What is Anarchism?
Part 0. Introduction
Obedience is the evil from which all other evils follow. –unknown
The words “anarchy” and “anarchism” conjure a pretty negative image for most people. Doesn’t that mean the destruction of society so that warlords can rise out of the vacuum? Doesn’t that mean a postapocalyptic nightmare with roving biker gangs terrorizing people? How on earth can anyone call themself an anarchist, except maybe for shock value? If you are reading this, you may have suspected that this isn’t really what anarchism is – and you would be right.
The goal of this pamphlet is not necessarily to convert you into “an anarchist”. It is to show you how similar the social philosophy known as “anarchism” may very well be to some of your own views, whether you think of yourself as a liberal, a conservative, a progressive, a moderate, a libertarian, or something else. Anarchism is not simply an idle speculation on a “perfect” society – rather, we believe that the application of anarchistic, libertarian principles is more relevant today than ever if we want a chance at solving some of the biggest problems that confront humanity.
Anarchism is historically considered to be on the far left of the political spectrum, but we’re not interested in dividing people based on political views. We sympathize with all who want freedom and control over their own lives. Don’t let the word “anarchy” drive you away – the ideas that anarchism represents are so terrifying to those with power that they have gone to great lengths to define “anarchy” as chaos, disorder, violence – the opposite of what it really means. Whatever words you want to use – “radicalism”, “participatory society”, “libertarian socialism”, “direct democracy” – the ideas are what matter.
“Anarchy”, according to those in positions of power, is the worst thing that could happen – a state of total lawlessness and disorder. Therefore, they insist, we must obey them if we want stability, justice, and freedom. And yet, strangely, no matter how much power we give them over our lives, it sure seems like our society is becoming more and more unstable, unjust, and unfree.
You don’t need us to tell you that there is something terribly wrong with the state of things today. The fact of the matter is that most people in today’s world have very little meaningful control over their lives. What control we do have to choose how we live – the right to vote, the right to change jobs, etc. – was won by generations of struggle against the self-proclaimed rulers of the world. Although not working any less hard than a few years ago, people are losing their jobs and being forced out of their homes because “The Economy” no longer needs them. The liberties that previous generations of Americans fought and died for, such as the right against search and seizure without a warrant, the right to a public trial, have been stealthily robbed from us with the so-called Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act. In order to maintain their place on top, the gangsters ruling us are subjecting our descendants to a crippling national debt that is running the U.S. government into bankruptcy – just as many empires and states have been led into bankruptcy and collapse due to the greed of their rulers. California is going bankrupt, reminding us that the parks, schools and public services which are supposedly “ours” are really anything but. And we are able to vote for change every few years, but somehow once they reach office, the politicians seem to always end up the same as the previous ones, and nothing fundamental changes.
This state of affairs is what is defined as “order” and “peace”. Those on top have since the days of antiquity sought for their chattel the “order” of the prison and the “peace” of the cemetery. And as the orgy of ruling-class plunder continues to drive us to social collapse, we will be told that it happened because we weren’t obedient enough, and that the next round of rulers will solve our problems as long as we stay silent and obey, and the misery and violence will continue on.
All of these problems can be connected to a common source: the principle of authority, which when embedded into social structures becomes hierarchy. There is no solution to be found within the very system responsible for the mess we are in. We can solve these problems ourselves by taking power over our lives into our own hands, where it should have been all along. By thus rejecting hierarchism, we embrace anarchism, which means “the opposition to rulers”.
First, let’s state what anarchism is not.
Anarchism is not a nihilistic rejection of society or the urge for wanton destruction. It does not have anything to do with creating chaos.
Anarchism is not the hope that, if only government somehow vanished (like, say, if the police went on strike), we would no longer have any problems and everything would just resolve itself on its own. Anarchists do not advocate “abolishing government” except as the culmination of a general social transformation.
Anarchism is not the notion that collective decision-making is unnecessary, or that social order is undesirable, or that anyone could do what they wanted to anyone without consequences.
Anarchism is not the belief that all ‘public services’ and land should be converted into private property, and that we should then hope for the best.
Anarchism is not the idea that communities should have control over the lives of their inhabitants and that privacy and individuality would be abolished in order to maintain “equality”.
Anarchism is not the desire to go back to some golden age in the past.
As a matter of fact, anarchism does not even predict that needed social change will cause all human vices to be ended once and for all, and so it is not a utopia. So…
Part I. What is Anarchism?
The man
Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate’er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame
A mechanized automaton. –Percy Shelley, “Queen Mab”
Perhaps the best way to describe anarchism is as the rejection of all forms of domination of one person over another. We see power as a psychosis that destroys all relationships it enters and degrades what it means to be human. Whether it’s a local bureaucrat with the power to ruin someone’s livelihood with the selective enforcement of obscure laws, a president with the power to order airstrikes on civilian populations, a worker who is declared useless to society and thrown out of the business he’s been working at for 30 years because those at the top have decided on “cost-cutting”, the school designed to turn unique children into obedient drones that can be used as “human capital” to increase their government’s “competitiveness” (and boss’ profits), the teenager who is told that her natural impulses for creativity are bad and she need to be disciplined into conformity to ‘get ahead’ in this society – these are all aspects of the same underlying problem.
The exercise of power in its purest form is seen in the Nazi concentration camps, an experiment in turning human beings into numbers on a piece of paper, where the psychosis of social control was brought to its logical conclusion through mass extermination. Where obedience for the sake of obedience was employed to the end of brutality for the sake of brutality, as it always must. The degree to which we are free from this today is the degree to which we have rejected power and embraced anarchy in our own lives. Ever since the theory of the “divine right of kings”, slavery, feudalism, etc. has lost popularity in the last few hundred years, many people have internalized the truth that no person has legitimate authority over another, and live according to this assumption in our daily interactions with people. We take this view to its logical conclusion and add that therefore all social institutions that enable one group of people to control another have no legitimate authority. Social “order” based on subjugation of some people to others has no legitimacy, and is also unstable and ineffective, as social control brings out the worst in people, both in rulers and ruled. Being forced into subjugation to other people erodes the human tendencies of cooperation, creativity, and tolerance, making populations “require” masters, and power structures thereby self-perpetuate, their perpetuation being their only purpose. The only way we will be able to create lasting peace and stability – of a kind that no government has ever been able to create – is to reject concentrations of power to the greatest extent possible and work toward a consensual social order based on equal liberty and cooperation. We need to stop looking to bureaucrats and managers to take care of us and do the things we want to see done, and get together with our friends, neighbors, and coworkers to do them ourselves. This is what anarchism is all about.
An anarchist society would not be one without social order or even without “laws”. In other words, it is simply incorrect to say that one would be able to go around killing people or burning down buildings in an anarchist society and get away with it. Moreover, we are not trying to create some sort of utopia where all human vices have been stamped out. The sort of society we seek is, to the maximum extent that can be created, a society of equals – one where nobody is forced to cringe before a boss, politician, bureaucrat, or ruler of any kind. A society where people participate in decision-making to the degree they are affected by it. Where each person’s total freedom of action is limited only by the equal such freedom of others. Where people come together to make decisions without getting on their knees to beg a political class to do it for them, under threat of arrest if they dare act on their own. Where people can work to produce what they want and need, rather than spend their lives taking orders from a boss to work for the enrichment of the super-rich. Anarchy is a process; a way of looking at the world and interacting with other people. It may be impossible to create a society that is completely anarchistic all the time – but we don’t have some sort of final end goal in mind.
Anarchists share with people who call themselves liberals, conservatives, progressives, and libertarians the desire for peace, freedom, justice, and order. But there can be none of these as long as institutions of social control exist – there can be no peace between ruler and ruled. The State, along with all hierarchical institutions, can never efficiently be used to ensure these ends, because the State, by its nature, can only ever be what historically it was created to be, which is an instrument for the domination and control of some people over others. If we wish to see these things, we must build new social structures based on equal liberty and reject institutions whose function and purpose is the continued control of some people by others.
The only way to achieve anarchism is to make ourselves ungovernable. It is to recognize that authority structures are imaginary, there is nobody fit to rule us, and that instead we must take up the responsibility for our own governance, because if we don’t, then someone else will, and we know from history where that leads. It is our choice: we can have hier-archy or an-archy.
Part II. Enforced Chaos: a Brief History of the State (and Hierarchy generally)
The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently. –Gustav Landauer
Look at a map of a world. Have you ever thought about how it ended up that way? We are told that the world is divided up into “democracies” and “dictatorships”, but how were these created? The uncomfortable truth is that the world is divided up into 195 completely arbitrary states, which were formed through medieval conquest (Western Europe), great-power politics (Africa, the Middle East), and other unpleasant facts of history, and all of us living in them are forced to obey them whether we want it or not. Larger states bully smaller ones, and states large and small ruthlessly attack “secessionists”, groups of people who wish to be free of their rule. How can we be said to be governing ourselves if we are born under institutions that put the survival of their own territorial claims above the desires of any number of their subjects? We aren’t. The State is, by its very essence, incompatible with democracy.
It is extremely important to distinguish between the State and governance. Governance, used broadly, can refer to any kind of social order and collective decision-making. The State is a specific kind of social organization, one that is hierarchical and parasitic by its very nature, and whose purpose has always been the exploitation and control of a defeated class by a ruling class. Power itself is the sole aim and purpose of any State – acquiring it, exercising it, and keeping it.
Why does the State exist? We are usually taught that “government” originated when people decided to come together to make decisions. However, this does not accurately describe the origin of any one of the 195 nation-states into which the world is currently carved, nor does it describe the origin of any State that has ever existed. Such collective decision-making between free people is, in fact, anarchy, and it is what anarchists advocate, as will be explained in Part IV. Whenever people have actually done this, as in Oaxaca (2006), Paris (1871), or Spain (1936), they have been labelled as “anarchists” and “traitors” and brutally crushed by their ruling State. The fact is that “government” in this sense has not yet ever been allowed to exist in hierarchical societies, as the whole purpose of “government”, as outlined in the Declaration of Independence, would be to prevent a concentration of power from coming into existence. We’ll get to that.
In fact, the State is a purely antisocial institution, designed to make justice difficult and keep most people out of decision-making that affects them. Historically, the State presents itself as a parasite upon civilization, appearing not long after the first recorded settled societies about five thousand years ago. All states, beginning in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China, originated in violent conquest and the purpose of their governing institutions henceforth was to maintain the control of a privileged few over the vanquished subjects, and to enable them to live off their labor. The bandits and thugs that became known as “kings” lived off their subjects’ belief in supernatural authority, declaring themselves and a well-connected elite to be the rightful, divinely appointed owners of all the land and resources, thus demanding people pay tribute to them for their use. For thousands of years, throughout the world, the overwhelming majority of people in settled societies languished in crippling poverty as the product of their sweat was forcibly confiscated to build palaces for the parasites above them, and to build instruments of war, so they could be sent off to die for these ruling parasites to gain more land and slaves to rule over. The threat of arbitrary arrest, torture, and death hung over the head of anyone not allied with the ruling elite. The State is simply piracy and crime, writ large.
In other words, the story of human civilization, up until very recently, has been primarily the story of elite-enforced chaos, violence, and injustice. The official justification for this miserable state of affairs was that a strong ruler was needed in order for decisions to be made; if people could associate as equals, all hell would break loose. Ordinary people are evil, went the official line, while those who happen to be ruling them are wiser, nobler, and inspired by the gods. In service to this monstrous ideology, countless people were broken in like cattle, forced into obedience to their rulers, and their entire lives ripped to pieces. The psychosis of power extended far beyond the State, into the family structure, the distribution of property, and the way different groups of people interacted with one another. This was more or less the condition every society found itself in, and only began to change when people started making an effort to resist it.
However, the self-proclaimed rulers of the world could never, in any society, completely break the human spirit. They have never been able to stop people’s natural tendency to work together, to cooperate for common goals, which is inherent in us as a species, but is mostly suppressed by power structures. In the later Middle Ages people moved to towns and declared their freedom from the bandit-rulers who continued to plague those under their grip. They created sophisticated commercial and social codes, maintaining social order in spite of, not because of, the governments they had escaped from. Out of the chaos of the Middle Ages arose a new idea, seen as incredibly radical and dangerous at the time – that each person must follow his own conscience in the realm of religion. Not long after, with the Mayflower compact, the roots were planted for an even more extreme, radical, and dangerous idea: the idea that government must be based on the consent of the governed. Heresy! Treason!! Anarchism comes from taking this idea to its logical conclusion. Not surprisingly, then, it is in the English civil war that the roots of modern anarchism are found, with Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of the Diggers, calling upon the poor to seize the land that they tilled and do away with all hierarchies and titles of nobility. They did not prevail, but their ideas were slowly sinking in, as the decades went by. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that these centuries were ones that were also seeing a Scientific Revolution in the west. If kings were not responsible for making the sun rise, then maybe people didn’t need them after all? This treasonous idea was one that started to become popular in the 18th century enlightenment.
As time developed and knowledge became more widespread, people continued to break free from the arbitrary controls that had been placed on them by their rulers. The American Revolution, in particular, contained roots of a radical rejection of the outdated hierarchical social order, in favor of a society based on consent and cooperation among equals. It was thus one of the first victories in the war between producers and parasites that goes back to the days of the pyramids. The Declaration of Independence is one of the most radical documents in history, declaring all external authority over the individual to be illegitimate. However, the Declaration, which if taken to its logical conclusion leads to anarchy, was subverted by the Constitutional convention, which was convened after Shay’s rebellion due to the economic elite’s fear of “anarchy” – in other words, that ordinary people might have too much control over their own lives. The writers of the Constitution had to guarantee several liberties to the American people because they had proved themselves nearly ungovernable; tyranny would have been impossible to enforce. However, the Constitution, whether or not it was intended to enshrine an elite minority’s right to dictate the governing structure of the entire continent to unborn descendants forevermore, was a blow against the radical principles of the American revolution.
Europe’s ruling classes also could not completely hold back the radical ideas of freedom and self-government that were spreading at the time. William Godwin, who wrote Principles of Political Justice in the years after the French revolution, was one of the first who saw that the evil of tyranny is inherent to the State; going further than his contemporaries, he wrote of the possibility of a stateless social order based on cooperation and equality.
During the 19th century, people in Europe were becoming more critical of traditional power structures and becoming better educated, and their rulers could no longer justify their authority by divine right. So they instead took control of the education of all youths, and instilled nationalism in their subjects to justify the existence of States – training them to fear and hate those who lived on the other side of imaginary lines that had been created through conquest. A new ruling class was coming into existence, the capitalist-industrial class, and depended on State force for its power, and began to direct the actions of States, which then engaged in a brutal process of colonialism, to further their power. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the first self-described Anarchist, critiquing the property order at the root of social hierarchy in his What is Property? of 1840. Anarchism became a mass movement with Mikhail Bakunin, who was a member of the Workingmen’s International. Theorists such as Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman and Errico Malatesta developed communist anarchism, calling for the working class to take the means of production into their own hands, while in America, individuals such as Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner and Josiah Warren took the sovereignty of the individual as their starting-point. At the turn of the 20th century, there were tens of thousands of anarchists in the developed world, most of them working-class, and members of unions and social movements that were able to win important concessions from the rulers of society.
The tipping-point for social revolution was World War I, one of the most viciously pointless mass slaughters in history. Unfortunately, State-Communism, whose dangers anarchists had warned about since the 19th century, rode the wave of social revolution in the 20th century, and due to its acceptance of the apparatus of the State wherever implemented, became as murderous as the regimes of the past.
Anarchists participated in the Spanish revolution of the 1930’s and the struggle against fascism 1936-39, and large parts of Spain were organized along more or less anarchist principles during these years. Productivity increased, crime went down, and large numbers of people got their first chance to participate in society as human beings, not as pack animals. Spanish anarchy did not collapse due to an internal contradiction or unworkability, but because it was relentlessly attacked by the Nazi-aided Nationalist forces. We can learn from the mistakes made by the Spanish anarchists, but let it never be said that “anarchy doesn’t work”. It did work.
The 20thcentury demonstrates once again the viciousness and dangerousness of the hierarchical State, as the power-lust of nations has repeatedly robbed millions of their lives and held the world under the threat of a nuclear holocaust. Many of the problems in the world today, just as during any moment in history, are due to elite-enforced chaos, with arbitrary colonial borders in Africa being bloodily enforced upon their subject peoples, leading to vicious conflicts. The “anarchy” that we have been taught to fear, as in Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, or Yugoslavia, typically breaks out precisely as a result of elite enforcement of completely imaginary borders and the brutality of the oligarchies and tyrannies picked out and enforced for the hapless subjects by the global elites. Hierarchy has always meant, and must always mean, enforced lawlessness, enforced chaos.
Anarchism resurfaced in the ‘60s after being labeled “irrelevant” after the fascist takeover of Spain. The anarchist movement has picked up new life since the fall of the Soviet Union, now that State-Communism has been discredited. And now that neoliberal State capitalism has also been shown to be a murderous fraud, anarchism is enjoying a major resurgence. What happens next is up to you and me.
If we try to draw conclusions from history, we can see that the justification of power structures has almost invariably rested on faith, tradition, and authority. But people have been fighting back against their ruling elites for hundreds of years, and it is thanks to those people that we have any freedom, justice, and social order at all. While the State has managed to survive the last few hundred years by appearing in new guises, the fact is that the State, together with other power structures, is an outdated institution, feeding on mankind’s early ignorance and fear of the unknown, and rendered unnecessary by the advances of science and knowledge. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “A man can’t ride your back unless it’s bent.” Hierarchical power structures only exist because the people allow them to. We are just as capable of withdrawing consent as we are of granting it, and people have been fighting back successfully against hierarchy for hundreds of years. The era we live in may be seen as humanity’s painful transition from control and brutality to anarchy and peace, if we take it upon ourselves to continue the struggle.
No matter what time or place, the purpose of the State and its governing apparatus – its “laws”, its police, its prisons, its wars – has always been the control and exploitation of society by a ruling class. States differ in degree, but not in basic purpose. The extent to which we force the State to be something other than this is the extent to which we move toward anarchy and full control over our own lives – but the State will continue to exercise these functions until it and social hierarchy are done away with altogether.
Doesn’t the State alleviate social inequality? No, because poverty and social inequality are not the result of “unrestrained markets” nor of the “natural laziness of the majority”. They come from the ruling elite’s near-monopoly on land, credit, and the means of production, brought about through outright robbery over the centuries, and enforced continuously with the very laws that look like they are there to help us. As long as we leave this ruling monopoly on our needs unchallenged, there will never be justice, freedom, or peace. The State, no matter how benevolent it might be on the surface, is built upon violence: the violent enforcement of imaginary borders, the violent enforcement of the property titles that keep the working majority dependent on a parasitic minority for their survival, and the violent protection of its own monopoly of power within the territory it has been able to subjugate, at the expense of anything resembling justice.
The State, needless to say, does not exist to serve you. Even if we could put well-meaning people into the State, it would be impossible to change its function and purpose, for the execution of power itself is the abuse, not its execution by “bad” people. It is an impossible task to turn the apparatus of the State into something fundamentally different from what it was designed to be: the reason it does what it does is because of what it is. If we would like to see peace, social justice, and equal liberty instead of war, hierarchy and control, trying to make existing power structures more “efficient” or “good” will be futile. The time has come to create new social structures in place of the State.
Many of the reasons that people reject what they understand to be “anarchism” come from some basic misunderstandings. We oppose not social order, but social control.
Part III. Anarchy and “Democracy”
“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters…Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.” –Frederick Douglass, 1857
i. Anarchy and ‘Limited Government’
Can a group of people be trusted to apply the laws they have the privilege of creating and enforcing…to themselves?
Well, judging by the historical record, apparently not. Throughout human history, the intention of “lawmakers” has never been to treat everybody equally, but to give themselves privileges to do things that would be called crimes if other people did them. They allowed themselves to commit murder by renaming it “war”. They allowed themselves to commit robbery by renaming it “taxes” and “rents”. The protection of equal justice and liberty has never been the reason any State has come into existence, and as long as there is a governing State, they will be impossible.
Can “limited government” work? Well, here’s the question: who’s going to limit it? And who limits them? And who limits them?… all the way to infinity, and then we are presented with one of two choices: either there is some group of people that is accountable to nobody, or everybody has to play their part in equally limiting the power of everybody else. Do you know what that would be called? Anarchy.
Limited government is impossible, then, because it contains a contradiction. A government, or a State, by definition, must have authority over its subjects so it can govern them, or else it is not a government at all. If it has authority over them, then there is no way they can limit it. If they could limit it, that would mean it was only governing them by their consent, as they could refuse to obey it and get rid of it at any time. How else would they be able to limit it?
This “government” would then no longer be a government at all, but simply a group of people entrusted by their neighbors to do a certain task, and still remain their equals – in other words, the social order that anarchists advocate! This is what government is according to our elementary school civics textbooks, but sadly does not describe any State that has ever existed, or ever could exist, our own being no exception. None of the governments existing today recognize their subjects’ right to ‘limit’ them in a way that would threaten their monopoly of power and privilege. When a government is unable to prevent its subjects from repudiating its authority, then it’s out of power, and typically calls upon its neighbors to reinstall it on a sullen population.
All governments, no matter how tyrannical, recognize certain boundaries that they cannot cross for fear of popular insurrection. But due to the contradiction of “limited government”, all governments will tend to slide one way or the other – either into a ruling State that is beyond the control of its subjects, or back into the anarchy, in which no group of people is above the law, in which it started. The U.S. constitution was perhaps a noble experiment in limited government, with the limits on it upheld by a vigilant, well-armed population. It failed, though, because the people lost the will to fight back against their government, and as all States tend to do, it expanded over time into a vast corporatist-imperialist police state, just like any other of its size in history. The U.S. government today has a vast surveillance, police, military, and financial apparatus all designed to continue its own existence, in spite of what its subjects might want. Its final purpose, as any other government’s, is its own continuation at all costs, not “to serve the public” or some such myth. With the ability to declare all internal opposition to it as “treason”, no matter how many of its own “laws” it breaks, our government cannot be seriously limited by its subjects, except through a full-scale insurrection.
Our opposition to the U.S. government as well as to all governments does not mean that we “hate America”. Indeed, if anything is un-American, it is submission to authority. Anarchism simply means taking the ideas of the American revolution and the Declaration of Independence to their logical conclusion. All claims by one person to rule another are just as illegitimate and imaginary as the King of England’s “right” to rule the colonies.
As it is an attempt to combine liberty and the State, which are by nature incompatible, “limited government” will always fail. The very idea of “limited government” already contains the roots of anarchy, and needs to be taken to its logical conclusion. If we can limit our government without chaos and “anarchy” breaking out (which is what the aristocrats who opposed the American revolution claimed would happen if the rebels won), then we can certainly govern ourselves.
Most people would agree that we need a neutral arbitrator to enforce the law. Not only has the State never been a neutral arbitrator, the fact is that even if the State consisted of angels, it would be impossible for it to be a neutral arbitrator. When one group of people has a monopoly on power, can they be expected to come to a neutral decision in a dispute between themselves and someone else? Of course not. And no State ever has. Because that’s not what States were created to do. If we want a chance of a neutral justice system, we have to reject the idea that any group of people is “governing” the rest of us.
ii. Anarchy as Unfettered Democracy
“Democracy” as it currently exists is a strange creature. A “functioning democracy” according to the media is one in which decisions are made behind the scenes by investors, politicians and bankers, and then people get to legitimize one of two clowns (or groups of clowns), who are practically identical on issues regarding the underlying structure of power, that have been picked out for them every few years, and then have to obey them until the next legitimization ceremony. Voting is an expression of powerlessness, not people power. When people get too uppity and think they can actually manage their own affairs, it is called a “crisis of democracy” and the military is typically sent in. We have a better idea: let’s do away with social hierarchy and the State, so that people can participate in decision-making to the extent they are affected by it.
The democratic idea that people have the right to vote and participate in decision-making is based on the assumption that human beings are rational, moral agents, capable of organizing their own societies. This leads logically to anarchism, and nullifies many of the knee-jerk fears about what would happen if there were no ruling class. Because then it doesn’t make any sense to say that some people can “democratically” subjugate others – that a group of people can bully and oppress noninvasive individuals through their “democracy” – because this undermines the whole reason that “democracies” were supposedly created – to recognize the liberty and moral autonomy of their participants. If nobody has legitimate authority over another (and “democracies” are supposedly built on this premise) then nobody is obliged to obey a “democracy” that attempts to rule them without their consent. Tyrants and their apologists have warned for centuries that true democracy is a very dangerous concept, because it leads to “anarchy”. They were right. While what we have now is a failed attempt to combine institutions of elite social control with a sprinkling of popular consent, anarchism is non-hierarchical, direct, true democracy – a system in which all people have the maximum amount of control over the decisions that affect them, limited only by the equal rights of others.
There are certain social goods associated with “democracy”. In our own time, for instance, we enjoy certain rights, certain protections, a certain degree of social order and equality under the law, and certain freedoms.
None of these were given to us as a gift from above. All the freedoms we enjoy today – freedom of speech, the right to a trial by jury, women’s legal equality, the abolition of slavery and serfdom, etc. – were won through popular struggle, and only enshrined in law when our rulers realized they would be unable to continue those forms of oppression – in other words, the people became ungovernable with respect to the specific issue. Paradoxically, the “threat” of anarchy is the reason for what social order, freedom and justice we do have. If our rulers didn’t actually fear us to some degree, we would still be in the middle ages.
The absence of a State, it is often claimed in the media, leads to a vacuum of power, which can only then be filled up by ‘warlords’ or gangs – that is, new hierarchies.
It is true that a vacuum of power will always be filled. But this is why it is so important that we take it upon ourselves to take control over our own lives, and fill this vacuum ourselves. This is a process that has already been going on throughout history, any time people have won concessions from their rulers. The choice is ours: we must either cooperate to build a social order dedicated to preserving liberty, or else risk a power vacuum where a violent hierarchy will inevitably arise.
Most arguments against anarchism, such as that it would lead to each person pursuing his or her self-interest and driving society into the ground, are based on the misunderstanding that anarchism is the rejection of any kind of social order, collective decision-making and the hope that people will not need these things. It is important to understand that this is not what it is. Rather, we believe that the overwhelming majority of people desire peace and freedom and are capable of individually and collectively securing these things for themselves without the “guidance” of a self-appointed elite. Recall that arguments of this kind were also made by reactionaries and aristocrats against the ideas of democracy, limited government, and Constitutionalism when those ideas were becoming popular around the time of the American revolution. Ordinary people could not be trusted to participate in decision-making, they argued, because without a strong ruler everybody would pursue his own selfish interest and society would collapse. Needless to say, they were completely wrong. In fact the division of society into gangs led by warlords always happens when people have been cruelly suppressed by unaccountable hierarchical institutions – France during the wars of religion, Rome in the late days of its republic, Pakistan and Somalia today, etc.
History shows that when people are not coerced by hierarchies, we are able to cooperate with other people to create true peace and justice in our communities. To give an example: a few years ago, a person’s car crashed in poor weather, in a distant community (in Yorkshire). Locals came out and arranged an ambulance and arranged for the person’s car to be repaired. Mutual aid in action! But obviously we can’t just hope for hierarchical institutions and concentrations of power to go away on their own. We have to free our own minds from the assumptions and myths that make such institutions possible and necessary.
Maintaining social order, peace, justice and freedom is in the self-interest of all of us, and we are capable of doing it when our sensibilities are not warped by institutions of control. But here’s the point: even if we assume that the possibility of people trying to impose little dictatorships on their neighbors, or any sort of tyranny of the majority, would be a problem, social hierarchy – allowing a class of people to rule over others – only makes it far, far worse. In an anarchist society, social order is maintained by people building networks of two-sided obligations: I don’t harm you because I don’t want you to harm me, and so on. We all give up our “freedom” to go around killing people so that we can live in peace from this. Imposing an unaccountable class of parasitic overlords, ruling the populace through the enforcement of its own whims, destroys this balance by forcing one-way obligations onto ordinary people to obey it. This never succeeds in its stated goals, and creates many more unforeseen problems as well!
So, if everyone were trying to set up his own little dictatorship, then it is true that anarchy would not go too well – but neither would any other system. In fact, the most dangerous thing to do would be to let one of these would-be rulers have his way – which is exactly what the State is. Instead, we need to reject the drug of power in our minds, as well as concentrations of power in the real world. Social control erodes our tendencies to help one another and behave peacefully and reasonably. The only way we can allow these traits to flourish is to challenge the institutions designed to seal our obedience, and rebuild society as we want to see it.
Part IV. What Would Anarchy Look Like?
Anarchism is not the quest for some static, frozen utopia. It would go against the principles of anarchism to write some blueprint of a “perfect” society to dictate to those who choose to implement it. Since anarchism is really, at root, a mode of non-coercive, non-hierarchical human interaction, there will be as many “societies” as there are people. We always believe that it will be for the living to decide what sort of institutions they want in their lives – not for the dead creeds of the past to strangle them. However we can sketch out some ideas of what features a free society would be likely to have.
“Politics”
When people want to engage in local collective decision-making, they would most likely create neighborhood assemblies for this purpose, as has been done in previous societies with anarchistic features. Attendance would be voluntary, and decisions could be made either by majority vote, consensus, or anything in between. The purpose of these assemblies would be to resolve any disputes that might come up, or make decisions such as, say, what to do with an empty plot of land. They would not be governments/States because they would not serve to extract tributes from unwilling subjects, pry into people’s personal lives, or enforce the rule of one class of people over another, but would simply exist to uphold the equal liberty of all participants. You would not have to have anything to do with these assemblies (or could make a different one), provided you do not harm anyone else. “Enforcement” of the decisions reached would either constitute going ahead and doing something they had decided to do, or settling a dispute. The latter would not be done through a police force, but through social pressure and refusing to do business with offenders (see below), only using force if absolutely necessary. Whether this would, in fact, constitute “law” and “government” from your point of view is a matter of personal semantical taste; we aim for a society without hierarchy or authority, to the greatest extent that is possible.
Economics
There are different schools of anarchism, relating to the distribution of resources. In general, anarchists advocate worker’s self-management. It would be up to you and your fellow workers how to distribute the fruits of your labor. In individualist anarchism, individuals and groups of workers would sell the product of their labor in a free marketplace. In collectivist/syndicalist anarchism, workers in the same industry would cooperate in planning production, and would create labor-notes to be used as currency. In communist anarchism, money would no longer exist, and work would be seen as something people do voluntarily because they enjoy it, and they would then have free access to the goods produced by others. In ParEcon (participatory economics), workers and consumers would plan together what should be produced, and remuneration would be based on effort and sacrifice. The purpose of this pamphlet is not to advocate one over the other. All of these systems would be voluntary, based on free agreement between groups of people, and could be switched to another whenever its participants wish. A single community could have characteristics of several of these economic systems, or there could be different communities with different ones.
Communities, workplaces, individuals, and groups could also federate as they see fit. Anarchist cities would not be isolated backwaters – just like the proto-anarchist free cities in the high Middle Ages, their inhabitants would connect with those of other areas through any number of political, economic, and social networks, which would always remain voluntary and managed from the bottom up by their members.
“How would crimes be punished in anarchy?”
The only crime is coercing others, though this may take various different forms. To start with, uprooting the main social causes of crime is likely to cause crime to fall dramatically. Capitalism, the State, and hierarchy provide both the motives and the material conditions for crime to flourish – hence it is typically more repressed societies that are more dangerous. This does not mean that we think all crime will magically disappear, though.
If people feared the possibility of armed robbery, rape, murder, and other violent crimes in their community, they would likely form neighborhood self-defense organizations, ready to come to one another’s aid if needed. Anarchists recognize the right of individuals, groups and communities to defend themselves from violent infringements such as these. Any dispute that might come up could then be discussed at, say, a neighborhood assembly (or whatever organ of self-management existed in that area), and taken to higher levels, as the participants desired. Bodies of custom would develop as to how to deal with different cases. There is no “exact” anarchist way to deal with these things: provided there is no hierarchy or ruling class, it will be left for the people in an area to decide. Perhaps the people in an area would agree there would be social institutions — an assembly, say — whose judgment would be, for all practical purposes, binding whenever there is a conflict between them. Maybe there could be different judicial arrangements existing side-by-side, and the people would look to a third party if a dispute arose between members of different groups. Or maybe a group of people will not feel the need for any fixed rules at all. The point is that the absence of hierarchy, privilege, and social control does not imply the absence of order (i.e. institutional means to secure justice and peace). As a matter of fact, the opposite is the case: there can be no rulers or ruled if any sort of justice is to exist.
For nonviolent but more subtly coercive behaviors, it might not be seen as appropriate to respond with direct physical force. Actions such as playing loud music late at night next to neighbors who want quiet, dumping barrels of oil into the river, harassing other people, etc. could be met first with various kinds of social pressure, then as a last resort, the offender’s name could (for example) be published in the local newspaper then locals would refuse to do business with them until they stopped or made restitution. Since anarchism would be a society of equal producers, one’s ability to partake in society would largely depend upon being on good terms with one’s neighbors, and the threat of boycott – or even, as a last resort, of withdrawal of respect for your personal space and possessions – would be a great deterrent. This, of course, is just one idea; it is not the “official” anarchist prescription for such a situation. Any activity that truly harms other people (and this includes damaging the environment) may be forcibly stopped, even if that isn’t always necessary.
Activities that do not infringe on the liberties of others would, of course, not be crimes at all. In general, anarchists would like to reduce actual force, and any kinds of restrictions on the freedom of the individual, to an absolute minimum, but that is not to say it will be possible for everyone to get what they want all the time, since people might have differing opinions on what constitutes “aggression”. It is a mistake to think that anarchism means that anyone can do whatever they want to anybody and not be stopped! What we advocate is in a sense the exact opposite of the comic-book version of “anarchy” (and, one might add, real-life hierarchies): everybody will be accountable to everybody. Coercing other people, whether by attacking them physically, trying to force them to follow your orders (which is the same thing), or wrecking the environment, will not be tolerated by your neighbors, no matter who you are.
“Don’t anarchists want to abolish capitalism? How will you prevent the accumulation of property?”
Some people don’t understand the anti-capitalism of anarchists. Isn’t capitalism just the sum of free exchanges?
Although different people define capitalism differently, we understand capitalism as it currently exists, which is not a free market or free exchange, nor a system in which each person gets the product of their own labor. Capitalism is a distortion of free markets, a system of state-enforced accumulation by a few people of other people’s labor. Capitalism, historically, is based on robbing people of the ability to live independently so they have to surrender control of their productive capacity to those who “own” the means of production. Then, no matter how hard they work, their work perpetuates their subjugation, accumulating more capital for their master who can use this to employ more workers. Capitalism is not only direct robbery (since it is based on non-labor income) but is a deeper sort of robbery, as it prevents those who work from having control over production and thus, over their lives. It is important to understand that the plutocratic social order we have now came about not through a hands-off policy or through the thrifty being rewarded for their investments, but through heavy-handed State action on behalf of the powerful, especially
*the land monopoly (the private enclosure of common land by an elite so that instead of living off the land, ordinary people have to go into wage labor to survive);
*the credit monopoly (state control over the currency so that one has to have good connections in order to have access to credit, and everyone else is at the mercy of lenders);
*the patent monopoly (property deeds from the state that enable well-connected corporations to prevent small, independent businesses from working with the same ideas);
*regulation (which large, politically connected corporations have the resources to deal with, enabling them to expand at the expense of smaller businesses and self-employment)
*corporate welfare and outright robbery (i.e. the “privatization” in post-Soviet Russia, having foreign dictators divide up the resources of “their” country among international corporations, etc. )
*state-granted property titles, in contradiction to personal labor and occupancy.
A truly free market would not have these things, and so would not be capitalist. Anarchists reject capitalism not because we think people should be denied the ability to reap the fruit of their talents and labor, but precisely because we support property in the product of your own labor, which is legitimate as well as the personal property of your home and possessions. Property, or something which may be exclusively used by somebody, is a socially legitimized construct, and so your legitimate property would that which is recognized as such by your neighbors, which would arise through two-way obligations that people would feel bound to respect: I would respect your personal space so you would respect mine, etc.
What anarchists do not recognize is the right to the product of other people’s labor, or any property claims that force other people into subservience to the property-owner, neither of which could be upheld in this way, and both of which can only exist when the ability of people to reap the fruit of their own labor has been violently suppressed. All anarchists agree that people should be rewarded for their labor, but differ in how to implement this; the choice on which system to go by would be yours to make, with the proviso that if you try to use property claims as a justification for bossing someone around, controlling their needs, or living off their labor, people are free to withdraw respect for those claims. Since labor is the only legitimate basis upon which one can claim to own nonpersonal property, there would be no private ownership of unimproved wilderness, beaches, bodies of water, etc. which would be managed for collective use (not “owned”, since anybody would be free to use them) by those in the area. In other words, you will not be forced to “share” your legitimate possessions or labor-product in anarchy. If you really want to profit off other people’s labor, you can try to find people willing to work for you – but it will be difficult when people are not compelled by economic circumstance! Again, there would be no threat of accumulation of property leading to the re-creation of hierarchy because if the people in an area felt that a person’s property claims were unreasonable and/or bringing back hierarchy, they would simply ignore those claims.
“What are you going to do about religion and traditional values?”
The majority of anarchists oppose any form of coercive morality, superstition and following tradition for the sake of tradition. However, we do not intend to enforce what we think is the right way on anyone. That would contradict the basic principles of anarchism.
So anarchists do not seek to “abolish” any of these things. Nobody will be prevented from making their own specific living arrangements in an anarchist society, provided they do not harm another person’s liberty.
Part V. Getting there
“This sounds beautiful in theory, but surely you are forgetting human nature?”
Traditional arguments against popular sovereignty, democracy and anarchy have usually relied on the assumption that people are evil, and that we cannot be trusted to make decisions on our own. But how would you like it if someone made this argument about you as an excuse for controlling your life? That’s all that this old argument amounts to. The real reason the ruling elites, who stay in power by maintaining this fear, need you to think that everyone around you is evil is that their power would quickly be eroded if ordinary people started cooperating to guard their shared freedom – which is how all social freedoms that we enjoy today were won, it is important to remember.
We believe that using “human nature” as an argument against anarchism is not only not a very good argument, but one that is not even relevant. It’s not like we’re debating whether we’d be better off with space aliens or computers governing us! No matter what social system we have, it will always be humans making the decisions, and so we simply have to decide whether we should give some of those people power over others, or whether maybe that’s not a very good idea.
“Human nature” is, in fact, a very good argument against power structures and for anarchism. If people are evil, then hierarchical power structures will be even more evil, and therefore the most dangerous and foolish thing we can do is create institutions that allow the most psychotic among us to exert power over their neighbors! Indeed, looking at history, we see that the most vicious crimes that supposedly demonstrate the evil of “human nature” have been committed by those with power, and therefore the best way we can protect ourselves from this aspect of human nature is to repudiate all power structures and be willing to resist any attempt to reinstate them.
So “human nature”, but more specifically the “nature of power”, is precisely why we must reject concentrations of power and fight for anarchism instead. Over the last several thousand years, people have had to suffer centralized bureaucracies, ridiculous hierarchies, and concentrations of purely arbitrary power. And yet in spite of these things, not because of them, they still managed to grow the food each year, trade with one another, and (when not brutally prohibited) secure some level of peace and social order. So what is it, really, that “doesn’t work”: the anarchy we live every day, or the structures that attempt to control us?
“Who will prevent (fill in the blank) from happening in anarchy? Who will (fill in the blank)?”
We will.
You will. I will. All of us – your friends and neighbors, the folks that volunteer to pick up trash, give to charity, fight fires, etc. without whom any society would come to a grinding halt – will still be here. What will no longer exist will be legitimized structures of control, which can only create more chaos and misery.
Anarchism is not guaranteed to solve all social problems or conflicts. But there is no situation in which social hierarchy is better adapted to solve a problem than social anarchy/equality. The more power that is concentrated into fewer hands, the more likely it is that something will go wrong. There is no magical way to guarantee that there will be no social conflict, people making bad decisions, or other problems, but the best possible way we can guard against these things is to disperse power as far as possible, thereby nullifying it, and to be willing to stand up and fight for our rights. Authoritarianism and hierarchy, and the mentality that allows these things to fester, will only make any such problems far worse.
Social justice, freedom and peace are not going to fall into our laps on their own. They never have. As has always been the case in history, if we want to see these things, we have to make it happen.
“Sounds good! What do I do now?”
If you found the ideas contained here inspiring or helpful in any way, be sure to share them with people you know. Anarchism will come into being when enough people withdraw their consent from existing power structures and build the institutions of the new society within the shell of the old – neighborhood mutual-aid networks, off-the-radar exchanges, radical unions of workers, and so on. When enough of us make ourselves ungovernable, hierarchical institutions will become unenforceable, and they will simply crumble – which is not to say they will go down without a fight, and so we must be ready to defend ourselves when the time comes. Until then, the best thing we can do is to spread the word, and show people that they do not have to tolerate the outrages being committed against us by our “representatives”. Let’s make this century the graveyard of the State.
Conclusion. Our Choice: Chaos…or Anarchy?
Hundreds of years ago, the word “anarchist” was originally used as an insult to those who believed that there should be limitations on the power of the King of England, just as the word “atheist” was once used to describe those who believed that each person should worship as he or she pleases. It may well be that hundreds of years from now, ideas that are now denounced as “anarchist” will simply be considered common sense. Society is always changing, and what is considered insanely unworkable and radical by one generation will often be taken for granted by the next. Racial segregation, the legal subordination of women, the execution of gay people, slavery, rigid hierarchy in every aspect of life – all these were at one time said to be inevitable aspects of the human condition, and that any opposition to them was naive of “unchanging human nature”. But radicals fought to end these things, and eventually their ideas came to be accepted as common sense.
We live in an era marked by contradictions: on the one hand, ordinary people have taken control over their own affairs like never before. We create our own videos on YouTube, share knowledge on Wikipedia, contact one another on Twitter. Information, previously a monopoly of a literate elite, continues to become more and more accessible to more and more people. We enjoy choices and freedoms in our personal lives unparalleled in human history. Intuitively, we feel that people should be able to participate in decisions that affect them, that nobody has the right to control another’s life – ideas that were seen as extreme not so long ago. Most of our interactions with one another are already anarchist. Friendship, love, all human interactions outside the official structures of control — our social lives would come to a swift collapse if we tried to engage with people in our daily lives the same way a politician or boss does to his subjects.
And yet we continue to live in a world with millions of people starving to death as the food they grow is shipped to wealthy countries overseas; people dying of curable diseases due to patents keeping available treatments out of their reach, people dying in wars between ruling elites, people losing their homes and jobs due to decisions made by the parasites who live off their labor, and people being bullied, harassed and humiliated by their “superiors” on a daily basis.
These are not problems inherent to the human condition; they are specific to the social structures that we have chosen to tolerate. It is up to us to decide between hier-archy or an-archy. Whether to obey the edicts of an insane, power-drunk elite as we follow them over the cliff of total chaos, social breakdown and totalitarianism, or to fight for a new social order based on peace, justice and friendship, one that upholds the freedom and dignity of every single human being. We are fully capable of living without masters: all we need to do is to withdraw our consent from them. Our freedom is there for the taking – it is only our reluctance that keeps it from us. The decision is ours to make. We have a world to win.
For a much more detailed anarchist response to several frequently asked questions, see
An Anarchist FAQ
www.infoshop.org/faq
Websites:
infoshop.org
libcom.org
c4ss.org
crimethinc.com
flag.blackened.net
all-left.net
dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives
Books and Essays (all available on the ‘Net):
What is Property? (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon)
God and the State (Mikhail Bakunin)
No Treason (Lysander Spooner)
Instead of a Book (Benjamin Tucker)
The Conquest of Bread (Peter Kropotkin)
“Anarchism” (Peter Kropotkin)
“Anarchy” (Errico Malatesta)
“Anarchy: What it is and What it Stands For” (Emma Goldman)
“Anarchism and American Traditions” (Voltairine de Cleyre)
The ABC’s of Anarchist Communism (Alexander Berkman)
Our Enemy, the State (Albert Jay Nock)
The Joy of Revolution (Ken Knabb)
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (David Graeber)
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (Kevin Carson)
“The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand” (Kevin Carson)
“The Obviousness of Anarchy” (John Hasnas)
