Let’s do a quick word association, okay? I’ll say a word and you just notice the first thing that comes to your mind.
Anarchy.
What was it you saw in your mind’s eye? Was it a Molotov cocktail smashing through a police station window? Perhaps a nihilistic teenage punk with a mohawk? Maybe it was a mustachioed madman murdering a President whose name you can’t remember? A faceless hacker in a Guy Fawkes mask? Or maybe you just saw images of broad disorder: civilization undone, smoking skylines and empty, crumbling streets.
You could be forgiven for seeing these images. Fuck it, you are forgiven. Anarchy, in respectable circles, is viewed with dismissive contempt, and this attitude has seeped pretty pervasively into pop culture. Depictions of anarchy are split into a few broad camps: you’ve got your Jokers, amoral agents of chaos; you’ve got your Tylers Durden and Misters Robot, split-personality disaffected weirdos; and you’ve got your Johnnies Rotten, adolescent thrashers who are rebelling against… whatever.
The rare semi-positive cultural depiction of an anarchist — say V in Alan Moore’s comic V for Vendetta — will be ideologically stripped when it’s made into a movie, and will be turned into a clumsy metaphor for anti-Bush liberalism.
So yeah: it’s okay that you’ve never seriously considered anarchism as a viable political system. Everything in your world has told you it’s ridiculous from day one.
But hey, you wanna consider anarchy for a minute?
Why the fuck should I?
Hostilely put, but fair. Let’s go full 21st century and start with our influencers, shall we? A lot of the people you most admire and respect from pages of history were anarchists.
George Orwell, co-opted by the right as an anti-communist and the left as an anti-fascist, read by everyone as an ominous oracle of what’s to come every time a new president is elected, was closer to an anarchist than anything else. When he went to go fight the fascists in Spain, the battalion he joined was an anarchist battalion, and his most glowing praise is reserved for the days that Barcelona was effectively an anarchist commune. While fighting, he was shot in the neck by a fascist, and while still recovering from his wounds, he was chased out of Catalonia by Stalinists who were purging the Republic of anarchists and their allies.
Welcome back to Instagram. Sign in to check out what your friends, family & interests have been capturing & sharing around the world.
Henry David Thoreau was an anarchist, and famously wrote the essay “Civil Disobedience,” which argues that people of conscience should refuse to cooperate with an immoral government. This essay was influential to Christian anarchist Leo Tolstoy, who wrote the book The Kingdom of God is Within You, which makes a pretty good case for the idea that Jesus Christ himself was an anarchist. The two of these together were major influences to Mohandas Gandhi (who is said to have privately identified as an anarchist) and Martin Luther King, Jr. Regardless of whether either of these men were literal anarchists, their movements heavily borrowed anarchist ideas like direct action and civil disobedience.
The art world is chock-full of anarchists: the punk rock movement is basically synonymous with anarchism, but it's worth pointing out that its philosophical roots came from a group of anti-totalitarian Marxists called the Situationists. It was this same group that gave us the modern graffiti and street art movement. Anarchism continued to be influential among punk's many offshoots, particularly in grunge, the Riot Grrl movement, and the nu metal of groups like Rage Against the Machine. Chumbawamba and Bjork? Anarchists.
Among writers, the list of anarchists is bananas: aside from Orwell, you've got Albert Camus, Ursula K. LeGuin, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Thomas Pynchon, Edward Abbey, Henry Miller, J.R.R. Tolkein, Robert Anton Wilson, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn. Comics has also been a bastion of anarchism, with Alan Moore, Alan Grant, and Grant Morrison as the most prominent examples (if you're looking for a cool newer anarchist comic book writer, check out Ben Passmore).
Welcome back to Instagram. Sign in to check out what your friends, family & interests have been capturing & sharing around the world.
"The cool kids are anarchists" is, of course, a terrible reason to become an anarchist. But a list that includes Gandhi, Jesus, and Chumbawamba is one that deserves your attention.
What even is anarchism?
The word "anarchy" literally means "without rulers." If that sounds broad and vague… yeah, it is. Like every political school of thought, there are about ten billion schisms of anarchism, so it really gets hard to define it beyond that. One of the more popular anarchist slogans is "No Gods, No Masters," but even that is tricky, because there are both Christian and Jewish forms of anarchism, and both of those groups, you know, believe in gods. In an interview with Mehdi Hasan, Noam Chomsky gave an uncharacteristically brief explanation of what anarchism means to him:
"What does anarchism mean? ...It fundamentally means opposition to structures of authority and domination unless they can justify themselves. Illegitimate structures of domination and hierarchy ranging from paternalistic family to business which is a tyranny in which people rent themselves as slaves, to international affairs. Anywhere across this domain if you find illegitimate authority, it should be eliminated. I suspect most people believe that."
What's often confusing about anarchy is that its best ideas are frequently co-opted by other groups or movements. The word "libertarian" has been associated with anarchism far longer than it's been associated with the weird cryptofascist corporate movement championed by people like Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan in America. "People who are called libertarians in the United States," Chomsky pointed out in the same interview with Hasan, "...are fundamentally calling for rule by unaccountable private tyrannies. I don’t see anything libertarian about that.”
Likewise, well-known terms like "conscientious objection," "squatting" and "free love" all have roots in anarchism even though many of their practitioners aren't anarchists. The rewilding movement, the vegan movement, and modern hacking have strong anarchist ties, but aren't necessarily anarchist movements.
The term itself is also often conflated with things it is not. You will sometimes hear people say stuff like, "God, I went to Walmart on Black Friday, it was fucking anarchy." They don't mean anarchy, they mean chaos. Most ideal visions of an anarchic world would, in fact, imply the nonexistence of Walmart. Anarchy is also conflated with violence (even though an enormous proportion of the violence committed in this world is committed by governments), and with nihilism (which is fair some, but not all, of the time).
Part of the reason anarchism isn't widely regarded or understood is because no one who wields an enormous amount of power -- your Hitlers, your Stalins, your Bezoses -- profits from promoting good faith depictions of an ideology that would require that they relinquish all of their power. No other political system views power itself as evil — the rest are concerned with which types of power suck.
Another part of the reason it's so confusing is that if you say to someone, "hey, let's remove each other's chains. What life should we now live, now that we are free?" literally every single person will come up with a different answer and a different vision. The tolerance for an endless amount of diversity is anarchism's great strength, but it also makes it super hard for any one person to say, "this is what anarchism is." Because they don't have the fucking authority to say that. Nobody does. We got rid of authority, remember?
But is anarchism even relevant anymore?
Writing for a friend's newsletter, I recently pointed out that at the core of the liberal belief system is a thought experiment called the "social contract." The social contract is based on the belief that we all choose to live in society that puts limits on our freedom because the anarchic “state of nature” we lived in was “nasty, brutish, and short.”
I also pointed out that this thought experiment was flatly wrong, that it was dreamed up a couple hundred years before we even knew what evolution was. What we know now is that early humans lived in small tribal communities that took all different shapes and forms. You could call these communities anarchies, because they lacked any formal government structure. We also know that they were hardly miserable meat-grinders of barbarism, and that while, like today, some lived short lives of misery and toil, many others lived rich, fulfilling lives.
A lot of stuff we take for granted as necessary for a civilization to function — say, prisons, permanent police forces, or standing armies — ignore the fact that these inventions came about only in the last few centuries (in the case of the first two), or have only been used by some civilizations (in the latter case) during certain eras.
If you can accept that everything we currently have developed out of anarchy, it’s not a huge leap to seeing that everything is, in a sense, still anarchy. A common argument against it is: “Anarchy would just result in the strongest taking what they want and leaving nothing for the rest.” The only reasonable response you could give to this is “how the fuck is that any different from now?”
If this is anarchy, it’s badly developed anarchy. Because humanity is so flexible and adaptable, we could choose to build a different one, a better one.
Anarchist economics
One thing that’s confronting us in the 21st century, climate change, is caused by the current anarchy’s economic system, which is based on eternal growth. “Growth for the sake of growth,” the writer Edward Abbey pointed out, “is the ideology of a cancer cell.”
Anarchist economist E.F Schumacher proposed a different type of economy in his book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. He suggested that an economy based on valuing human life would be one where all work was meaningful, consumption was kept to a minimum, and where most if not all of the materials we used came from local, renewable resources.
This would, of course, mean giving up a lot of capitalism’s creature comforts. But it would almost certainly make us happier, with the fringe benefit of saving the planet.
Many anarchists also believe that the ideal economy is one in which the only work you do is work you choose to do voluntarily, and which you can reap the rewards of as an equal partner. Anarcho-syndicalists, for example, are big promoters of worker co-ops. If you were a bartender in an anarcho-syndicalist co-op bar, for example, instead of earning $2 plus tips from drunk bros who "don't believe in tipping," you'd have an equal share in the bar, and would earn the same profits from it that the bar manager and the line cook would. This, arguably, would make you a bit more invested and passionate about your work, because you'd no longer be making shit wages for assface owners. You, the worker, would have ownership of the means of production.
You may notice that this sounds an awful lot like socialism. That's because it kind of is! Anarchists and socialists have long been leery allies who often agree on the ends they want but disagree on the means of getting there. Marx's anarchist rival in the First International (a famous international coalition of leftists) was a man named Mikhail Bakunin. Bakunin and Marx agreed on some things, but Bakunin believed that Marx’s suggestion that the communists create a "dictatorship of the proletariat" when they take power would just turn into another dictatorship.
“Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice," Bakunin said, "socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.”
Hard to argue with him there. History speaks for itself.
Mutual aid
Another idea anarchists dream up that is wildly useful is “mutual aid.” Mutual aid is when people in a community choose to take care of one another through a voluntary exchange of goods or services. Say you have a job but your neighbor doesn’t. Mutual aid between you two could conceivably look like you feeding and housing your neighbor while they take care of your kids or tend your herb garden. The point is that it’s reciprocal — it’s solidarity, not charity.
In times of disaster, mutual aid turns out to be a wildly effective method of distributing resources. After Katrina, government agencies like FEMA and the Red Cross often totally failed to reach certain neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods were kept afloat by mutual aid networks that coordinated and distributed food and healthcare and other basic human needs. Disaster researchers have consistently found that far more lives end up being saved in a catastrophe by civilians present on the scene than first responders, and that cities where the government has suddenly failed to provide the necessities often manage to self-organize and find a way to distribute those necessities on their own.
As Rebecca Solnit points out in her excellent book, A Paradise Built in Hell, this sudden popular autonomy is dangerous to those in power, because if it goes on for too long, people may start to wonder if they need their leaders at all. The go-to response by the elites in a disaster is to suggest that looting is rampant, which then justifies a violent crackdown by law enforcement. Looting is almost always overreported, and what looting is reported is often just the requisitioning of essential goods, like food, that would spoil instead of feeding someone who desperately needs food were it not “looted.” The elite response always tends to emphasize the importance of protecting property (which is replaceable and often insured) even at the expense of human lives (which are, you know, not expendable).
Mutual aid networks like Food Not Bombs have been feeding people hot vegan meals during COVID at a time when the government has been failing to give people the resources they need to survive. Perhaps people will come away from this crisis with less confidence that our federal government is the essential order-keeping apparatus it claims to be, and that the real future lies in solidarity with other members of their community.
Direct action
Another anarchist idea worth taking seriously is direct action. You may, like many people, have become disillusioned with the electoral process. Good! The electoral process is hot trash, a shadow of democracy run by corrupt shitheads.
The alternative is direct action, which basically means exercising your political and economic power in the real world rather than through elected proxies. It’s basically everything the civil rights and labor movements have done to affect change: sit-ins, strikes, boycotts, marches, protests, occupations, and whatnot. There are also violent forms of direct action —street battles, uprisings, assassinations, revolutions — and in between stuff like sabotage, property destruction, and looting, which are considered violence by people who value things over people.
Direct action, when done well, is the reason for virtually all substantive change. For a real glimpse into how this is the case, read Howard Zinn’s seminal A People’s History of the United States. It was, for example, the strikes and organizing of the socialists — as well as the always-lingering threat of a Russian-style revolution, it’s own type of direct action — that got us the New Deal, for example. It was the activism of Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as well as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Students for a Democratic Society, and more militant groups like Malcolm X’s Nation of Islam that pushed American political leaders to finally implement the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The idea behind direct action is that you have power, and you can choose to exercise it in ways outside the voting booth.
Baby, I’m an anarchist
There are a dozen other anarchist ideas that are worth engaging with, and if you want a thoughtful walk through some of them, you can check out James C. Scott’s excellent book Two Cheers for Anarchism. He takes a positive but somewhat skeptical view of the belief system -- it's hard to come up with an anarchist solution to things like nuclear weapons, of course. Some autonomous self-organized societies may reasonably choose, through democratic means, to sacrifice freedom for security and order, and who are you to tell them what they really want? Others may simply not want to deal with the day-to-day bullshit of governing their own lives. It's a big responsibility, liberating yourself.
On the other hand, Scott suggests, we unconsciously subjugate ourselves to other people all the time -- how many of the people who are reading this have worked for an absolute tyrant of a boss who they've refused to stand up to out of fear for losing their jobs? How many times have you followed a rule that you've found stupid and senseless, just because breaking it would be a whole big thing? This may sound like nothing, but how, Scott asks, could we expect to one day stand up to an authoritarian regime, if we'd spent the entire rest of our lives practicing obedience rather than rebellion? Anarchism offers a practice in rebellion that some of us desperately need.
But you don’t have to become a full-blown anarchist in order to engage with anarchist ideas. Opposition to illegitimate power and commitment to personal autonomy is more of an orientation toward the world than it is a rigid ideology. You can and should find your own creative ways to become a freer, more liberated person, and to help others become free as well.
Call yourself what you want — but if you ever want some pointers on liberation, might I suggest the anarchists?
Further Reading
V for Vendetta by Alan Moore
Two Cheers for Anarchism by James C. Scott
A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit
Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E. F. Schumacher
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
Your Black Friend and Other Strangers by Ben Passmore
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
The Kingdom of God is Within You by Leo Tolstoy
Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus
Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey