What is Anarchism? | The Anarchist Library

What is anarchism?

Anarchism is the unity between means and ends, fighting for freedom in
freedom. Anarchism is a philosophy, social movement, lens of analysis,
and way of life built on the principles of Prefiguration, Direct Action,
Solidarity, Accountability, Mutual Aid and Decentralisation.

The word “Anarchy” takes its origin in the Greek word anarkhia meaning
“without ruler.” Many anarchists use the term ‘Anarchic’ to describe
social relationships, movements or situations without authority or
hierarchy. 

Anarchists take what’s already present in the free associations between
humans and other animals and push it into conflict with the state, its
defenders and its false critics. Unlike other anti-capitalists, we
reject the notion that the state will liberate us. This is because we
understand the state as an organisation with a monopoly on the
legitimate use of force over a governed territory, a tool that the
ruling class uses to exert their power through domestic and militarised
force, legislation, bureaucracy, and other tools of coercion. Anarchists
recognise that control of these institutions perpetuates their very
existence and therefore agitate for abolition rather than reformism.

Anarchism is realised in everyday acts of generative disruption. A group
of hunt saboteurs destroying traps is anarchic; seed bombing a bit of
brownfield land is anarchic, too – just as a community tool shed is
anarchic, or intervening when you see a stranger being hassled by law
enforcement. 

No one told you to do it and you certainly weren’t forced to do so: you
had the simple desire to help someone else. This simple idea of
cooperation without coercion, solidarity without obligation is, in a
word, anarchy.

What are some key concepts in anarchism?

Prefiguration. 

Anarchists emphasise the unity between means and ends in our daily
struggle against the state. This can be found in small groups who
awkwardly practice de-arrests in the park at 3am preparing themselves
for police violence at demonstrations, while those who shoplift or fare
evade have the knowledge to outsmart surveillance in more high-pressure
situations, or the know-how on building durable barricades for an
illegal rave also protects the squat against eviction.

Direct Action. 

Direct action shows us the omnipresence of the state is an illusion. We
do not delegate struggle against oppression to ‘experts’ or elected
bodies but instead put our money where our mouths are by fighting the
state in the streets, rather than from the ballot box every few years.
Historically, many anarchists have advocated for Propaganda by The Deed
– small acts of personal courage that people can daringly imitate,
proliferating the movement through our actions.

Solidarity. 

For us, solidarity isn’t just a dry statement, a retweet, or a cute
enamel pin. Solidarity is something you can hold in your hands, feel,
smell, touch, taste and wield as a weapon against our shared enemies.
Anarchists have traveled across continents to support each other and
projects with whom we share an affinity. Anarchists have a long history
of being imprisoned, repressed and censored; as such we know how
important it is to provide support that is material, not vibes-based.

Accountability. 

Anarchists advocate that people engage in open critique of each other in
order to resist the exploitation of individual freedoms and repair
relational
violence. ‘what
about the rapists? Anarchist approaches to crime & justice’ by
dysophia5 explores anarchist conceptions of accountability further.

Mutual Aid. 

Voluntary giving or lending of resources, labour or goods to others in
shared communit(ies) with the expectation that the whole community will
benefit. Mutual
aid ensures the survival and co-operation of human and non-human
life alike.

Decentralisation. 

Waging the struggle on numerous fronts with every participant choosing
to fight in their way of fighting. Refusing to centralise the movement
around one organisation or project is a resilience measure learned from
centuries of repression against working class movements. Anarchists
participate in the things they’re interested in participating, rather
than having party leadership order them around. As such there are many
tendencies, programmes, perspectives and schools of thought in
anarchism.

How is anarchy rooted in decolonial principles?

“Of all ideologies, anarchy is the one that addresses liberty and
equalitarian relations in a realistic and ultimate fashion. It is
consistent with each individual having an opportunity to live a complete
and total life, With anarchy, the society as a whole not only maintains
itself at an equal expense to all, but progresses in a creative process
unhindered by any class, caste or party. This is because the goals of
anarchy don’t include replacing one ruling class with another, neither
in the guise of a fairer boss or as a party.” 

– Kuwasi
Balagoon, Anarchy
Can’t Fight Alone

In Muntjac, a collective
of 4^th
world anarchists, we recognise the value of anarchist methodologies
in our struggles as displaced colonised peoples. We also remember and
learn from the anarchic ways in which people from the countries of our
origin have struggled against colonialism, both the struggles of the
present day and that of our ancestors.

We recognise anarchism in
the Pure
Anarchist movement of interwar Japan, resisting the orientalist
conception of docile and economically robotic Asians. We recognise
anarchism in the practices of Black resistance, of marronage and slowing
down and stoppage, of named and unnamed Black comrades like Lucy Parsons
in the “US”, Domingos Parsons in “Brazil”, and the Black anarchist at
Whiteways Commune, Gloucestershire in 1910. We recognise the lineage of
Black anarchism as squatting, illegalism, autonomous organisation and
prisoner support. We recognise anarchism as queer insurrectionists who
reject respectability, attack police recruitment offices, gum up church
locks, have sex on golf courses, and
always Bash
Back!

We recognise anarchism as antagonistic to the state, rather than seeking
reconciliation with any of its institutions. For example, speaking from
an Indigenous anarchist feminist
perspective, Tawinikay said:
“Reconciliation can only mean eliminating the conflict by enmeshing
Indigenous and settler communities […] making conflicting positions
compatible,” then observing that Marxist historical materialist deemed
Indigenous societies were “primitive communism” which needed to evolve
through capitalism to achieve respectable communism. She proposes
anarchism as a way through and forward, dismantling the centralised
state of Canada in favour of self-organised communities in parallel with
each other.

Anarchists have been involved in campaigns of solidarity with indigenous
struggle. Anarchists like Ricardo Flores Magon
influenced Zapata, a
leader in the Liberation Army of the South, an agrarian movement made up
of people who lived in Indigenous Nahua villages.
The Popular
Indigenous Council of Oaxaca-Ricardo Flores Magón (CIPO-RFM) and the
famous Zapatista movement, named after Zapata, are inspired by anarchism
and
maintain friendly
relationships with anarchists. 

In Chile, anarchists struggle
in solidarity
with the Mapuche, while in so-called Canada, anarchists
fought alongside
Indigenous resistance fighters against pipelines and the olympics.
Leonard Peltier also wrote that
anarchists helped
his support committee in its early days. In Bolivia, Silvia Rivera
Cusicanqui forwards an Indigenous
Anarchist Critique of
Bolivia’s ‘Indigenous State.’

In so-called North America, some Indigenous anarchist theorists like
Gord Hill (aka Zig Zag), Aragorn!, Ziq and Klee Benally combined their
experiences in the Indigenous resistance movement with
anarchist-nihilism.

Formulating
theories of Indigenous Anarchism based around a critique of
civilisation and the civil or reformist parts of Indigenous resistance
movements, instead advocating for an anti-colonial praxis of direct
action, community defence and sabotage. Later, a network called
the Indigenous
Anarchist Federation would emerge, producing literature and guides on
self-defence, fieldcraft, communication tools and
weaponry. Warrior
publications also published several guides on defence and
countering police tactics alongside fieldcraft and reviews of survival
equipment.

What are some anarchist schools of thought?

What anarchists do reflects their own desires and needs. As such,
anarchists historically and today have always had numerous different
tendencies, strategies and perspectives. This has helped the movement
constantly challenge itself and evolve over time. We’d outstay our
welcome if we listed all these developments, so we’re going to squeeze
these dozens of tendencies into three groups: Individualist Anarchism,
Insurrectionary Anarchism and Social Anarchism.

It’s also worth noting that anarchists don’t have to stick to one
tendency or school of thought. The idea is that we can evolve our
methodologies for what’s needed based on experience and desire. As a
comrade put it, we’re Individualists when we’re
alone, Insurrectionists when we’re in the streets
and Syndicalists when we’re at the jobs we all hate.

Individualist Anarchism

“Anarchist individualism still means eternal revolt against eternal
sorrow, the eternal search for new springs of life, joy and beauty. And
we will still be such in Anarchy.” 

– Novatore,
Anarchist Individualism in the Social Revolution, 1919

Individualist anarchism is a synthesis
of Nihilism and Egoism which
emphasises the full autonomy of the individual. Anarchist individualists
still recognise that classes or groups of people are oppressed by social
systems like the state or the patriarchy, but they choose to fight these
ills themselves, recognising themselves as part of the exploited and
excluded without reporting to other people or a ‘mass movement’ to back
them up. 

Their participation is according to their individual will. Renzo
Novatore, who wrote anarchist-nihilist prose and threw grenades at
Italian fascists, explained the anarchist individualist strategy of
spreading itself through attack and the reproduction of attack: the
affirmation of the self through revolt is what makes life worth living.

Insurrectionary Anarchism

“It’s easy. You can do it yourself. Alone or with a few trusted
comrades. Complicated means are not necessary. Not even great technical
knowledge. Capital is vulnerable. All you need is to be decided.” 

– Alfredo
M. Bonnano, Armed Joy, 1977

Insurrectionary anarchism is an anarchist practice that focuses on
organising attacks. This developed from a critique of the anarchist
movement presented by anarchists in Italy during
the Years
of Lead but it should be noted that the methods that insurrectionary
anarchists use have existed long before the term was coined. Anarchists
like Jean Weir, Alfredo M. Bonanno and publications
like Insurrection
Magazine argued for informal, small, tight-knit groups of
anarchists called ‘affinity groups’ who, if they desired, would organise
into informal federations of affinity groups, to coordinate and plan out
attacks on the state, its defenders and its false critics.

Insurrectionary anarchists criticize the numbers-based organisations
that syndicalist and communist other anarchists advocate for, arguing
that since they rely on legitimacy from a perceived ‘mass’ of people,
they are in
fact a
dampener on revolt, not a tool to further it.

Insurrectionary anarchists would later develop a theory
called Autonomous
Base Nuclei to synthesise the model of informal, decentralized
networks with broader, larger projects with politically mixed groups.
Examples of this include
a campaign against
a military base, an
autonomous trade
union of railway workers struggling against the existing union
leadership and the bosses, and
the Switch Off campaign.

Social Anarchism

This encompasses the various tendencies who believe that the best way to
organise for anarchism is to organise a mass movement. All social
anarchists are Communists who explicitly reject statism in favor of
worker autonomy as the primary factor that leads to communist social
relations, rather than an eventual end goal. For them, communism is the
combination of an economic program of social equity founded upon the
principles of mutual aid and solidarity with an anarchist program for
social revolution that makes it possible.

One organisational tendency
is anarchist
syndicalism, which focuses on the union as the primary vehicle for
class conflict. The practice is expanded beyond the workplace to other
fronts such as housing and civil rights. Through the creation of
non-hierarchical unions, Syndicalists argue that people will discover
their own power through expressions of their autonomy both in the
struggle to organise and eventually self-manage their workplaces,
housing, and other areas of life.

With regard to anarchist communism, two different tendencies
include Platformism and Synthesism.
Platformism aims to create a federation with theoretical unity while
Synthesism desired more ideological diversity.

Within platformism, Especificist Anarchism developed in a Latin American
context during the 1970s. The following diagram maps their idea of
influencing social movements through the flow of anarchist militants.

Synthesist anarchists disagree with platformists’ desire for tactical
and theoretical unity and instead argue that a diversity of positions
and methods is better as it allows anarchists to spread into more fields
of social struggle.

What are the main misconceptions about anarchism?

• “Anarchism is chaos!”

  Well, yes, but actually no. What people tend to conflate is the concept
  of hierarchy (i.e. an authoritarian structure which places people under
  the control of another group ‘above’ them) with the idea of social
  cohesion. Anarchists, as a rule, aren’t massive fans of whatever
  capitalists want to call “order” (oppression) so often you’ll see us
  talking about how much we love chaos.

• “Anarchists are all Punks.”

  While it’s true that punk has helped spread anarchist ideas across the
  globe, as a decentralised counter cultural music-based movement with
  broad anti-authoritarian themes. Not all anarchists are punks and not
  all punks are anarchists. However, countercultural anarchist punk scenes
  in South East Asia, the Americas and Europe have introduced tens of
  thousands of people to anarchism.

• “Anarchists are all anti-theists.”

  It’s true that many early anarchist movements were heretical or
  anti-theistic, just as many anarchist organisations and movements are
  and have been religious, there have been and are Christian, Jewish,
  Islamic, Daoist, Buddhist and Pagan anarchisms.

• “Anarcho-Capitalism?”

  Nonsense! In the 80s, segregationist holocaust deniers like Samuel
  Edward Konkin III appropriated anarchist terminology, inspired by The
  Chicago School “Economist” Murray Rothbard’s appropriation of the term
  ‘Libertarian’ from the anarchist movement, who was then inspired by
  two-time card carrying fascist Ludwig Von Mises. They decided to meme
  into existence a contradictory nonsensical ideology and that’s kinda it.

• “Anarchism is white.”

  It’s true that anarchism, as a social movement, has its origin in the
  European labour movement. However, anarchism quickly spread around the
  world in the 19^th century and is now found pretty much everywhere,
  including distinctly non-white anarchist tendencies.

Which individuals/groups/orgs are practicing anarchy?

In this country, there are dozens of Squats, Housing Cooperatives,
Social Centers, Infoshops, Bookstores, Campaigns and Publishing houses
run in an anarchic (i.e. anti-authoritarian manner) however it would be
wrong to call them all anarchists as many don’t subscribe to the term. A
few good places to look for projects like this in your area would be:

What can you do?

Do:

Protect Yourself:

Read:  

Archives:

Listen:

Watch:

Stay Informed:

Organisations to follow:

Illustration by @blkmoodyboi who says “This illustration aims to represent the power of collective action and anarchism. How it’s about rebelling against an oppressive carceral capitalist system (represented by the chains) but also its about resisting and collective organizing. Using the colours of the anarchist flag this illustration also aims to name how marginalised genders have historically carried these movements.”