History UsefulNotes / Anarchism

Anarchism is the broad belief that ''rulership'', not just the state, should not exist--as indicated in its Greek roots, an- + -arkhos [no ruler]--and that people should instead organize their social relations and institutions through voluntary cooperation without hierarchies of power. So what characterises anarchism is less anti-statism than 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 to greater or lesser degrees depending on the context.[[/note]]

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.

* ''Market Anarchists'' want a stateless free-market economy co 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.

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 Benedict Anderson argues 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 UsefulNotes/{{Japan}}, the UsefulNotes/{{Philippines}}, UsefulNotes/LatinAmerica, UsefulNotes/{{Egypt}}, and Southern UsefulNotes/{{Africa}}.

Its popularity waned somewhat after [[UsefulNotes/RedOctober the second 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 [[https://libcom.org/history/1936-1939-the-spanish-civil-war-and-revolution 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.

For those new to anarchist ideas, there's been a massive project aimed at explaining everything about (social) anarchist theory, practice, and history called [[https://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/index.html An Anarchist FAQ]] available at this link, and a series of introductory videos on social anarchist/left-libertarian ideas is available [[https://m.youtube.com/user/TheLeftLibertarian here]], [[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WIvn8qjyrzk here]], and [[https://www.youtube.com/c/anark here]]. A more narratively framed primer can be found at [[https://anarchy.works/primer.html Anarchy Works]]. ''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 Aspirations'' by Cindy Milstein, and ''A Living Spirit of Revolt'' by Ziga Vodovnik are good book-length intros.

('''Note''': As ''social anarchism'' is by far the majority tendency within anarchism, most of the following article will address primarily what social anarchists believe, 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.[[/note]])

In contrast to Marxists and liberals, whose methodologies usually start at the abstract level and develop 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 what people are doing in their battles for freedom and equality. They then try to work out theories in which people could push those elements in a more explicitly anarchist direction. So, for Marxists and liberals, practice should follow theory, while for anarchists, theory must follow pre-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 if their activities are anarchistic in their ethos.

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'' [[http://web.archive.org/web/20140326055217/http://www.raikoth.net/consequentialism.html ethics]], and support anarchism out of the belief that it would ensure the greatest freedom and wellbeing 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."[[/note]]

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 person(s) being helped, acts as the social glue which binds anarchists together in their ethical commitments.

A common misconception is that anarchists believe RousseauWasRight 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 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.)

Anarchism, meaning ''rulerlessness'', could be summed up as a fully horizontal plane of power relations, where each person 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 a Zen sort of ideal to which to aspire continuously, dissolving hierarchy wherever it appears and pushing ever closer towards complete liberation in all things.

!!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- 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:

# '''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.

And all six could in turn be condensed into the formula:

Anarchism = Autonomy + Cooperation

The word "commune" just means a local residential area (roughly synonymous with "municipality") and doesn't have anything to do with "communes" of the [[NewAgeRetroHippie hippie]] or {{cult}} variety.

While some older anarchist literature uses the word "political" as a synonym for "statist," later anarchists distinguish politics (the collective administration of social affairs) from statecraft (the monopolisation of politics by a centralised system of rulership).

!!Anti-capitalism

Economically, anarchists (save anarcho-capitalists) think CapitalismIsBad, instead advocating 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. Some call for the armed overthrow of the state and corporations. Others call 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.

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 [[NoTrueScotsman 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.

# The Ruling Elite[[note]]A constellation of powerful classes which includes the economic ruling class--people who own the means of production--but also those who wield other forms of social power who might not own means of production, like politicians and religious figures.[[/note]]

Each of the classes has competing class interests and different desires for what kind of economy and society they would like to create. Members of the ruling class want to maintain their position at the top, using divide-and-rule tactics to keep everyone from uniting against them. Members of the managerial class want to push things in a more technocratic and bureaucratic direction, putting themselves more at the forefront. Members of the popular classes want to unite worldwide, put aside racial, gender, national, and religious differences, and create an 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.

In fact, this is the core of their rebuttal 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 things or material they don't use or occupy themselves. In theory, Alice could defend her personal property with just a gun, while it's difficult to imagine how businessman Bob 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.

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 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 socioeconomic safety net, which they see as an essential feature of any free egalitarian society 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 medium 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 socioeconomic safety net.

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:

While some other economists of the time, such as 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).[[/note]]

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, 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. Building on work pioneered by Barbara and John Ehrenreich, they contended 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 consider. 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 ''[[https://zcomm.org/category/topic/parecon/ ZNet]]''.

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 consists 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 philosophy of idealism associated with GWF Hegel in [[UsefulNotes/ImperialGermany 19th-century Germany]]. German idealism claims that it is primarily collections of ideas, not material forces, which shape historical progress; and that society develops in a mostly linear path along successive stages of complexity, with each stage making society more enlightened than the previous one. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels agreed that history proceeds along a mostly linear path in different stages but thought that technology and economics were more responsible for driving this process, with ideas largely being conditioned by these "material" factors.

Élisée 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 specific 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 "backward," seeing their own cultures as the image of what they need to "catch up" to.[[note]]Jared Diamond, in ''Literature/GunsGermsAndSteel'', 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. Key were domesticated animals like 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.[[/note]]

None of them tries 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 people could also have taken less hierarchical paths had conditions been different or different forces prevailed.

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.

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 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, early states in Mesopotamia (and probably Mesoamerica) ''created'' the first markets to break up and "declutter" 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. A more accurate line of economic history, then, would be:

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 defeated 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 [[http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-500-years-of-Indigenous-resistance forced the native peoples]] of those regions into the European nation-state model and the early forms of capitalism and landlordism. This destruction of [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0BXCiKOsKY 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 fact, 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.

The first person to call himself an anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, had some pretty nasty sexist views. However, almost every single self-identified anarchist after him has rejected his patriarchal beliefs and argued that they contradicted damn near 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.

While the term "anarcha-UsefulNotes/{{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 address gender issues and the plight of women specifically in her essays and activism, and was also one of the first to attack UsefulNotes/{{homophobia}} and the persecution of non-heterosexual people. Unlike the first-wave feminists however, early anarcha-feminists like Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Louise Michel, [[https://libcom.org/files/He%20Zhen%20and%20Anarcha-Feminism%20in%20China.pdf 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 [[http://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/no-god-no-boss-no-husband founded in Argentina in 1896]].

During the UsefulNotes/SpanishCivilWar, 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 [[http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lucia-sanchez-saornil-the-question-of-feminism 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 [[SexIsLiberation 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. ([[SlutShaming Sound familiar?]])

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 spouses, 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.

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 {{internalized|Categorism}} 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 thought up in the 1600s to try to prevent African slaves and European indentured servants in the American colonies from joining together to overthrow the colonial ruling class.

At their best, 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 multiracial unions of Blacks and Whites in UsefulNotes/SouthAfrica, Korean immigrant workers with native Japanese in Japan, Blacks, Whites, and mixed workers in UsefulNotes/{{Brazil}} and UsefulNotes/{{Argentina}}, Whites and Amerindians in UsefulNotes/{{Peru}} and Mexico, Afro-UsefulNotes/{{Cuba}}ns and Euro-Cubans in Cuba, Whites, Blacks, and Indigenous peoples in the UsefulNotes/UnitedStates and Australia (under the IWW) and in Europe tried to organise Jewish people with Gentiles when so much of the subcontinent[[note]]Yes, Europe is a subcontinent (like India), not a continent. It's part of the same landmass as Asia, which together are known as Eurasia. Realising you're on the same piece of land as the Chinese, Indians, Arabs, and others does much just by itself to decentre 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 must change very quickly as far as anarchists are concerned.[[/note]] was fervently antisemitic.

It's essential to take account of the fact that oppressions are contextual, and while White people are the most dominant racial group in the Global North, other ethnicities occupy that position in different parts of the world. In most of the Middle East, for example, Arabs enjoy the position of dominance relative to Kurds, Yezidis, and other groups. Similarly, in UsefulNotes/{{Tibet}} under UsefulNotes/{{China}} the dominant racial group is Han Chinese, with Tibetans in particular facing vicious discrimination.

Most of the classical anarchists didn't place a huge focus on ecological issues, but some, most notably [[http://zabalazabooks.net/2013/12/04/green-flame-kropotkin-and-the-birth-of-ecology/ Peter Kropotkin]] and [[http://theanarchistlibrary.org/authors/elisee-reclus Élisée Reclus]], explored ideas and raised concerns in their geographical and scientific writings which today would be regarded as proto-environmentalist and expressive of an ecological worldview. Reclus deserves special credit for being pretty much the first person to espouse an unambiguously green perspective in his scholarship.[[note]]Anarchist philosopher John P. Clark has even claimed that he not only anticipated nearly every important facet of the 20th-century green movements, but was in fact the [[http://72.52.202.216/~fenderse/Reclus.htm best anarchist theorist ever]] in terms of the quality of his ideas. For Clark, Reclus had less influence than Bakunin, Kropotkin, or Goldman because he tended to express his thought in very long scholarly works inflected more subtly with his political philosophy rather than laid out in pithy, memorable AuthorTract[=s=] for a general audience.[[/note]]

Other green anarchist movements such as Deep Ecology and anarcho-primitivism came later and see ecological problems lying not in the authoritarian ways humans treat each other, but in [[HumansAreTheRealMonsters humanity itself as a species]]. While Social Ecology was developed within the social anarchist movement, Deep Ecology was developed outside it by the UsefulNotes/{{Norw|ay}}egian philosopher Arne Naess and then caught on among many green anarchist activists in the [[TheOtherRainforest Pacific Northwest]]. Deep Ecologists believe that all life forms have a right to existence apart from or even in opposition to human needs, and humans must restructure our societies radically to accommodate them.

Concerning the creation of art in the contemporary world, anarchists are fond of pointing out that the only reason that every single movie, TV show, video game, book, album, etc. couldn't be made available right now for free through the Internet is the existence of intellectual property laws (patents, copyrights, and trademarks), as all of the above could in theory be distributed gratis for downloading and streaming due to there being little-to-no material cost involved. They feel that abolishing IP laws (especially copyrights) would unleash a multitude of creative endeavours as people would be able to use all the non-material resources available (including editing software) to improve upon and create their own works of art and entertainment, distributing it online as part of a [[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_culture participatory culture]]. It's for this reason that there's a lot of overlap between anarchists and the [[http://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software free software movement]].

While not an anarchist himself, the fantasy novelist Creator/ChinaMieville suggested a system that most anarchists would find appealing: authors (and other artists and entertainers) could be paid salaries for doing creative work rather than being paid per the profits for their individual products, as they could be distributed for free online. While this would obviously mean that most of the big-name artists and entertainers could no longer make millions, he pointed out that for most StarvingArtist[=s=] it would be a pay upgrade, allowing them to devote themselves to their craft full-time. An anarchist entertainment industry could therefore be based on cooperatives (based on location) and democratic guilds (based on art form), where big-scale art/entertainment projects like blockbuster movies would be greenlit based on perceived quality instead of potential profitability.

Of all the social sciences, anarchists have been most consistently drawn to anthropology. Contemporary anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber believed that this may be because, as proponents of a stateless and non-hierarchical society, anarchists pursue anthropology to show that such social set-ups are indeed possible, given that anthropologists devote their careers to studying them.

Anthropological elements are found in the works of classical anarchists like Peter Kropotkin and Élisée Reclus, by twentieth-century anarchists Murray Bookchin and Colin Ward, and by modern-day anarchists who are by profession anthropologists like Brian Morris and the aforementioned David Graeber. Jeff Shantz has argued that [[https://www.strath.ac.uk/aer/materials/6furtherqualitativeresearchdesignandanalysis/unit5/introductiontoethnographyandautoethnography/ auto-ethnography]] in particular--people from marginal groups giving first-person accounts of their lives and experiences--can be regarded as an especially anarchistic form of anthropology.

There's also a lot of mucking about in anthropology by so-called "anarcho-primitivists" like John Zerzan, though their works tend to suffer from selective reading and romanticisation of hunter-gatherer lifestyles as GoodOldWays. Most anarchists admire certain features of such communities, such as mutual aid, reciprocity, communality, and ecological stewardship, but have no desire to go back to such states of affairs, abandoning all sophisticated technology. It's important to note that many (perhaps most) hunter-gatherer societies are in fact very hierarchical and patriarchal.

One of the most famous anarchists of the last few decades is Noam Chomsky, who places a special focus in his work on how mass media is used by states and corporations to create the illusion of popular agreement with what those powerful forces do to the public. With Edward S. Herman, whom Chomsky has credited with coming up with most of the theory, he developed an anarchistic approach to studying mass media called the [[http://beautifultrouble.org/theory/the-propaganda-model/ propaganda model]]. Herman and Chomsky presented the propaganda model in their book ''Manufacturing Consent'', first released in 1988, then reissued with revision in 2002. It holds that state and corporate media are structured in a way which imposes a rather uniform perspective with the aim of shaping general opinion along certain lines. A few factors condition this hegemonic worldview and how it gets expressed:

# ''Fear'' of a perceived "enemy."[[note]]The big [[RedScare "enemy" in the west used to be Communism]], but since the fall of the UsefulNotes/BerlinWall and later [[UsefulNotes/TheWarOnTerror 9/11, the "enemy" has been designated as]] Islam.[[/note]]

Also, while most media sources do compete with and disagree with each other, at the same time they have a certain set of common aims and interests on which they align to reinforce the status quo in popular consciousness and push the agenda of the ruling elite. Moreover, insofar as they espouse different views, they do so from a starting point of similar, flawed, rarely interrogated background assumptions. Anarchists have always tried to establish their own non-profit, [[http://www.wsm.ie/c/media-mayhem-anarchists-mass-media alternative forms]] of media to enable marginalised voices an outlet they rarely get in the mainstream, attempting to create an anti-authoritarian, democratic counternarrative to the dominant ideology.

The proposals of anarchist urbanists like Élisée Reclus, Paul Goodman, and Murray Bookchin were very similar to what's now called New Urbanism and New Pedestrianism, and similar to utopian city-planners like Ebenezer Howard and the Garden City movement. Colin Ward was an urban planner by profession and wrote extensively about the subject.

A few others support what's called "destructivist" voting (so named by the obscure 1870s anarchist Paul Brousse). This means taking part in municipal elections (though never national elections) to devolve the powers of local governments to directly democratic neighbourhood assemblies, and to municipalise enterprises before turning them over to worker self-management. It was recommended by several anarchists in the First Internarional for a time (even, briefly, Bakunin and Kropotkin), and was later pushed by Murray Bookchin as part of his broader strategy of "libertarian municipalism." Though this is a minority position, with most anarchists being against taking part in ''any'' form of electoral politics, believing it to be useless at best and counterproductive to movement-building at worst.

In contrast to other self-described "revolutionaries," anarchists have always stressed that they want more than just a political revolution (a change in governments), but a more all-encompassing social revolution--that is, a transformation in political, economic, and societal structures, changing people's social consciousness as well as institutions. They also stress that revolution (transformation) is a process, not an event, and that the word doesn't just refer to erecting barricades and storming government buildings. The Industrial Revolution was just as transformative as the French Revolution.

At first, inspired by the Paris Commune of 1871, this involved recommending acts of collective insurrection, leading many anarchists to try taking over small municipalities in Italy and Spain, with the intention of turning them into free communes. The idea being that this would cause a domino effect of the people in other parishes, towns, and cities becoming inspired to mirror such actions, turning their local areas into free communes with libertarian socialist economies. This was called ''propaganda by the deed'': belief that living examples of socialist revolution proved more effective than writing pamphlets or making speeches; that is, written and oral propaganda. And just to clarify, the word ''propaganda'' back then didn't mean {{brainwash|ed}}ing (as it mostly does today), but was a term roughly synonymous with what's now called public relations (PR): getting your message out there. After a string of failures however, and the successful assassination of Tsar Alexander II in Russia in 1881, focus shifted to acts of individual insurrection, targeting royals and businessmen in the hope that this would give the masses the confidence to rise up and overthrow the governments and the structures of private property. This didn't work either. In fact, the violent acts of individual ''attentats'' (political assassins) only served to alienate the general population, leading to the now-popular image of anarchists as bomb-throwers in black trenchcoats. A lot of these attentats also, probably, looked to have serious mental health problems given the description of their personalities and behaviour. Others came from extremely deprived and brutal backgrounds, turning to such actions out of desperation and misplaced thirst for vengeance. Anarchists, who had bad press to begin with, started really getting a bad rep when targets expanded to include random members of the wealthy or royalty who hadn't even done anything.

This strategy was already discussed by Mikhail Bakunin and others in the First International in the 1860s and 1870s. But it became most relevant in the 1880s through to the 1910s, as the labour movements of the world became increasingly successful and relevant. This led to the birth of anarcho-syndicalism as a distinct strategic approach which centred the workplace, the industrial working class, and trade unions ("syndicates" in French) as the primary vehicles of revolution. Though a lot of anarchists, such as Errico Malatesta and Emma Goldman, discouraged people from emphasising syndicalism too much, arguing that focusing on economic issues alone could cause anarchists to neglect political, societal, and individual-level issues.

For example, at the 1907 UsefulNotes/{{Amsterdam}} Congress of anarchists, some expressed the idea that the strategy of revolutionary syndicalism (trade unionism) was "enough in itself" to realise anarchist goals, and that anarchists should dissolve themselves into the wider labour movement. Errico Malatesta came out staunchly against this view, claiming that while workers' struggles were important, they were (by themselves) conservative unless their participants pulled in a more social libertarian direction, and that specifically anarchist political organisations would be necessary, not just anarchists working within trade unions. This came from his view, contrary to Marxism, that mass struggle has as much to do with ''will'' (fighting for a chosen ideal) as with ''material interest'' (reacting to the mechanical processes of the economy).

Confusingly, the commune-oriented group, the "communalists," tended to call themselves "anarcho-communists," even though many of them also supported revolutionary syndicalism as a tactic. Meanwhile, the worker-oriented group, the "workerists," tended to call themselves "anarcho-syndicalists," even though they tended to support a free communist economy.

This dual meaning of "communist" within anarchism--organisation through communes and a moneyless commons economy--has befuddled both anarchists and non-anarchists, hence the reason that the use of communism to mean commune-ism is often retroactively referred to as communalism.

However, in the second half of the century, some anarchists, such as Murray Bookchin, argued for focusing more on the commune, claiming that in the era of the welfare state, the working class and trade unions had been bought off by reforms and no longer had the potential to dismantle capitalism and the state; attacking anarcho-syndicalism as too class-centric and too accepting of the "work ethic" found in both capitalism and state socialism. Transformative change should therefore be waged by a convergence of oppressed social groups (women, people of colour, LGBT+ folks) and focus more on creating democratised communities rather than trying to organise workers into radical trade unions.

Anarchists agree with most other radical socialists that ''class struggle'' (of the popular classes against the ruling elites) is a necessary part of social transformation. However, they tend to disagree with many, especially Marxists, who see economic class as the only/primary form of oppression, with others, like race, gender, sexuality, nationality, or ecology, being secondary or at worst a distraction. Rather, they see it as necessary to [[http://www.afed.org.uk/blog/state/327-a-class-struggle-anarchist-analysis-of-privilege-theory--from-the-womens-caucus-.html integrate class struggle with trans-class forms of struggle]], unifying them in a way that makes purely class-based issues (like workplace organising) complement non-economic concerns (like fights against gender or ethnic oppression, or defence of the environment) as part of an intersectional ''social struggle'' against all forms of hierarchy and domination, whatever the specific tactics used for achieving an anarchist society.

To offer a brief run down of the various strategies that have been proposed to dissolve hierarchical society and bring about libertarian socialism, they are:

Though, to be fair, propaganda by the deed first referred to armed struggle in a collective sense, such as militias taking over a small town and turning it into an autonomous territory, not assassinations or bombings. When seen in this context, the idea seems more appropriate and likely to inspire further popular uprisings.

This is social struggle (of which class struggle is the main part) in the more familiar sense. Mass organising by anarchist groups and other transformative forces to push against existing forms of domination, with the intention of winning enough victories against capital and the state to trigger the downfall of the capitalist state system.

Varieties of this approach are ''platformism'', ''specifism'', and the more famous tactic of ''anarcho-syndicalism''. While many have (somewhat inaccurately) used this term to refer to a certain type of social anarchist economic system,[[note]]One which would be worker-directed (by federations of worker councils and syndicates) rather than community-directed (by popular assemblies and confederated municipalities).[[/note]] it's actually a strategy of achieving libertarian socialism through the use of trade unions. Anarcho-syndicalists propose setting up anarchist syndicates (unions), as well as establishing an anarchist presence in mainstream unions, so as to get as many working people organised as possible and eventually declare a general strike (or "general lockout of the capitalist classes") to shut down the capitalist economy until the capitalists and landlords agree to sign over control over the means of production, distribution, and investment to the federation of syndicates that would have been established, who would then reorganise the economy on the basis of decentralised worker self-management.

Anarcho-syndicalism, as a strategy, is still very popular today despite having been developed over a century ago in very different economic circumstances. It's also the one that's been most successful thus far, winning many labour victories through trade unions in the early 20th century with the [[UsefulNotes/SpanishCivilWar Spanish Revolution of 1936]] successfully establishing a libertarian socialist economy for a short time (before being suppressed by Marxist–Leninists on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War).

This involves escaping the capitalist state system by creating counter-institutions to it--like worker cooperatives, directly democratic popular assemblies, affinity groups, democratic schools, interest-free banks, intentional communities--and then linking them all together into a confederated network, all to contest the power of corporations and governments over the administration of society.

The words "anarchy" and "anarchism" themselves arose in the mid-1600s during the English Civil War as an insult hurled at fringe radical groups. While this epithet for the most part had no basis in fact, two groups which were active at the time, the Diggers and the Ranters, had ideas and practices which were quite close to anarchism. (The Diggers have their own [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA4FTIz2Zrw folk song]] which expressed many of their proto-anarchist sentiments.)

Some view the English radical William Godwin as the first modern philosophical anarchist, from his work ''Enquiry Concerning Political Justice'' (1793) in which he espoused proto-anarchist views about the state and the then-emerging economic system of capitalism in England.[[note]]It is perhaps worth noting that Godwin himself acknowledged a large debt to Creator/EdmundBurke for his ''A Vindication of Natural Society''. Burke himself later claimed that the work was satire, but some commentators have argued that he meant it in earnest and felt it necessary to disavow it for political reasons.[[/note]] A few decades later in Germany, an obscure girls' school teacher wrote a book called ''The Ego and its Own'' under the pseudonym Max Stirner. While largely ignored at the time, it was later rediscovered in the 1890s (along with William Godwin's book) and praised by anarchists for its anti-authoritarian individualist philosophy.

French writer and politician Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the first thinker to call ''himself'' an anarchist, which he did in the book ''What Is Property?'' (1840), from which came the famous slogan: "property is theft." It's important to remember that Proudhon did not mean ''all'' forms of what we could call "property" by this, only those not defined by personal possession. In other words, he supported personal property (defined by use and occupancy) but opposed "private" property (when defined by absentee ownership), which he felt was based on theft of others' personal property.

They came up with this model in large part due to what they felt was Marxism's inadequacy when it came to addressing issues of race and gender in a United States context. At the time, many in the Black Power and Chicano movements could at times act as if racial oppression (cultural sphere) was the most important hierarchy to get rid of, or how the nascent feminist movement emphasised gender inequality (kinship sphere) as the most pressing problem. Marxists tended to be dismissive of race and gender struggles as distractions from the workers' class struggle (economic sphere), while some anarchists at times acted as if taking down the state should dominate oppositional campaigns (political sphere). All these movements, it was claimed, needed to stop thinking of domination in monist terms and examine how their oppressions relate to each other in holist terms. In other words, they were countering what's called the "lynchpin" view of oppression: the idea that there's one main form of oppression (e.g., class or patriarchy) which, if gotten rid of, will cause all other oppressions to crumble, like a lynchpin causing something to unravel if pulled loose.

The complementary holist model also stresses the importance of a the "third class" in-between the ruling classes and the working classes called the ''managerial class'' (or coordinator class) whose ideal is neither capitalism nor worker self-management but a kind of left-wing bureaucracy. It is this class, they claim, who is best served by traditional state-socialism and social democracy. A broad outline of these ideas is available [[http://www.afreesociety.org/writings/OFS-PointsofUnity.pdf here]].

There's also something of an affinity between anarchism and American [[http://www.anarkismo.net/article/26978 pragmatism]], with both supporting a "whatever works" attitude to solving problems, with the US writer Paul Goodman inspiring many a student radical with his commonsense, pragmatic approach to anarchism.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who started writing in 1840, argued that property, except when based in personal possession (i.e., occupancy and use), was theft. He laid out his reasoning exhaustively in ''What Is Property?'', with most if not all anarchists accepting it. Opposition to "private property" (anything besides actual possession) in addition to the state is near-universal to anarchism, though some have used the term in a positive way to support property that is the product of one's own labour. Along with this, most opposed sexism, racism, homophobia, classism, and social hierarchy generally. Proudhon did not in fact oppose the concept of a free market, supporting workers' associations (cooperatives) and mutual banks (like modern credit unions) to compete away industrial capitalism. His school of thought is termed ''mutualism''. While it fell out of favour for a long time, it has recently been revived by the economic theorist Kevin Carson, who has integrated it with elements borrowed from the thought of other left-wing, pro-market writers.

Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian noble turned radical writer who was imprisoned for his politics, escaping into exile, followed Proudhon and broke with him on many issues, supporting collective work without markets and workers' self-management. Bakunin also linked opposition to religion, especially organized, hierarchical forms, to his view of anarchism, seeing God as the ultimate authority. He turned a saying of Creator/{{Voltaire}}'s on its head: "If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him." He was a strong rival of Marx in the First International, and the two fought a long war of words over control of the organization until Bakunin's followers were expelled from it by Marx's. Bakunin's school of thought, called ''anarcho-collectivism'', could be considered a sort of middle way between mutualism (markets but with cooperatives instead of corporations) and communism (in which markets and even money would be abolished).[[note]]It's important to note that the term collectivism here is purely an economic term, not a social one. It refers only to the collectivisation of industry, not giving priority to the collective interest over that of the individual.[[/note]] The best outline of how a collectivist anarchist economy would work in practice is the pamphlet [[http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/james-guillaume-ideas-on-social-organization Ideas on Social Organisation]] by Bakunin's friend James Guillaume. Participatory Economics (Parecon) and Inclusive Democracy (ID) could be considered contemporary forms of collectivist anarchism.

Peter Kropotkin, a Russian prince who, like Bakunin, [[DefectorFromDecadence gave it all up for radicalism]], advocated full libertarian communism on the principle "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," favouring abolition of money in favour of free access to communally owned goods, although with voluntary, direct democratic participation: ''communist anarchism'', or later ''anarcho-communism''.[[note]]The terms anarchist communism and ''anarcho''-communism originally meant different (albeit related) things. The former referred to a society structured without a state, markets, or money, while the latter term was (confusingly) used in the early 20th century to refer to those who wanted a community-directed economy rather than a worker-directed economy (for which most anarcho-syndicalists were pushing). The terms sounded so similar that people ended up using them as synonyms.[[/note]] Many on first impression may find the term communist anarchism odd, given the modern associations of the word Communism with the statist, centrally planned economies of the former Soviet States. However, in the 19th century, the word communist simply referred to any economic system that lacked both a state and money, where goods were distributed according to need. It is this original sense of the word that anarchists refer to when talking about communism. Kropotkin provided a general outline of anarchist communism [[https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/kropotkin/ancom/ here]].

Meanwhile, in the United States, a very different brand of anarchism emerged. American writers such as Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, and William Green set out an ideal very close to Proudhon's, with even more emphasis upon an "anti-capitalist free market," in which self-employed craftsmen, artisans or farmers were paid their "full wage" and land title was possession-based only. In short, ''individualist anarchism'' argued for a society where every individual was a "capitalist" (in the Marxist sense, i.e., an owner of capital). Essentially, they held to the Labour Theory of Value along with support of free markets--"cost is the limit of price" was among their key slogans. Their ideal was a stateless economy made up mostly of self-employed artisans and shopkeepers. This school of thought began slowly dying out in the late 19th century as social anarchism (collectivist or communist) took over, with immigrants from Europe such as bringing it to the forefront of US anarchism.

At around the same time Proudhon was penning his socialist attacks on property and the state, another writer, Max Stirner, wrote a similar attack on these and other authoritarian institutions from a more individualist perspective in ''The Ego and Its Own'' (1845). Stirner did not label himself an anarchist, but later people have counted him among them due to his rejection of the state, capitalism, and, well, basically all institutions. He believed that rights, property, the state, conventional morality and God were all "spooks" holding back the individual from themselves, since all these are placed above them. It's worth noting that Stirner, while believing the individual's right to act was unlimited, advised that it would be best if they respected each other as individuals, to let each flourish, even saying people could not have their full self-expression absent communion with others, so they could join together voluntarily in a way he called the "Union of Egoists," which was similar in principle to what most anarchists now call voluntary association, but less formalised. [[http://libcom.org/library/right-be-greedy-theses-practical-necessity-demanding-everything Here]] is a classic text by the Situationist International, advancing a socialist form of egoism. Stirner denounced authoritarian communism of his time, but a kind which respected individuals and lent them full expression of themselves is viewed to be compatible with his ideas. Even the anarcho-communist Emma Goldman was a big fan, and saw Stirner's ideas as fully compatible with her own.

In the late 19th century, Russian novelist Creator/LeoTolstoy (who, like Bakunin and Kropotkin, was a Russian noble who renounced his title) embraced a form of Christian, pacifist anarchism--though like Stirner and Godwin before him, he didn't use the label anarchist himself. Unique among anarchist trends for its total rejection of violence, even in self-defense or defense of others, Tolstoy advocated essentially the same ideas as Bakunin or Kropotkin, his countrymen and more famous anarchists, but with complete pacifism. His work deeply influenced [[UsefulNotes/MahatmaGandhi Mohandas K. "Mahatma" Gandhi]] (who knew Indian anarchists in UsefulNotes/{{London}} early in his activism, while disagreeing with them over the issue of using violence) in addition to ''Civil Disobedience'', by Creator/HenryDavidThoreau. Critics argued his ideas were fit only for saints (though many think Gandhi was such). Another prominent anarcho-pacifist was the American public intellectual Paul Goodman, who became a kind of go-to guy for student radicals in the 1960s opposed to UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar. While initially supportive of radical youth movements, he later became critical of them for abandoning nonviolence and decentralist organising for militant action and Marxism-Leninism.

It is important to note, however, that while syndicalism is typically associated with anarchism, this does not mean that all syndicalists are anarchists; some of them are actually very authoritarian. UsefulNotes/BenitoMussolini, the leader of UsefulNotes/FascistItaly, in fact called his economic model National Syndicalism, as did Franco, though [[InNameOnly this meant something completely different, as fascist "syndicates" were government-created trade associations which ran industry]]. It's like a Venn diagram, in that there are non-anarchist syndicalists and non-syndicalist anarchists who favour other tactics for achieving libertarian socialism.

"Post-left" and "lifestyle" anarchism has become widespread in modern times, something Murray Bookchin and others disapproved of. Lifestylism could be summed up as viewing anarchism more as a means of personal rebellion in the here-and-now than transforming all of society in the long-term. These are marked by a tendency to reject classical social anarchism's left-wing, working-class organizing and goals or at least complement them with ecological or animal rights issues. Veganism and dumpster diving (combined as "freeganism"--eating only food that is reclaimed after being discarded) have become common for such lifestyle anarchism, in addition to using the system (especially where it has an ecological impact) to the lowest degree possible. The group [[http://www.crimethinc.com Crimethinc]] are the most prominent exponents of this brand of post-left/lifestyle anarchism.[[note]]Though their more recent writings and activities have seen them drift more towards social anarchism, focusing more on social change than personal rebellion. However, they still tend to reject the label "leftist" to describe their politics.[[/note]]

Primitivists emerged from the nascent green anarchist milieu in the Pacific Northwest in the late 20th century and are heavily inspired by both Deep Ecology and anti-civilisation ideology. They view all forms of complex technology as corruptive and wish to abandon it in favour of a hunter-gatherer way of life, significantly reducing the human population as a necessary stage in this goal. Some even reject language (at least in a written fashion), counting, and acknowledging the passage of time as oppressive--which they consider remnants of "symbolic culture." Primitivists cite that tribal groups [[https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201105/how-hunter-gatherers-maintained-their-egalitarian-ways don't have domestication]] (i.e., farming) [[http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race tend to be more egalitarian than those with domestication.]] Some argue that while technology itself isn't inherently oppressive, the structures that it requires to exist are. An example can be seen in weapons. In a primitivist society, theoretically, everyone would have access to stone or wooden weapons, or at least could use their own body as a weapon, putting them on a mostly even playing field. When advanced technology comes into play, those with access to the means to create more powerful weapons will have an advantage against those who do not. (That is, a person with a wooden spear would either be killed by or have to submit to a person armed with a firearm.) Whereas if everyone had access to the same type of weapons, this playing field would force people at least to attempt to work together in a more voluntary fashion.

They are heavily [[https://propertyistheft.wordpress.com/2010/05/27/where-the-sane-fear-to-tread-anarcho-primitivism/ criticised by social anarchists]] as a source of great embarrassment for their association with the a-word. Like voluntaryists, most social anarchists don't consider primitivism to be a form of anarchism and regard it as a [[https://libcom.org/library/anarchism-vs-primitivism separate ideology]]. Lately, many primitivists have agreed, and have begum to regard their ideas as [[http://www.thewildernist.org/blogs/hg/2015/02/primitivism-wo-anarcho/ distinct from anarchism]].

While anarcho-capitalists may see themselves as anarchists, after having read through this article you should realize that other anarchists ... well, don't. To avoid getting into a discussion on anarchist theory again, let's just say most anarchists take offense to putting "anarcho-" and "-capitalism" together. (In turn, anarchists may also feel reasonably satisfied with calling it by a different name.) So, let's assume the ideology probably deserves a write-up somewhere else and leave it at that.

Also, Rudolf Rocker in his magnum opus ''Nationalism and Culture'' argued that all artists and artworks should be evaluated as "Of their time, not of their place." He argued that national art did not exist as such, given that artists borrow and meld influences from all parts of the world.[[note]]For example, he argued that it was absurd to consider Albrecht Dürer emblematic of German art given that most of his influences were Italian artists (themselves inspired by Greek and [[UsefulNotes/TheRomanEmpire Roman]] art), or Creator/RembrandtVanRijn characteristic of the [[UsefulNotes/TheNetherlands Dutch]] artistic spirit given that [[NeverAcceptedInHisHometown much of his work was seen as deeply un-Dutch during his own lifetime]].[[/note]] Instead, he saw the necessity of viewing art as a global, international phenomenon that should ideally try to draw out the spirit of the times the artist lived in, and how all the epochs that came before worked their way into it. In other words, art is a commons.

The neo-Impressionists, a group of late-1800s painters inspired by anarchism, claimed that there ought to be three functions of anarchist art:

The association of anarchism with punk music and punk culture is well-known. Acts like Music/{{Crass}}, the Subhumans, and Music/{{Chumbawamba}} pushing anarchist, pacifist, anti-fascist, and pro-queer messages in their lyrics. Even punk artists who weren't explicitly anarchist frequently had anarchist influences, like Riot Grrrl and Pussy Riot. For the record, despite their famous song "Anarchy in the UK," the Music/SexPistols were about as close to anarchism as Pluto is to the Sun. They merely appropriated the iconography of actual anarcho-punk bands like Crass without taking the "anarcho-" part seriously, viewing it as little more than a rebellious-sounding chant. Though another form of "punk" most don't realise has anarchist roots, in fact, is [[https://steampunkanarchist.wordpress.com steampunk]].

In novels, there's a long association with works that take a critical or satirical look at existing society and point out its hypocrisies and how its problems mostly originate in relations, institutions, and beliefs founded on centralised power, greed, and unquestioned authority. They particularly appreciate stories that focus on the plight of oppressed and marginalised groups of people--women, people of color, Indigenous peoples, queer people, anthropomorphised animals, the working classes--told from their point of view. There's also a great appreciation for the science-fiction and fantasy genres and utopian fiction, especially works like those of Creator/UrsulaKLeGuin, Creator/WilliamMorris, Creator/KenMacleod, Creator/KimStanleyRobinson, and Creator/IainBanks, who use fantastical and imagined settings to explore alternative visions of how societies might work. The purpose being to paint hierarchical society as it exists at present as unreal and absurd compared to a more rational and liberated anarchistic ideal.

Writers, artists, and entertainers who openly declared an affinity with political anarchism are somewhat rare, although a few notable ones are Creator/OscarWilde, Creator/JamesJoyce, Creator/GeorgeOrwell (in his early days), Creator/CharlieChaplin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Creator/MichaelMoorcock, Robert Anton Wilson, Alan Moore, Creator/GrantMorrison, and (uh...) Creator/WoodyHarrelson.

Like many political and philosophical discourses, anarchism has its own assortment of key terms. Some of which are more familiar terms but used in a somewhat idiosyncratic way compared to other political traditions. The most important ones are as follows.

'''Anarchy''': From the Greek ''anarchos'', meaning "without rulership." Anarchists frequently point out that the term means "without rulers, not without rules," and that what they seek is not chaos or disorder, but voluntary, decentralised, non-hierarchical order. What most people really refer to when they use the word anarchy (rulerlessness) would more accurately be defined as anomie (orderlessness). Because of the negative association of the noun, most anarchists today only ever say anarch''ism'' and avoid using the word anarchy.

'''Balanced Job Complexes''': Where people in a workplace do a variety of tasks, sharing and rotating both the enjoyable and dirty work, instead of the ultra-specialisation that pervades capitalist and state enterprises. Many anarchists see this as a good way of avoiding managerialism, as people would take it in turns to be managers instead of having management be a fixed layer of the workplace above ordinary workers.

'''Class''': Economic hierarchy. Anarchists agree with Marxists by defining different classes not so much by income differences, but how they relate to the means of production. The ruling class (part of the ruling elite) owns the means of production, while the working classes (the plural form is important here)--or ''popular classes''--operate them. Unlike in Marxism, which recognizes only two key classes, many anarchists claim that there is an important third class in between the rulers and the workers/popular classes called the "professional-managerial class," or just ''managerial class'' for short. This class coordinates relations between the rulers above and the workers below, monopolising important information and empowering forms of work. It includes (obviously) managers, university professors, doctors, lawyers, and most people in professional occupations. While all anarchists would generally agree that class formations are very important, unlike most Marxists they don't think everything can be reduced to class or economics, and they also think that appealing to people as "the people" is just as important, if not more so, than appealing to them as workers (so that they're not just reduced to their economic function).

'''Commons''': A collective pool of resources (physical or intellectual) which anyone can partake of or contribute to, some of which are open access, while others are cooperatively managed by their users. Forms an important part of contemporary anarchism, in which the goal is seen as the creation of a widespread ''free commons'' (in contrast to a free market) administered via decentralised, horizontal cooperation. The trope of "tragedy of the commons" is frequently cited as a case against such a set up. Anarchists argue that the real problem with the tragedy of the commons is the selfish and profit-driven behavior, not the fact that there's a common pool of resources. The commons can be seen as the "third way" of economic organisation beyond both state (public property) and market (private property). Commons are stewarded rather than "owned." Making temporary exclusive use of common resources is called ''usufruct'', which is only granted to certain individuals or groups with the understanding that their user rights over the resources will dissolve after an agreed time has elapsed or goal accomplished.

'''Communism''': Used in two different ways by anarchists depending on how the word is spelled. With a capital C, Communism for them, as for non-anarchists, refers to the totalitarian regimes ruled by Marxist-Leninists in the twentieth century. With a small c, communism refers to an economic system that operates without a state, markets, or money and things are organised on the basis "from each according to ability, to each according to need." The small-c definition in fact antedates what Communism has come to mean in mainstream political discourse--which is the polar ''opposite'' of the definition that late-19th-century radicals applied to the word. The weird thing is, no Marxist-Leninist government ever referred to its economic system as communism, which they all believed was still yet to be achieved. They insisted that they had socialism, which was the highest stage below full communism in Marxist theory. The confusion arose because Communist Parties ruled all such governments, so Westerners came to associate the term "Communism" with the centrally planned economic systems they had, even though the Communist Parties themselves never called them that.

'''Decentralism''': The idea that, wherever possible, institutions should be decentralised, devolved, localised, and otherwise scaled down to a smaller and more immediate scale, so that people are better able to directly participate in and manage them.

'''Direct Action''': Grassroots actions and forms of organising that are unmediated by formal political institutions. What anarchists promote as a means of accomplishing things in place of electoral politics and capturing state power. Not the same thing as protesting. Protesting is about challenging existing authorities to do something, whereas a direct-actionist approach is to bypass the authorities, start doing it yourselves without their approval, then basically saying "Come at me bro" if they ask you to stop.

'''Feminism''': As a theory of sexual equality and gender liberation, feminism is an essential component of anarchist theory and practice, along with masculism (men's liberation) when it's supportive of feminism. Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre are seen as key figures in the history of both anarchism and feminism. There's been a close association between anarchism and the more left-wing varieties of feminism since the 1960s, with many of the consensus-based decision-making practices anarchists now use having been pioneered in feminist circles. Anarcha-feminists tend to be critical of so-called "sex-negative" schools of feminism and anti-transgender feminists.

'''Freedom''': Anarchists understand freedom to mean more than just the absence of coercion (called negative freedom or formal freedom) and hold that one needs to have the capabilities for self-fulfillment and self-realisation if one is to be called free in any meaningful sense (called positive freedom or effective freedom). They think effective freedom is only possible in practice in conditions of equality and solidarity, where each individual has a guaranteed minimum (in terms of their economic needs). "My freedom ends where yours begins" is a frequently used phrase to emphasise the complementarity of freedom with equality. As Mikhail Bakunin put it, "I can only be truly free when all those around me are equally free."

'''Guaranteed Minimum''': (Also called Irreducible Minimum) The ethic that everyone, simply by virtue of being a living person, should be entitled to a basic minimum standard of living and capabilities for satisfying their needs, regardless of whether they engage in socially valued work. Anarchists want to provide this through a voluntary, horizontally organised ''welfare commons'' instead of a centralised welfare state. They find a Basic Income is a better way of providing this in present society than state welfare programs.

'''Hierarchy''': Originally derived from an older Greek term for "holy rulership," anarchist use this term in a more specific (somewhat idiosyncratic) to refer to relations and institutions in which one party is subordinate to another party ''primarily for the higher party's benefit''. As a result, they aren't necessarily against all forms of "hierarchy" in the more mainstream sense, such as ranking systems and taxonomies, only hierarchies of power.

'''Human Nature''': Anarchists have a contextual view of human nature and human social development. They don't agree with many postmodernists who think human nature is an artificial social construct that biology and evolution play no role in. But neither do they agree with biological determinists who think that there are a fixed and static set of behaviours that all humans end up succumbing to regardless of environment. Instead, they view human beings has having two main tendencies in their biological and social evolution: the ''egotistic'' tendency and the ''mutualistic'' tendency. They believe that an environment that promotes sociality, personal freedom, unity-in-diversity, love, and equality will better bring out the mutualistic tendency, even if the egotistic tendency can never be expunged entirely.

'''Market(s)''': There's a crucial difference to be made between markets (plural) and ''the'' market (singular). The former have existed in most organised societies throughout human history, while the latter is only about 200–300 years old. The difference is that while markets have usually formed a component part of economies, they were never the central organising factors of economic activity, always being subject to social controls and embedded within a social context. That started changing with the enclosure of the commons, in which European states "nationalised" dispersed local markets to form a single national market, which later via imperialism became an internationalised (and now globalised) market economy in which all non-market means of organising economic activity become subordinated to the market logic of the growth imperative, the profit-motive, propertarianism, and rugged individualism.[[note]]And as David Graeber explains in ''The Utopia of Rules'', contra the rhetoric of pro-privatisation neoliberals, increasing bureaucratisation almost always accompanies increasing marketisation. In UsefulNotes/{{Poland}}, for example, the number of both public and private bureaucrats ''increased'' ten years after the fall of state socialism.[[/note]] Many anarchists see no issue in supporting markets while opposing the market ''economy''--also called the ''cash nexus''. The problem, as they see it, is the tendency to conflate markets (plural) and the market economy (singular), just as many conflate nationality with nationalism.

'''Neoliberalism''': (Also called market fundamentalism) The most prominent economic ideology since the late 1970s and early 1980s. Its practitioners think that the market economy is the natural state of human affairs and that state "intervention" in the economy always makes things worse.[[note]]There's really no such thing as state/government "intervention" in the economy for two reasons: (1) the state is ''part'' of the economy; (2) the state establishes the boundaries of the (legal) market economy in the first place.[[/note]] Neoliberals want to privatise as many things as possible and to cut state-provided social programs out of the interlocking beliefs that they make ordinary people lazy and that ending them would encourage them to go out and get jobs. Anarchists have no love for the welfare state and managerialism but see them as a lesser evil to the kind of society neoliberalism wishes to create.

'''Pacifism/Pacificism''': Anarchists have a long history of association with anti-war, anti-militarist, and peace movements, and aside from a few isolated individuals who committed bombings and assassinations in the late 19th century, anarchism could be considered one of the ''least'' lethal political philosophies in practice. Pacifism means avoiding violence in absolutely all cases, even in self-defence or the defence of others from being hurt and killed. [[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacificism Pacificism]] on the other hand is like pacifism ''with exceptions''. It rests on an ethical aversion to war, militarism, and violence in general, while still allowing for violence in self-defence when no other possible alternative is available to prevent more people from being hurt or killed. The broad anarchist tradition tends to be mostly pacificist, rather than pacifist (at one extreme) or insurrectionist (at the other). While there does exist a prominent anarcho-pacifist school of thought--associated at the theoretical level mostly with Gustav Landauer and Paul Goodman--even those two would more accurately qualify as pacificist, rather than pacifist in the strict sense. One anarchist who was an ActualPacifist is Creator/LeoTolstoy.

'''Popular Assemblies''': Face-to-face meetings of people where they make decisions about issues that affect them (directly and without representation) through participatory democracy, using either majority voting, consensus decision-making, or a combination of the two. These have existed for most of human history as mechanisms of collective self-rule outside of the state, though the word democracy has not usually been applied to them, even though what they do is far closer to what the word democracy originally meant (in ancient Athens) than modern representative democracy.

'''Statism''': The existence of the state and the ideology of believing the state is good and should exist. Anarchists make a distinction between state and government, with a state being used to mean an institution of class rule with a "monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force" (Max Weber), and government meaning the apparatus that controls the state. Different governments can control the same state, much like different people can wield the same sword, but the sword (state) remains constant and distinct. In other words, anarchists are not necessarily opposed to "government" (or more accurately governance), just centralised state government which relies on structural violence. The goal of anarchism is to dissolve the state and decentralise government so that it becomes participatory self-governance of autonomous communities.

'''Vegetarianism/Veganism''': A key aspect of contemporary anarchist life and ethics, with most anarchists adopting vegetarian or vegan diets out of their support for animal liberation. Most, however, don't believe that changing one's eating/spending habits is likely to have any real impact on the meat industry, and are critical of so-called ethical consumerism, which they see as the co-optation of animal/environmental causes. Only by replacing capitalism and statism do they see animal liberation as being fully possible. The classical anarchist and proto-Social Ecologist Élisée Reclus was one of the first modern Western intellectuals to advocate vegetarianism on secular ethical grounds.

'''Voluntarism''': The principle that relations and institutions should exist based on voluntary association, with the freedom of any person or component unit to disassociate or secede. While anarchists see voluntary association as an essential feature of social organisation, they think that it is fundamentally incomplete unless accompanied by non-hierarchy. In other words, they don't agree that forms of hierarchy or centralised power are okay just because those subject to them give their formal consent. In fact, many think such forms of "voluntary" rulership are more insidious than overtly coercive forms, as they present themselves as existing based on formal equality between ruler and subordinate, when the disparity of bargaining power between the two makes the subordinate's "consent" little more than a ruse, as they can't effectively choose an alternative in which they would retain their autonomy. Voluntarism is not synonymous with ''voluntaryism'', which is another (more accurate in fact) term for the philosophy of "anarcho-capitalism."

'''Worker Self-Management''': (Also called workers' control, economic democracy, or just self-management) Where enterprises are organised from the bottom up by their workers through democratic assemblies and councils instead of being administered through a hierarchy of bosses and managers. Cooperatives, commons-based peer-production, and self-employment are examples of worker self-management that already exist. Anarchists would like to see them expanded to the whole economy.

The definition of anarchism to most people is something like "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.

('''Note:''' As ''social anarchism'' is by far the majority tendency within anarchism, most of the following article will address primarily what social anarchists believe, 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.[[/note]])

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'' [[http://web.archive.org/web/20140326055217/http://www.raikoth.net/consequentialism.html 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."[[/note]]

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.

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 multiracial unions of Blacks and Whites in UsefulNotes/SouthAfrica, UsefulNotes/Korean immigrant workers with native Japanese in Japan, Blacks, Whites, and mixed workers in UsefulNotes/{{Brazil}} and UsefulNotes/{{Argentina}}, Whites and Amerindians in UsefulNotes/{{Peru}} and Mexico, Afro-UsefulNotes/{{Cuba}}ns and Euro-Cubans in Cuba, Whites, Blacks, and Indigenous peoples in the UsefulNotes/UntedStates and Australia (under the IWW) and in Europe tried to organise Jewish people with Gentiles when so much of the subcontinent[[note]]Yes, Europe is a subcontinent (like India) not a continent. It's part of the same landmass as Asia, which together are known as Eurasia. Realising you're on the same piece of land as the Chinese, Indians, Arabs, and others does much just by itself to decentre 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 must change very quickly as far as anarchists are concerned.[[/note]] was fervently antisemitic.

At this point in history, anarchism had the leg over Marxism because Marxism tended to think socialism could only be established in heavily industrialised countries (such as the U.S., UsefulNotes/UnitedKingdom, or UsefulNotes/{{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 both rejected this view and saw revolutionary potential in agrarian populations which hadn't yet been industrialised.

This changed when UsefulNotes/VladimirLenin took power in UsefulNotes/{{Russia}}. In addition to establishing the first so-called example of "socialism" on a national scale, Lenin 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 or syndicalism started to gravitate to ideologies such as Marxism and general anticolonial nationalism.

In their views on social psychology, anarchists believe that social hierarchies create "lopsided relations of the imagination" which make people at both ends of the hierarchy stupid, uncaring, and violent, but in different ways. Hierarchies also make it so that the lowers (the working classes, women, people of colour) are always more psychologically empathetic towards the highers (the rich, men, Whites) than the other way around. This is because those on the receiving end of hierarchical power must understand how their masters' minds and social environments operate to get by in life, but those on the top don't have to know much about the worlds of their subordinates.[[note]]Notice how ordinary people know a lot about the lives of the rich and famous, whereas the rich and famous often don't even know what the minimum wage is. Likewise, how women tend to be savvier on the lives of men than men are on the lives of women.[[/note]] Anarchists hold that society can only achieve genuine psychological well-being through creating conditions of material equality, personal freedom, and social relations built upon horizontal cooperation, communal caring, and mutual aid.

They don't put much faith in even a well-meaning government to do what's right for the socially oppressed, relative to the oppressed themselves through bottom-up forms of collective self-help. Though that's not to say they oppose making demands on the government from the outside, through protest and civil disobedience, and this usually entails (1) demanding the state reduce its own authority over people, and (2) redirect its resources (assuming it has them at all) towards helping the general population rather than the ruling elite.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first person to self-identify as an anarchist, foresaw social revolution involving the gradual exodus of the people from the capitalist state system through the construction of alternative institutions: cooperatives, credit unions, interest-free banks, and confederations of free communes. He imagined that the new libertarian socialist order would chip away at the old order, which would shrink as more people became part of the non-capitalist counter-economy. This strategy of exodus and dual power is still a popular strain in anarchist thought, later being elaborated by thinkers such as Gustav Landauer, Paul Goodman, and Murray Bookchin.

'''Sites of Struggle: The Commune (Municipality) and the Workplace'''

* '''The Commune:''' (aka Municipality) The local territory where people live, corresponding to small towns, city districts, or rural parishes.
* '''The Workplace:''' The enterprise where people work, producing things for consumption and providing services, whether public utilities or recreational.

* '''Mass Anarchism:''' Trying to turn anarchism into a mass movement of the people; educating, agitating, and organising the oppressed through building political organisations, trade unions, and cooperatives which were run on anarchist lines, as well as working within broader liberatory movements.
* '''Insurrectionary Anarchism:''' Trying to catalyse the oppressed into revolutionary action through "propaganda by the deed," performing spectacular acts of violence and property damage to instil a sense of popular confidence that a large-scale uprising was possible.

* '''Platformism and Specifism:''' These two approaches developed independently of each other (platformism in East Europe, specifism in South America), but came to most of the same conclusions, such as the need for anarchist political organisations which were tightly structured, had a general agreement on ideas and practices, and had an ethos of collective responsibility among its members rather than a loose "anything goes" attitude to what members did. One of the main points of unity being that each organisation should only espouse one post-capitalist economic system, namely anarchist communism.
* '''Synthesis Anarchism:''' (aka Synthesism) This approach developed in opposition to platformism, which was felt by some to be too doctrinaire and against plurality in anarchist thought and action, particularly its position on only allowing one kind of post-capitalist economic model. Synthesism instead tries to "synthesise" different anarchist schools in one organisation, enabling every kind of anarchist to work together.

* '''Specifism (Political Level):''' Having specifically social anarchist political organisations, with a general agreement on theory and strategy.
* '''Social Insertion (Social Level):''' Anarchists getting involved in more mainstream social movements, both to help them accomplish common goals, and to act as an anarchistic influence, pushing such movements away from centralism and hierarchy and towards decentralism and horizontal cooperation.

In his book ''Underground Passages'' (2015), Cohn traces the history of anarchist "resistance culture" around the world and the kinds of arts/literature/entertainment admired by and produced by anarchists. Classical anarchists greatly admired what nowadays would be termed "high art," especially works that blended high concepts and important issues with popular folk traditions, and tended to dismiss most examples of romanticism and mass culture as sentimental, decadent, and escapist. In other words, they liked art/entertainment that was "accessible but thought-provoking," which made the audience think critically about what was wrong with hierarchical society and work out liberatory alternatives to the status quo. They hoped that liberatory art could help create an anarchistic ''transfer-culture'' which would help transform society as it existed in the present by teasing out what was already liberatory/progressive in the existing culture and transition people from the authoritarian world to the libertarian socialist one.

Also, Rudolf Rocker in his magnum opus ''Nationalism and Culture'' argued that every artist and work of art should be looked at as "Of their time, not of their place." He argued that national art did not exist as such, given that artists borrow and meld influences from all parts of the world.[[note]]For example, he argued that it was absurd to consider Albrecht Dürer emblematic of German art given that most of his influences were Italian artists (themselves inspired by Greek and Roman art), or Creator/RembrandtVanRijn characteristic of the [[UsefulNotes/TheNetherlands Dutch]] artistic spirit given that [[NeverAcceptedInHisHometown much of his work was seen as deeply un-Dutch during his own lifetime]].[[/note]] Instead, he saw the necessity of viewing art as a global, international phenomenon that should ideally try to draw out the spirit of the times the artist lived in, and how all the epochs that came before worked their way into it. In other words, art is a commons.

The neo-Impressionists, who were a group of late 1800s painters inspired by anarchism, claimed that there ought to be three functions of anarchist art:

* Gustav Landauer part-timed in his early days as a literary critic.
* Voltairine de Cleyre wrote of the importance of a "double reading" of books: the first reading for pleasure, examining the book in the spirit it was intended by the author, and the second reading to pick it apart and examine it critically for what it says about the society it came from and how it might say things that the author didn't intend.

* David Graeber arguably invented Buffy Studies by writing the [[http://mikeholt.tripod.com/buffy.html first academic essay]] examining ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer'', and later wrote anarchist analyses of fantasy fiction and, notably, [[http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/super-position/ superheroes]].
* Paul Goodman and Erich Mühsam wrote that the goal of good art (specifically poetry for the former and theatre for the latter) should be to make people realise the affinities they have with one another, breaking down their alienation, and bring them together as a community--or more accurately, a counter-community with shared values opposed to those of the existing hierarchical society.

Paul Goodman also stressed the importance of theatre, which in the late 19th and early-to-mid-20th century was a key means of spreading anarchist ideas to working class audiences. In his own day he was involved in the famous [[http://www.livingtheatre.org/about/history Living Theatre]] in UsefulNotes/NewYorkCity, which was a sort of haven for playwrights of an anarchist and radical pacifist sensibility.

In contemporary times, as anarchist academic Jeff Shantz has noted, there's a lot of anarchists involved in DIY forms of artistic production, especially since the advent of the Internet. Anarchists tend to view culture itself as a sort of commons which should belong to everyone--viciously opposing all intellectual property, especially copyrights--with the practice of fan labour (fan art, fan fiction, fan songs, and the like) being very in-keeping with the anarchist ethos, as is the practice of {{sampling}} in hip-hop.

'''Anarchy:''' From the Greek ''anarchos'', meaning "without rulership." Anarchists frequently point out that the term means "without rulers, not without rules," and that what they seek is not chaos or disorder, but voluntary, decentralised, non-hierarchical order. What most people really refer to when they use the word anarchy (rulerlessness) would more accurately be defined as anomie (orderlessness). Because of the negative association of the noun, most anarchists today only ever say anarch''ism'' and avoid using the word anarchy.

'''UsefulNotes/{{Atheism}}:''' A key intellectual foundation for anarchist thought, with anarchists viewing religious authority and unquestionable supernatural beliefs in general as the root of all other forms of hierarchy and domination. This is because they promote, in the words of Murray Bookchin, "epistemologies of rule" in which nature/reality itself is conceived as having a natural hierarchical order where the strong are on top and the weak obey or are destroyed for the benefit of the strong. While there have been [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_and_religion a few philosophical anarchists who were religious]] (for example, Leo Tolstoy interpreted the teachings of Christ as being compatible with anarchism, and several anarchists have argued the ''Tao Te Ching'' is a proto-anarchist text), the broad anarchist tradition has been almost entirely anti-theistic and supportive of science, rationalism, and [[http://www.infoshop.org/CriticalThinking critical thinking]] as enemies of authoritarianism.

'''Authority:''' Contrary to popular belief, anarchists are not against ''all'' forms of authority. Mikhail Bakunin once said: "Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from such a thought. When I need shoes, I defer to the authority of the boot maker. When a bridge needs to be built, I defer to the authority of the architect. But I allow neither the boot maker nor the architect to ''impose his authority upon me''." In other words, anarchists, while always at least ''sceptical'' of authority as a concept, are okay with certain forms of it if they are (1) voluntary; (2) temporary; and (3) minimal. So, anarchists accept temporary and minimal forms of authority like the relationships between parent/child, teacher/student, doctor/patient (all of which ideally exist for the benefit of the one subject to authority and not the wielder) if they're organised in as equitable a way as possible. They are, however, opposed to all forms of ''authoritarianism'', forms of authority that are involuntary, permanent, or maximal.

'''Autonomy:''' While most often used to mean independence or self-reliance, the etymological root ''nomos'' (from which the "nomy" part comes) means "order" or "law." So what autonomy more fully means is more along the lines of "self-ordering" or "self-determination"; with its opposite being ''heteronomy'' (other/external-ordering). This can be collective as well as individual and this more specific meaning--self-ordering free of external determinations--is the way anarchists use the word.[[note]]The Greek libertarian socialist philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis was perhaps the main theorist of autonomy/heteronomy as concepts and their importance to social change.[[/note]]

'''Autonomism:''' A form of anti-authoritarian Marxism with a lot of similarity to social anarchism. Adherents of each philosophy frequently cooperate with each other. Like social anarchists, autonomists want a stateless participatory democracy and libertarian socialist economy and reject the state as a means for achieving them. Unlike social anarchists, they root themselves at the theoretical level in Marx's and Engels's writings instead of Bakunin's and Kropotkin's. They're also still very much committed to the theory of historical materialism (which many anarchists find reduces social issues to economic ones), though unlike most Marxists who use the methodology, they don't see forms of social struggle relating to race, gender, sexuality, or ecology as less important than class-based struggle. This is because they see capitalism as having fundamentally changed since the decline of industrialism and the coming of the internet, with "immaterial labour" (the provision of services and creation of non-material products) having replaced material/manual labour as the most important form of work to the running of capitalism. Thus, they see the primary "site of struggle" against capitalism as no longer being the factory/workplace (as when industrial capitalism reigned), but the city/metropolis--anarchist Murray Bookchin felt the same way, though he thought the city, not the workplace, should ''always'' have been seen as the primary site of struggle.[[note]]Anarchist and anthropologist David Graeber, while supportive of autonomism for other reasons, criticised the idea that the importance of "immaterial labour" to the economy is a new thing, saying that if you look at human history, it's always been important. The only reason it doesn't tend to get as much focus as manual labour is, he claims, simple sexism, as women tended to do most of what's now termed "immaterial" work in history.[[/note]]

'''Balanced Job Complexes:''' Where people in a workplace do a variety of tasks, sharing and rotating both the enjoyable and dirty work, instead of the ultra-specialisation that pervades capitalist and state enterprises. Many anarchists see this as a good way of avoiding managerialism, as people would take it in turns to be managers instead of having management be a fixed layer of the workplace above ordinary workers.

'''Capital:''' Self-expanding money. Or more specifically, financial wealth which can be used to create more financial wealth, usually through buying and trading stocks and bonds.[[note]]While the stock market is often discussed as the centrepoint of the capitalist system, it's really the bond market that matters most to how the whole framework functions.[[/note]] While capital originally referred to finance and only finance, the term later came to refer to other forms of wealth, both tangible and non-tangible, such as plant and machinery (hard capital), natural resources (natural capital), and even social skills and group relationships (social capital). The proper meaning only refers to intangible finance, however. Anarchists cite the capitalisation non-economic phenomena like social relations as evidence of just how much the logic of capitalism is penetrating everyday life.

'''Capitalism:''' Used by anarchists to mean an economic system characterised by (1) primarily private ownership of the means of production, distribution, and investment; (2) production for profit rather than production for use; and (3) wage-labour as the main form of legal work. They reject the commonplace understanding of capitalism as simply "voluntary exchange" (which antedates capitalism by thousands of years) or the presence of markets (many anarchists support markets, just not private businesses). And unlike both Marxists and ([[TheHorseshoeEffect humorously]]) libertarian capitalists, they view capitalism as inherently statist and argue that without a state or state-like entity to enforce (absentee-owned) private property, capitalism couldn't even exist.

'''Class:''' Economic hierarchy. Anarchists agree with Marxists by defining different classes not so much by income differences, but how they relate to the means of production. The ruling class (part of the ruling elite) owns the means of production, while the working classes (the plural form is important here)--or ''popular classes''--operate them. Unlike in Marxism, which recognizes only two key classes, many anarchists claim that there is an important third class in between the rulers and the workers/popular classes called the "professional-managerial class," or just ''managerial class'' for short. This class coordinates relations between the rulers above and the workers below, monopolising important information and empowering forms of work. It includes (obviously) managers, university professors, doctors, lawyers, and most people in professional occupations. While all anarchists would generally agree that class formations are important, unlike most Marxists they don't think everything can be reduced to class or economics, and they also think that appealing to people as "the people" is just as important, if not more so, than appealing to them as workers (so that they're not just reduced to their economic function).

'''Commission:''' Used by the social anarchist James Guillaume to refer to local institutions tasked with carrying out various operations in a locality, usually public services like sanitation, transport, communications, and others. The various "working groups" set up within Occupy Wall Street could be seen as a small-scale version of these.

'''Commons:''' A collective pool of resources (physical or intellectual) which anyone can partake of or contribute to, some of which are open access, while others are cooperatively managed by their users. Forms an important part of contemporary anarchism, in which the goal is seen as the creation of a widespread ''free commons'' (in contrast to a free market) administered via decentralised, horizontal cooperation. The trope of "tragedy of the commons" is frequently cited as a case against such a set up. Anarchists argue that the real problem with the tragedy of the commons is the selfish and profit-driven behavior, not the fact that there's a common pool of resources. The commons can be seen as the "third way" of economic organisation beyond both state (public property) and market (private property). Commons are stewarded rather than "owned." Making temporary exclusive use of common resources is called ''usufruct'', which is only granted to certain individuals or groups with the understanding that their user rights over the resources will dissolve after an agreed time has elapsed or goal accomplished.

'''Commune:''' What social anarchists see as the central political/social unit of an anarchist polity. A self-governing territorial area of no more than about 15,000 people. The word commune in most European languages simply means a small-scale local area, like a small town, rural parish, or city ward. However, in English, the word has (perhaps unfortunate) associations with hippies and even cults. For this reason, English speakers tend to say ''municipality'' instead to mean the same thing; with a voluntary confederation of communes/municipalities being the core structure of an anarchist society. With each commune/municipality administering itself through a local network of directly democratic popular assemblies and other voluntary associations.

'''Communism:''' Used in two different ways by anarchists depending on how the word is spelled. With a capital C, Communism has come to refer to the totalitarian regimes ruled by Marxist-Leninists in the twentieth century. With a small c, communism refers to an economic system that operates without a state, markets, or money and things are organised on the basis "from each according to ability, to each according to need." The small-c definition is in fact older than what Communism has come to mean in mainstream political discourse--which is the polar ''opposite'' of what late-19th-century radicals used the word to mean. The weird thing is, not even the Marxist governments of the time referred to the economic system they had as communism, which they believed was still yet to be achieved. The confusion arose because Communist Parties ruled all such governments, so Westerners came to associate the term "Communism" with the centrally planned economic systems they had, even though the Communist Parties themselves never called them that.

'''Cultural Anarchism:''' Spreading anarchistic ideas and values throughout general culture; part of trying to create an anarchist transfer-culture that will raise people's consciousness of non-hierarchical, democratic, and cooperative alternatives to the status quo. Coined by communitarian anarchist and Social Ecologist John P. Clark.

'''Decentralism:''' The idea that, wherever possible, institutions should be decentralised, devolved, localised, and otherwise scaled down to a smaller and more immediate scale, so that people are better able to directly participate in and manage them.

'''Democracy:''' Used to mean direct, participatory democracy rather than representative democracy. In fact, most anarchists would regard representative "democracy" as a contradiction in terms, as democracy (which means "people power" in the original Greek) for most of its history was thought of as ''by definition'' direct and without representation. Representative government, they find, is a more appropriate term. It should be noted that anarchists didn't always use the word in a positive sense, with the classical anarchists still mostly equating it with representation and majority rule. Since the 1960s, however, most anarchists have reclaimed the word to refer to the participatory decision-making processes they always supported anyway.

'''Dialectic:''' An important part of much anarchist philosophy, concerned with how opposing forces interact with each other and shape future developments by becoming synthesised. Also a form of analysis in which social structures are critiqued in terms of how they internally contradict themselves (for example, if a society founds itself on the ideal of equality, but doesn't realise it in practice), with progressive changes being regarded as the "working out" of these contradictions; like a knotted piece of rope unraveling itself.[[note]]While normally associated with the German philosophers G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx, many Eastern philosophical traditions--especially UsefulNotes/{{Taoism}} and [[UsefulNotes/{{Buddhism}} Zen]]--are also highly dialectical, as they deal with the interplay of opposite forces (e.g.: Yin and Yang) and how they create new totalities as a result of one ''negating'' the other, then the negation itself being negated. The formula of dialectic is typically phrased as "thesis-antithesis-synthesis," though Hegel used the more cryptic terms "identity-negation-totality."[[/note]]

'''Direct Action:''' Grassroots actions and forms of organising that are unmediated by formal political institutions. What anarchists promote as a means of accomplishing things in place of electoral politics and capturing state power. Not the same thing as protesting. Protesting is about challenging existing authorities to do something, whereas a direct-actionist approach is to bypass the authorities, start doing it yourselves without their approval, then basically saying "Come at me bro" if they ask you to stop.

'''Domination:''' Being subject to centralised/hierarchical power and unable to act autonomously (self-determining). The core thing anarchists are opposed to; used synonymously with "rulership." Domination is somewhat broader than oppression, as the word oppression tends only to be used for persons while domination can also apply to non-human animals and to the natural world, which anarchists see as also being subject to hierarchical domination. Along with prefiguration (means-ends consistency) the principle of ''anti-domination'' is the most pervasive ethic in anarchist theory and practice; "I will neither be dominated nor dominate others myself."

'''Ecology:''' Means more than just environmentalism. Environmentalism refers to concern for the environment, while ecology also includes how humanity relates to the natural world while being a part of it. As a philosophy, ecology could be thought of as environmentalism + an examination of humanity's role in the environment. The word later came to refer to the science of studying the natural world, being closely linked to biology. [[http://www.kurdishquestion.com/index.php/insight-research/analysis/what-is-social-ecology-by-murray-bookchin.html Social Ecology]] is perhaps the most significant ecological perspective developed within anarchism, though Deep Ecology (developed outside of anarchism by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess) also has a strong presence, especially among lifestyle anarchists.

'''Ethics:''' While there is no single set of anarchist ethics, different schools of anarchism do tend towards several of the main ethical traditions. Social anarchists tend towards consequentialist ethics and virtue ethics, while market anarchists tend towards deontological ethics (based on natural law theories) and ethical egoism. Not actually the same thing as morality, even though the two are often thought of as the same thing. Morality refers to objective standards of good and evil, while ethics refers to codes of behaviour. Some anarchists, like Emma Goldman, reject the notion that good and evil can have an "objective" basis outside of human interactions, and thus oppose "morality" while still supporting their own brand of ethics. Most settle on a few basic principles like non-domination, prefiguration (means-ends consistency), inclusiveness, and voluntary association as a must for all human relations.

'''Federation/Confederalism:''' These terms are normally employed to mean systems of government in which some powers are devolved to more local component parts. Anarchists, however, use federation/federalism/federative to mean decentralised forms of organisation in which autonomous groups cooperate with each other on a horizontal basis. Confederalism is somewhat more recent (though the idea isn't) and refers more specifically to the large-scale voluntary union of free communes/municipalities in an anarchist society.

'''Feminism:''' As a theory of sexual equality and gender liberation, feminism is an essential component of anarchist theory and practice, along with masculism (men's liberation) when it's supportive of feminism. Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre are seen as key figures in the history of both anarchism and feminism. There's been a close association between anarchism and the more left-wing varieties of feminism since the 1960s, with many of the consensus-based decision-making practices anarchists now use having been pioneered in feminist circles. Anarcha-feminists tend to be critical of so-called "sex-negative" schools of feminism and anti-transgender feminists.

'''Freedom:''' Anarchists understand freedom to mean more than just the absence of coercion (called negative freedom or formal freedom) and hold that one needs to have the capabilities for self-fulfillment and self-realisation if one is to be called free in any meaningful sense (called positive freedom or effective freedom). They think effective freedom is only possible in practice in conditions of equality and solidarity, where each individual has a guaranteed minimum (in terms of their economic needs). "My freedom ends where yours begins" is a frequently used phrase to emphasise the complementarity of freedom with equality. As Mikhail Bakunin put it, "I can only be truly free when all those around me are equally free."

'''Guaranteed Minimum:''' (Also called Irreducible Minimum) The ethic that everyone, simply by virtue of being a living person, should be entitled to a basic minimum standard of living and capabilities for satisfying their needs, regardless of whether they engage in socially valued work. Anarchists want to provide this through a voluntary, horizontally organised ''welfare commons'' instead of a centralised welfare state. They find a Basic Income is a better way of providing this in present society than state welfare programs.

'''Growth:''' In economic terms, the expansion of GDP (gross domestic product), which is basically like the profit of an entire national economy measured through the amount of economic transactions that take place and how much capital (self-expanding money) is accumulated. Since the birth of the modern market economy, as distinct from markets (plural), this ''growth imperative'', or "grow-or-die" logic, has been the central organising principle of all major economies, both capitalist and even state-socialist. Anarchists want to replace economic growth as the way progress is measured with needs-satisfaction and increased well-being of people and the planet, moving from production-for-profit to production-for-use and from a growth-based economy to a needs-based economy.

'''Hierarchy:''' Originally derived from an older Greek term for "holy rulership," the term is used in a more specific (somewhat idiosyncratic) way by anarchists to refer to relations and institutions in which one party is subordinate to another party ''primarily for the higher party's benefit''. As a result, they aren't necessarily against all forms of "hierarchy" in the more mainstream sense, such as ranking systems and taxonomies, only hierarchies of power.

'''Horizontalism:''' Organising things on a decentralist and lateral basis where all parties involved share power equally. The opposite of hierarchy.

'''Human Nature:''' Anarchists have a contextual view of human nature and human social development. They don't agree with many postmodernists who think human nature is an artificial social construct that biology and evolution play no role in. But neither do they agree with biological determinists who think that there are a fixed and static set of behaviours that all humans end up succumbing to regardless of environment. Instead, they view human beings has having two main tendencies in their biological and social evolution: the ''egotistic'' tendency and the ''mutualistic'' tendency. They believe that an environment that promotes sociality, personal freedom, unity-in-diversity, love, and equality will better bring out the mutualistic tendency, even if the egotistic tendency can never be expunged entirely.

'''Intersectionality:''' A big word for a fairly simple idea: that when examining different forms of social hierarchy/oppression, they can't be examined in isolation from each other (or have one be given primary status as the only important one) but need to be analysed in terms of how the overlap and ''intersect'' with one another. Examples include how gender intersects with class or how sexuality intersects with race. A woman will experience class relations in different ways from a man. A Black gay person will experience discrimination in a different way to a White gay person. While the term was only coined in the late 1980s, and is associated mostly with feminism, anarchists, in critically examining different forms of hierarchy, have arguably always been intersectional in their theory. Emma Goldman and Murray Bookchin in particular stand out as exemplars of proto-intersectional thinkers.

'''Libertarian:''' Synonym for "anarchistic" or "anti-authoritarian." Despite being most often used in English-speaking countries today to mean "laissez-faire capitalist," the word libertarian was first used in a political context by anti-capitalist anarchists all the way back in the 1850s (though it tended to be used as an adjective, not a noun). Something could be described as libertarian in character, but the term "libertarian''ism''" was only coined when American capitalists adopted the word for their own beliefs.

'''Managerialism:''' The ideology of the professional-managerial class (or just ''managerial class'' for short), the class in between the ruling class and working classes who manage the relations between the two. Mikhail Bakunin called it the "bureaucratic class" and the "aristocracy of labour." Strives to make the administration of things hierarchical and bureaucratic, claiming ordinary people can't do it for themselves due to not having the right information, and capitalists can't do it right due to being too greedy. Thus, everything must be made technocratic and centralised for the people's own benefit, with an enlightened group of well-educated managers on top. This, anarchists claim, is the class whose interests the statist left (Marxists and left liberals) have always represented, not the working classes.

'''Market(s):''' There's a crucial difference to be made between markets (plural) and ''the'' market (singular). The former have existed in most organised societies throughout human history, while the latter is only about 200–300 years old. The difference is that while markets have usually formed a component part of economies, they were never the central organising factors of economic activity, always being subject to social controls and embedded within a social context. That started changing with the enclosure of the commons, in which European states "nationalised" dispersed local markets to form a single national market, which later via imperialism became an internationalised (and now globalised) market economy in which all non-market means of organising economic activity become subordinated to the market logic of the growth imperative, the profit-motive, propertarianism, and rugged individualism.[[note]]And as David Graeber explains in ''The Utopia of Rules'', contra the rhetoric of pro-privatisation neoliberals, increasing bureaucratisation almost always accompanies increasing marketisation. In UsefulNotes/{{Poland}}, for example, the number of both public and private bureaucrats ''increased'' ten years after the fall of state socialism.[[/note]] Many anarchists see no issue in supporting markets while opposing the market ''economy''--also called the ''cash nexus''. The problem, as they see it, is the tendency to conflate markets (plural) and the market economy (singular), just as many conflate nationality with nationalism.

'''Means of Production:''' Large-scale, physical, tangible resources that are used to produce things in the economy. "Big stuff that can be used to create smaller stuff ... and to assemble that smaller stuff into big stuff." Usually refers to factories, heavy machinery, transportation, communications centres, and (sometimes) land and natural resources. Social anarchists want the means of production to be socialised into the common property of confederated, democratic communities. Market anarchists want either workers or individual self-employed professionals to own them. Neither want private or state ownership of productive resources.

'''Mutual Aid:''' Voluntary cooperation without hierarchy in which one party helps another, forming a bond in which the receiver would help the giver when they're in need. As an ethical practice, mutual aid [[TakeAThirdOption goes beyond the traditional dichotomy of egoism versus altruism]], as it is neither entirely selfless nor entirely self-serving. It deliberately avoids quantifying obligations people have to each other, helping each party when they need assistance according to need.

'''Neoliberalism:''' (Also called market fundamentalism) The most prominent economic ideology since the late 1970s and early 1980s. Its practitioners think that the market economy is the natural state of human affairs and that state "intervention" in the economy always makes things worse.[[note]]There's really no such thing as state/government "intervention" in the economy for two reasons: (1) the state is ''part'' of the economy; (2) the state establishes the boundaries of the (legal) market economy in the first place.[[/note]] Neoliberals want to privatise as many things as possible and to cut state-provided social programs out of the interlocking beliefs that they make ordinary people lazy and that ending them would encourage them to go out and get jobs. Anarchists have no love for the welfare state and managerialism but see them as a lesser evil to the kind of society neoliberalism wishes to create.

'''Pacifism/Pacificism:''' Anarchists have a long history of association with anti-war, anti-militarist, and peace movements, and aside from a few isolated individuals who committed bombings and assassinations in the late 19th century, anarchism could be considered one of the ''least'' lethal political philosophies in practice. Pacifism means avoiding violence in absolutely all cases, even in self-defence or the defence of others from being hurt and killed. [[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacificism Pacificism]] on the other hand is like pacifism ''with exceptions''. It rests on an ethical aversion to war, militarism, and violence in general, while still allowing for violence in self-defence when no other possible alternative is available to prevent more people from being hurt or killed. The broad anarchist tradition tends to be mostly pacificist, rather than pacifist (at one extreme) or insurrectionist (at the other). While there does exist a prominent anarcho-pacifist school of thought--associated at the theoretical level mostly with Gustav Landauer and Paul Goodman--even those two would more accurately qualify as pacificist, rather than pacifist in the strict sense. One anarchist who actually was an ActualPacifist is Creator/LeoTolstoy.

'''Politics:''' The collective organisation of social affairs, which anarchists want to be directly democratic and organised from the bottom up, starting with the local community through popular assemblies. Distinguished by anarchists from ''statecraft'', for which the word politics is occasionally used as a synonym.

'''Popular Assemblies:''' Face-to-face meetings of people where they make decisions about issues that affect them (directly and without representation) through participatory democracy, using either majority voting, consensus decision-making, or a combination of the two. These have existed for most of human history as mechanisms of collective self-rule outside of the state, though the word democracy has not usually been applied to them, even though what they do is far closer to what the word democracy originally meant (in ancient Athens) than modern representative democracy.

'''Power:''' Roughly, "decision-making ability." While the distinction exists in other languages (like in French with ''pouvoir'' and ''puissance'') social power is really two different, albeit related, things. To make this distinction, the best way is to hyphenate the word. The first kind of power is ''power-to',' which simply means the effective ability to do something. The other kind is ''power-over',' which refers to having control over others and being capable of getting them to do things they otherwise wouldn't do, usually by means of coercion. Anarchists seek to dissolve oppressive forms of power-over and disperse power-to equally to everyone, so that no person or group can wield power-over to lessen the freedom of others.

'''Prefiguration:''' Forms of action and organisation which prefigure the shape of a future libertarian socialist society: autonomy, voluntarism, participatory democracy, decentralisation, nonviolence (unless one is directly attacked), and ecological stewardship. Also, the ethic of means-ends consistency. Along with the anti-domination principle, prefiguration is the most pervasive ethic in anarchist theory and practice.

'''Ruling Elite:''' Those who wield the most hierarchical power in society. Includes the ruling (economic) class, but also politicians, important religious figures, media/cultural figures, and certain powerful intellectuals. Unlike the ruling class, you don't necessarily have to be rich to be a part of the ruling elite, in which social/political power is counted along with economic power.

'''Socialism:''' Perhaps no other word in political discourse causes more confusion and misunderstandings than the word socialism when used by anarchists. Many today, especially Americans, are baffled by how anarchism can be a form of socialism when they associate the term "socialist" with statism and collectivism (in the negative sense of the word). This is because anarchists use an earlier definition of the term (from the 19th century) which referred to several potential economic systems in which economic institutions were administered without bosses through ''worker self-management''. In fact, most anarchists don't regard government-directed economic systems to be socialist at all, merely "state-capitalist"; as the economy is still premised on profit and growth (at the national level), people still work for wages instead of controlling their own workplaces, and class stratifications still exist. In other words, the economy is still technically capitalist (by their definition), it's just that a centralised state directs it instead of polycentric private businesses. It is worth noting that anarchism has existed for longer than most other forms of socialism, including Marxism. Chinese anarchist Ba Jin even regarded anarchism as the "purest" form of socialism.

'''Statism:''' The existence of the state and the ideology of believing the state is good and should exist. Anarchists make a distinction between state and government, with a state being used to mean an institution of class rule with a "monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force" (Max Weber), and government meaning the apparatus that controls the state. Different governments can control the same state, much like different people can wield the same sword, but the sword (state) remains constant and distinct. In other words, anarchists are not necessarily opposed to "government" (or more accurately governance), just centralised state government which relies on structural violence. The goal of anarchism is to dissolve the state and decentralise government so that it becomes participatory self-governance of autonomous communities.

'''Vegetarianism/Veganism:''' A key aspect of contemporary anarchist life and ethics, with most anarchists adopting vegetarian or vegan diets out of their support for animal liberation. Most, however, don't believe that changing one's eating/spending habits is likely to have any real impact on the meat industry, and are critical of so-called ethical consumerism, which they see as the co-optation of animal/environmental causes. Only by replacing capitalism and statism do they see animal liberation as being fully possible. The classical anarchist and proto-Social Ecologist Élisée Reclus was one of the first modern Western intellectuals to advocate vegetarianism on secular ethical grounds.

'''Voluntarism:''' The principle that relations and institutions should exist based on voluntary association, with the freedom of any person or component unit to disassociate or secede. While anarchists see voluntary association as an essential feature of social organisation, they think that it is fundamentally incomplete unless accompanied by non-hierarchy. In other words, they don't agree that forms of hierarchy or centralised power are okay just because those subject to them give their formal consent. In fact, many think such forms of "voluntary" rulership are more insidious than overtly coercive forms, as they present themselves as existing based on formal equality between ruler and subordinate, when the disparity of bargaining power between the two makes the subordinate's "consent" little more than a ruse, as they can't effectively choose an alternative in which they would retain their autonomy. Voluntarism is not synonymous with ''voluntaryism'', which is another (more accurate in fact) term for the philosophy of "anarcho-capitalism."

'''Worker Self-Management:''' (Also called workers' control, economic democracy, or just self-management) Where enterprises are organised from the bottom up by their workers through democratic assemblies and councils instead of being administered through a hierarchy of bosses and managers. Cooperatives, commons-based peer-production, and self-employment are examples of worker self-management that already exist. Anarchists would like to see them expanded to the whole economy.

1. Associate the word democracy with representative government; and\\
2. Especially those who associate the word socialism with statism.

1. A stateless participatory democracy, made up of voluntary confederations of "free communes" (self-governing localities).\\
2. 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.\\
3. 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.

1. Individual Autonomy\\
2. Voluntary Association\\
3. Mutual Aid\\
4. Self-Organisation\\
5. Free Federation \\
6. Direct Action

'''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 relative to other persons and 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 relative to other persons and groups relative 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 all contain 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 ''closer'' to what the word ''democracy'' originally meant. Though this is only as long as the democracy is based on voluntary association and respects individual autonomy.\\
'''5. Free Federation''' (''Concerning groups relative to other groups''): In keeping with their commitment to decentralisation of power, anarchists support organising things on a large scale through federations or 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.

1. Municipal/Communal[[note]]The level of the "free commune" (city ward, small town, or rural parish) numbering about 10,000–20,000 people.[[/note]]\\
2. Regional/Cantonal[[note]]Made up of federated municipalities/communes.[[/note]]\\
3. National/Confederal[[note]]Made up of federated regions/cantons.[[/note]]

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.

Economically, anarchists oppose capitalism (save anarcho-capitalists), instead advocating 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. Some call for the armed overthrow of the state and corporations. Others call 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.

1. The Ruling Elite[[note]]A constellation of powerful classes which includes the economic ruling class--people who own the means of production--but also those who wield other forms of social power who might not own means of production, like politicians and religious figures.[[/note]]\\
2. 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).[[/note]]\\
3. The Popular Classes[[note]]The traditional working classes (or "proletariat") plus the rural peasantry, the unemployed, and basically everyone else who isn't a member of the above two classes.[[/note]]

1. Labour\\
2. Utility[[note]]Conditioned by supply and demand.[[/note]]\\
3. Power relations[[note]]Such as monopoly shares of the market, class inequalities, and social hierarchies.[[/note]]

'''Queer Anarchism'''

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 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.

* ''The Eotechnic Phase''[[note]]Roughly 1100–1750. Characterised by the first complex pulley systems and early mechanical devices. Decentralist.[[/note]]
* ''The Paleotechnic Phase''[[note]]Roughly 1750–1900. The coming of steam power and industrialisation. Characterised by the enclosure of the commons, the birth of the factory system, mass production for profit, and hierarchical divisions of labour. Centralist.[[/note]]
* ''The Neotechnic Phase''[[note]]Roughly 1900–1990. The discovery of electricity and its many applications. Had the potential to move beyond the centralised industrialism of the paleotechnic phase and encourage more decentralist alternatives based on small-scale workshop production and home manufacturing. Ended up getting channeled into paleotechnic forms of mass production instead. Decentralist.[[/note]]

1. ''Appreciation'', that is, peer recognition;\\
2. ''Patronage'', or a source of income to be able to earn a living from their work; and\\
3. ''Liberty'' in their creative endeavours.

1. ''Ownership'' of the medium\\
2. ''Funding'' sources of the medium\\
3. ''Sourcing'' of content for the medium\\
4. ''Flak'' by states, businesses, special interest groups, and other mediums\\
5. ''Fear'' of a perceived "enemy."[[note]]The big [[RedScare "enemy" in the west used to be Communism]], but since the fall of the UsefulNotes/BerlinWall and later [[UsefulNotes/TheWarOnTerror 9/11, the "enemy" has been designated as]] Islam.[[/note]]

At first, inspired by the Paris Commune of 1871, this involved recommending acts of collective insurrection, leading many anarchists to try taking over small municipalities in Italy and Spain, with the intention of turning them into free communes. The idea being that this would cause a domino effect of the people in other parishes, towns, and cities becoming inspired to mirror such actions, turning their local areas into free communes with libertarian socialist economies. This was called ''propaganda by the deed'': belief that living examples of socialist revolution proved more effective than writing pamphlets or making speeches; that is, written and oral propaganda. And just to clarify, the word ''propaganda'' back then didn't mean brainwashing (as it mostly does today), but was a term roughly synonymous with what's now called public relations (PR): getting your message out there. After a string of failures however, and the successful assassination of Tsar Alexander II in Russia in 1881, focus shifted to acts of individual insurrection, targeting royals and businessmen in the hope that this would give the masses the confidence to rise up and overthrow the governments and the structures of private property. This didn't work either. In fact, the violent acts of individual ''attentats'' (political assassins) only served to alienate the general population, leading to the now-popular image of anarchists as bomb-throwers in black trenchcoats. A lot of these attentats also, probably, looked to have serious mental health problems given the description of their personalities and behaviour. Others came from extremely deprived and brutal backgrounds, turning to such actions out of desperation and misplaced thirst for vengeance. Anarchists, who had bad press to begin with, started really getting a bad rep when targets expanded to include random members of the wealthy or royalty who hadn't even done anything.

(A) Get people organising along anarchistic lines, practicing worker self-management and socialist distribution of resources; putting in place the underlying structure of the future society, making the transition easier.\\
(B) Turn the modest demands of mainstream unions (higher wages, shorter hours, better conditions) into opportunities to confront capital and the state directly, eventually turning strikes into riots and riots into a full-blown popular uprising.

Peter Kropotkin claimed that social revolution should be conceived in three stages, not a simple two-stage "before and after" framework:

1. Preparation\\
2. Fermentation\\
3. Transformation

A possible solution to this problem was advocacy of "anarchism without adjectives," where the question of free collectivism versus free communism was left to each individual free commune in the post-statist society, recommending that anarchists shouldn't be divided over the future when they needed to remain united to dismantle capitalism and the state.[[note]]The term "anarchism without adjectives" at first only included social anarchists--supporters of free collectivism or free communism--but was later expanded to include forms of market anarchism. Some market anarchists even use the term today to describe a situation in which a "free market," rather than a confederation of free communes, is the basis of the future social order. A lot of social anarchists are not happy with this, and so sometimes specify that they're only for "''social'" anarchism without adjectives.[[/note]]

Anarcho-syndicalism, as a strategy, is still very popular today despite having been developed over a century ago in very different economic circumstances. It's also the one that's been most successful thus far, winning many labour victories through trade unions in the early 20th century with the [[UsefulNotes/SpanishCivilWar Spanish Revolution of 1936]] successfully establishing a libertarian socialist economy for a short time (before being suppressed by Marxists on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War).

* ''Market anarchism'' (containing mutualist anarchism and individualist anarchism), which seeks a non-capitalist free market made up of self-employed professionals and worker-run cooperatives, and ...

The turn of the 20th century saw another trend, which advocated for revolutionary unions to overthrow capitalism and the state using militant industrial organizing, sabotage, general strikes and overall working-class solidarity. This is called ''anarcho-syndicalism'', from the French phrase for labour union--"chambre syndical." It was less a separate school of thought than tactical view, since followers were invariably social anarchists in the collectivist or communist mould. The [[UsefulNotes/SpanishCivilWar Spanish Revolution]], often pointed to as their greatest ([[DoomedMoralVictor albeit doomed]]) triumph by social anarchists, utilized this in the CNT (''Confederación Nacional del Trabajo'', National Confederation of Labour), which organized a worker's revolt in 1936 following the military coup led by UsefulNotes/FranciscoFranco against the elected Spanish Popular Front government. The CNT and FAI (''Federación Anarquisto Ibérica''--Iberian Anarchist Federation) ran much of northeast Spain, centred in Catalonia, along anarchist lines with no small success for the next three years until a combination of [[UsefulNotes/JosefStalin Stalinists]] and Francoist forces crushed the revolution.

While anarcho-capitalists may or not see themselves as anarchists, after having read through this article you should by now realize that other anarchists ... well, don't. To avoid getting into a discussion on anarchist theory again, let's just say most anarchists take offense against putting "anarcho-" and "-capitalism" together. (In turn, anarchists may or not feel reasonably satisfied with calling it by a different name.) So, let's assume the ideology probably deserves a write-up somewhere else and leave it at that.

Also, Rudolf Rocker in his magnum opus ''Nationalism and Culture'' argued that every artist and work of art should be looked at as "Of their time, not of their place." He argued that national art did not exist as such, given that artists borrow and meld influences from all parts of the world.[[note]]For example, he argued that it was absurd to consider Albrecht Dürer emblematic of German art given that most of his influences were Italian artists (themselves inspired by Greek and Roman art), or Creator/{{Rembrandt}} characteristic of the [[UsefulNotes/TheNetherlands Dutch]] artistic spirit given that [[NeverAcceptedInHisHometown much of his work was seen as deeply un-Dutch during his own life]].[[/note]] Instead, he saw the necessity of viewing art as a global, international phenomenon that should ideally try to draw out the spirit of the times the artist lived in, and how all the epochs that came before worked their way into it. In other words, viewing art as a commons.

The association of anarchism with punk music and punk culture is well-known. Acts like Music/{{Crass}}, Music/{{Subhumans}}, and Music/{{Chumbawamba}} pushing anarchist, pacifist, anti-fascist, and pro-queer messages in their lyrics. Even punk movements who weren't explicitly anarchist frequently had anarchist influences, like Music/RiotGrrrl and Music/PussyRiot. For the record, despite their famous song "Anarchy in the UK," the Music/SexPistols were about as close to anarchism as Pluto is to the Sun. They merely appropriated the iconography of actual anarcho-punk bands like Crass without taking the "anarcho-" part seriously, viewing it as little more than a rebellious-sounding chant. Though another form of "punk" most don't realise has anarchist roots, in fact, is [[https://steampunkanarchist.wordpress.com steampunk]].

In novels, there's a long association with works that take a critical or satirical look at existing society and point out its hypocrisies and how its problems mostly originate in relations, institutions, and beliefs founded on centralised power, greed, and unquestioned authority. They particularly appreciate stories that focus on the plight of oppressed and marginalised groups of people--women, people of color, Indigenous peoples, queer people, anthropomorphised animals, the working classes--told from their point of view. There's also a great appreciation for the science-fiction and fantasy genres and utopian fiction, especially works like those of Creator/UrsulaKLeGuin, Creator/WilliamMorris, Creator/KenMacleod, Creator/KimStanleyRobinson, and Creator/IainMBanks, who use fantastical and imagined settings to explore alternative visions of how societies might work. The purpose being to paint hierarchical society as it exists at present as unreal and absurd compared to a more rational and liberated anarchistic ideal.

[[caption-width-right:350:The [[ArcSymbol Circle-A]], the most common symbol of [[TitleDrop Anarchism]]]]

Anarchism is the broad belief that ''rulership'', not just the state, should not exist -- as indicated in its Greek roots, an- + -arkhos [no ruler] -- and that people should instead organize their social relations and institutions through voluntary cooperation without hierarchies of power. So what characterises anarchism is less anti-statism than 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 to greater or lesser degrees depending on the context.[[/note]]

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

In fact, the word democracy originally meant ''direct'' democracy, like in Ancient Greece. And the word socialism originally referred to several economic systems in which the people who worked in economic institutions operated them as well. Anarchists use the earlier meanings of both words when talking about them. This also applies to their use of the word ''libertarian''. Despite its modern Anglo-American use to mean laissez-faire capitalist, anarchist socialists were the first people to use that word; they defined it as "anti-authoritarian." A frequently used synonym for social anarchism is ''libertarian socialism''.

* ''Social Anarchists'', on the other hand, want what could be called a "free commons,"[[note]] See [[http://commonstransition.org/frequently-asked-questions/ here]] for some basic info on what's meant by "commons" in a modern context.[[/note]] in which systems of decentralised and localised planning of the economy (by directly democratic popular assemblies and worker-controlled enterprises) replace traditional market relations. In terms of numbers, this is by far the most prominent anarchist tradition and is what most people are referring to when they talk about "anarchism" without prefixes.

Both 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:

('''Note:''' As ''social anarchism'' is by far the majority tendency within anarchism, 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.[[/note]])

However, while anarchism as a political tradition only emerged in the 1800s, philosophically anarchist (or "anarchistic") ideas and practices can arguably be found across time and the space of our planet, from Indigenous tribal confederations to peasant revolts to urban social movements, whenever people resist hierarchical domination and organise based on voluntary cooperation where power is decentralised to all people. 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.

In contrast to Marxists and liberals, whose methodologies usually start at the abstract level and develop 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 what people are doing in their battles for freedom and equality. They then try to work out theories in which people could push those elements in a more explicitly anarchist direction. So, for Marxists and liberals, practice should follow theory, while for anarchists, theory must 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 if their activities are anarchistic in their ethos.

At the baseline level, anarchists support the same triad of left-wing values that animated UsefulNotes/TheFrenchRevolution 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: organized religion, capital, and the state, and believe that each of those thrives off the existence of the other two.

"Religion" here doesn't just refer to supernatural beliefs, but also be understood to encompass authoritarian ideologies in general, including ethnic supremacy, caste systems (like in the UsefulNotes/{{India}}n subcontinent), patriarchy, and heteronormativity. 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 twenty-first 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.[[/note]]

Almost all anarchists would agree, however, 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 [[http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/goldmanmor.htm 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.

More contemporary examples of anarchist(-ish) political systems are the [[http://roarmag.org/2014/01/zapatista-autonomy-reinventing-revolution/ Zapatista]] Councils of Good Government in southern UsefulNotes/{{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 [[http://roarmag.org/2014/12/janet-biehl-report-rojava/ Rojava]] (Western UsefulNotes/{{Kurdistan}}) region of North UsefulNotes/{{Syria}}, [[https://vimeo.com/120245429 inspired]] in part by the political theories of anarchist Murray Bookchin. Other examples, which cropped up during the twentieth century, occurred in UsefulNotes/{{Spain}} and Catalonia during the UsefulNotes/SpanishCivilWar, and in UsefulNotes/{{Ukraine}} (the Free Territory) roughly concurrent with the UsefulNotes/{{Russia}}n Revolution. Anarchist philosopher John P. Clark claims that the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement in UsefulNotes/SriLanka is also roughly anarchist in its principles, being inspired in large part by philosophical anarchist UsefulNotes/MahatmaGandhi.

For sociopolitical 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 so-called ''[[http://shawnewald.info/aia/dec_affinity.html 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).

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 no individual or group can 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:

Despite anti-bureaucratic rhetoric nowadays coming from the right wing, anarchists have been staunch critics of bureaucracy as both ideology and practice since the mid-19th century, and support 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 a "red bureaucracy" rather than economic democracy. 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-UsefulNotes/WorldWarII world after the construction of the welfare state ("which trades social welfare for social justice") and recommended bottom-up, decentralist alternatives for organising society.

If anarchist politics is "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 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.

Economically, anarchists oppose capitalism (save anarcho-capitalists), instead advocating 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. Some calling for the armed overthrow of the state and corporations. 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 the word "capitalism" in the same way Marxists do (the system of wage labour, which according to Marxism is exploitative). However, non-anarchists also commonly define "capitalism" as "free-market economics" (that is, when all economic activity takes place outside the state). Most anarchists consider the two meanings to be separate concepts, using "capitalism" in the same sense as Marxists and reserving "free market" for the second definition.

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.

1. 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.[[/note]]\\

The productive resources in any given locality -- the means of production, distribution, and investment -- anarchists claim, should be "owned" (or rather ''stewarded'') as [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0BXCiKOsKY 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:

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 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 socioeconomic 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 medium term, anarchists are likely to support proposals for a universal ''basic income'' over increases in public spending on social programs.

While some other economists of the time, such as 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).[[/note]]

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 considering 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; especially the domestic and caring labour of women -- in a [[http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau3.2.012/758 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.[[/note]]

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 [=McKay=] 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 at least elements of modern monetary theory ([[http://neweconomicperspectives.org/modern-monetary-theory-primer.html MMT]]) into their analyses, which is most popular with the post-Keynesian school of economics.

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:

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...

''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 groupthink 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 on which anarchists have always placed strong emphasis. 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."

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 mere "resources" to be extracted from. This didn't become a major environmental problem until the coming of the imperialist nation-state and capitalism, though, 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 [[CloserToEarth have more of a connection to nature]] and more commitment to defend it from spoiling.

Anarchist political scientist James C. Scott argues that many organic societies existing in the present -- like the people of [[http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/12/06/the_mystery_of_zomia/ Zomia]] in Southeast 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.

* Communal economies/Barter --> Money/Markets --> Credit (then states)

* Communal economies/Credit --> (then states) Markets/Money --> Barter

Contra 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 [[http://www.historytoday.com/stephen-halliday/first-common-market-hanseatic-league Hanseatic League]] and city-republics of UsefulNotes/{{Italy}}. Also important were 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 UsefulNotes/{{Africa}} in the form of tribal leagues and among the Indigenous peoples of UsefulNotes/NorthAmerica, especially the Iroquois Confederacy.

While the term "anarcha-UsefulNotes/{{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 address gender issues and the plight of women specifically in her essays and activism, and was also one of the first to attack UsefulNotes/{{homophobia}} and the persecution of non-heterosexual people. Unlike the first-wave feminists however, early anarcha-feminists like Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Louise Michel, [[https://libcom.org/files/He%20Zhen%20and%20Anarcha-Feminism%20in%20China.pdf 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 [[http://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/no-god-no-boss-no-husband founded in Argentina in 1896]].

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 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.

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 {{internalized|Categorism}} form of hierarchy -- especially by those who may not realise they have internalised it.

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, 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. In governments' eyes, Hispanic people even went between being non-White and White depending on the political and economic situation.

At this point in history, anarchism had the leg over Marxism because Marxism tended to think socialism could only be established in heavily industrialised countries (such as the U.S., UsefulNotes/UnitedKingdom, or UsefulNotes/{{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 both rejected this view and saw revolutionary potential in agrarian populations which hadn't yet been industrialised.

An issue that's become pressing for anarchists in recent years is the plight of [[https://intercontinentalcry.org/towards-an-anti-colonial-anarchism/ Indigenous peoples]] in the Americas and Australia, who often live in wretched economic conditions and are treated as virtual aliens on the land masses their people have spent millennia on. Recognising the (mostly unacknowledged) privileges being classified as White brings someone -- especially in parts of the Global North where POC are ethnic minorities -- is something White anarchists must try to come to terms with and try to work against in terms of how they relate to people of colour -- especially if they happen to live on colonised land.

Most of the classical anarchists didn't place a huge focus on ecological issues, but some -- most notably [[http://zabalazabooks.net/2013/12/04/green-flame-kropotkin-and-the-birth-of-ecology/ Peter Kropotkin]] and [[http://theanarchistlibrary.org/authors/elisee-reclus Élisée Reclus]] -- explored ideas and raised concerns in their geographical and scientific writings which today would be regarded as proto-environmentalist and expressive of an ecological worldview. Reclus deserves special credit for being pretty much the first person to espouse an unambiguously green perspective in his scholarship.[[note]]Anarchist philosopher John P. Clark has even claimed that he not only anticipated nearly every important facet of the 20th-century green movements, but was in fact the [[http://72.52.202.216/~fenderse/Reclus.htm best anarchist theorist ever]] in terms of the quality of his ideas. For Clark, Reclus had less influence than Bakunin, Kropotkin, or Goldman because he tended to express his thought in very long scholarly works inflected more subtly with his political philosophy rather than laid out in pithy, memorable AuthorTract[=s=] for a general audience.[[/note]]

[[http://www.social-ecology.org/about/about-the-ise/ ''Social Ecology'']] was coined by Murray Bookchin, whose book ''Our Synthetic Environment'' was released six months before the more famous ''Silent Spring'' by Rachel Carson, the book widely credited with kickstarting the modern environmentalist movement. Social Ecology takes the anarchist perspective of seeing social problems as stemming from hierarchy and domination and applies it to humanity's relation to nature: seeing the negative way humans treat the environment -- such as pollution, landscape spoiling, and animal cruelty -- as being rooted in the negative ways humans treat each other. As a solution, Social Ecologists seek to utilize technology for ecological rather than profit-driven ends and to decentralize institutions into small-scale eco-communities operating through direct democracy.

Anthropological elements are found in the works of classical anarchists like Peter Kropotkin and Élisée Reclus, by twentieth-century anarchists Murray Bookchin and Colin Ward, and by modern-day anarchists who are by profession anthropologists like Brian Morris and the aforementioned David Graeber. Jeff Shantz has argued that [[https://www.strath.ac.uk/aer/materials/6furtherqualitativeresearchdesignandanalysis/unit5/introductiontoethnographyandautoethnography/ auto-ethnography]] in particular -- people from marginal groups giving first-person accounts of their lives and experiences -- can be regarded as an especially anarchistic form of anthropology.

There's also a lot of mucking about in anthropology by so-called "anarcho-primitivists" like John Zerzan, though their works tend to suffer from selective reading and romanticisation of hunter-gatherer lifestyles. Most anarchists admire certain features of such communities -- mutual aid, reciprocity, communality, ecological stewardship -- but have no desire to regress back to such states of affairs, abandoning all sophisticated technology. It's important to keep in mind that many (perhaps most) hunter-gatherer societies are in fact very hierarchical and patriarchal.

In contrast to other self-described "revolutionaries," anarchists have always stressed that they want more than just a political revolution (a change in governments), but a more all-encompassing social revolution -- that is, a transformation in political, economic, and societal structures, changing people's social consciousness as well as institutions. They also stress that revolution (transformation) is a process, not an event, and that the word doesn't just refer to erecting barricades and storming government buildings. The Industrial Revolution was just as transformative as the French Revolution.

This came close to becoming the default version of anarchism in the mid-20th century -- after the (mainly anarchist) Spanish Revolution and World War II, but before the revival of anarchism in the New Left of the 1960s -- as establishing a completely stateless non-hierarchical world seemed ever more impossible. This position was called "resistencialism" by its detractors, meaning concerned only with ''resisting'' authoritarianism instead of dissolving it.

There was some tension early in the 1870s and 1880s over whether a post-capitalist economy should be organised primarily through self-governing communes or self-managed syndicates, but these tensions between pro-commune and pro-syndicate factions became a lot more pronounced in the early 20th century, especially after the birth of anarcho-syndicalism -- a fusion of social anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism -- in the 1920s.

Confusingly, the commune-oriented group -- the "communalists" -- tended to call themselves "anarcho-communists," even though many of them also supported revolutionary syndicalism as a tactic. Meanwhile, the worker-oriented group -- the "workerists" -- tended to call themselves "anarcho-syndicalists," even though they tended to support a free communist economy.

This dual meaning of "communist" within anarchism -- organisation through communes and a moneyless commons economy -- has befuddled both anarchists and non-anarchists, hence the reason that the use of communism to mean commune-ism is often retroactively referred to as communalism.

* '''Anarcho-Syndicalists''' (workerists) generally wanted a free communist economy -- no state, no markets, no money -- but wanted to achieve it via industrial proletarian class struggles through trade unions.[[note]]However, a few supported free collectivism instead of free communism as a post-capitalist economic model, especially in Spain.[[/note]] They also wanted the future society to be organised with the self-managed workplace at the centre of things, with the economy being composed of federations of worker-run enterprises.

Aside from the question of how to bring about a social revolution to transform things into anarchism, there remained divisions within anarchism over what kind of post-capitalist economy there should be -- e.g.: free collectivism or free communism. This sometimes led to arguments within organisations as to whether they were really fighting for the same thing. Support for anarchist communism (a moneyless economy with distribution "according to needs") ended up becoming the majority tendency in most countries, though anarchist collectivism (an economy which retained incomes and prices with distribution "according to deeds") became the majority in Spain, anarchism's main centre of activity. Support for free collectivism was also a minority position among anarchists in countries where free communism was the default position of anarchists.

A possible solution to this problem was advocacy of "anarchism without adjectives," where the question of free collectivism versus free communism was left to each individual free commune in the post-statist society, recommending that anarchists shouldn't be divided over the future when they needed to remain united to dismantle capitalism and the state.[[note]]The term "anarchism without adjectives" at first only included social anarchists -- supporters of free collectivism or free communism -- but was later expanded to include forms of market anarchism. Some market anarchists even use the term today to describe a situation in which a "free market," rather than a confederation of free communes, is the basis of the future social order. A lot of social anarchists are not happy with this, and so sometimes specify that they're only for "''social'" anarchism without adjectives.[[/note]]

Anarchists agree with most other radical socialists that ''class struggle'' (of the popular classes against the ruling elites) is a necessary part of social transformation, though they tend to disagree with many, especially Marxists, who see economic class as the only/primary form of oppression, with others -- like race, gender, sexuality, nationality, ecology -- being secondary or at worst a distraction. Rather, they see it as necessary to [[http://www.afed.org.uk/blog/state/327-a-class-struggle-anarchist-analysis-of-privilege-theory--from-the-womens-caucus-.html integrate class struggle with trans-class forms of struggle]], unifying them in a way that makes purely class-based issues (like workplace organising) complement non-economic concerns (like fights against gender or ethnic oppression, or defence of the environment) as part of an intersectional ''social struggle'' against all forms of hierarchy and domination, whatever the specific tactics used for achieving an anarchist society.

This involves escaping the capitalist state system by creating counter-institutions to it -- like worker cooperatives, directly democratic popular assemblies, affinity groups, democratic schools, interest-free banks, intentional communities -- and then linking them all together into a confederated network, all to contest the power of corporations and governments over the administration of society.

The words "anarchy" and "anarchism" themselves arose in the mid-1600s during the English Civil War as an insult hurled at fringe radical groups. While this epithet for the most part had no basis in fact, two groups which were active at the time -- the Diggers and the Ranters -- had ideas and practices which were quite close to anarchism. (The Diggers have their own [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA4FTIz2Zrw folk song]] which expressed many of their proto-anarchist sentiments.)

While Proudhon and a few other thinkers called themselves anarchists in the 1840s and 1850s, anarchism didn't really get organised as a cohesive movement until the mid 1860s within the famous socialist group the IWMA (International Working Men's Association), also called the "First International," as there have been at least three others that came after it. Although the First International is most well-known today because Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were members, for a time it contained more anarchists than Marxists -- until Marx himself expelled them in the early 1870s, that is.

Having developed out of the same European socialist movement that Karl Marx was a part of, anarchism's relationship to Marxism has always been ambivalent. While many anarchists accepted Marx's critique of capitalism and (with nuance) the Marxian school of economics, they strenuously rejected Marx's politics, in particular the tactic of taking state power to bring about socialism. For anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin (Marx's rival in the First International), the state was inherently an institution of class rule, and could never be used to bring about a classless society, as it would just corrupt whatever group laid their hands on it. (Bakunin's view is generally regarded as having been VindicatedByHistory given what happened in the [[UsefulNotes/SovietRussiaUkraineAndSoOn Soviet Union]] and other nominally Communist countries.)

They also tended to reject the Marxist conception of history -- historical materialism -- which claims that economic and technological factors are the fundamental driving force of human development. Anarchists saw this perspective as reductionist and ignoring important social factors that weren't directly related to economics -- their own conception of history might best be termed ''historical naturalism''.[[note]]This means that they accept the naturalist (non-supernatural) view of the world that sees science and reason as the best means for achieving knowledge, but don't accept the idea that everything that happens in a society is ultimately caused by economic/technological conditions. Indeed, David Graeber has argued that historical materialism, in a way, isn't materialist ''enough'', in that it denies the materiality (and thus material significance) of intellectual/affective forces, as well as the idealist components of so-called material forces.[[/note]]

With each sphere existing in an ecological context, incorporating Murray Bookchin's theory of [[http://www.kurdishquestion.com/index.php/insight-research/analysis/what-is-social-ecology-by-murray-bookchin.html Social Ecology]] -- which also developed out of the '60s countercultural environment.

Meanwhile, in the United States, a very different brand of anarchism emerged. American writers such as Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, and William Green set out an ideal very close to Proudhon's, with even more emphasis upon an "anti-capitalist free market," in which self-employed craftsmen, artisans or farmers were paid their "full wage" and land title was possession-based only. In short, ''individualist anarchism'' argued for a society where every individual was a "capitalist" (in the Marxist sense, i.e., an owner of capital). Essentially, they held to the Labour Theory of Value along with support of free markets -- "cost is the limit of price" was among their key slogans. Their ideal was a stateless economy made up mostly of self-employed artisans and shopkeepers. This school of thought began slowly dying out in the late 19th century as social anarchism (collectivist or communist) took over, with immigrants from Europe such as bringing it to the forefront of US anarchism.

In the late 19th century, Russian novelist Creator/LeoTolstoy (who, like Bakunin and Kropotkin, was a Russian noble who renounced his title) embraced a form of Christian, pacifist anarchism -- though like Stirner and Godwin before him, he didn't use the label anarchist himself. Unique among anarchist trends for its total rejection of violence, even in self-defense or defense of others, Tolstoy advocated essentially the same ideas as Bakunin or Kropotkin, his countrymen and more famous anarchists, but with complete pacifism. His work deeply influenced [[UsefulNotes/MahatmaGandhi Mohandas K. "Mahatma" Gandhi]] (who knew Indian anarchists in UsefulNotes/{{London}} early in his activism, while disagreeing with them over the issue of using violence) in addition to ''Civil Disobedience'', by Creator/HenryDavidThoreau. Critics argued his ideas were fit only for saints (though many think Gandhi was such). Another prominent anarcho-pacifist was the American public intellectual Paul Goodman, who became a kind of go-to guy for student radicals in the 1960s opposed to UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar. While initially supportive of radical youth movements, he later became critical of them for abandoning nonviolence and decentralist organising for militant action and Marxism-Leninism.

The turn of the 20th century saw another trend, which advocated for revolutionary unions to overthrow capitalism and the state using militant industrial organizing, sabotage, general strikes and overall working-class solidarity. This is called ''anarcho-syndicalism'', from the French word for labour union -- "chambre syndical." It was less a separate school of thought than tactical view, since followers were invariably social anarchists in the collectivist or communist mould. The [[UsefulNotes/SpanishCivilWar Spanish Revolution]], often pointed to as their greatest ([[DoomedMoralVictor albeit doomed]]) triumph by social anarchists, utilized this in the CNT (''Confederación Nacional del Trabajo'', National Confederation of Labour), which organized a worker's revolt in 1936 following the military coup led by UsefulNotes/FranciscoFranco against the elected Spanish Popular Front government. The CNT and FAI (''Federación Anarquisto Ibérica'' -- Iberian Anarchist Federation) ran much of northeast Spain, centred in Catalonia, along anarchist lines with no small success for the next three years until a combination of [[UsefulNotes/JosefStalin Stalinists]] and Francoist forces crushed the revolution.

"Post-left" and "lifestyle" anarchism has become widespread in modern times, something Murray Bookchin and others disapproved of. Lifestylism could be summed up as viewing anarchism more as a means of personal rebellion in the here-and-now than transforming all of society in the long-term. These are marked by a tendency to reject classical social anarchism's left-wing, working-class organizing and goals or at least complement them with ecological or animal rights issues. Veganism and dumpster diving (combined as "freeganism" -- eating only food that is reclaimed after being discarded) have become common for such lifestyle anarchism, in addition to using the system (especially where it has an ecological impact) to the lowest degree possible. The group [[http://www.crimethinc.com Crimethinc]] are the most prominent exponents of this brand of post-left/lifestyle anarchism.[[note]]Though their more recent writings and activities have seen them drift more towards social anarchism, focusing more on social change than personal rebellion. However, they still tend to reject the label "leftist" to describe their politics.[[/note]]

Primitivists emerged from the nascent green anarchist milieu in the Pacific Northwest in the late 20th century and are heavily inspired by both Deep Ecology and anti-civilisation ideology. They view all forms of complex technology as corruptive and wish to abandon it in favour of a hunter-gatherer way of life, significantly reducing the human population as a necessary stage in this goal. Some even reject language (at least in a written fashion), counting, and acknowledging the passage of time as oppressive -- which they consider remnants of "symbolic culture." Primitivists cite that tribal groups [[https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201105/how-hunter-gatherers-maintained-their-egalitarian-ways don't have domestication]] (i.e., farming) [[http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race tend to be more egalitarian than those with domestication.]] Some argue that while technology itself isn't inherently oppressive, the structures that it requires to exist are. An example can be seen in weapons. In a primitivist society, theoretically, everyone would have access to stone or wooden weapons, or at least could use their own body as a weapon, putting them on a mostly even playing field. When advanced technology comes into play, those with access to the means to create more powerful weapons will have an advantage against those who do not. (That is, a person with a wooden spear would either be killed by or have to submit to a person armed with a firearm.) Whereas if everyone had access to the same type of weapons, this playing field would force people at least to attempt to work together in a more voluntary fashion.

Anarchists have long seen great potential in the arts for expanding people's consciousness in a liberatory direction, stressing the importance of "social art" -- that explores social, political, and intellectual concerns -- over the idea of "art-for-art's-sake" favoured by the Romantic school of thought. The literature professor Jesse Cohn [[https://www.academia.edu/235148/What_Is_Anarchist_Literary_Theory has argued]] that anarchists hold to a [[http://www.infoshop.org/pdfs/AnarchismRepresentationCulture_Cohn.pdf critical aesthetics]] that views the value of art/entertainment in terms of its anti-hierarchical ethics; appreciating a work in terms of how it supports vs. challenges the established order based on hierarchy and domination. He also proposes what he calls a "social anarchist hermeneutic" (method of interpretation) for the purposes of textual analysis (do note that in literary theory, a "text" refers to anything that can be analysed, not just the written word).

In novels, there's a long association with works that take a critical or satirical look at existing society and point out its hypocrisies and how its problems mostly originate in relations, institutions, and beliefs founded on centralised power, greed, and unquestioned authority. They particularly appreciate stories that focus on the plight of oppressed and marginalised groups of people -- women, people of color, Indigenous peoples, queer people, anthropomorphised animals, the working classes -- told from their point of view. There's also a great appreciation for the science-fiction and fantasy genres and utopian fiction, especially works like those of Creator/UrsulaKLeGuin, Creator/WilliamMorris, Creator/KenMacleod, Creator/KimStanleyRobinson, and Creator/IainMBanks, who use fantastical and imagined settings to explore alternative visions of how societies might work. The purpose being to paint hierarchical society as it exists at present as unreal and absurd compared to a more rational and liberated anarchistic ideal.

* Paul Goodman and Erich Mühsam wrote that the goal of good art (specifically poetry for the former and theatre for the latter) should be to make people realise the affinities they have with one another, breaking down their alienation, and bring them together as a community -- or more accurately, a counter-community with shared values opposed to those of the existing hierarchical society.

In contemporary times, as anarchist academic Jeff Shantz has noted, there's a lot of anarchists involved in DIY forms of artistic production, especially since the advent of the Internet. Anarchists tend to view culture itself as a sort of commons which should belong to everyone -- viciously opposing all intellectual property, especially copyrights -- with the practice of fan labour (fan art, fan fiction, fan songs, and the like) being very in-keeping with the anarchist ethos, as is the practice of {{sampling}} in hip-hop.

'''Autonomy:''' While most often used to mean independence or self-reliance, the etymological root ''nomos'' (from which the "nomy" part comes) means "order" or "law." So what autonomy more fully means is more along the lines of "self-ordering" or "self-determination"; with its opposite being ''heteronomy'' (other/external-ordering). This can be collective as well as individual and this more specific meaning -- self-ordering free of external determinations -- is the way anarchists use the word.[[note]]The Greek libertarian socialist philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis was perhaps the main theorist of autonomy/heteronomy as concepts and their importance to social change.[[/note]]

'''Autonomism:''' A form of anti-authoritarian Marxism with a lot of similarity to social anarchism. Adherents of each philosophy frequently cooperate with each other. Like social anarchists, autonomists want a stateless participatory democracy and libertarian socialist economy and reject the state as a means for achieving them. Unlike social anarchists, they root themselves at the theoretical level in Marx's and Engels's writings instead of Bakunin's and Kropotkin's. They're also still very much committed to the theory of historical materialism (which many anarchists find reduces social issues to economic ones), though unlike most Marxists who use the methodology, they don't see forms of social struggle relating to race, gender, sexuality, or ecology as less important than class-based struggle. This is because they see capitalism as having fundamentally changed since the decline of industrialism and the coming of the internet, with "immaterial labour" (the provision of services and creation of non-material products) having replaced material/manual labour as the most important form of work to the running of capitalism. Thus, they see the primary "site of struggle" against capitalism as no longer being the factory/workplace (like when industrial capitalism reigned), but the city/metropolis -- anarchist Murray Bookchin felt the same way, though he thought the city, not the workplace, should ''always'' have been seen as the primary site of struggle.[[note]]Anarchist and anthropologist David Graeber, while supportive of autonomism for other reasons, criticised the idea that the importance of "immaterial labour" to the economy is a new thing, saying that if you look at human history, it's always been important. The only reason it doesn't tend to get as much focus as manual labour is, he claims, simple sexism, as women tended to do most of what's now termed "immaterial" work in history.[[/note]]

'''Class:''' Economic hierarchy. Anarchists agree with Marxists by defining different classes not so much by income differences, but how they relate to the means of production. The ruling class (part of the ruling elite) owns the means of production, while the working classes (the plural form is important here) -- or ''popular classes'' -- operate them. Unlike in Marxism, in which there are only two key classes, many anarchists claim that there is an important third class in between the rulers and the workers/popular classes called the "professional-managerial class," or just ''managerial class'' for short. This class coordinates relations between the rulers above and the workers below, monopolising important information and empowering forms of work. It includes (obviously) managers, university professors, doctors, lawyers, and most people in professional occupations. While all anarchists would generally agree that class formations are important, unlike most Marxists they don't think everything can be reduced to class or economics, and they also think that appealing to people as "the people" is just as important, if not more so, than appealing to them as workers (so that they're not just reduced to their economic function).

'''Commune:''' What social anarchists see as the central political/social unit of an anarchist polity. A self-governing territorial area of no more than about 15,000 people. The word commune in most European languages simply means a small-scale local area -- like a small town, rural parish, or city ward. However, in English, the word has (perhaps unfortunate) associations with hippies and even cults. For this reason, English speakers tend to say ''municipality'' instead to mean the same thing; with a voluntary confederation of communes/municipalities being the core structure of an anarchist society. With each commune/municipality administering itself through a local network of directly democratic popular assemblies and other voluntary associations.

'''Communism:''' Used in two different ways by anarchists depending on how the word is spelled. With a capital C, Communism has come to refer to the totalitarian regimes ruled by Marxist-Leninists in the twentieth century. With a small c, communism refers to an economic system that operates without a state, markets, or money and things are organised on the basis "from each according to ability, to each according to need." The small-c definition is in fact older than what Communism has come to mean in mainstream political discourse -- which is the polar ''opposite'' of what late-19th-century radicals used the word to mean. The weird thing is, not even the Marxist governments of the time referred to the economic system they had as communism, which they believed was still yet to be achieved. The confusion arose because Communist Parties ruled all such governments, so Westerners came to associate the term "Communism" with the centrally planned economic systems they had -- even though the Communist Parties themselves never called them that.

'''Dialectic:''' An important part of much anarchist philosophy, concerned with how opposing forces interact with each other and shape future developments by becoming synthesised. Also a form of analysis in which social structures are critiqued in terms of how they internally contradict themselves (for example, if a society founds itself on the ideal of equality, but doesn't realise it in practice), with progressive changes being regarded as the "working out" of these contradictions; like a knotted piece of rope unraveling itself.[[note]]While normally associated with the German philosophers G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx, many Eastern philosophical traditions -- especially UsefulNotes/{{Taoism}} and [[UsefulNotes/{{Buddhism}} Zen]] -- are also highly dialectical, as they deal with the interplay of opposite forces (e.g.: Yin and Yang) and how they create new totalities as a result of one ''negating'' the other, then the negation itself being negated. The formula of dialectic is typically phrased as "thesis-antithesis-synthesis," though Hegel used the more cryptic terms "identity-negation-totality."[[/note]]

'''Growth:''' In economic terms, the expansion of GDP (gross domestic product), which is basically like the profit of an entire national economy measured through the amount of economic transactions that take place and how much capital (self-expanding money) is accumulated. Since the birth of the modern market economy -- as distinct from markets (plural) -- this ''growth imperative'', or "grow-or-die" logic, has been the central organising principle of all major economies, both capitalist and even state-socialist. Anarchists want to replace economic growth as the way progress is measured with needs-satisfaction and increased well-being of people and the planet, moving from production-for-profit to production-for-use and from a growth-based economy to a needs-based economy.

'''Market(s):''' There's a crucial difference to be made between markets (plural) and ''the'' market (singular). The former have existed in most organised societies throughout human history, while the latter is only about 200–300 years old. The difference is that while markets have usually formed a component part of economies, they were never the central organising factors of economic activity, always being subject to social controls and embedded within a social context. That started changing with the enclosure of the commons, in which European states "nationalised" dispersed local markets to form a single national market, which later via imperialism became an internationalised (and now globalised) market economy in which all non-market means of organising economic activity become subordinated to the market logic of the growth imperative, the profit-motive, propertarianism, and rugged individualism.[[note]]And as David Graeber explains in ''The Utopia of Rules'', contra the rhetoric of pro-privatisation neoliberals, increasing marketisation is almost always accompanied by increasing bureaucratisation. In UsefulNotes/{{Poland}} for instance, the number of both public and private bureaucrats ''increased'' ten years after the fall of state socialism.[[/note]] Many anarchists see no issue in supporting markets while opposing the market ''economy'' -- also called the ''cash nexus''. The problem, as they see it, is that markets (plural) and the market economy (singular) tend to be conflated, just as nationality is often conflated with nationalism.

'''Means of Production:''' Large-scale, physical, tangible resources that are used to produce things in the economy. "Big stuff that can be used to create smaller stuff -- and to assemble that smaller stuff into big stuff." Usually refers to factories, heavy machinery, transportation, communications centres, and (sometimes) land and natural resources. Social anarchists want the means of production to be socialised into the common property of confederated, democratic communities. Market anarchists want them to be under worker ownership or individual ownership by self-employed professionals. Neither want private or state ownership of productive resources.

'''Neoliberalism:''' (Also called market fundamentalism) The most prominent economic ideology since the late 1970s and early 1980s. Believes that the market economy is the natural state of human affairs and that state "intervention" in the economy always makes things worse.[[note]]There's really no such thing as state/government "intervention" in the economy for two reasons: (1) the state is ''part'' of the economy; (2) the state establishes the boundaries of the (legal) market economy in the first place.[[/note]] Wants to privatise as many things as possible and wants to cut state-provided social programs out of the belief that they make ordinary people lazy and that getting rid of them would encourage them to go out and get jobs. Anarchists have no love for the welfare state and managerialism but see them as a lesser evil to the kind of society neoliberalism wishes to create.

'''Pacifism/Pacificism:''' Anarchists have a long history of association with anti-war, anti-militarist, and peace movements, and aside from a few isolated individuals who committed bombings and assassinations in the late 19th century, anarchism could be considered one of the ''least'' lethal political philosophies. Pacifism means avoiding violence in absolutely all cases, even in self-defence or the defence of others from being hurt and killed. [[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacificism Pacificism]] on the other hand is like pacifism ''with exceptions''. It rests on an ethical aversion to war, militarism, and violence in general, while still allowing for the use of violence in self-defence when no other possible alternative is available to prevent more people from being hurt or killed. The broad anarchist tradition tends to be mostly pacificist, rather than pacifist (at one extreme) or insurrectionist (at the other). While there does exist a prominent anarcho-pacifist school of thought -- associated at the theoretical level mostly with Gustav Landauer and Paul Goodman -- even those two would more accurately qualify as pacificist, rather than pacifist in the strict sense. One example of an anarchist who actually was an ActualPacifist is Creator/LeoTolstoy.

'''Politics:''' The collective organisation of social affairs, which anarchists want to be directly democratic and organised from the bottom-up, starting with the local community through popular assemblies. Distinguished by anarchists from ''statecraft'', for which the word politics is occasionally used as a synonym.

'''Popular Assemblies:''' Face-to-face meetings of people where they make decisions about issues that affect them (directly and without representation) through participatory democracy -- using either majority voting or consensus decision-making, or a combination of the two. These have existed for most of human history as mechanisms of collective self-rule outside of the state, though the word democracy has not usually been applied to them, even though what they do is far closer to what the word democracy originally meant (in ancient Athens) than modern representative democracy.

'''Prefiguration:''' Forms of action and organisation which prefigure the shape of a future libertarian socialist society -- autonomy, voluntarism, participatory democracy, decentralisation, nonviolence (unless one is directly attacked), and ecological stewardship. Also, the ethic of means-ends consistency. Along with the anti-domination principle, prefiguration is the most pervasive ethic in anarchist theory and practice.

'''Socialism:''' Perhaps no other word in political discourse causes more confusion and misunderstandings than the word socialism when used by anarchists. Many today, especially Americans, are baffled by how anarchism can be a form of socialism when they associate the term "socialist" with statism and collectivism (in the negative sense of the word). This is because anarchists use an earlier definition of the term (from the 19th century) which referred to several potential economic systems in which economic institutions were administered without bosses through ''worker self-management''. In fact, most anarchists don't regard government-directed economic systems to be socialist at all, merely "state-capitalist" -- as the economy is still premised on profit and growth (at the national level), people still work for wages instead of controlling their own workplaces, and class stratifications still exist. In other words, the economy is still technically capitalist (by their definition), it's just that a centralised state directs it instead of polycentric private businesses. It is worth noting that anarchism has existed for longer than most other forms of socialism, including Marxism. Chinese anarchist Ba Jin even regarded anarchism as the "purest" form of socialism.

-> ''"Anarchy is, and always has been, a romance. It is also clearly the only morally sensible way to run the world."''
-->-- Creator/AlanMoore

Of all the political philosophies that have existed throughout history, anarchism is perhaps the most misunderstood. General impressions range from the notion that AnarchyIsChaos to scary images of BombThrowingAnarchists from popular fiction. What most don't realise is there's actually a wealth of complex, multilayered ideas associated with anarchism that have had an impact on radical politics, the arts, and even mainstream culture.

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 through 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. [[/note]]

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 formally weaken the state, but would also increase the power of private corporations and lead to the rich having advantages over everyone else. Anarchists would probably oppose doing this as the consequence would be a net increase in hierarchical authority wielded over the population. 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 [[http://roarmag.org/2013/08/real-direct-participatory-democracy/ participatory democracy]] and [[https://libcom.org/library/workers-self-management-faq 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.

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 [[http://commonstransition.org/frequently-asked-questions/ here]] for some basic info on what's meant by "commons" in a modern context.[[/note]] in which systems of decentralised and localised planning of the economy (by directly-democratic popular assemblies and worker-controlled enterprises) replace traditional market relations. In terms of numbers, this is by far the most prominent anarchist tradition and is what most people are referring to when they talk about "anarchism" without prefixes.

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:

* ''Collectivist anarchism'' (Mikhail Bakunin)

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 [[https://libcom.org/history/1936-1939-the-spanish-civil-war-and-revolution 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 [[http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/2011112872835904508.html 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 necessarily 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 [[http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/index.html An Anarchist FAQ]] available at this link, and a series of introductory videos on social anarchist/left-libertarian ideas is available [[http://m.youtube.com/user/TheLeftLibertarian here]] and [[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WIvn8qjyrzk here]]. A more narratively-framed primer can be found at [[https://anarchy.works/primer.html Anarchy Works]]. 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 Aspirations'' 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.[[/note]])

[[folder: 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. 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.

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, whose methodologies 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. They 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 doesn't just refer to supernatural beliefs, but also be understood to encompass authoritarian ideologies in general, including: ethnic supremacy, caste systems (like in the Indian subcontinent), patriarchy, and heteronormativity. 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.[[/note]]

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'' [[http://web.archive.org/web/20140326055217/http://www.raikoth.net/consequentialism.html 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".[[/note]]

Peter Kropotkin, an anarchist philosopher and scientist, devised an [[http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-anarchist-morality 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.[[/note]]

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 [[http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/goldmanmor.htm 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 RousseauWasRight 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.

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.

* 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.

[[folder: Key Principles]]

* Individual Autonomy
* Voluntary Association
* Mutual Aid
* Self-Organisation
* Free Federation
* Direct Action

'''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.

[[folder: 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.

For taking care of issues that go beyond the local level, anarchists propose creating inter-municipal [[http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-the-meaning-of-confederalism "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.

* (1) Municipal/Communal [[note]] The level of the "free commune" (city ward, small town, or rural parish) numbering about 10,000 - 20,000 people [[/note]]
* (2) Regional/Cantonal [[note]] Made up of of federated municipalities/communes. [[/note]]
* (3) National/Confederal. [[note]] Made up of federated regions/cantons. [[/note]]

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, [[http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/james-guillaume-ideas-on-social-organization 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 [[http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/254543/Hanseatic-League 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. [[/note]] Other examples would be the [[http://new-compass.net/articles/citizens'-assemblies-new-england-rojava 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 [[http://roarmag.org/2014/01/zapatista-autonomy-reinventing-revolution/ 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 [[http://roarmag.org/2014/12/janet-biehl-report-rojava/ Rojava]] (western Kurdistan) region of North Syria; [[https://vimeo.com/120245429 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 UsefulNotes/SpanishCivilWar, 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 ''[[http://shawnewald.info/aia/dec_affinity.html 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).

'''Decision-making Principles'''

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.

[[folder: 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. [[/note]]
* 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). [[/note]]
* 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. [[/note]]

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 [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0BXCiKOsKY 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".

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. When the modern anarchist movement was getting started in the 1870s and 80s, 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.

Even today, 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 [[http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/wayne-price-marx-s-economics-for-anarchists 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 [[/note]]
* (3) Power relations [[note]] Such as monopoly shares of the market, class inequalities, and social hierarchies. [[/note]]

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). [[/note]]

'''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 [[https://zcomm.org/category/topic/parecon/ 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 [[http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/fotopoulos/english/brbooks/brtid/brtid.htm here]].

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 [[http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau3.2.012/758 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. [[/note]]

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 ([[http://neweconomicperspectives.org/modern-monetary-theory-primer.html 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. [[/note]]

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 [[http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/05/capital-as-power/ capital-as-power]] framework: "Anarchists imagine a world without corporate/state organizations, 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 [[http://www.jayhanson.org/_Economics/Nitzan%20and%20Bichler%20-%20Capital%20As%20Power.pdf here]]

'''A Social Anarchist Political Economy(?)'''

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.

[[folder: 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

* Feminism [[note]] and masculism when it's supportive of feminism.[[/note]]

* 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).[[/note]]
* 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.[[/note]]

Lately, there's also been broad support for the theory of [[http://www.wsm.ie/c/insurrections-intersections-feminism-intersectionality-and-anarchism 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).

''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:

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.

[[folder: 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).

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. German idealism claims that it is primarily collections of ideas, not material forces, which shape historical progress; and that society develops in a mostly linear path along successive stages of complexity, with each stage making society more enlightened than the previous one. 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 these "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.[[/note]]

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 that ideational activities have, as well as the ideational nature of material activities, with the Base/Superstructure model itself being remarkably undialectical. So for most social anarchists:

* material conditions (economics and technology) 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.[[/note]]

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 [[https://zcomm.org/zblogs/introduction-to-totality-and-complementary-holism-by-chris-spannos/ 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 [[http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/12/06/the_mystery_of_zomia/ 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. [[/note]]

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 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: