Anarchy: What It Is and Why Pop Culture Loves It

It’s a complicated philosophy that’s more than just a punk rock phrase.

BY KIM KELLY TEEN VOGUE JUNE 3, 2020


NEW YORK, NY - MAY 1: Anarchists lead a march through Greenwich Village on May Day, May 1, 2018, in New York City. (Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

In a pop-cultural sense, at least, the idea of anarchy has been characterized by either a middle-fingers-up, no-parents-no-rules punk attitude, or a panicky, more conservative outlook used by national and state sources to represent violent chaos and disorder. Today, we can see an extremely serious, radical leftist political philosophy on T-shirts at Hot Topic.

So what is anarchism? What do those people raising black flags and circling A’s really want? Here’s what you need to know:


What is anarchism?

Anarchism is a radical, revolutionary leftist political philosophy that advocates for the abolition of government, hierarchy, and all other unequal systems of power. It seeks to replace what its proponents view as inherently oppressive institutions — like a capitalist society or the prison industrial complex — with nonhierarchical, horizontal structures powered by voluntary associations between people. Anarchists organize around a key set of principles, including horizontalism, mutual aid, autonomy, solidarity, direct action, and direct democracy, a form of democracy in which the people make decisions themselves via consensus (as opposed to representative democracy, of which the United States government is an example).

“I would define anarchism as the nonhierarchical, nonelectoral, direct-action-oriented form of revolutionary socialism,” Mark Bray, a lecturer at Dartmouth College and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, tells Teen Vogue.

As the New York City-based anarchist group Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council (MACC), of which I’m a member, writes on its website it, “We demonstrate a vision for a society in fundamental opposition to the brutal logic of contemporary capitalism — a society based on mutual aid, cooperation, and radical democracy.”
Where did anarchism come from?

Anarchism has ancient roots, with the word itself stemming from the ancient Greek anarchos, or "without rulers," but it fully bloomed as a political philosophy in Europe and the United States during the 19th century. At the time, Communist thinker Karl Marx’s writings had become popular, and people were searching for alternatives to the capitalist system. The Paris Commune — a brief period in 1871 when Paris was controlled by anarchists and communists — helped spread the message of anarchism further, and inspired more young radicals to take up the cause, sometimes to violent effect when they embraced the philosophy of “propaganda by the deed.” By the early 20th century, anarchism had spread throughout the world, but government repression often made it difficult for anarchists to organize and achieve their goals.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is generally recognized as the first self-proclaimed anarchist, and his theories continue to influence anarchist thought today — if you’ve ever heard the phrase “property is theft,” that’s straight from Proudhon’s 1840 book What Is Property? But Proudhon was far from the only prominent thinker to advance the cause of anarchy. William Godwin’s 1793 treatise, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, is hailed as a classic of antistate, proto-anarchist thought. Other famous contributors to anarchism’s development include Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Voltairine De Cleyre, Max Stirner, Johann Most, Buenaventura Durruti, and Alexander Berkman. In addition to these names, countless others, whose identities have been lost to history, have helped refine and spread the ideology of anarchism. Today, anarchism is a fully global, intersectional philosophy, with particularly strong roots in Latin America, Spain, Germany, and, as of 2012, the Middle East, due to the 2012 Rojava Revolution in occupied Kurdistan.
How does anarchism intersect with other political philosophies?

Anarchism as a philosophy lends itself to many ideas. There is no one way to be an anarchist.

Classic anarchist traditions include mutualism, which is situated at the nexus of individual and collectivist thought; anarcho-communism, which favors community ownership of the means of production, and the abolishment of the state and capitalism; anarcho-syndicalism, which views unions, the working class, and the labor movement as potential forces for revolutionary change; and individualism, which has similarities with libertarianism, and emphasizes individual freedom above all. More recent, more post-modern schools of thought, including anarcha-feminism, Black anarchism, queer anarchism, green or eco-anarchism, and anarcho-pacifism, have found firm footing in today’s anarchist communities.

Anarcho-capitalism, which is interested in self-ownership and free markets, is much rarer, and is considered by most anarchists to be illegitimate because of anarchism’s inherent opposition to capitalism.

What is the difference between anarchism and communism?

“When [most people] think of communism, they inevitably think of the states that were formed in the 20th century based on various interpretations of Marxism-Leninism, and the difference between anarchism and those states and those theories and those ideas is their perspective on the state,” Bray tells *Teen Vogue. “In orthodox Marxist theory, the state is an institution that is politically neutral, and it can be used for different purposes, depending on which class controls it; therefore, the orthodox Marxist goal is to capture the state, turn it into a dictatorship of the proletariat, and suppress the capitalist class. Once they do that, the state will wither away and you’ll have communism. The anarchist argument is that the state is not neutral, it is inherently hierarchical, it is inherently an institution of domination; therefore, anarchists oppose the state as much as they oppose capitalism.

“Another important difference is that, historically, in Marxism, economics were the fundamental building block,” Bray continues, “whereas anarchists have historically formed a critique of domination and hierarchy that is broader and not as one-dimensional. Marxist-Leninist parties advocate a vanguard model of organizing with a small group at the top, and anarchists are about horizontal, directly democratic kinds of politics.”
How does antifascism intersect with anarchism?

Since fascism is an antidemocratic ideology that thrives on oppression, and anarchism is explicitly against oppression in all forms, and for direct democracy, anarchism is inherently antifascist (much like all anarchists are by necessity anti-police and anti-prison). Not all antifascists are anarchists, but all anarchists are antifascist, and have been fighting against fascist forces for centuries. During the Spanish Civil War, most of the country was under anarchist control, and thousands of anarchists joined the International Brigades, a volunteer militia numbering in the thousands, who traveled to Spain to fight against General Francisco Franco and his fascist forces. It’s no coincidence that there are black flags waving in many photos of masked antifa, who have been very active in widely resisting what they view as oppressive policies across the U.S.

How else has anarchism made an impact on pop culture?

“I am an antichrist, I am an anarchist!” Delivered in doomed Sex Pistols vocalist Johnny Rotten iconic snarl, that simple phrase struck fear in the hearts of respectable adults throughout Great Britain and traveled across the Atlantic to thrill America’s nascent punk rockers. “Anarchy in the U.K.,” the Sex Pistols’ lean, mean, irreverent debut single, sent shockwaves through the bloated 1970s rock scene — and introduced millions of angry young kids to the idea of anarchy as an option, or even an ideal. Although Sex Pistols songwriter John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon explained in the 2000 documentary The Filth and the Fury that he’d only brought up anarchy because he “couldn’t find a damn thing to rhyme” with “antichrist” (and later said in a 2012 interview that he’d never been an anarchist at all), the damage had already been done. Sid Vicious aside, anarchism has also made a broader impact on global pop culture, from the work of Noam Chomsky to Joe Hill’s union songs to Ursula K. Le Guin’s beloved anarchist sci-fi novels. Famed 1984 author George Orwell fought alongside anarchists in the Spanish Civil War; Irish playwright Oscar Wilde became an anarchist after reading the work of Peter Kropotkin; deaf and blind activist Helen Keller was a socialist who palled around with Emma Goldman and other anarchists. Countless bands and artists have drawn inspiration from anarchist ideas, from anarcho-punks Crass and crust-punk godfathers Amebix (whose 1982 song “No Gods, No Masters!” remains a rallying cry) to Rust Belt punks Anti-Flag, U.K. black metallers Dawn Ray’d, hip-hop artist MC Sole, and Laura Jane Grace-fronted indie punks Against Me! (who basically wrote anarchism’s unofficial theme song with 2002’s “Baby, I’m an Anarchist”).

Anarchist symbols like the black flag and the circle A are easily recognizable when scrawled on desks or spray-painted on walls, but they have also become ubiquitous in music and film, from SLC Punk to V for Vendetta to the punk rock slasher flick Green Room (though the biker-soap Sons of Anarchy has nothing to do with the political ideology itself). Even hip-hop queen Cardi B rocked a big circle A patch in the video for her smash hit “Bodak Yellow”.

Anarchism and anarchists are everywhere, and hopefully now you’ve got a better understanding of what they’re fighting for — and against.

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Anarchist Censorship

The Article Infoshop Does Not Want You to Read!

I emailed Chuck O the 'owner' of Infoshop, an American anarchist web site, on 14.06.2004 asking him to post my article Post-McQuinn Anarchism,(see below) on Infoshop as part of the Post-Left Anarchist debate he and Jason McQuinn, 'owner' of Anarchy 'a Magazine of Desire Armed', are foisting on the anarchist movement in North America.

I had posted it to the International Anarchist Studies website as a reply to the debate ongoing there between Peter Staudenmaier and McQuinn.

It is in the reply section under Peters article entitled:
Anarchists in Wonderland: The Topsy-Turvy World of Post-Left Anarchy

In reply to my request to the Rev. Chuck O (as he titles himself at Infoshop, clearly appointing himself as an anarchist of the 'catholic' persuasion: his way or the highway) that he publish this on Info shop he sent me the following dismissive response which I have included below. And in my own charming way asked him again to publish it. He did not reply.

That little spat did nothing, there was no posting of my article on Infoshop. So on June 18 I posted it myself under Anarchist Opinion on Infoshop. And low and behold, it still, as of this date June 22, has not appeared.

The very reverend Chuck O. as the owner of the site, in violation of the anarchist principle of free speech, has censored an opinion he does not like. I leave it to you to determine, whether you agree with me or not as Voltaire would say, whether such obvious censorship should be practiced by self proclaimed anarchists.

In true American entrepreneurial style of his libertarian predilections, Chucky has decided that ownership allows him the corporate right to determine what gets published on 'his' web site. So much for Infoshop being a voice of the anarchist movement. This is another case of Anarchism Inc. once again proving that "the only free press belongs to those that own one."(A.J. Liebling)

Now that I am on Chucks enemies list I feel I am in good company. But at least we all know now that Chuck O. is truly an American libertarian, and like his pal McQuinn, they believe they own the rights to (c) anarchism. This is the reality of their post-left-anarchism. Hey they would do Murray Rothbard proud just kidding, he at least supported free speech. McQuinn and Chuck O. are not anarchists they are members of that fraternity of American Exceptionalism known as libertarianism. Ironically they would say they are the left of that movement.

Finally I am incredulous that the Institute for Anarchist Studies has even given the Post Left Anarchism debate any academic credibility by allowing it to be seriously discussed in the Theory and Practice section of their web site. It is a chimerical debate of navel gazing proportions. It is simply an argument circulated by McQuinn and Co. as simple economic self promotion, it sells his magazine, and gets him paid speaking engagements. It has no more credibility than that.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHUCKO EMAIL

At 11:36 PM 6/14/04 -0700, you wrote:
>What a pile of crap and ignorant garbage!
>
>It's a good thing that anarchism has moved beyond marginal cranks such as
>yourself!
>
>Oh, by the way, as somebody in "McQuinn's circle of friends," I've long
>appreciated Bookchin andhis contribution to anarchism.
>
>Chuck0
>
Ouch you cut me to the quick I am stunned and agog at your debating skills, your Swiftian editorial pen, please, please do not pummel me oh great one.
If I am a marginal crank it must be because I belong to a marginal movement or are you in your American wisdom assuming that the anarchist movement is marginal in Canada?
Did you even bother to read my article or in fact do you even read the shit you publish on Infoshop, be it the utopian ranting of CrimeThInc. or even over the top ranting of your 'friend' McQuinn when he is challenged.
Shall we hum a few bars of Phil Ochs small circle of friends....you can barely fund raise the money you need to continue your publishing efforts, while Democrats score millions from their web sites, talk about marginal.
But I digress, I don't give a shit if you don't like my opinion, at least if you are going to debate my ideas debate them, do not dismiss them as crap or marginal, twit. Do you intend to publish it or are you the Chief Anarchist censor now?!
As for you liking Bookchin good for you, however I maintain that McQuinn is trying to posit his critique as post-bookchin, and he is not a major anarchist theorist except in his own mind, and obviously yours. I noticed you didn’t mention Dolgoff so am I to assume that like McQuinn Dolgoff is too left for you.
Yours from the margins,
Eugene Plawiuk

------------------------------------------------------
AND NOW THE ARTICLE CHUCK O. DOESN'T WANT YOU TO READ:


Post-McQuinn Anarchism


Girl: What'cha rebeling against Johnny?
Johnny: What'cha got!
The Wild Ones

This in a nutshell sums up the rebellion of Jason McQuinn, and the debate on Post Left Anarchism. That this debate, which in itself is a strawdog, should appear on the web site of IAS befuddles the mind (as it clearly befuddled Mr. McQuinn from his snarky comments on your asking him to publish here).

It is strictly an American debate. It takes place in the context of the American Anarchist Milieu and that milieu alone. It does not encapsulate the rest of North America, such as Canada or Mexico, nor does it address the anarchist movement in Europe, Latin America, Central America, Africa, the Middle East, and Australia-Asia.

It is an argument that has been used to sell a magazine, and to prop up the Infoshop web site with an apparent theory they can embrace. It did not need to be placed with such prominence on the IAS site, which only gives greater credence to this little idea whose time has come and, unfortunately for its authors, gone.

It is not a new idea, as McQuinn admits, it is founded on the ranting of self-appointed theorist Bob Black. Mr. Black is very good himself at taking other peoples ideas and making $$$$ by restating them as his own. In this case his critique of work, workerism, etc. was lifted from LeFargue's The Right to Be Lazy, the proto-situationist text The Right to be Greedy, and from the writings of Wilhelm Reich and the European far left (such as Paul Cardin/Castoradis and Maurice Briton).

Mr. Black has made a tidy sum and a small reputation by attacking and denouncing those he does not like. This he believes makes him a critical thinker in critical theory, actually all it does is make him a critic.

A rebuttal of Mr. Black's post-left anarchism is the essay McAnarchism by Tim Balash.

McQuinn's essay is overly generalized, setting up strawdogs (and proceeds to berate his critics for doing to him what he does in his own essay) of some ambiguous Leninist left. Painting with broad brush strokes the workers movement, the socialist movement, and the communist movement and yes the anarchist movement as if it were all one large monolithic structure unaffected by history. This static strawdog is then knocked down with a fallacious argument that there needs to be a new theory of anarchism, that there has not been any new anarchist theory since Malatesta died.

Ah and that’s the crux of this post left anarchism. It is the new theory of the movement, brought to you by Mr. McQuinn via Mr. Black. The fact that Mr. McQuinn, supposedly a student of Paul Goodman, misses a vast school of post-Malatesta anarchist thought in his essay shows just how specious his argument is. He mentions nothing of Emma Goldman, Alexader Berkman, Elise Recluse, Victor Serge, Ward Churchill, Nicholas Walter, Stewart Christe, Albert Meltzer, Wilhelm Reich, Alex Comfort, George Woodcock, Paul Goodman, Sam Dolgoff, Murray Bookchin, etc. etc. I could go on and on. But you get the point.

That is the crux of his argument, that there has been no new anarchist theory, (which is an entirely false argument) and post left anarchism is the answer. If it is an answer what is the question? Well simply put it is what is the alternative to Murray Bookchin. Let’s call a spade a spade shall we. Stripped of its vacuous rhetoric, vast flourishes of generalizations, McQuinn is, like his mentor Bob Black, attacking Bookchin. So Post-Left Anarchism should rightly be called Post Bookchin Anarchism.

No one in the McQuinns circle of friends, those being the folks publishing and editing his little magazine, likes Bookchin. And resent his popularity, his efforts to theorize, any more than they like Sam Dolgoff, or Malatesta. Like Bob Black, they literally seethe with apoplexy against anyone who would align anarchism with class struggle.

It is the individual that is supreme, cries these radical subjectivists. Ah yes that revolutionary school of thought of Francis Dashwood, DeSade, Stirner, Nietzche, and Crowley that desire must be unleashed. The individual is king, we are all to be kings, in worlds of our own creating. Such magickal thinking is not a theory it is the musings of would be aristocrats, looking backward to some decentralized village community where hermits freely associate or lock their doors.

It is American Exceptionalism not anarchism. It's roots are in the rural artisan culture of America that harkens backwards to its past, rather than accept that America was and is part of the ascendancy of Capitalism. It is, like Proudhonism and his American proponents Tucker, Josiah Warren and Lynsander Spooner, the anarchism of small shopkeepers.

There is nothing new in this. Its clear in the wrintings of the Greenwich Village bohemian anarchist artist Hyppolite Havel, long before Mr. McQuinn or Mr. Black recuperated it for themselves.
Stripped of its rhetoric it is the theory that Anarchism is Anti-Political, and Anti-Organization. That small sect of Anarchists that would have nothing to do with any organization that would have them as a member, as Grucho Marx would say.

And again it is an attack on those who see class struggle as a crucial part of anarchism, in this case the unstated object of this attack is Bookchin, but it could just as easily be Dolgoff.

There is no class struggle in America is the crux of American Exceptionalism and it is the crux of McQuinns theory. So what is the basis of the struggle? Well as the quote says above, What'cha got. We should just revolt, because freedom is revolution. Or as Abbie Hoffman once said; Revolution for the Hell of It.

This is not a theory and it is certainly not an argument that demolishes class struggle anarchism, nor is it even an alternative to class struggle anarchism. It would like to be but it isn't. It is however an argument that is made to criticize class struggle anarchism, and to say American anarchism is an exception.
It is an attempt to say that any subjective struggle is anarchism as long as it is not organized, not permanent, and not political.

It is the anarchism of food coops, food not bombs, homes not bombs, the black block. It is the anarchism of hippie culture, and DIY. It is in a word not anarchism but reformism. McQuinn's anarchism can be summed up in the old cliche, if it feels good do it.

Shucks I just hate dating myself, by even remembering all this old stuff from the Movement days of the late sixties and early seventies, but since we are looking backwards with McQuinn and company, his argument is based in the little pamphlet still in circulation entitled Anti-Mass. Add some Bob Black school of vitrupitive caustic comments posing as a critique and there you have post left anarchism.

In fact I am surprised that McQuinn did not entitle his essay Listen Anarchist! But that would have been too obvious as to whom his comments were aimed at. After all the Bookchin debate has been going on for decades so it hardly qualifies for a "new" theory.

I certainly hope that we can move on from this navel gazing self-aggrandizing debate that exists simply to sell Mr. McQuinns magazine and assuage his ego that he his a profound thinker. His desire may be armed but his Post Left Anarchism is sightless.

June 2004
Posted on the web on Indymedia, Resist.ca, FLAG, and through email lists.
NOT posted on Infoshop by decision of the ‘owner’ Chuck Muson.

socialism

Canada

Politics

anarchism

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The Need for Arab Anarchism

Sadly outside of Lebanon, the Left in the Arab world carries with it little or no poltical consequence. With perhaps the exception of the Workers Communist Parties of Iran and Iraq, which have mobilized workers, students, and women, there has been stagnation of the Left bringing it to the verge of historical extinction. Nowhere is this clearer than in Egypt. Once the hot bed of the Left and the Pan Arab movement, today the left wanders in the desert wondering What Is To Be Done. As Al-Ahram reports; What's left of the left?

He listed other reasons why the left was no longer a presence on the political scene. It is too scattered and divided, and on too many occasions the various factions have squandered whatever political capital they possessed on squabbling among themselves. "We need to unite, we need a party," he continued, "an Egyptian communist party that can Egyptianise Marxism... An elected, democratic party... We communists have never experienced democracy [from within].We know only centralization."

Without self-criticism and an honest acceptance of past mistakes the left "won't have any credibility with the people".

In the past, he continued, "the communist Egyptian left indulged in theoretical debates about Marxism. It learned Marxist texts by heart, adopted the experiences of others without devising mechanisms to fit our Arab reality. It approached Marxism as if it was sacred, ignoring the fact that it is not a monotheistic religion but a methodology."

"The left has been completely absent from [recent] national struggles, contenting itself with watching from the comfort of closed rooms while others were working."

But all is not yet lost. There is still hope, El-Hilali suggests, if leftists find a way to work together, though "not in the form of yet another political party". What is needed, he says, is a broad non-ideological coalition, "including as many factions as possible and able to steer away from the typical ghettoising of Trotskyites, Nasserists and the like".

Tamer Wageeh, of the Socialist Studies Centre, pointed to the "ill-defined" masses of activists who have taken to the streets in the last six years, citing Intifada solidarity demonstrations, anti-war protests and the more recent demonstrations demanding change in Egypt. But instead of swelling the ranks of left-wing factions these young and politicized activists are rejecting the left label.

"They don't define themselves as yassar (left) though they subscribe to its principles -- anti-privatisation, anti- imperialism, women's rights, Coptic rights and so on -- because the reputation of the Egyptian left has put them off. The challenge is to integrate these people into the movement."

So what label are they accepting do you think? Why like much of the anti-globalization movement, and those struggling around feminist or religious minority rights, they broadly call themselves Anarchist. And a good dose of anarchist zeal and organization is exactly what this old left in Egypt needs.

The fact they are discussing exactly this delimma one that all of the 'old' left, especially the Communist parties and the communist movement faced after 1989 at this late date, later than the movements in Europe which already had begun to move towards Euro-communism prior to the fall of the Berlin wall, is a good sign for a renewal of a more libertarian left in Egypt. Anarchist Organisation not Leninist Vanguardism

As Richard Day points out in his book Gramsci is Dead, this is also the debate in the Western Anti-Globalization movement, where groups like the Socialist Workers Party and its theroiticians have attempted to comandeer the anti-globalization movement flumoxed by its web like organizational features, which they embrace yet wish to place a structural form on.

These old style parties of the Left in Europe, are eqaually flumoxed by Hardt and Negri's Empire, and the idea of a multitude, a term that to me reflects a widing of the idea of the proletariat; to include all the sans papier, the illegal immigrants that are now swarming Europe and North America. The movement of labour that is created by the movement of capital under globalization. Much of this multitude being from the Third World, and muslim.

GOPAL BALAKRISHNAN - HARDT AND NEGRI'S EMPIRE

Akca, Ismet, 'Globalization', State and Labor: Towards a Social Movement Unionism


Though Hardt and Negri can't bring themselves to say it, any more than Foucault could bring himself to say it with his critique of Governmentability and the politics of control, this is the core of the Anarchist critique of the State and Authority, under capitalism.

That if as Herr Dr. Marx says that capitalism is not just about the production and distribution of good, prices and wages, but about 'the social relations of the means of production'. Then in advanced capitalism, the critique of the modern state capitalism, and the capitalist state, the critique of globalization and its contradictions requires a revitalized anarchist critique of ideologies (Islam, Evangelical fundamentalism, Neo-liberalism, The Third Way etc.).

A fundamental critique of the hegemony of ideologies that attempt to interpret the social relations of globalization as the politics of identity and soverignty. Religion versus mass culture, of Anti-Imperialism that is merely Anti-Coca Cola, Islamism that is radical social democracy of Allah with a gun. Of the Imperialism of Zionism, and the failed social revolutions in the Middle East.

The anarchist critique has always been about the dialectical relationship between the individual and the community, neither can come into existence without a radical awareness of the 'other'. That is community is always new, it's existenance is not based on tradition, of aprori existence but of the growth and existence of indvidualization, which includes then a greater sense of need for community.

Anarchism challenges the statist quo, the very nature of all previous communities, by saying a new world is being birthed within the shell of the old.

That a different future is possible. That resistance is growth, not failure, that hope is eternal, that you can make a difference. This then is the challenge not only for the Egyptian left, but for the Left in general. The old models of socialist organizing have failed. Failed because they only saw politics as a means to an end instead of the end in itself. That to be political is to be active is as much an individual choice as it is a collective responsibility.

The classic question of Anarchism being identified with the Politics of the Deed, whether it was the bombings and bank robberies of the 19th Century or the assisination of politicians, which made Anarchism a political pariah, now comes back full ciricle with Bush's phony War on Terror.

The officials I interviewed [at the American consulate] were very American, especially in being very polite; for whatever may have been the mood or meaning of Martin Chuzzlewit [a Charles Dickens novel with an unflattering portrait of the U.S.], I have always found Americans by far the politest people in the world. They put in my hands a form to be filled up, to all appearances like other forms I had filled up in other passport offices. But in reality it was very different from any form I had ever filled up in my life. …

One of the questions on the paper was, "Are you an anarchist?" To which a detached philosopher would naturally feel inclined to answer, "What the devil has that to do with you? Are you an atheist" along with some playful efforts to cross-examine the official about what constitutes atheist.

Then there was the question, "Are you in favor of subverting the government of the United States by force?" Against this I should write, "I prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour and not the beginning." C.K. Chesterton Coming to America

The revival of the caricture of Anarchism as 'terrorism' came with the Black Block and the resulting news coverage of them during Seattle and the anti-globalization protests that followed. Once again direct action was misinterpreted by a fringe group as meaning destruction of property, rather than organising collective resistance. It found a niche in the media who wanted to exploit the image of Anarchism as mindless destruction, chaos, once again.


Ever since Haymarket the idea of the Anarchist as bomber, as terrorist has been used to create a state of fear and ideology of fear against Anarchy. As Richard Day points out in his introduction to Gramsci is Dead, this played into the hands of the state and its media quite nicely, since that has been the historic image of anarchism used to justify the police state. The origins of Interpol were founded in the International Anti-Anarchist league in the late 19th Century.

“Wild Beasts Without Nationality”: The Uncertain Origins of Interpol, 1898-1910

The United States, International Policing and the War against Anarchist Terrorism, 1900–1914

1899 -- US: Emma Goldman speaks at a large meeting at Cooper Union to protest the International Anti-Anarchist Conference in Rome.


Today in the United States the police under Homeland Security continue to spy on the modern day anarchist and social change movements; TARGETS of surveillance | PortlandTribune.com

As Kropotkin wrote this is NOT what anarchism is at all, but its very caricature. Anarchist Morality

In fact the Anarchist movement faced off squarely against the ultimate in statist reaction; fascism, during the Spainish Civil War. And it is this Internationalist anarchism that is needed again today in the Middle East. For exactly the reason that as a poltical ideology of the individual and the commons/community it provides an antitode to the new fascism of Islamism and the old medievalist regimes that dominate the region.

Finally it is anarchism that recognizes, and has done so historically, the key role of feminism as individualism that is important for the social revolution against Patriarchy.
In a patriarchical culture that is Islam this struggle is even more important in undermining the authoritarian statist quo of the Mullahs.Unanswered questions


Proponents of democratic reforms to Muslim states will talk about liberalism versus anarchism, and reduce the liberation struggles in the Middle East down to this which is a false dichotomy. Anarchism arose from liberalism and superceded it. Anarchism expresses a dialectic of individual and collective rights, not through the political state, as classical liberalism does, but through the 'free association of producers' which would be a real 'free market' unlike the current monopoly capitalist mode of geo-politics.

American Values, American Interests: The United States and Free-Market Democracy in the Middle East

Also see: anarchism

Can you be a Muslim Anarchist?

Gnostic Heresy in Islam

Dr. Marx on Islam

Islam = Fascism

Below are links to articles on both Arabic Anarchism, Anarchist critiques of Islam, and Anti-Zionist Anarchism. I have linked to articles dealing with the similarity between this new war on terror and the old bugaboo about anarchist terrorists.

Further Reading on Arab Anarchism, Anarchy and Terrorism, Anti-Zionist Anarchism:

Arab Anarchism

التحررية الجماعية Communism libertarian

LIBERTARIANS, THE LEFT AND THE MIDDLE EAST

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي ...

Left Hegelianism, Arab Nationalism, and Labor Zionism

Religious Fundamentalist Regimes: A Lesson from the Iranian Revolution 1978-1979

celebrating solitude

Social Philosophy Of Russian Anarchism (Kropotkin)
and of Muammar Al Qadhafi: An Essay In Comparison

An anarchist analysis of Islam

International Institute of Social History The Arab Middle East Section - collections from Egypt, Sudan, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon.

Biography of Algerian anarchist Saïl Mohamed

Reality of the Egyptian Proletariat Sameh Saeed Abbood

Project for the creation of a Libertarian Studies & Research Centre in Morocco

SIYAHI INTERLOCAL Journal of Postanarchist Theory, Culture and Politics

Siyahi Interlocal began with a group of writers working in Istanbul, Turkey who had been interested in relations between anarchism and poststructuralist thought ('postanarchism') since the early Nineties. The group gave lectures around the country, wrote numerous essays on the subject, published an independent journal called 'Karasin' and produced several special issues of the country's oldest literary magazine 'Varlik'. By the turn of the millenium, they had begun integrating their work with similar projects already developing in Europe, North America and elsewhere, particularly through the translation of texts, as well as exchanging visits by writers working in that vein. This history finally culminated in the appearance of Siyahi Interlocal, the global electronic counterpart to the print journal by the same name that is currently published in Turkish. Today it is a meeting of minds hailing from France, Netherlands, Germany, Sicily, England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, the United States, Hawai'i, Australia and Turkey, all of whom have come together to create a space within which to develop new directions in radical theory and practice.

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No Really, What is Anarchism?

Eric Fleischmann
October 7, 2020

The terms ‘anarchist’ and ‘anarchism’ are returning to the center stage of political lingo in the twenty-first century. To quote my own article on Center for a Stateless Society:

“President Donald Trump has repeatedly attempted to associate Black Lives Matter with anarchists and anarchism. He has tweeted such threatening posts as just the phrase ‘Anarchists, we see you!’ with a video of a man dressed in black at one protest, and he has referred to protesters in Portland, Oregon as ‘anarchists who hate our Country’ and called for Governor Kate Brown to ‘clear out, and in some cases arrest, the Anarchists & Agitators in Portland.’

It is certainly true that many anarchists—such as myself—have been involved in Black Lives Matter protests, but it is obvious that President Trump is not making an objective ideological observation but rather is attempting to use anarchist as a ‘dirty word’ intended to make protestors out to be terroristic criminals.”

“Joe Biden employed a similar tactic in the following statement: “‘I’ve said from the outset of the recent protests that there’s no place for violence or destruction of property. Peaceful protesters should be protected, and arsonists and anarchists should be prosecuted, and local law enforcement can do that.’”

The mainstream media’s understandings of anarchism since (at least) the nineteenth century have involved a desire for chaos, disorder, and destruction. In early twentieth century North America, anarchists were depicted as bearded, often-foreign men with bombs, knives, or other weapon threatening symbols of the United States, liberty, or civilization. Modern day examples might include psychopathic terrorists like Solomon Lane from “Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation and Fallout” who, as Villains Wiki explains, seeks to create “a new world order based on unstoppable accidents and terrorist attacks that will actually turn the entire world into a massive terrorist superpower.”

Or, more generously, there is the character Zaheer in “Legend of Korra” (voiced by punk rock legend Henry Rollins) who seeks to bring down all governments, prompting the protagonist Korra at one point: “The idea of having nations and governments is as foolish as keeping the human and spirit realms separate [a reference to a previous season’s plot]. You’ve had to deal with a moronic president and a tyrannical queen. Don’t you think the world would be better off if leaders like them were eliminated?”

The latter example is a tad kinder to the ideology, but media depictions of anarchism rarely give a full view or even the benefit of the doubt. There are numerous schools of thought — generally differentiated by their economic models — that fall under the descriptor of anarchism ranging from anarcho-communism to individualist anarchism (and even ideologies that claim the title to the dismay of almost all other anarchists such as anarcho-capitalism and the racist, crypto-fascist national anarchism), but I would like to semi-informally compile some quick (unfortunately largely Western) information to hopefully help anybody begin to genuinely answer the question “what is anarchism?”

I am no expert in etymology, but according to (may a higher power forgive me) the Internet, it seems that ‘anarchy’ is derived from the ancient Greek anarkhia (‘without a ruler’) — composed of an- (‘without’) and arkhos (‘ruler’) — which was used first recorded as having been used in 404 B.C.E. in reference to the Year of Thirty Tyrants in Athens during which there was no one ruler or archon. This transformed into the Medieval Latin anarchia and French anarchie (both meaning roughly the same thing as the Greek). Thus, for numerous centuries ‘anarchy’ was used to refer to confusion in the absence of authority.

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the first usage of the term ‘anarchism’ as opposed to ‘anarchy’ was in 1642. However, it is popularly accepted that the first usage of it as a political ideology in itself is by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who wrote in 1840, “Anarchy, — the absence of a master, of a sovereign, — such is the form of government to which we are every day approximating.” Thus, Proudhon adds the -ism—stating in a hypothetical back-and-forth “‘What are you, then?’ — ‘I am an anarchist.’”— to denote a deliberate political ideology.

Proudhon acknowledges that “[t]he meaning ordinarily attached to the word ‘anarchy’ is absence of principle, absence of rule; consequently, it has been regarded as synonymous with ‘disorder.’” Then he rejects these previous understandings, stating that “[a]lthough a firm friend of order, I am (in the full force of the term) an anarchist.”

A formal and ‘mainstream’ definition of anarchism can be found in the 1910 edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica, in which Pyotr Kropotkin writes that anarchism is “the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government – harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.”

Furthermore, it must be added that many thinkers have identified anarchism as the libertarian branch of the much larger socialist movement. Mikhail Bakunin—the famous anarchist rival of Karl Marx—identified anarchism as “Stateless Socialism” and writes that “freedom without Socialism is privilege and injustice” and that “Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.”

Continuing, in Anarchism and Other Essays, Emma Goldman writes that anarchism is “[t]he philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary” — which might be a commonly accepted definition by students of politics, who may not be deeply knowledgeable on the subject.

But two more contemporary thinkers, David Graeber and Noam Chomsky give definitions that, when coupled together — deepen an understanding of anarchism: Graeber, in The Democracy Project, writes that “[t]he easiest way to explain anarchism…is to say that it is a political movement that aims to bring about a genuinely free society — and that defines a ‘free society’ as one where humans only enter those kinds of relations with one another that would not have to be enforced by the constant threat of violence.” Noam Chomsky says, in an interview with Harry Kreisler, that…

“The core of the anarchist tradition, as I understand it, is that power is always illegitimate, unless it proves itself to be legitimate. So the burden of proof is always on those who claim that some authoritarian hierarchic relation is legitimate. If they can’t prove it, then it should be dismantled.”

There are many questions left to be asked of anarchism: how will individual violence be handled? How will a stateless society protect itself from neighboring states? What economic formations will take shape in the absence of a state? However, these are not questions to be answered here.

The most salient concept demonstrated is that anarchism is not an ideology of violence (or at least it is significantly less so than those ideologies that call for concentrations of violence in the state and its cronies) but one which opposes violence at a systemic level and seeks liberation and voluntary interaction in all spheres of life.

About the Writer
Eric Fleischmann,

Peter Kropotkin and the Anarchist Intellectual Tradition

by Jim Mac Laughlin

Peter Kropotkin’s philosophy of anarchism suffers from neglect in mainstream histories; misrepresented as a utopian creed or a recipe for social chaos and political disorder, the intellectual strengths and philosophical integrity is overlooked. Jim Mac Laughlin, author of Kropotkin and the Anarchist Intellectual Tradition, aims to change this; examining the history of the anarchist movement in light of Kropotkin.

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‘Anarchism is the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government – harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreement concluded between various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety needs and aspirations of a civilised being.’ – Kropotkin, Anarchism, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1910.

Few words have travelled further from their original meanings than ‘anarchy’ and ‘anarchists’. In

classical Greece and Rome these terms specifically referred to ‘barbaric’ people and crucially also ‘wild’ or ‘unruly’ places that were considered beyond the administrative control of city-states and military elites. Today, anarchism is simply equated with political chaos, while all those engaged in wilful acts of anti-state terrorism are regularly described as anarchists. In this work, the first comprehensive study of Peter Kropotkin’s intellectual contribution to modern anarchism, I argue that few minorities have been as misrepresented as anarchists. Every conceivable crime of political terrorism has been laid at their door, and anarchy has become a twenty-first century equivalent of wickedness and social evil.

In unearthing the roots of anarchism in evolutionary theory and historical grassroots traditions of sociability and mutuality, Kropotkin did more than anyone to provide anarchism with an historical pedigree and scientific legitimacy. He sought to advance the cause of the stateless society through political and intellectual debate and peaceful strategies. Anarchists, he claimed, did not seek inspiration ‘from on high’ – they simply maintained that human sentiments of pity, sympathy and mutual respect, which were, and still are, so essential to the successful evolution of stateless societies, were to be the natural basis of social policy and political morality. Thus, for Kropotkin, anarchism which he termed the ‘no-government system of society’, was not merely a political ideology, it was ‘a conception of the universe’ based on the interpretation of the whole of nature, including human nature as well as socio-economic and cultural history. Anarchist morality, or the ‘moral sense of people’, had its origins in the further elaboration of mutual-aid tendencies that had evolved in animal and human societies long before the first man-like creatures appeared on earth.

Kropotkin also demonstrated that notwithstanding the vicissitudes of history and the efforts of power-holders to crush human sociability and mutual aid tendencies in advanced capitalist societies, these social traits were so deeply intertwined with the evolution of the human race that they survived even into the era of advanced capitalism. As a social historian and anthropologist, he showed that, whenever humans wished to adapt to a new phase of development their constructive genius always drew inspiration from these primordial tendencies of sociability, co-operation and mutual aid. In so far as they were creations of the masses rather than their masters, progressive ethical systems and revolutionary morality had their origins in these same social tendencies. Therefore, he concluded, the ethical progress of the human race, especially over the longue durée, represented nothing less than the gradual extension of the sociability and mutual aid tendencies of animals and primitive tribes to the large ‘agglomerations’ of people in modern societies.

Writing in the latter half of the nineteenth century in terms that still have profound relevance to marginalised communities throughout the world today, Kropotkin relentlessly argued that ‘associationism’, federalism, social cooperation and mutual aid should become the guiding principles of progressive social and cultural change. He further insisted that the anarchist ‘no-government’ system of socialism was not a dream that could only be realised in the distant future. Neither was it a stage to be reached only after other stages had been passed through. It was the product of ‘processes of life everywhere about us, which we may advance or hold back.’ Basing his anarchism on scientific evidence for sociability and mutual aid in nature and human society, he held that social convention and historical tradition could also become the foundations upon which egalitarian, self-governing societies could be constructed in the future. Indeed, for Kropotkin, social custom and historical tradition were analogous to instinctual behaviour in the animal world. He also demonstrated that social change in human society had clear parallels with evolutionary change in organic nature. Having demonstrated that mutualism and sociability were important factors of evolution in the pre-scientific past, he went on to suggest that they would be infinitely more important in the future, particularly if underpinned by a new humanism based on anarchist principles and scientific research that served the common good rather than the sectional interests of any one class or authoritarian state.

In common with other socialists, Kropotkin believed that competitive free enterprise and the private ownership of land, capital and the means of production were fated to disappear. The need for government, he argued, would also disappear once all requisites for production became the common property of society, to be managed solely by producers, rather than by state authorities and the owners of wealth. In response to those who accused him of placing too much faith in evolutionary theory and too little in revolutionary action, he called on his fellow anarchists to actively ‘promote their ideas directly amongst the labour organisations to induce those unions to a direct struggle against capital, without placing their faith in parliamentary legislation’. This is still of fundamental importance today as hegemonic ideas about social change and political progress continue to stress the role of self-assertion, competition and struggle to the ethos of capitalism and the successful implementation of neoliberal policies in the global arena.

Contrary to conventional caricatures of anarchists, Kropotkin insisted that anarchists were not opposed to all manifestations of authority, they simply rejected the specific forms of authority associated with hierarchy and socio-economic privilege. While recognising the many varieties of anarchism, he stressed that all true anarchists shared a common characteristic that distinguished anarchism from other political creeds. In proclaiming the illegitimacy of ‘the principle of authority in social organisations’, anarchists of all hues professed a mutual ‘hatred of all constraints that originate in institutions founded on this principle’. Crucially, his opposition to the principle of authority extended equally to anarchist activists and to philosophers of anarchism. Regardless of their status as theorists or the calibre of their political thinking, no individual anarchist theorist or group of anarchists was to be allowed to formulate a libertarian ‘creed’ that might foster the development of canonical thinking. Neither could they devise an anarchist ‘catechism’ that could hamper freedom of anarchist thought or action either in the present or in the future. This is why the majority of anarchists still object to any close identification of anarchism with its best-known theorists and writers, including, not least, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, Tolstoy and Reclus.

With the exception of a handful of advanced libertarian thinkers such as Murray Bookchin, Noam Chomsky, Paul Goodman and Peter Marshall, twentieth-century writers on anarchism have generally failed to compete with the new mandarins of revolutionary thought as represented by state-centred Marxism, Maoism, and more recently political Islam. In the event, most traditional anarchist activists, not least Spanish and Italian anarchists in the first half of the twentieth century, struggled to keep alive the ideas of classical anarchists.

Nevertheless, as this work clearly demonstrates the heritage of classical anarchism is still to be found not only in the inspirational lives of self-sacrifice of these anarchists who dedicated to the service of ‘the wretched of the earth’. It is also evident in the intellectual stimulation that their writings have offered to all those who still believe that moral self-realisation must ultimately depend upon free choice, human dignity, sound ecological practice, social harmony, and fair moral judgements. These arguments must never be swapped for material affluence, the false promises of political democracy, and the illusions of collective security. Thus the anarcho-communist intellectual tradition that Kropotkin did so much to sustain has survived as a subaltern tradition right up to the present day, even if it sometimes seemed to lie dormant in the decades immediately after his death.

More recently, it has been experiencing a vibrant Renaissance with the growth of ‘academic anarchism’ and the growing popularity of anti-statist politics. With the emergence of the anti-globalisation movement, the rise of Occupy movements in cities as far apart as New York, Cairo, Barcelona, London and Athens, the birth of the Democracy Project, and the political coming of age of new groupings like Podemos and People Before Profit movement, anarchism has emerged as one of the most vibrant and exciting political movements of our times.

Despite the assertions of those critics who predicted that the emergence of affluent, industrial state-societies would sound the death knell of anarchism and usher in a new federalised and vibrantly democratic capitalist utopia, the passing of industrial society in the traditional core areas of global power has instead ushered in a new era of anarchist agitation and theorising. Conditions for the future growth and development of this new critical anarchism have rarely been better. The growing disillusionment with state-centred politics and the rise of the ‘nanny state’ calls for the rejection of political borders, the radical disavowal of sexism and racism, and the growth of increasingly intrusive ‘regimes of domination’ that have for so long structured modern life – all these should encourage political activists and social theorists alike to re-acquaint themselves with the classical works of modern anarchism, not least with the vast volume of work left by Kropotkin and Reclus.

The rapid growth of social media and trans-territorial modes of social and political organisation, together with the bankruptcy of state-centred Marxism and Islamic fundamentalism, the rejection of state-centred democracy, the denunciation of post-Keynesian austerity policies as well as the widespread appeal of ‘low-footprint’ lifestyles, the attractions of consensus decision-making, the growing attractions of ‘neighbourhood politics’ and libertarian municipalism, all point to a growing proportion of well-educated and highly articulate young activists in the direction of vibrant new conceptualisations of Kropotkin’s ‘no-government system of society’. Not only is this new ‘advocacy anarchism’ now flourishing, but debates within anarchism continue to flourish within and outside academic circles. This has resulted in the birth of intellectually sustained and critical new studies of anarchist theory and anarchist practice. This has clearly been helped by a renewed quest for free communities of liberation and solidarity that must not only be socially and economically sustainable in the traditional sense, but must also be capable of self-determination, self-transformation and creative self-negation.

As this study concludes, it is in this atmosphere that critical re-evaluations of the works of leading anarchist theorists must take place. Like other founding fathers of anarchist theory, he lamented the centralisation of state authority, the unification of nation-states, the commercialisation of social and environmental relations, the increased efficiency of state surveillance systems and the globalisation of metropolitan authority on the world stage. Today’s anarchists should not shy away from a critical reappraisal of Kropotkin’s work in their efforts to articulate an anarchist alternative to the failed state-centred strategies of the Left and Right. Today’s anarchists face a new challenge, one that must live up to the intellectual standards of pioneers like Kropotkin and Reclus in particular. This will involve a robust re-evaluation of the logic of anarchist scholarship and a critical reappraisal of the classics of anarchist thought in the light of the vibrant critiques of Marxism, structuralism, authoritarianism, sexism, racism, and post-colonialism that have added such intellectual vigour to antithetical theory and revolutionary praxis.

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Jim Mac Laughlin is a political geographer and social scientist who has published widely on state formation, nation separatism, political regionalism, emigration, racism and the ideology of the social sciences. He is the author of Reimagining the Nation State: The Contested Terrains of Nation-building (Pluto, 2001).

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Kropotkin and the Anarchist Intellectual Tradition is available from Pluto Press.