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An Introduction to Anarchy in the 21st Century

  1. What is Anarchy?

  2. What is Archy?

  3. What is Autonomy?

  4. What is Mutual Aid?

  5. What is Direct Action?

  6. What is Praxis?

  7. What is Leftism and How Does it Relate to Anarchy?

  8. Do Anarchists Support Free Speech?

  9. Are libertarian socialists the same as anarchists?

  10. Can Capitalism Be Anarchist?

What is Anarchy?

Anarchy is the relentless negation of structures of domination, the endeavor to carve out little pockets of life free from exploitation and suffering.

Anarchy is the uncompromising push against oppression and the vocal demand for autonomy and self-determination, the rejection of all the classes, institutions and dogmas built to rule people.

Anarchy is above all a practice, not a theory. It is about actively working to end authoritarian relationships wherever they exist, and build non-authoritarian alternatives.

It is not about trying to prescribe a way of life for an imagined place and time, and imagined people. It is for real people and dealing with real problems.

Anarchy is a living and breathing practice that we incorporate into our everyday lives. A personal stance against domination that informs all our decisions and thus shapes the trajectory of our existence.

There is no end-goal to anarchy. It is an ongoing, unending fight against hierarchical systems and the authority figures that construct them.

Anarchy is a desire for freedom from tyranny. Anarchy is countless generations of disparate people with the drive to be freer than they are under the systems that forcibly govern them.

An anarchist is anyone who refuses to be governed, dominated, ruled.

Here are some of those people.


Anarchy is about us not needing that imposed structure from anyone, and just being cognizant and caring and compassionate enough to take care of ourselves and our communities and each other without anyone making it happen. It’d be like democratic socialism, except without anyone calling it that and imposing a structure. It’s more along the lines of a village model. When people call that a primitive style of governance, that’s offensive to me. The village model is probably the most effective model of taking care of communities. That’s what I’m all about: giving power to communities to take care of themselves and each other.

-Candi CdeBaca


Anarchy is the thing we want. It is the Beautiful Idea. It is the entirely impractical idea that we can be, and must insist on being, totally free. From domination, of course, but also from mundanity and morality. It is the id to the super-ego of society and its shaming, fear-instilling humiliations and self-inflicted limitations.

Anarchy is an act of faith—a leap into the unknown—and a totally sober proposition. It is an explosion and the simple things we do unconsciously. It is something that predates civilization and cannot be tamed by cities, governments, exchange, or politics.

Anarchy is anarchy, it is both organization (along completely different lines than the ones that currently exist on a broad level), and chaos. It is each of us having the ability to determine our own lives and the ways that we relate to others, from our most intimate relationships to the more far-flung. Anarchy is impossible and it is that very impossibility that makes it desirable. As desirable as the eventual lover or the water at the end of a long hike. As impossible as independence, autonomy, and collaboration among equals.

Long Live Anarchy!

-anonymous


Anarchy describes a particular type of situation, one in which either authority does not exist or its power to control is negated. Such a situation guarantees nothing—not even the continued existence of that situation, but it does open up the possibility for each of us to start creating our lives for ourselves in terms of our own desires and passions rather than in terms of social roles and the demands of social order. Anarchy is not the goal of revolution; it is the situation which makes the only type of revolution that interests me possible—an uprising of individuals to create their lives for themselves and destroy what stands in their way. It is a situation free of any moral implications, presenting to each of us the amoral challenge to live our lives without constraints.

Since the anarchic situation is amoral, the idea of an anarchist morality is highly suspect. Morality is a system of principles defining what constitutes right and wrong behavior. It implies some absolute outside of individuals by which they are to define themselves, a commonality of all people that makes certain principles applicable to everyone.

-Feral Faun


As opponents of control, we should not assume an adversarial position (like the forces of counter-control), nor identify ourselves with the oppressed (the controlled); rather, we should situate ourselves within the matrix of anarchy, and become uncontrollables. Only then can we develop a liberatory praxis, which simultaneously promotes the disintegration of the entire control complex, and facilitates others to reintegrate within the creative potentialities of anarchy. We should be neither demonic, nor humanist, but anarchic.

Our divine principle should not be deistic power, or demonic, Dionysian energies, or human community, but positive and creative chaos (a natural “order” which the advocates of order designate as disorder). Chaos is homologous with ecological order, and social ecology constitutes the specifically human component within that order. It is from this position that we must approach those existential problems that remain so troubling.

-John Moore


If anarchy does not have a road map then we (as anarchists) are free to work together. Our projects might not be of the same scale as the general strike, or even the halting of business-as-usual in a major metropolitan area, but they would be anarchist projects.

An anarchy without road map or adjectives could be one where the context of the decisions that we make together will be of our own creation rather than imposed upon us. It could be an anarchy of now rather than the hope of another day. It would place the burden of establishing trust on those who actually have a common political goal (the abolition of the state and capitalism) rather than on those who have no goal at all or whose goal is antithetical to an anarchist one.

An anarchy without road map or adjectives does not ignore difference but instead places it in the context that it belongs in. When we are faced with a moment of extreme tension, when everything that we know appears about to change, then we may choose different forks in the road. Until that time anarchists should approach each other with the naïvete that we approach the world with. If we believe that the world can change and could change in a radical direction from the one traveled the past several thousand years then we should have some trust in others who desire the same things.

-Aragorn!


The goals of anarchy don’t include replacing one ruling class with another, neither in the guise of a fairer boss or as a party. This is key because this is what separates anarchist revolutionaries from Maoist, socialist, and nationalist revolutionaries who from the onset do not embrace complete revolution. They cannot envision a truly free and equalitarian society and must to some extent embrace the socialization process that makes exploitation and oppression possible and prevalent in the first place.

-Kuwasi Balagoon


Our anarchy is an anarchy of abundance. It must be in order to survive against the power of our enemies. We are forcing the horizons wide open to the imagination. We believe there can (and must) be a world that has both wilderness and cities—a planet where people live in hunting-gathering tribes and in the diverse neighborhoods of cities. Where the goals of both groups are in harmony. There is enough creativity in our minds, enough courage in our souls, and enough passion in our hearts to accommodate both green and urban anarchy. No desire need succeed by destroying the other.

-Curious George Brigade


Anarchy is positioned to articulate —not a program— but a number of revolutionary themes with contemporary relevance and resonance. It is unambiguously anti- political, and many people are anti- political. It is hedonistic, and many people fail to see why life is not to be lived enjoyably if it is to be lived at all. It is “individualistic” in the sense that if the freedom and happiness of the individual —ie, each and every really existing person, every Tom, Dick and Murray —is not the measure of the good society, what is? Many people wonder what’s wrong with wanting to be happy. Post-leftist anarchy is, if not necessarily rejective, then at least suspicious of the chronically unfulfilled liberatory promise of high technology. And maybe most important of all is the massive revulsion against work, an institution which has become more and more important, and oppressive, to people outside academia who actually have to work. Most people would rather do less work than attend more meetings. Post-leftist anarchists mostly don’t regard our times one-dimension- ally, as either a “decadent, bourgeoisified era” of “social reaction” or as the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. The system, unstable as ever, never ceases to create conditions which undermine it. Its self-inflicted wounds await our salt. If you don’t believe in progress, it’ll never disappoint you and you might even make some progress.

-Bob Black


By taking for our watchword anarchy, in its sense of no-government, we intend to express a pronounced tendency of human society. In history we see that precisely those epochs when small parts of humanity broke down the power of their rulers and reassumed their freedom were epochs of the greatest progress, economical and intellectual. Be it the growth of the free cities, whose unrivalled monuments —free work of free associations of workers—still testify of the revival of mind and of the well-being of the citizen; be it the great movement which gave birth to the Reformation —those epochs witnessed the greatest progress when the individual recovered some part of his freedom. And if we carefully watch the present development of civilised nations, we cannot fail to discover in it a marked and ever-growing movement towards limiting more and more the sphere of action of government, so as to leave more and more liberty to the initiative of the individual. After having tried all kinds of government, and endeavoring to solve the insoluble problem of having a government ‘which might compel the individual to obedience, without escaping itself from obedience to collectively,’ humanity is trying now to free itself from the bonds of any government whatever, and to respond to its needs of organisation by the free understanding between individuals prosecuting the same common aims.

-Pëtr Kropotkin


There are a million ways to go about attacking the interconnected structures of power and oppression, and creating anarchy. Only you can decide which paths to take. It’s important not to let your efforts be diverted into any of the channels that are built into the system to recuperate and neutralize resistance, such as requesting change from a political party rather than creating it yourself, or allowing your efforts and creations to become commodities, products, or fashions. To free ourselves, we need to regain control over every aspect of our lives: our culture, our entertainment, our relationships, our housing and education and healthcare, the way we protect our communities and produce food — everything. Without getting isolated in single-issue campaigns, figure out where your own passions and skills lie, what problems concern you and your community, and what you can do yourself. At the same time, stay abreast of what others are doing, so you can build mutually inspiring relationships of solidarity.

-Peter Gelderloos


The State had now disappeared from my conception of society; there remained only the application of Anarchism to those vague yearnings for the outpouring of new ideals in education, in literature, in art, in customs, social converse, and in ethical concepts. And now the way became easy; for all this talking up and down the question of wealth was foreign to my taste. But education! As long ago as I could remember I has dreamed of an education which should be a getting at the secrets of nature, not as reported through another’s eyes, but just the thing itself; I had dreamed of a teacher who should go out and attract his pupils around him as the Greeks did of old, and then go trooping out into the world, free monarchs, learning everywhere —learning nature, learning man, learning to know life in all its forms, and not to hug one little narrow spot and declare it the finest one on earth for the patriotic reason that they live there, and here I picked up Wm. Morris’ News from Nowhere, and found the same thing. And there were the new school artists in France and Germany, the literateurs, the scientists, the inventors, the poets, all breaking way from ancient forms. And there were Emerson and Channing and Thoreau in ethics, preaching the supremacy of individual conscience over the law,— indeed, all that mighty trend of Protestantism and Democracy, which every once in a while lifts up its head above the judgments of the commonplace in some single powerful personality.

That indeed is the triumphant word of Anarchism: it comes as the logical conclusion of three hundred years of revolt against external temporal and spiritual authority—the word which has no compromise to offer, which holds before us the unswerving ideal of the Free Man.

-Voltairine de Cleyre


Anarchy, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property, from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.

-Emma Goldman

What is Archy?

The dictionary definition of 'archy' is any body of authoritative officials organized in nested ranks. Be it aonarchy, an oligarchy, a republic, a feudal state or any other hierarchical society.

While anarchy is the opposition to social hierarchy and domination, archy is the full embodiment of those things. While anarchy calls for the absence of rulers, archy depends on the majority of a population serving and obeying a minority of rulers. Sometimes a few rulers (e.g. monarchies), and sometimes many (e.g. social democracies).

Hierarchies exist for rulers to maintain their social control & power over the population. This control is maintained with violent force by authorities appointed by the rulers: the army, national guard, police, courts, prisons, social workers, media, tax collectors, etc.

Not all guidance given by one person to another constitutes hierarchy. Choosing to accept a specialist's expertise in their craft needn't create a hierarchy or make them your ruler. A roofer laying your roof or a chef cooking your meal needn't be your superior on a hierarchy simply because they are providing you with a valued service.

Similarly, an individual using force to strike a blow at the system of authority that oppresses them does not turn the individual into an authority.

Authority is not simply an isolated instance of the use of force, but an ongoing social relationship between two parties. It is a relationship where one party has the socially legitimized right to command, and the other party has the corresponding obligation to obey.

Destroying archy where you see it does not create archy, it creates anarchy.

What is Autonomy?

From sub.media

Autonomy is one of the most important of all anarchist principles, and a building block for understanding anarchist philosophy more broadly. So what is it, exactly?

Well... basically, it's freedom. But more than that, it's a particularly an anarchist type of freedom.. the freedom to make decisions, and then act out those decisions without asking permission from a higher power.

In some ways, autonomy is similar to liberty, a political concept that dates back to Europe's so-called “Age of Enlightenment” in the 18th century. Back in those days, liberty was a radical new idea that sought to put limits on the absolute power of kings and queens. Its early advocates argued that human beings possessed certain inalienable rights, granted to them by God, which rulers had to respect. This idea was obviously pretty popular, and so it soon became the rallying cry of the French and American Revolutions, which helped overthrow feudalism and usher in the era of liberal democracy.

Over the centuries, countless astute, and not-so-astute political thinkers, from Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson, to Alex Jones and Glenn Beck have claimed liberty as a universal human right. But to say that this principle hasn't been universally applied would be a gross understatement. This is because from its very beginnings, the concept of liberty has existed within a framework of European global conquest, a process facilitated by colonialism, slavery and genocide. Even today, the language of liberty is still used to mobilize people's support for imperialist wars. Remember when the United States government claimed they were bringing freedom to Iraq?

The roots of this contradiction lie in the fact that liberty has always been tied to the existence of states, and the associated legal category of citizens. Often this is described as a social contract. In exchange for obedience to state authority, citizens are granted rights and freedoms, such as freedom of expression, freedom to associate, and the right to pursue happiness or bear arms. Non-citizens, or citizens of other states are not included in this contract. And even putting aside the problem of who gets to be considered a citizen, just like anything else that is given to you, rights can also be taken away. At the end of the day, it's politicians and courts who get to decide what rights you are allowed to exercise at any given moment.

Autonomy, on the other hand, doesn't rely on a state-based framework of rights. Rather than concentrating power and decision-making in the tops of social and political hierarchies, autonomy starts at the level of the individual, and scales up. If you’re a visual thinker, it might be helpful to imagine it as sort of like an inverted pyramid. As the scope of autonomy grows to include more and more people, we move from talking about individual autonomy to collective autonomy – the power of groups of people to make collective decisions on issues that affect them directly.

Individual and collective autonomy are indivisible under anarchism. You can't have one without the other. Autonomous collectives are made up of autonomous individuals, who have all made the decision to work together to pursue their common interests. Unless you’re living in a cabin in the woods, it's difficult to exercise individual autonomy outside of a collective, first of all because those in power make it hard to get away with, and second because human beings are inherently social creatures.

Building collective autonomy is what anarchism is all about. Whether this assumes the form of an autonomous feminist collective that gets together to make decisions on how to fight patriarchy, or neighbourhood assemblies that come together to fight gentrification... or even the millions of Kurds in Rojava who are building social structures that are autonomous from the Syrian state. While these are just a few examples, the thing that connects them all is a shared pursuit of greater collective autonomy.

And that’s something we should all be striving for…. because at the end of the day… do you really need someone in authority telling you what you can or can’t do?

What is Mutual Aid?

From sub.media

Mutual Aid is a guiding factor behind anarchist practice, and an essential framework for understanding anarchist views on social organization more broadly. So... what is it, exactly?

Well... in its simplest form, mutual aid is the motivation at play any time two or more people work together to solve a problem for the shared benefit of everyone involved. In other words, it means co-operation for the sake of the common good.

Understood in this way, mutual aid is obviously not a new idea, nor is it exclusive to anarchists. In fact, the very earliest human societies practised mutual aid as a matter of survival, and to this day there are countless examples of its logic found within the plant and animal kingdoms.

To understand anarchists’ specific embrace of mutual aid, we need to go back over 100 years, to the writings of the famous Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin, who in addition to sporting one of the most prolific beards of all time, just so happened to also be an accomplished zoologist and evolutionary biologist.

Back in Kropotkin's day, the field of evolutionary biology was heavily dominated by the ideas of Social Darwinists such as Thomas H. Huxley. By ruthlessly applying Charles Darwin's famous dictum “survival of the fittest” to human societies, Huxley and his peers had concluded that existing social hierarchies were the result of natural selection, or competition between free sovereign individuals, and were thus an important and inevitable factor in human evolution.

Not too surprisingly, these ideas were particularly popular among rich and politically powerful white men, as it offered them a pseudo-scientific justification for their privileged positions in society, in addition to providing a racist rationalization of the European colonization of Asia, Africa and the Americas.

Kropotkin attacked this conventional wisdom, when in 1902 he published a book called Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, in which he proved that there was something beyond blind, individual competition at work in evolution.

Kropotkin demonstrated that species that were able to work together, or who formed symbiotic arrangements with other species based on mutual benefit, were able to better adapt to their environment, and were granted a competitive edge over those species who didn't, or couldn't.

In today’s metropolitan societies, people are socialized to see themselves as independent, self-sufficient individuals, equipped with our own condos, bank accounts, smartphones and facebook profiles. However, this notion of human independence is a myth, promoted by corporations and states seeking to mould us into atomized, and easily controlled consumers, concerned primarily with our own short-term well-being. The truth is that human beings are incredibly interdependent. In fact, that’s the key to our success as a species.

Do you ever spend time thinking about where the food you eat, or the clothes you wear come from? What about the labour and materials that went into building your house, or your car? Left to fend for ourselves without the comforts of civilization, few among us would survive a week, let alone be able to produce a fraction of the myriad commodities we consume every day.

From the great pyramids commissioned by the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, to today’s globe-spanning production and supply chains, the primary function of the ruling class has always been to organize human activity. And everywhere that they have done so, they have relied on coercion. Under capitalism, this activity is organized through either direct violence, or the internalized threat of starvation created by a system based on private ownership of wealth and property.

Capitalism can inspire people to do many amazing things, as long as there is a profit to be made. But in the absence of a profit motive, there are many important tasks that it will not and cannot ever accomplish, from eradicating global poverty and preventable diseases, to removing toxic plastics from the oceans. In order to carry out these monumental tasks, we require a change in the ethos that connects us to one another, and to the world that sustains us. A shift away from capitalism... towards mutual aid.

Glimpses of the Anarchist ideal of mutual aid can be seen today in communities of open source software developers, and in programmers coming up with new forms of encryption to thwart NSA surveillance. They can be seen in neighbours coming together to organize a daycare collective, and in the aftermath of disasters such as Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, when in the absence of state institutions, perfect strangers rush to one another’s aid. It can be seen in the bravery of the white helmets of Aleppo, who risk their lives to pull children from the collapsed ruins of buildings hit by Assad’s barrel bombs.

Imagine a world in which human activity was not organized on the basis of ceaseless competition over artificially scarce resources, but the pursuit of the satisfaction of human needs… and you will understand a vision of the world that anarchists seek to create.

What is Direct Action?

From sub.media

Direct Action is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot when describing anarchist tactics and rightly so, since it's one of the main ways anarchists put our values of autonomy, self-organization and mutual aid into practice.

So what is it exactly?

Well, a simple definition would be to say that a direct action is a political action aimed at achieving a specific goal or objective, and which is carried out directly by an individual or group of people, without appealing to a higher authority for legitimacy.

Now, this broad definition covers a huge range of activities: everything from banner drops, to prison breaks. And it doesn't necessarily tell us much about the politics of those carrying out the action itself.

Direct actions are tactics, meaning that they are a specific type of action that can be used to implement a wide variety of strategies.

While you don't have to be an anarchist in order to carry out, or to participate in a direct action, the concept itself holds a special importance for anarchists and other anti-authoritarian radicals.

And that's because well-timed and well-executed direct actions can offer an escape from the endless cycle of representational politics, which assumes its highest form in the state.

The German philosopher Max Weber famously defined the state as a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force. In other words, state violence, whether dispensed by a politician's pen, a judge's gavel, or a cop's baton, is a manifestation of legitimate force, and a harsh reminder of the state's role as the ultimate mediator of social conflict.

This mandate includes everything from interpersonal disputes that end up settled in the courts, or by someone calling the cops, all the way up to the broader conflicts that spring from systemic inequality and the structural imbalances inherent to capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, ableism and hetero-patriarchy.

In its purest form, direct action does not aim to persuade those in power, but seeks to foster and assert the power of those carrying out the action themselves.

When people carry out a direct action, they are rejecting the state's monopoly on decision-making, and asserting their own autonomy while providing an example for others to follow.

To take just one example, rather than petitioning a politician to vote against the construction of a pipeline or appealing to state-controlled regulatory bodies, those who favour a direct action approach often find it more effective and empowering to go out and block the pipeline themselves directly.

Direct action can also be used to set up networks of mutual aid.

Fifty years ago, the Black Panthers were faced with the reality of widespread poverty and lack of service provision in their communities. Rather than appealing to the government, or to the conscience of White America, the Panthers set to work organizing their own health clinics and breakfast programs for hungry school children.

These programs were part of a broader strategy of building community power, and were identified by FBI Director J Edgar Hoover as a primary threat to national security - by which he meant a threat to the legitimacy of the state, and the white supremacist power structure that upholds it.

Because they transgress the official channels of politics, and often the law itself, direct action campaigns are inevitably met with a whole toolbox of tactics aimed at bringing conflicts back under state control. These can range from state and corporate-funded non-profits infiltrating and co-opting grassroots movements in order to force a change in tactics or leadership, all the way up to extreme repression, such as mass incarceration and targeted assassinations carried out by state and paramilitary forces.

Although as a concept, direct action has probably existed for as long as there have been hierarchies to rebel against, the term itself dates back to the early workers movement, where it was used to describe militant practices such as industrial sabotage and wildcat strikes.

By physically blocking production, and collectively defending themselves from repression, workers were able to force concessions from their capitalist masters.

The widespread use of these tactics eventually led to the legalization of trade unions and a whole host of concessions aimed at bringing the more radical sections of the workers movement back under state control.

One of the most significant heydays of direct action in modern history took place in 1970s Italy. Faced with a housing crisis provoked by capitalist restructuring of the economy, thousands of migrants from the country's south squatted apartment blocks, and physically defended families from eviction.

When the government attempted to hike transit fares and energy costs, tens of thousands of people refused to pay the increased rates, in collective actions known as auto-reductions.

Italy was, at that time, a deeply religious, conservative and rigidly patriarchal country, in which both abortion and divorce were illegal.

Within this context, a fearless women's liberation movement organized an underground network of clinics, with doctors and nurses providing hundreds of volunteers, with necessary skills to perform clean and safe abortions.

This direct action approach to reproductive health was complimented by massive and regular demonstrations calling for the legalization of abortion, which were ultimately successful.

In our current age of increasing polarization, uncertainty and insecurity, direct action offers a way for our movements to build and assert our collective power, both to defend our communities, and to fight for the world we want to live in.

What is Praxis?

A question you'll often get when you attempt to discuss anarchism with people new to these ideas is how practical is anarchy? How can anarchy be demonstrated to me in a way that I can appreciate its effectiveness? Nothing is more effective in demonstrating the value of anarchy than praxis.

Praxis is any action that embodies and realizes anarchist theory. It's a valuable method for creating awareness of anarchist causes and building solidarity in your community.

Examples of praxis:

  • Setting up a Food Not Bombs chapter in your community.

  • Squatting an unused building to provide a safe space for homeless people.

  • Guerilla gardening.

  • Setting up a free shop that people can freely take what they need from.

  • Building community gardens to feed and engage the community.

  • Preparing free meals for homeless people.

  • Helping people install a free and open source operating system and the Tor browser for privacy and security.

  • Converting old combustion-engine cars to electric.

  • Make a zine/informational about an important topic.

  • Creating memes from an Anarchist perspective.

  • Assassinating dictators.

  • Creating an autonomous zone.

  • Horizontal community public safety organizing to replace the police.

  • Teaching people how to steal from the rich effectively.

  • Creating a space online where Anarchists can share their ideas with each other.

  • Aiding in defending indiginous sovereignty.

  • Being support for people suffering from addictions, and helping them be on a healthy path they want to be on.

  • Stopping pipelines from being built.

  • Investigating history, and appreciating the context for how you have come to be.

  • Identifying privileges caused by being a part of a white-supremacist, hetero-normative, patriarchal, trans-phobic, classist, state controlled labor farm.

  • Calling out problematic behaviour in comrades, no matter their status in the group.

  • Teaching people to be self sufficient by gardening, foraging and upcycling.

  • Starting an anarchist bike collective to fix people's bikes.

  • Making anarchist music that shines a light on injustices in the world.

  • Setting up a community mesh-net to share data with people in a decentralized manner.

What is Leftism and How Does it Relate to Anarchy?

The left vs right divide comes from which side of the French king members of the états généraux parliament were sitting before the French revolution - those on the right were monarchist, those on the left were in favour of the republic. In other words, both were in favour of the state. Obviously all this was a long time ago, and most people aren't really aware of it, but that doesn't mean it's not relevant, because the underlying assumption still persists that the whole spectrum of conceivable politics need to be enacted through the state. That's still true, whether it's social-democrats, liberals, Leninists, greens, whatever.

One of the most important things anarchists need to get across is that worthwhile political changes can only be achieved through direct action outside and against the state, parliamentary democracy and the various structures of class collaboration, and that means questioning the left vs right thing.

Anarchists are not leftists, we side with neither monarchy nor republic, dictatorship nor democracy, free market capitalism nor state capitalism. We stand for anarchy. The absolute negation of all authority, including both wings of government.

Do Anarchists Support Free Speech?

From Wikipedia.org:

“Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms (e.g. "downsizing" for layoffs, "servicing the target" for bombing, in which case it is primarily meant to make the truth sound more palatable. It may also refer to intentional ambiguity in language or to actual inversions of meaning. In such cases, doublespeak disguises the nature of the truth.”

The concept of "free speech" is fundamentally flawed, and has historically been used to convince citizens of states that they have "rights" that are gifted to them by the supposedly benevolent and generous state.

In actuality, the state doesn't give you rights; it controls them, limits them, denies you them. It uses its monopoly on violence to censor, stalk, spy on, imprison and terrorize anyone that would threaten to subvert its power.

When an authority grants you "free speech", what they've really done is take away your freedom to speak, and then allow certain people (typically the favored social class) to say certain things under certain conditions. There's nothing "free" about this. You're still forbidden from speech that would threaten the state or those it empowers. You're still legally viable for slandering powerful people that can afford as many lawyers as it takes to sue you into bankruptcy. You're still beaten to a bloody pulp (or worse) for talking back to a cop. You'll still be imprisoned, enslaved and murdered by the state and its enforcers for being the wrong race or the wrong gender or the wrong sexuality or the wrong religion or the wrong class and daring to resist your oppressors.

Free speech is a lie told to us by our rulers to convince us we need to be ruled by them.

Anarchists are aware enough to realize the state does not grant us any kind of freedom. The entire existence of the state is predicated on taking freedom away from us to empower the rich and powerful minority that the state exists to serve. So as anarchists; as people who don't want to be ruled, people who see the blatant lies our rulers tell us for what they are, it would make little sense for us to support an inherently Orwellian concept as "free speech". Much more honest words for this concept would be "controlled speech" or "state-approved speech".

Really, when the state talks about freedom of speech, they're most often talking about the freedom to be a hateful bigot - since bigotry is really the only type of speech the state will go out of its way to protect. Bigotry allows the state to scapegoat undesirable groups and thus create gaping social divisions. If everyone is villainizing migrants or gays, those groups will serve as a fine distraction. Ensuring our rulers and their benefactors can live to exploit us for another day as we focus our rage at anyone but them.

According to the state, white supremacists are free to incite hatred against non-whites (which has often led to mass murder), but if someone were to say they think the president of the nation deserves to be stabbed for his crimes... Well, that person would promptly be carted off to prison for voicing such a dangerous idea.

Unfortunately, some people insist on using bigoted or otherwise oppressive language in anarchist spaces, claiming that free speech allows them to do so. Since we've established that free speech is nothing more than an insipid lie our rulers tell us in order to control us, it's important that we reject the dishonest language of the state when talking about anarchy, and take a long hard look at the reasons someone would have for clinging to the state's shrewd promises of "rights" and "freedoms" that simply don't exist.

"Free speech" is not an anarchist principle in any way. Actual anarchist principles of course include direct action, mutual aid, taking a strong stance against authority in all its guises, as well as freedom of association. This means we are free to associate with whoever we want and free to avoid associating with people that would build authoritarian structures to oppress us.

So let's talk about the people who enter anarchist spaces, direct slurs and hateful bigoted rhetoric at us, and then insist we accept their abuse because they have the sacred right to freedom of speech... These people simply have no understanding of anarchy. Their "right to free speech" that they insist we respect could only be granted to them by a state with a monopoly on violence. If someone comes into your space and calls you a racial slur, no institution should have the power to stop you from showing that person the door.

It takes an incredibly sheltered person to believe there should be no consequences for abuse. When someone is abusing you or people you care about, you should absolutely be free to take a stand and remove them from your space, no matter how many times the person cries "free speech" as they're telling you you're a worthless (slur).

The "freedom" to scapegoat, demonize and demean people who are different from you really stands in direct contradiction with anarchy. Discriminating against people based on ability, race, gender or sexuality creates authority. It makes you an authoritarian. Your rhetoric directly alienates the people who belong to the groups you're choosing to look down on in disgust and present as less-than human. By using demeaning language to chastise marginalized people for their perceived inadequacies, you're upholding normative social roles, creating classes and subclasses and strengthening the authoritarian power structures that directly oppress any people that belong to minority groups.

For example, by using the word "f*ggot" as an insult, you effectively cast gay people as being worthy of scorn and derision. You assert authority over everyone who isn't heterosexual and make life incredibly difficult for people that don't meet the normative standards you've helped construct to maintain the social dominance of heterosexuals.

Anarchists can and will choose to not associate with people that claim they have a right to oppress others. Anarchists are anti-authoritarian to our core, and this means we don't have to put up with hateful bigots in our spaces.

Are libertarian socialists the same as anarchists?

An anarchist by definition stands against all authority without exception, while a socialist by definition is simply someone who feels the means of production should be collectively owned. So socialism is narrowly focused on economic issues, while anarchy is explicitly concerned with any and all social issues.

When a socialist also identifies as a libertarian, they're indicating that they're critical of the traditional authoritarian socialist states that have been so prominent in the world (the USSR, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Yugoslavia, Zimbabwe, etc.)

But while libertarian socialists might reject one-party states, that doesn't mean they reject states entirely. A lot of them will support democratic states or other democratic forms of government. Anarchists, on the other hand, reject all forms of government.

Generally someone who chooses to identify as a libertarian socialist rather than an anarchist is making a deliberate choice to use non-committal language that implies they're willing to accept certain forms of authority. If they opposed all authority as anarchists do, they'd likely call themselves an anarchist.

There are various forms of libertarian socialism that promote a supposedly 'libertarian' state, while there are other libertarian socialists who reject the state form, but embrace other forms of authority.

Communalists are a famous example of libertarian socialists who embrace various forms of authority including majoritarianism but stop short of supporting a full-blown state. But the form of government they do support greatly resembles states on a smaller, more localized scale.

While a few anarchists might also choose to identify as libertarian socialists in polite company, the majority of libertarian socialists aren't anarchists, so anarchists would be better off avoiding the 'libertarian socialist' moniker since all it really says about a person's politics is they like socialist economics but have an aversion to vanguard parties. Anarchy is a whole lot more than economics.

Can Capitalism Be Anarchist?

“Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms (e.g. "downsizing" for layoffs, "servicing the target" for bombing, in which case it is primarily meant to make the truth sound more palatable. It may also refer to intentional ambiguity in language or to actual inversions of meaning. In such cases, doublespeak disguises the nature of the truth.” (From Wikipedia.org:)

The phrase "anarcho-capitalism" was coined by far-right white-nationalist Murray Rothbard as a way to demean anarchists by appropriating anarchist terminology and diluting anarchy's meaning by associating it with all the things anarchists struggle against.

In one of his unpublished pieces, Rothbard even admitted "we are not anarchists, and those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical" because "all" anarchists have "socialistic elements in their doctrines" and "possess socialistic economic doctrines in common."

Capitalism is just as brutal a hierarchy as statism and anyone claiming capitalists are capable of being anarchists is using malicious doublespeak to attack the anarchist movement by confusing the definitions of 'hierarchy' and 'authority'. Capitalism is a perverse authority that creates a multitude of oppressive totalitarian hierarchies. There is no way to make it compatible with anarchy.

These “anarcho” capitalist pretenders would have us believe that capitalism is “voluntary” when in reality private property rights can only be enforced violently; by an authority that is powerful enough to rule a society.

Rothbard's followers claim to oppose the state but not capital. In reality, they wish to replace the state with wholly unregulated corporations; effectively making the corporations into totalitarian states that don't have to answer to anyone.

For all intents and purposes, these so called "anarcho-capitalists", "propertarians" or "voluntaryists" wish to revert to feudalism and fully enslave workers, without the annoyance of human rights, labor and environmental laws or any other controls on their business activities.

They wish to replace the state's police forces and military with private police and military that would work directly for the corporations, with no accountability to the public and with the sole purpose of safeguarding the profits and personal safety of the owners of capital.

They have similarly hijacked the word 'libertarian' which was historically synonymous with “anarchist” (Kropotkin used both words interchangeably) and maintains its original meaning outside the USA.

Within the USA, “libertarian”, “voluntaryist”, “propertarian”, “deontological liberal”, “autarchist”, “paleocon”, “minarchist”, “neocon”, “rights-theorist”, “libertarian moralist” and “social conservative” are all words that just mean "capitalist that doesn't like public accountability or paying taxes" with very minor differences; usually relating to how private property “rights” will be enforced.

By creating far-right capitalist perversions of every anti-capitalist movement, the wealthy largely succeed in erasing the original revolutionary goals of a movement and replace them with more of the same capitalism, imperialism, poverty, genocide and environmental destruction.

"Anarcho"-capitalism is an oxymoron and has nothing to do with Anarchy.


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# What is Anarchy?

Anarchy is the relentless negation of structures of domination, the endeavor to carve out little pockets of life free from exploitation and suffering.

Anarchy is the uncompromising push against oppression and the vocal demand for autonomy and self-determination, the rejection of all the classes, institutions and dogmas built to rule people.

Anarchy is above all a practice, not a theory. It is about actively working to end authoritarian relationships wherever they exist, and build non-authoritarian alternatives.

It is not about trying to prescribe a way of life for an imagined place and time, and imagined people. It is for real people and dealing with real problems.

Anarchy is a living and breathing practice that we incorporate into our everyday lives. A personal stance against domination that informs all our decisions and thus shapes the trajectory of our existence.

There is no end-goal to anarchy. It is an ongoing, unending fight against hierarchical systems and the authority figures that construct them.

Anarchy is a desire for freedom from tyranny. Anarchy is countless generations of disparate people with the drive to be freer than they are under the systems that forcibly govern them.

An anarchist is anyone who refuses to be governed, dominated, ruled.


Here are some of those people.

---


Anarchy is about us not needing that imposed structure from anyone, and just being cognizant and caring and compassionate enough to take care of ourselves and our communities and each other without anyone making it happen. It’d be like democratic socialism, except without anyone calling it that and imposing a structure. It’s more along the lines of a village model. When people call that a primitive style of governance, that’s offensive to me. The village model is probably the most effective model of taking care of communities. That’s what I’m all about: giving power to communities to take care of themselves and each other.

-Candi CdeBaca

---

Anarchy is the thing we want. It is 
the Beautiful Idea. It is the entirely 
impractical idea that we can be, and 
must insist on being, totally free. From 
domination, of course, but also from 
mundanity and morality. It is the id to 
the super-ego of society and its 
shaming, fear-instilling humiliations and 
self-inflicted limitations.

Anarchy is an act of faith—a leap 
into the unknown—and a totally sober 
proposition. It is an explosion and the 
simple things we do unconsciously. 
It is something that predates civilization 
and cannot be tamed by cities, 
governments, exchange, or politics. 

Anarchy is anarchy, it is both organization 
(along completely different lines 
than the ones that currently exist on 
a broad level), and chaos. It is each of 
us having the ability to determine our 
own lives and the ways that we relate 
to others, from our most intimate 
relationships to the more far-flung. 
Anarchy is impossible and it is 
that very impossibility that makes it 
desirable. As desirable as the eventual 
lover or the water at the end of a long 
hike. As impossible as independence, 
autonomy, and collaboration among 
equals. 

Long Live Anarchy! 

-anonymous

---

Anarchy describes a particular type 
of situation, one in which either 
authority does not exist or its power 
to control is negated. Such a situation 
guarantees nothing—not even the 
continued existence of that situation, 
but it does open up the possibility for 
each of us to start creating our lives 
for ourselves in terms of our own 
desires and passions rather than in 
terms of social roles and the demands 
of social order. Anarchy is not the goal 
of revolution; it is the situation which 
makes the only type of revolution that 
interests me possible—an uprising 
of individuals to create their lives for 
themselves and destroy what stands in 
their way. It is a situation free of any 
moral implications, presenting to each 
of us the amoral challenge to live our 
lives without constraints. 

Since the anarchic situation is  amoral, 
the idea of an anarchist morality is 
highly suspect. Morality is a system of 
principles defining what constitutes 
right and wrong behavior. It implies 
some absolute outside of individuals 
by which they are to define themselves, 
a commonality of all people that 
makes certain principles applicable to 
everyone.    

-Feral Faun

---

As opponents of control, we 
should not assume an adversarial 
position (like the forces of counter-control), 
nor identify ourselves with the oppressed 
(the controlled); rather, we should situate 
ourselves within the matrix of anarchy, 
and become uncontrollables. Only then can 
we develop a liberatory praxis, which 
simultaneously promotes the disintegration 
of the entire control complex, and 
facilitates others to reintegrate within 
the creative potentialities of anarchy. 
We should be neither demonic, nor 
humanist, but anarchic. 

Our divine principle should not be deistic power, 
or demonic, Dionysian energies, or human community, 
but positive and creative chaos (a natural “order” which the advocates of order designate as disorder). Chaos is homologous with 
ecological order, and social ecology constitutes the specifically human 
component within that order. It is from this position that we must approach 
those existential problems that remain so troubling.

-John Moore

---

If anarchy does not have a road map 
then we (as anarchists) are free to 
work together. Our projects might 
not be of the same scale as the general 
strike, or even the halting of business-as-usual 
in a major metropolitan area, 
but they would be anarchist projects. 

An anarchy without road map or 
adjectives could be one where the 
context of the decisions that we make 
together will be of our own creation 
rather than imposed upon us. It could 
be an anarchy of now rather than the 
hope of another day. It would place the 
burden of establishing trust on those 
who actually have a common political 
goal (the abolition of the state and 
capitalism) rather than on those who 
have no goal at all or whose goal is 
antithetical to an anarchist one. 

An anarchy without road map or 
adjectives does not ignore difference 
but instead places it in the context that 
it belongs in. When we are faced with 
a moment of extreme tension, when 
everything that we know appears 
about to change, then we may choose 
different forks in the road. Until that 
time anarchists should approach each 
other with the naïvete that we approach 
the world with. If we believe 
that the world can change and could 
change in a radical direction from the 
one traveled the past several thousand 
years then we should have some trust 
in others who desire the same things.

-Aragorn!

---

The goals of anarchy don’t include replacing 
one ruling class with another, neither in the 
guise of a fairer boss or as a party. This 
is key because this is what separates 
anarchist revolutionaries from Maoist, 
socialist, and nationalist revolutionaries 
who from the onset do not embrace 
complete revolution. They cannot envision 
a truly free and equalitarian society and 
must to some extent embrace the 
socialization process that makes 
exploitation and oppression possible 
and prevalent in the first place.

-Kuwasi Balagoon

---

Our anarchy is an anarchy of abundance.
It must be in order to survive 
against the power of our enemies. 
We are forcing the horizons wide open 
to the imagination. We believe there 
can (and must) be a world that has both 
wilderness and cities—a planet where 
people live in hunting-gathering tribes 
and in the diverse neighborhoods of 
cities. Where the goals of both groups 
are in harmony. There is enough creativity 
in our minds, enough courage in our souls, 
and enough passion in our hearts to 
accommodate both green and urban anarchy. 
No desire need succeed by destroying the other.

-Curious George Brigade

---

Anarchy is positioned to 
articulate —not a program—
but a number of revolutionary themes 
with contemporary relevance and 
resonance. It is unambiguously anti-
political, and many people are anti-
political. It is hedonistic, and many 
people fail to see why life is not to be 
lived enjoyably if it is to be lived at all. 
It is “individualistic” in the sense that 
if the freedom and happiness of the 
individual —ie, each and every really 
existing person, every Tom, Dick and 
Murray —is not the measure of the 
good society, what is? Many people 
wonder what’s wrong with wanting to 
be happy. Post-leftist anarchy is, if not 
necessarily rejective, then at least 
suspicious of the chronically unfulfilled 
liberatory promise of high technology. 
And maybe most important of all is 
the massive revulsion against work, 
an institution which has become more 
and more important, and oppressive, 
to people outside academia who actually 
have to work. Most people would 
rather do less work than attend more 
meetings. Post-leftist anarchists mostly 
don’t regard our times one-dimension-
ally, as either a “decadent, bourgeoisified
era” of “social reaction” or as the 
dawning of the Age of Aquarius. The 
system, unstable as ever, never ceases 
to create conditions which undermine
it. Its self-inflicted wounds await our 
salt. If you don’t believe in progress, 
it’ll never disappoint you and you 
might even make some progress. 

-Bob Black

---

By taking for our watchword anarchy, 
in its sense of no-government, 
we intend to express a pronounced 
tendency of human society. In history 
we see that precisely those epochs 
when small parts of humanity broke 
down the power of their rulers and 
reassumed their freedom were epochs 
of the greatest progress, economical 
and intellectual. Be it the growth of the 
free cities, whose unrivalled monuments
—free work of free associations 
of workers—still testify of the revival 
of mind and of the well-being of the 
citizen; be it the great movement 
which gave birth to the Reformation
—those epochs witnessed the 
greatest progress when the individual 
recovered some part of his freedom. 
And if we carefully watch the present 
development of civilised nations, we 
cannot fail to discover in it a marked 
and ever-growing movement towards 
limiting more and more the sphere of 
action of government, so as to leave 
more and more liberty to the initiative 
of the individual. After having tried all 
kinds of government, and endeavoring 
to solve the insoluble problem of 
having a government ‘which might 
compel the individual to obedience, 
without escaping itself from obedience 
to collectively,’ humanity is trying now 
to free itself from the bonds of any 
government whatever, and to respond 
to its needs of organisation by the free 
understanding between individuals 
prosecuting the same common aims. 

-Pëtr Kropotkin

---

There are a million ways to go about 
attacking the interconnected 
structures of power and oppression, 
and creating anarchy. Only you can 
decide which paths to take. It’s important 
not to let your efforts be diverted 
into any of the channels that are built 
into the system to recuperate and neutralize 
resistance, such as requesting 
change from a political party rather 
than creating it yourself, or allowing 
your efforts and creations to become 
commodities, products, or fashions. 
To free ourselves, we need to regain 
control over every aspect of our lives: 
our culture, our entertainment, our 
relationships, our housing and education 
and healthcare, the way we protect 
our communities and produce food — 
everything. Without getting isolated 
in single-issue campaigns, figure out 
where your own passions and skills 
lie, what problems concern you and 
your community, and what you can do 
yourself. At the same time, stay abreast 
of what others are doing, so you can 
build mutually inspiring relationships 
of solidarity. 

-Peter Gelderloos

---

The State had now disappeared 
from my conception of society; 
there remained only the application of 
Anarchism to those vague yearnings 
for the outpouring of new ideals in 
education, in literature, in art, in 
customs, social converse, and in ethical 
concepts. And now the way became 
easy; for all this talking up and down 
the question of wealth was foreign to 
my taste. But education! As long ago as 
I could remember I has dreamed of an 
education which should be a getting at 
the secrets of nature, not as reported 
through another’s eyes, but just the 
thing itself; I had dreamed of a teacher 
who should go out and attract his 
pupils around him as the Greeks did of 
old, and then go trooping out into the 
world, free monarchs, learning everywhere
—learning nature, learning man, 
learning to know life in all its forms, 
and not to hug one little narrow spot 
and declare it the finest one on earth 
for the patriotic reason that they live 
there, and here I picked up Wm. Morris’ 
News from Nowhere, and found the 
same thing. And there were the new 
school artists in France and Germany, 
the literateurs, the scientists, the 
inventors, the poets, all breaking way 
from ancient forms. And there were 
Emerson and Channing and Thoreau 
in ethics, preaching the supremacy of
individual conscience over the law,—
indeed, all that mighty trend of 
Protestantism and Democracy, which every 
once in a while lifts up its head above 
the judgments of the commonplace 
in some single powerful personality. 

That indeed is the triumphant word 
of Anarchism: it comes as the logical 
conclusion of three hundred years of 
revolt against external temporal and 
spiritual authority—the word which 
has no compromise to offer, which 
holds before us the unswerving ideal 
of the Free Man.

-Voltairine de Cleyre

---

Anarchy, then, really stands for the 
liberation of the human mind 
from the dominion of religion; the 
liberation of the human body from the 
dominion of property, from the 
shackles and restraint of government. 
Anarchism stands for a social order based 
on the free grouping of individuals for 
the purpose of producing real social 
wealth; an order that will guarantee to 
every human being free access to the 
earth and full enjoyment of the 
necessities of life, according to individual 
desires, tastes, and inclinations.

-Emma Goldman

# What is Archy?

The dictionary definition of 'archy' is any body of authoritative officials organized in nested ranks. Be it aonarchy, an oligarchy, a republic, a feudal state or any other hierarchical society.

While anarchy is the opposition to social hierarchy and domination, archy is the full embodiment of those things. While anarchy calls for the absence of rulers, archy depends on the majority of a population serving and obeying a minority of rulers. Sometimes a few rulers (e.g. monarchies), and sometimes many (e.g. social democracies).

Hierarchies exist for rulers to maintain their social control & power over the population. This control is maintained with violent force by authorities appointed by the rulers: the army, national guard, police, courts, prisons, social workers, media, tax collectors, etc.

Not all guidance given by one person to another constitutes hierarchy. Choosing to accept a specialist's expertise in their craft needn't create a hierarchy or make them your ruler. A roofer laying your roof or a chef cooking your meal needn't be your superior on a hierarchy simply because they are providing you with a valued service.

Similarly, an individual using force to strike a blow at the system of authority that oppresses them does not turn the individual into an authority. 

>Authority is not simply an isolated instance of the use of force, but an ongoing social relationship between two parties. It is a relationship where one party has the socially legitimized right to command, and the other party has the corresponding obligation to obey.

Destroying archy where you see it does not create archy, it creates anarchy.

# What is Autonomy?

**From sub.media**

Autonomy is one of the most important of all anarchist principles, and a building block for understanding anarchist philosophy more broadly. So what is it, exactly?

Well... basically, it's freedom. But more than that, it's a particularly an anarchist type of freedom.. the freedom to make decisions, and then act out those decisions without asking permission from a higher power.

In some ways, autonomy is similar to liberty, a political concept that dates back to Europe's so-called “Age of Enlightenment” in the 18th century. Back in those days, liberty was a radical new idea that sought to put limits on the absolute power of kings and queens. Its early advocates argued that human beings possessed certain inalienable rights, granted to them by God, which rulers had to respect. This idea was obviously pretty popular, and so it soon became the rallying cry of the French and American Revolutions, which helped overthrow feudalism and usher in the era of liberal democracy.

Over the centuries, countless astute, and not-so-astute political thinkers, from Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson, to Alex Jones and Glenn Beck have claimed liberty as a universal human right. But to say that this principle hasn't been universally applied would be a gross understatement. This is because from its very beginnings, the concept of liberty has existed within a framework of European global conquest, a process facilitated by colonialism, slavery and genocide. Even today, the language of liberty is still used to mobilize people's support for imperialist wars. Remember when the United States government claimed they were bringing freedom to Iraq?

The roots of this contradiction lie in the fact that liberty has always been tied to the existence of states, and the associated legal category of citizens. Often this is described as a social contract. In exchange for obedience to state authority, citizens are granted rights and freedoms, such as freedom of expression, freedom to associate, and the right to pursue happiness or bear arms. Non-citizens, or citizens of other states are not included in this contract. And even putting aside the problem of who gets to be considered a citizen, just like anything else that is given to you, rights can also be taken away. At the end of the day, it's politicians and courts who get to decide what rights you are allowed to exercise at any given moment.

Autonomy, on the other hand, doesn't rely on a state-based framework of rights. Rather than concentrating power and decision-making in the tops of social and political hierarchies, autonomy starts at the level of the individual, and scales up. If you’re a visual thinker, it might be helpful to imagine it as sort of like an inverted pyramid. As the scope of autonomy grows to include more and more people, we move from talking about individual autonomy to collective autonomy – the power of groups of people to make collective decisions on issues that affect them directly.

Individual and collective autonomy are indivisible under anarchism. You can't have one without the other. Autonomous collectives are made up of autonomous individuals, who have all made the decision to work together to pursue their common interests. Unless you’re living in a cabin in the woods, it's difficult to exercise individual autonomy outside of a collective, first of all because those in power make it hard to get away with, and second because human beings are inherently social creatures.

Building collective autonomy is what anarchism is all about. Whether this assumes the form of an autonomous feminist collective that gets together to make decisions on how to fight patriarchy, or neighbourhood assemblies that come together to fight gentrification... or even the millions of Kurds in Rojava who are building social structures that are autonomous from the Syrian state. While these are just a few examples, the thing that connects them all is a shared pursuit of greater collective autonomy.

And that’s something we should all be striving for…. because at the end of the day… do you really need someone in authority telling you what you can or can’t do?

# What is Mutual Aid?

**From sub.media**

Mutual Aid is a guiding factor behind anarchist practice, and an essential framework for understanding anarchist views on social organization more broadly. So... what is it, exactly?

Well... in its simplest form, mutual aid is the motivation at play any time two or more people work together to solve a problem for the shared benefit of everyone involved. In other words, it means co-operation for the sake of the common good.

Understood in this way, mutual aid is obviously not a new idea, nor is it exclusive to anarchists. In fact, the very earliest human societies practised mutual aid as a matter of survival, and to this day there are countless examples of its logic found within the plant and animal kingdoms.

To understand anarchists’ specific embrace of mutual aid, we need to go back over 100 years, to the writings of the famous Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin, who in addition to sporting one of the most prolific beards of all time, just so happened to also be an accomplished zoologist and evolutionary biologist.

Back in Kropotkin's day, the field of evolutionary biology was heavily dominated by the ideas of Social Darwinists such as Thomas H. Huxley. By ruthlessly applying Charles Darwin's famous dictum “survival of the fittest” to human societies, Huxley and his peers had concluded that existing social hierarchies were the result of natural selection, or competition between free sovereign individuals, and were thus an important and inevitable factor in human evolution.

Not too surprisingly, these ideas were particularly popular among rich and politically powerful white men, as it offered them a pseudo-scientific justification for their privileged positions in society, in addition to providing a racist rationalization of the European colonization of Asia, Africa and the Americas. 

Kropotkin attacked this conventional wisdom, when in 1902 he published a book called Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, in which he proved that there was something beyond blind, individual competition at work in evolution.

Kropotkin demonstrated that species that were able to work together, or who formed symbiotic arrangements with other species based on mutual benefit, were able to better adapt to their environment, and were granted a competitive edge over those species who didn't, or couldn't. 

In today’s metropolitan societies, people are socialized to see themselves as independent, self-sufficient individuals, equipped with our own condos, bank accounts, smartphones and facebook profiles. However, this notion of human independence is a myth, promoted by corporations and states seeking to mould us into atomized, and easily controlled consumers, concerned primarily with our own short-term well-being. The truth is that human beings are incredibly interdependent. In fact, that’s the key to our success as a species. 

Do you ever spend time thinking about where the food you eat, or the clothes you wear come from? What about the labour and materials that went into building your house, or your car? Left to fend for ourselves without the comforts of civilization, few among us would survive a week, let alone be able to produce a fraction of the myriad commodities we consume every day. 

From the great pyramids commissioned by the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, to today’s globe-spanning production and supply chains, the primary function of the ruling class has always been to organize human activity. And everywhere that they have done so, they have relied on coercion. Under capitalism, this activity is organized through either direct violence, or the internalized threat of starvation created by a system based on private ownership of wealth and property.

Capitalism can inspire people to do many amazing things, as long as there is a profit to be made. But in the absence of a profit motive, there are many important tasks that it will not and cannot ever accomplish, from eradicating global poverty and preventable diseases, to removing toxic plastics from the oceans. In order to carry out these monumental tasks, we require a change in the ethos that connects us to one another, and to the world that sustains us. A shift away from capitalism... towards mutual aid.

Glimpses of the Anarchist ideal of mutual aid can be seen today in communities of open source software developers, and in programmers coming up with new forms of encryption to thwart NSA surveillance. They can be seen in neighbours coming together to organize a daycare collective, and in the aftermath of disasters such as Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, when in the absence of state institutions, perfect strangers rush to one another’s aid. It can be seen in the bravery of the white helmets of Aleppo, who risk their lives to pull children from the collapsed ruins of buildings hit by Assad’s barrel bombs.

Imagine a world in which human activity was not organized on the basis of ceaseless competition over artificially scarce resources, but the pursuit of the satisfaction of human needs… and you will understand a vision of the world that anarchists seek to create.

# What is Direct Action?

**From sub.media**

Direct Action is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot when describing anarchist tactics and rightly so, since it's one of the main ways anarchists put our values of autonomy, self-organization and mutual aid into practice.

So what is it exactly?

Well, a simple definition would be to say that a direct action is a political action aimed at achieving a specific goal or objective, and which is carried out directly by an individual or group of people, without appealing to a higher authority for legitimacy.

Now, this broad definition covers a huge range of activities: everything from banner drops, to prison breaks. And it doesn't necessarily tell us much about the politics of those carrying out the action itself.

Direct actions are tactics, meaning that they are a specific type of action that can be used to implement a wide variety of strategies.

While you don't have to be an anarchist in order to carry out, or to participate in a direct action, the concept itself holds a special importance for anarchists and other anti-authoritarian radicals.

And that's because well-timed and well-executed direct actions can offer an escape from the endless cycle of representational politics, which assumes its highest form in the state.

The German philosopher Max Weber famously defined the state as a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force. In other words, state violence, whether dispensed by a politician's pen, a judge's gavel, or a cop's baton, is a manifestation of legitimate force, and a harsh reminder of the state's role as the ultimate mediator of social conflict.

This mandate includes everything from interpersonal disputes that end up settled in the courts, or by someone calling the cops, all the way up to the broader conflicts that spring from systemic inequality and the structural imbalances inherent to capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, ableism and hetero-patriarchy.

In its purest form, direct action does not aim to persuade those in power, but seeks to foster and assert the power of those carrying out the action themselves.

When people carry out a direct action, they are rejecting the state's monopoly on decision-making, and asserting their own autonomy while providing an example for others to follow.

To take just one example, rather than petitioning a politician to vote against the construction of a pipeline or appealing to state-controlled regulatory bodies, those who favour a direct action approach often find it more effective and empowering to go out and block the pipeline themselves directly.

Direct action can also be used to set up networks of mutual aid.

Fifty years ago, the Black Panthers were faced with the reality of widespread poverty and lack of service provision in their communities. Rather than appealing to the government, or to the conscience of White America, the Panthers set to work organizing their own health clinics and breakfast programs for hungry school children.

These programs were part of a broader strategy of building community power, and were identified by FBI Director J Edgar Hoover as a primary threat to national security - by which he meant a threat to the legitimacy of the state, and the white supremacist power structure that upholds it.

Because they transgress the official channels of politics, and often the law itself, direct action campaigns are inevitably met with a whole toolbox of tactics aimed at bringing conflicts back under state control. These can range from state and corporate-funded non-profits infiltrating and co-opting grassroots movements in order to force a change in tactics or leadership, all the way up to extreme repression, such as mass incarceration and targeted assassinations carried out by state and paramilitary forces.

Although as a concept, direct action has probably existed for as long as there have been hierarchies to rebel against, the term itself dates back to the early workers movement, where it was used to describe militant practices such as industrial sabotage and wildcat strikes.

By physically blocking production, and collectively defending themselves from repression, workers were able to force concessions from their capitalist masters.

The widespread use of these tactics eventually led to the legalization of trade unions and a whole host of concessions aimed at bringing the more radical sections of the workers movement back under state control.

One of the most significant heydays of direct action in modern history took place in 1970s Italy. Faced with a housing crisis provoked by capitalist restructuring of the economy, thousands of migrants from the country's south squatted apartment blocks, and physically defended families from eviction.

When the government attempted to hike transit fares and energy costs, tens of thousands of people refused to pay the increased rates, in collective actions known as auto-reductions.

Italy was, at that time, a deeply religious, conservative and rigidly patriarchal country, in which both abortion and divorce were illegal.

Within this context, a fearless women's liberation movement organized an underground network of clinics, with doctors and nurses providing hundreds of volunteers, with necessary skills to perform clean and safe abortions.

This direct action approach to reproductive health was complimented by massive and regular demonstrations calling for the legalization of abortion, which were ultimately successful.

In our current age of increasing polarization, uncertainty and insecurity, direct action offers a way for our movements to build and assert our collective power, both to defend our communities, and to fight for the world we want to live in.

# What is Praxis?

A question you'll often get when you attempt to discuss anarchism with people new to these ideas is how practical is anarchy? How can anarchy be demonstrated to me in a way that I can appreciate its effectiveness? Nothing is more effective in demonstrating the value of anarchy than praxis. 

Praxis is any action that embodies and realizes anarchist theory. It's a valuable method for creating awareness of anarchist causes and building solidarity in your community.

**Examples of praxis:**

* Setting up a [Food Not Bombs](http://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/) chapter in your community.

* Squatting an unused building to provide a safe space for homeless people.

* Guerilla gardening.

* Setting up a free shop that people can freely take what they need from.

* Building community gardens to feed and engage the community.

* Preparing free meals for homeless people.

* Helping people install a free and open source operating system and the Tor browser for privacy and security.

* Converting old combustion-engine cars to electric.

* Make a zine/informational about an important topic.

* Creating memes from an Anarchist perspective.

* Assassinating dictators.

* Creating an autonomous zone.

* Horizontal community public safety organizing to replace the police.

* Teaching people how to steal from the rich effectively.

* Creating a space online where Anarchists can share their ideas with each other.

* Aiding in defending indiginous sovereignty.

* Being support for people suffering from addictions, and helping them be on a healthy path they want to be on.

* Stopping pipelines from being built.

* Investigating history, and appreciating the context for how you have come to be.

* Identifying privileges caused by being a part of a white-supremacist, hetero-normative, patriarchal, trans-phobic, classist, state controlled labor farm.

* Calling out problematic behaviour in comrades, no matter their status in the group.

* Teaching people to be self sufficient by gardening, foraging and upcycling.

* Starting an anarchist bike collective to fix people's bikes.

* Making anarchist music that shines a light on injustices in the world.

* Setting up a community mesh-net to share data with people in a decentralized manner.

# What is Leftism and How Does it Relate to Anarchy?

The left vs right divide comes from which side of the French king members of the états généraux parliament were sitting before the French revolution - those on the right were monarchist, those on the left were in favour of the republic. In other words, both were in favour of the state. Obviously all this was a long time ago, and most people aren't really aware of it, but that doesn't mean it's not relevant, because the underlying assumption still persists that the whole spectrum of conceivable politics need to be enacted through the state. That's still true, whether it's social-democrats, liberals, Leninists, greens, whatever.

One of the most important things anarchists need to get across is that worthwhile political changes can only be achieved through direct action outside and against the state, parliamentary democracy and the various structures of class collaboration, and that means questioning the left vs right thing.

Anarchists are not leftists, we side with neither monarchy nor republic, dictatorship nor democracy, free market capitalism nor state capitalism. We stand for anarchy. The absolute negation of all authority, including both wings of government.

# Do Anarchists Support Free Speech?

From Wikipedia.org:

>“Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms (e.g. "downsizing" for layoffs, "servicing the target" for bombing, in which case it is primarily meant to make the truth sound more palatable. It may also refer to intentional ambiguity in language or to actual inversions of meaning. In such cases, doublespeak disguises the nature of the truth.”

The concept of "free speech" is fundamentally flawed, and has historically been used to convince citizens of states that they have "rights" that are gifted to them by the supposedly benevolent and generous state.

In actuality, the state doesn't give you rights; it controls them, limits them, denies you them. It uses its monopoly on violence to censor, stalk, spy on, imprison and terrorize anyone that would threaten to subvert its power.

When an authority grants you "free speech", what they've really done is take away your freedom to speak, and then allow certain people (typically the favored social class) to say certain things under certain conditions. There's nothing "free" about this. You're still forbidden from speech that would threaten the state or those it empowers. You're still legally viable for slandering powerful people that can afford as many lawyers as it takes to sue you into bankruptcy. You're still beaten to a bloody pulp (or worse) for talking back to a cop. You'll still be imprisoned, enslaved and murdered by the state and its enforcers for being the wrong race or the wrong gender or the wrong sexuality or the wrong religion or the wrong class and daring to resist your oppressors.

Free speech is a lie told to us by our rulers to convince us we need to be ruled by them.

Anarchists are aware enough to realize the state does not grant us any kind of freedom. The entire existence of the state is predicated on taking freedom away from us to empower the rich and powerful minority that the state exists to serve. So as anarchists; as people who don't want to be ruled, people who see the blatant lies our rulers tell us for what they are, it would make little sense for us to support an inherently Orwellian concept as "free speech". Much more honest words for this concept would be "controlled speech" or "state-approved speech".

Really, when the state talks about freedom of speech, they're most often talking about the freedom to be a hateful bigot - since bigotry is really the only type of speech the state will go out of its way to protect. Bigotry allows the state to scapegoat undesirable groups and thus create gaping social divisions. If everyone is villainizing migrants or gays, those groups will serve as a fine distraction. Ensuring our rulers and their benefactors can live to exploit us for another day as we focus our rage at anyone but them. 

According to the state, white supremacists are free to incite hatred against non-whites (which has often led to mass murder), but if someone were to say they think the president of the nation deserves to be stabbed for his crimes... Well, that person would promptly be carted off to prison for voicing such a dangerous idea.

Unfortunately, some people insist on using bigoted or otherwise oppressive language in anarchist spaces, claiming that free speech allows them to do so. Since we've established that free speech is nothing more than an insipid lie our rulers tell us in order to control us, it's important that we reject the dishonest language of the state when talking about anarchy, and take a long hard look at the reasons someone would have for clinging to the state's shrewd promises of "rights" and "freedoms" that simply don't exist.

"Free speech" is not an anarchist principle in any way. Actual anarchist principles of course include direct action, mutual aid, taking a strong stance against authority in all its guises, as well as freedom of association. This means we are free to associate with whoever we want and free to avoid associating with people that would build authoritarian structures to oppress us.

So let's talk about the people who enter anarchist spaces, direct slurs and hateful bigoted rhetoric at us, and then insist we accept their abuse because they have the sacred right to freedom of speech... These people simply have no understanding of anarchy. Their "right to free speech" that they insist we respect could only be granted to them by a state with a monopoly on violence. If someone comes into your space and calls you a racial slur, no institution should have the power to stop you from showing that person the door.

It takes an incredibly sheltered person to believe there should be no consequences for abuse. When someone is abusing you or people you care about, you should absolutely be free to take a stand and remove them from your space, no matter how many times the person cries "free speech" as they're telling you you're a worthless (slur).

The "freedom" to scapegoat, demonize and demean people who are different from you really stands in direct contradiction with anarchy. Discriminating against people based on ability, race, gender or sexuality creates authority. It makes you an authoritarian. Your rhetoric directly alienates the people who belong to the groups you're choosing to look down on in disgust and present as less-than human. By using demeaning language to chastise marginalized people for their perceived inadequacies, you're upholding normative social roles, creating classes and subclasses and strengthening the authoritarian power structures that directly oppress any people that belong to minority groups.

For example, by using the word "f*ggot" as an insult, you effectively cast gay people as being worthy of scorn and derision. You assert authority over everyone who isn't heterosexual and make life incredibly difficult for people that don't meet the normative standards you've helped construct to maintain the social dominance of heterosexuals.

Anarchists can and will choose to not associate with people that claim they have a right to oppress others. Anarchists are anti-authoritarian to our core, and this means we don't have to put up with hateful bigots in our spaces.

# Are libertarian socialists the same as anarchists?



An anarchist by definition stands against all authority without exception, while a socialist by definition is simply someone who feels the means of production should be collectively owned. So socialism is narrowly focused on economic issues, while anarchy is explicitly concerned with any and all social issues.

When a socialist also identifies as a libertarian, they're indicating that they're critical of the traditional authoritarian socialist states that have been so prominent in the world (the USSR, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Yugoslavia, Zimbabwe, etc.)

But while libertarian socialists might reject one-party states, that doesn't mean they reject states entirely. A lot of them will support democratic states or other democratic forms of government. Anarchists, on the other hand, reject all forms of government.

Generally someone who chooses to identify as a libertarian socialist rather than an anarchist is making a deliberate choice to use non-committal language that implies they're willing to accept certain forms of authority. If they opposed all authority as anarchists do, they'd likely call themselves an anarchist.

There are various forms of libertarian socialism that promote a supposedly 'libertarian' state, while there are other libertarian socialists who reject the state form, but embrace other forms of authority.

Communalists are a famous example of libertarian socialists who embrace various forms of authority including majoritarianism but stop short of supporting a full-blown state. But the form of government they do support greatly resembles states on a smaller, more localized scale.

While a few anarchists might also choose to identify as libertarian socialists in polite company, the majority of libertarian socialists aren't anarchists, so anarchists would be better off avoiding the 'libertarian socialist' moniker since all it really says about a person's politics is they like socialist economics but have an aversion to vanguard parties. Anarchy is a whole lot more than economics.


# Can Capitalism Be Anarchist?

>“Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms (e.g. "downsizing" for layoffs, "servicing the target" for bombing, in which case it is primarily meant to make the truth sound more palatable. It may also refer to intentional ambiguity in language or to actual inversions of meaning. In such cases, doublespeak disguises the nature of the truth.” (From Wikipedia.org:)

The phrase "anarcho-capitalism" was coined by far-right white-nationalist Murray Rothbard as a way to demean anarchists by appropriating anarchist terminology and diluting anarchy's meaning by associating it with all the things anarchists struggle against.

In one of his unpublished pieces, Rothbard even admitted "we are not anarchists, and those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical" because "all" anarchists have "socialistic elements in their doctrines" and "possess socialistic economic doctrines in common."

Capitalism is just as brutal a hierarchy as statism and anyone claiming capitalists are capable of being anarchists is using malicious doublespeak to attack the anarchist movement by confusing the definitions of 'hierarchy' and 'authority'. Capitalism is a perverse authority that creates a multitude of oppressive totalitarian hierarchies. There is no way to make it compatible with anarchy. 

These “anarcho” capitalist pretenders would have us believe that capitalism is “voluntary” when in reality private property rights can only be enforced violently; by an authority that is powerful enough to rule a society.

Rothbard's followers claim to oppose the state but not capital. In reality, they wish to replace the state with wholly unregulated corporations; effectively making the corporations into totalitarian states that don't have to answer to anyone.

For all intents and purposes, these so called "anarcho-capitalists", "propertarians" or "voluntaryists" wish to revert to feudalism and fully enslave workers, without the annoyance of human rights, labor and environmental laws or any other controls on their business activities.

They wish to replace the state's police forces and military with private police and military that would work directly for the corporations, with no accountability to the public and with the sole purpose of safeguarding the profits and personal safety of the owners of capital.

They have similarly hijacked the word 'libertarian' which was historically synonymous with “anarchist” (Kropotkin used both words interchangeably) and maintains its original meaning outside the USA.

Within the USA, “libertarian”, “voluntaryist”, “propertarian”, “deontological liberal”, “autarchist”, “paleocon”, “minarchist”, “neocon”, “rights-theorist”, “libertarian moralist” and “social conservative” are all words that just mean "capitalist that doesn't like public accountability or paying taxes" with very minor differences; usually relating to how private property “rights” will be enforced.

By creating far-right capitalist perversions of every anti-capitalist movement, the wealthy largely succeed in erasing the original revolutionary goals of a movement and replace them with more of the same capitalism, imperialism, poverty, genocide and environmental destruction.

"Anarcho"-capitalism is an oxymoron and has nothing to do with Anarchy.