made up of federated regions/cantons. 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 , 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 ) which for a time looked like they could've represented a decentralised alternative to the then emergent nation-states. note 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. Other examples would be the town hall democracy 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 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 (western Kurdistan) region of North Syria; inspired 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, 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 ; 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: 1. Power-to: the basic sense of power as the capacity to affect reality. The basis of individual autonomy.

2. Power-over: power-to wielded as domination and/or manipulation of others in hierarchical and coercive settings. The basis of rulership.

3. 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 19th 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 note 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.

The Managerial Class note 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).

The Popular Classes note 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. 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 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 .) 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: (1) Labour

(2) Utility note Conditioned by supply and demand

(3) Power relations note Such as monopoly shares of the market, class inequalities, and social hierarchies. 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. note 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). Economic Analysis (Beyond Marxism) In the late 20th and early 21st 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 . 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 . 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 ). 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 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. note 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. 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 ) 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. note 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. 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 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 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 note 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 for the anti-statist, anti-capitalist Kurdish struggle in Turkey (North Kurdistan) and Syria (West Kurdistan or "Rojava").

Feminism note and masculism when it's supportive of feminism.

LGBT+ liberation

Animal liberation note 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).

Radical environmentalism. note 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. Lately, there's also been broad support for the theory of intersectionality , 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. note To give a brief synopsis of the theory, it says that human society is composed of (1) A material/technological/economic Base (basically a society's technology and economic set-up) which determines the shape of its ... (2) 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 19th 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. note 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. 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 (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 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. note 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 19th 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 , 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 . 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 , despite their radicalism in other areas; combined with the problem of a lot of them using the free love (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?). 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 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. note 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. As a result, anarchism and syndicalism tended to thrive in the late 19th and early 20th 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 (POC) note 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 have been coming more to the forefront and working out means of struggle 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 opined "Every time I hear someone talk about my people as if we are just some 'wo