What Is Anarchism All About?

Whenever public protests ignite into violent behaviour, the mainstream media are often quick to refer to “anarchy” and to “anarchists”. Those who are referred to as anarchists are protesters who burn tyres or engage in battles with the police. In this narrative, anarchists are lawless hooligans and anarchy is about chaos and pointless violence.

The latest example is the Million Mask March in London on November 5. This event was indeed organised by a number of anarchist groups – and there were limited outbreaks of violence – but the equation of chaos and violence with anarchism is about as productive as the equation of circles with squares. It is a crude and bizarre misrepresentation.

What is anarchism anyway? It is a radical and revolutionary political philosophy and political economy. While there are many definitions and many anarchisms, most would agree to the definition formulated by PeterKropotkin. This definition is in an article which Kropotkin was invited to write for the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

According to Kropotkin, anarchism: “is a 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 the 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 civilised being.”

Free society of free individuals

Let’s unpack this a bit. The etymology of the term traces back to the Greek word “anarkhia”, which means “without rulers” or “without authority”. It stands for the absence of domination, hierarchy and power over others.

Anarchism is a process whereby authority and domination is being replaced with non-hierarchical, horizontal structures, with voluntary associations between human beings. It is a form of social organisation with a set of key principles, such as self-organisation, voluntary association, freedom, autonomy, solidarity, direct democracy, egalitarianism and mutual aid.

Based on these principles and values, anarchism rejects both a capitalist economy and a nation state that is governed by means of a representative democracy. It is a utopian project that aspires to combine the best parts of liberalism with the best parts of communism.

At its heart is a mix of the liberal emphasis on individual freedom and the communist emphasis on an equal society. I particularly like the definition of Cindy Milstein about anarchism being a “free society of free individuals”.

Long history

The political philosophy of anarchisms emerged in the mid-19th century – as part of the thought of Enlightenment. Key anarchist thinkers include Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, William Godwin, Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman, and Max Stirner. Proudhon is credited as the first self-proclaimed anarchist and is often seen as the founder of classic anarchist thinking. In particular, he developed the concept of spontaneous order in society, where organisations can emerge without central or top-down coordination.

In fact, Godwin developed his anarchist theory half a century earlier – without ever using the term. His writings are a profound critique of the state and its structural violence, arguing that the state and its government has a bad influence on society in that it produces unwanted dependency. He has also pointed out that law and legislation is created by the rich and powerful. Sound familiar?

However, it is also important to emphasise that most anarchist principles, convictions and moral positions are not at all an invention of modern anarchist theory – they are as old as human civilisation. And due to the rather different political philosophies of liberalism and communism, anarchist theory – like most political ideologies – is not a consistent and homogeneous concept. It evolves as different people articulate its core ideologies in different ways.

We can at least distinguish between two rather different schools: social anarchism and libertarian anarchism (or free market anarchism). While social anarchism puts emphasis on society and often supports a political economy that socialises the means of production, libertarian anarchism is mostly concerned with ensuring the maximum amount of liberty for the individual. Here, the will of the individual is considered to be more important even than a harmonious and egalitarian society.

Anarchism and activism

Over the past two decades or so, anarchist practice has enjoyed a significant revival. This is particularly visible in new social movements that have been influenced by anarchist forms of organisation with horizontal structures and non-representative decision-making processes.

Anarchist forms of resistance have also largely informed the alter-globalisation movement – which believes in the benefits of global thinking but rejects economic globalisation. The 1999 battle of Seattle was perhaps the first moment of a reinvigorated anarchism. It has been followed my many other movements and forms of resistance such as Reclaim the Streets, EuroMayDay, various environmental movements, and more recently the Occupy movement and the hacktivist group Anonymous. And they are having quite an impact. One could easily argue that anarchist forms of resistance are now outperforming the more socialist and hierarchical forms of resistance.

Oscar Wilde, a libertarian anarchist, is widely associated with the following bonmot: “The problem with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings.”

An anarchist world?

But questions must be raised about the feasibility of anarchist practice. While anarchist organisation clearly can work on a local level, on the level of small communities and on a rural regional level (see the Zapatistamovement or large parts of Kurdish rural regions) the jury is still out on whether anarchist social organisation can be embedded in large urban areas, or on a national or global level.

How can forms of direct democracy, such as the general assembly of the Occupy movement, be built and maintained in settings with large populations? At first glance, this seems rather unlikely. Then again, digital technologies might open up new possibilities for large-scale forms of anarchist organisation. Certainly, anarchism is on the rise.

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The Tea Party Is Giving Anarchism A Bad Name

In a recent impassioned speech, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren used the word “anarchy” repeatedly to describe the tea party’s role in the ongoing government shutdown. So did Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who said on the Senate floor that “anarchists have taken over.”

If only that were true.

The figure of the anarchist has long dominated our national imagination. It’s a word that conjures up the lawless, the nihilistic and even the violent. It’s the image Senators Reid and Warren invoked in their talking points against the Republicans, and it’s the image law enforcement officials use over and over again to break up protests and illegally surveil social movements.

But political hooligans like those in the tea party are giving anarchism a bad name. In fact, they’re not really anarchists at all.

Real anarchist communities operate according to radically democratic principles. They theorize, and even organize, with egalitarian political and social visions in mind. Unlike tea party obstinacy, anarchism promotes cooperative forms of decision-making—not only in political life, but in social and economic institutions as well. Co-op book and grocery stores, community gardens, employee-owned businesses, land trusts and cooperative housing projects, as well as grassroots relief efforts like Occupy Sandy, are just a few examples of anarchist praxis at work in our society.

Anarchism is not lawless, but it does involve a critique of the state. Anarchists encourage us to place a burden of proof on existing authority structures, and push us to limit, or even dismantle, the power of institutions, regulations and individuals whose authority proves to be illegitimate.

That might sound at first like the tea party’s rallying cry, but there are important distinctions. Anarchists want to prefigure, within their own communities, the egalitarian societies they seek to create. In a political system like ours, which is dominated by money interests, they do not acknowledge institutions like the U.S. Congress as legitimate representatives of everyday people, nor as agents of a truly free, democratic society.

The tea party is trying to diffuse the power of centralized government, but, paradoxically, they’re using big corporate heads and political figures within centralized government to get there. When billionaire conservatives like David and Charles Koch are able to use the tea party as a fig leaf for promoting corporate deregulation, that does not anarchism make.

Despite their anti-authoritarianism, some of today’s anarchists concede that states can serve socially important functions like ensuring sound infrastructure, basic consumer protections and comprehensive social welfare (though they believe such services are better executed with decentralized communities). But they do not support coercive aspects of state sovereignty, such as those operative in our military and criminal justice systems, and institutions like the NSA. The tea party claims to be for small government, but it calls for a strong centralized military and highly militarized law enforcement, especially with regard to undocumented immigrants.

Anarchists seek to promote autonomy and challenge forms of control in other realms of social life as well, such as the family, religion and our education system. Tea partiers, by contrast, support highly conservative efforts that seek to restrain sexual freedom, impose the denial of climate change in our schools, and privilege Judeo-Christian values.

So if the tea party is not anarchist, what is? It’s closer to what we’ve seen with pro-democracy movements around the world—in Brazil, Turkey, Spain, Egypt and here at home—where large segments of society lost faith in their elected leadership and refused to recognize their authority. In all of these countries, activists rejected formal political organization, and instead created all-inclusive, leaderless movements to test the potential for social and political change from below.

In Egypt, they ousted a dictator. In Turkey and Brazil, they advocated for policy change. In Europe, they scored a financial transactions tax and, in some countries, a curb on CEO pay. In the United States, they highlighted the problem of the “1 percent.” And in each case, they did this without ceding their grassroots social movement power to political elites.

Anarchists believe, ultimately, in the power of people, not the people in power. The truth is, our top political and economic institutions are not really structured as representative bodies. The idea of representation is being used today to legitimize the vast decision-making powers of a ruling elite, of which tea party politicians are a part, who exercise an inordinate level of influence in our political and social system.

The ongoing government shutdown is putting the problem of American democracy and its relationship to social inequality back on the table. The real source of this governmental impasse is the fundamental marginalization of everyday Americans from political life—from the circles of power in which key decisions are being made (or not being made) about our well-being and future.

Reid and Warren’s misuse of the term “anarchism” thus presents us with a terrific irony: If anarchists had indeed taken over Congress, then the American people might be invited to collectively decide our fate, rather than entrust it to representatives of a powerful few. But a government by all, and leadership by many, is precisely what our politicians fear—on both sides of the aisle. Anarchism seeks to diffuse power based on hubris, superiority and the conceited pursuit of wealth, and re-root it in democratic principles and egalitarian ethics. Given our current situation, that doesn’t sound like such a bad thing.

Heather Gautney is author of “Protest and Organization in the Alternative Globalization Era“ (Palgrave). She is an associate professor of sociology at Fordham University.

Note: This post has been updated. The original version said that many anarchists think the state is sometimes better equipped than decentralized communities to provide certain social services. The language has since been refined for accuracy.

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Is Anarchism Russia's Solution?

For a Russian translation of the National-Anarchist Movement manifesto, please click here.

A column by Russian TV journalist Andrei Loshak is making waves in Russia, with over 400,000 people having read it so far. (Read it in English here.)

In the piece, Loshak detects a major change in the public attitude to the state. “Instead of anxiety and apathy," he argues, "wrath comes to the fore.” Furthermore, he answers the two eternal, “cursed questions” of Russian thinking about society: “Who is guilty?” and “What is to be done?”

Loshak's answer: the state is to be held responsible, and the solution, surprisingly enough, is anarchism.

He paints a dire picture of contemporary Russia, recounting IKEA's run-in with the authorities, or the case of Hermitage Capital Management investor William Browder and the subsequent scandal that erupted over Browder’s advocate Sergei Magnitsky, who was jailed and died after one year in prison.

He also notes the decay in Russian law-enforcement agencies, with its corruption and cover-ups and the shooting spree of police major Yevsyukov, which Loshak says marks a turning point in public consciousness.

That the corrupt state is responsible for this misery is not a surprising conclusion, but anarchy as the solution? With Russia these days mostly in the bellicose conservative-chauvinistic corner, suggesting anarchism seems to be rare and unexpected.

Loshak quotes the philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev who once said that “Russia is the most antistate country in the world. Anarchism is a phenomenon of the Russian spirit. It is characteristic of our far left as well as our far right. The Slavophiles and Dostoevsky were just as much anarchists as Bakunin, Kropotkin, or Tolstoy.”

To Loshak's mind, citizens -- with regard to the failing state -- should react with dignity to cynicism, with composure to moral decay, and, instead of cutting each other’s throats, should offer a helping hand.

But Loshak's argument makes several blunders.

Firstly, he grossly idealizes what he understands as the Russian strand of anarchism. This can be clearly shown by his depiction of a village in the Urals, which has been described as the “anarchic ideal of Count Kropotkin” -- in some way similar to Slavophiles praising the village community as the cradle of true Russianness. (From another perspective, the village can be seen as a place of dilapidation, heavy drinking, and ruthless morals.)

Secondly, Loshak confuses two concepts that should be kept separate: the state and those in power. By praising anarchistic forms of self-government, he automatically excludes any kind of statehood. In an infamous letter, Leo Tolstoy wrote:

This curious so-called science of law, which is essentially outright nonsense, conceived and disseminated not 'a coeur joie' as the French say, but with a distinctive and bad aim: to justify malicious deeds committed by people of the idle stratum.... For the ones in power, law is actually called the permission, which they gave to themselves, to force the people they govern to do what is beneficiary to the potentates. For the subjects, on the other hand, law is called the permission to do what is not forbidden for them.

Consider the impact if such a stance would become mainstream.

What Russia really needs is to reconcile with the state and aspire towards a Russian form of good governance with all its necessary checks and balances.

Otherwise, this strand of thinking could well lead to what Khodorkovsky recently described as a traditional Russian scenario: bottom-up and with blood.

This article is discussed on the N-AM Facebook group here.

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School Reports A-Level Student To Police About His Interest In Anarchism

UPDATE: The Guardian has written an excellent piece, 'Hampstead School's 'anarchist' blogger should not facecensure'. 

Original article below.

Headteacher tells police of pupil 'enchanted by anarchism' and tips off his chosen university 

Kinnan Zaloom, 19, labelled teachers as Orwellian totalitarian characters in The Hampstead Trash blog. Blog blocked in April by headmaster Jacques Szemalikowski. Headmaster of Hampstead School said he was 'duty bound' to prevent 'violent extremism' of student 'developing into an anarchist'. Blog now being run by anonymous current student.

A London headteacher reported an A-Level student to police and informed the university he had applied for that the teenager had succumbed to 'violent extremism' after he criticised the school in a blog.

Jacques Szemalikowski, the headmaster of Hampstead School, told 19-year-old Kinnan Zaloom never to return to the school grounds again after he set up a website [they also have a facebook page (and have written a 'final note' on the matter on their blog)] attacking the way it was run.

And he informed the school's on-site policemen and Glasgow University, where Mr Zaloom hoped to take a degree, that the student could be 'developing into an anarchist.

The Hampstead Trash, which Mr Zaloom started in February, contained a series of colourfully-worded articles that likened the school staff to characters in George Orwell's anti-totalitarian novels - most notably casting Mr Szemalikowski in the role of Animal Farm's chief pig, Napoleon.

In a style that he likened to that of the irreverent satirical magazine Private Eye, the young blogger accused the school of failing to push GCSE results any higher, a lack of investment in musical instruments and gym equipment, and of not listening to pupils' views.

[Left] Trash: A post from Mr Zaloom's blog, run along with several students, which slammed the school management using the fruitiest of language.

Mr Szemalikowski confirmed yesterday that he had blocked the blog from school computers in April and condemned the articles as 'mad writings'.

He said he had 'major concerns and was duty bound under legal acts for the prevention of violent extremism' and that he was 'erring on the side of caution' in taking action.

'It is fairly worrying stuff,' he added.

Mr Szemaliskowski said he was particularly concerned 'that Kinnan has mentioned the ideologies of anarchism and individualism on this blog'.

'I must do something,' he said. 'In the last year he has become more and more enchanted by anti-establishment ways of thinking and has even said that there is an inherent risk that every government is corrupt.

[Left] School for scandal: Hampstead School in Camden, north London, teaches around 1,300 pupils.

'I am not an expert in these matters but I had training in how to look for things that might need a second opinion. I didn’t think it was illegal but the undertones towards the end made me think - does this need a second opinion?

'I phoned Glasgow to warn them what sort of person they were dealing with, to advise them that this person thinks thoughts like these, and they could then make an informed decision. 

'I am duty bound to do that.'

The headteacher added: 'I also reported what he had written to the police, and the officer I spoke to said he would pass these mad writings of his on to a colleague.'

Neither Mr Szemalikowski nor Mr Zaloom has since heard from police.

[Left] Bloggers: The website is 'edited' by students under the pseudonyms Heywood Jablome and Cllr. Hugh G. Rection.

The north-west London school caters for around 1,300 pupils, with former students including novelist Zadie Smith, women’s England international footballer Rachel Yankey and actress Sadie Frost.

The blog is now being updated by another, anonymous student as Mr Zaloom has left the school.

In his final post on the blog, Mr Zaloom wrote: 'This past year, I have become more and more enchanted by the ideology of anarchism and individualism.'

He added: 'I am not hailing anarchism as the only way of life, just pointing out that any type of government has the risk of being corrupt and vile.'

Mr Zaloom said he had been summoned to the headteacher’s office on his last day and interrogated about his articles, before he was warned never return to the school site - even to pick up his A-level exam results - because the work was 'offensive'.

One article that caused particular trouble commented that the school was 'playing the school league tables' in terms of how results were presented.

It claimed there were tensions among staff members about the way the school was run, outlined in phrases such as: 'So f*** you school management, f*** you.'

Another article read: 'The school claims again and again that it listens to students needs and that it takes into consideration what students say and care about. This is utter horses***. So much horses*** indeed, that findus’ lasagne is bewildered' - referring to the scandal earlier last year, when ready meals were found to contain horse meat.

The article went on: 'The school magazine is not worth the paper it is printed on and does s*** all to voice student consensus.'

Mr Zaloom, who did not get the grades he needed to get into Glasgow and will be studying mathematics at Portsmouth University, said: 'They said I had brought the school into disrepute. I said that was their opinion, but nothing I had done was illegal so why such severe action?

'I was prepared to apologise for the language. But what worries me is if I had been a year younger they said they would have expelled me halfway through my A-levels, and that means they would have been prepared to ruin my education because they didn’t like my thoughts.

'It was useless to call the police because I didn’t break the law.

'I was concerned he’d called Glasgow because I’m worried he would go to those lengths of intimidation to control a student’s thoughts. But I wasn’t too panicked because it turned out I didn’t have the grades to get in there anyway.'

Mr Zaloom, who co-founded a debating society at the school, compared his treatment to those fighting for press freedom in the Middle East.

He said: 'Obviously it’s not on the same scale at all, this injustice is small, I know that. But my family are from Jordan so I know how things work there, and newspapers are not allowed to write what they want.

'Everybody is controlled, and I can see that happening here. It reminds me of Ingsoc [a totalitarian government in the Orwell novel Nineteen Eighty-Four], people must conform or they are out.

'When he blocked the blog from the school’s computers that was bizarre. How does he find the time to go round doing things like that?'

Mr Szemalikowski defended his actions, saying: 'He posted lies about the school and I will not tolerate that.

'His posts were scattered with the f-word and c-word and if a student spoke like that in school they would be expelled. So of course I blocked the blog, and told him never to come back. 

'He’s right, if he had been younger, he would have been expelled.

'It would have been his responsibility that he ruined his education, not mine.'

He added that if Mr Zaloom had not used bad language he would still have warranted an expulsion 'for his mad ideas and ranting'.

Mr Zaloom said he wanted to thank 'a lot of the very good teachers at Hampstead School' but felt they were not given the chance to 'teach the way they want to'.

(Source) 

Related article of interest

* UK Anarchists Targetted: Police Tells Public To Report Anti-Government Beliefs As Terrorism '

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