Anarchism
All coercive hierarchy — the state above all — should be dismantled and replaced by voluntary, federated self-organisation.
What does this mean?
Anarchism is the position that authority has to justify itself, and that most authority cannot. Its central target is the state: an institution which claims the exclusive right to use force, which nobody alive consented to, and which anarchists argue cannot be made accountable enough to be legitimate. But the argument extends to any relationship of command — employer over worker, priest over congregation, one caste or gender over another.
What it proposes instead is not disorder but a different kind of order: voluntary associations, cooperatives, communes and federations coordinating from the bottom up, with decisions made as close as possible to the people they affect and delegates recallable at any time. Anarchists differ over property — some are individualist, most are collectivist — but agree that a society run without permanent hierarchy is both possible and preferable. The tradition has produced significant practical experiments, including revolutionary Catalonia in 1936–37, and continues in cooperative and mutual-aid movements.
Where did it come from?
Formulated in nineteenth-century Europe by Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin, and split from Marxism at the First International over whether a workers’ state was a step toward liberation or a new form of domination. It was a major force in Spanish and Italian labour movements, and in India its concerns overlap with Gandhian ideas of village self-rule and with the socialist critique of centralised power.
Major thinkers
- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
- Mikhail Bakunin
- Peter Kropotkin
- Emma Goldman
- Murray Bookchin
Historical figures
- Emma Goldman
- Buenaventura Durruti
- Nestor Makhno
What it looks like today
- Mutual aid networks and horizontally organised social movements
- Cooperative and commons-based economic projects
- The democratic confederalist experiment in north-east Syria
Where it sits on each dimension
Wealth and inequality
The state in the economy
At the limited-state pole, but for reasons unrelated to markets: the objection is to the state as such, not to its economic role.
Personal liberty
Tradition and change
Nation and the world
Religion and the state
Power and its limits
At the pluralist pole in the sense of dispersed, recallable power — though anarchists reject representative government as a form of rule.
Environment and growth
Crime and punishment
Its strongest arguments
- It asks a question most traditions skip: what actually makes any authority legitimate, given that nobody consented to be born under it?
- Its warning that a revolutionary state becomes a new ruling class was made in the 1870s and was borne out in the twentieth century.
- Small-scale non-hierarchical coordination demonstrably works, in cooperatives, mutual aid and open-source production.
Its strongest criticisms
- It is unclear how a stateless society would handle large-scale coordination, external aggression or determined internal violence.
- Abolishing formal hierarchy can produce informal hierarchy that is harder to see and impossible to hold to account.
- The historical experiments were mostly short-lived and ended under military pressure, so the model remains largely untested at scale.
Common misconceptions
- That anarchism means chaos or violence. The tradition is about organisation without rulers; most anarchist writing is concerned with how to coordinate, not how to destroy.
- That anarchists have no economics. They have several, from mutualism to anarcho-communism, and disagree with each other sharply.
- That it is the same as libertarianism. Most anarchists reject private ownership of productive property, which libertarians treat as fundamental.
A caveat
Anarchism is unusually badly served by a left–right axis: it is simultaneously at the far anti-state end and, in most versions, at the far anti-market end.
Sources
- Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread · 1892
- Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy · 1873
- Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action · 1973