What Is Anarchism? A Case Against Rule, Not Against Order
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
In ordinary usage anarchy means chaos. As a political tradition anarchism means something considerably more specific and more demanding: the position that hierarchical authority must justify itself and that most of it cannot, combined with the claim that people can coordinate through voluntary association instead. Whether that is achievable is the argument; what it proposes is not disorder.
The core claim
The starting point is a burden of proof rather than a blanket rejection. Anarchist writers hold that any relationship in which one party commands and another obeys requires justification, and that most such relationships, including the state, the employment relationship and traditional hierarchies of race and sex, fail to supply one. Noam Chomsky's formulation is that authority is not self-justifying and must demonstrate its legitimacy, and that where it cannot, it should be dismantled, with a parent restraining a child from running into traffic offered as the kind of case that can be justified. From that follows a distinction that outsiders usually miss: anarchists are not opposed to organisation, rules or coordination, and are opposed to those being imposed and enforced by a body claiming a monopoly on legitimate force. Proposed alternatives include federations of workplace and community assemblies, mandated and recallable delegates rather than representatives, and decision by consensus or by directly accountable councils.
The main currents
Anarchism is a family of positions that disagree substantially, particularly about property:
- •Mutualism, associated with Proudhon, who in 1840 was the first to call himself an anarchist and who argued for worker-owned enterprises, mutual credit and possession based on use rather than absolute property
- •Collectivist and communist anarchism, associated with Bakunin and Kropotkin, which rejects private ownership of the means of production and, in the communist version, distributes according to need
- •Anarcho-syndicalism, which treats the labour union as the vehicle, using direct action and the general strike to replace the state and the employer with worker-run industry
- •Individualist anarchism, which emphasises personal autonomy and voluntary contract
- •Anarcha-feminism, which extends the critique of hierarchy to the family and to gender relations, and which Emma Goldman argued was inseparable from the rest
- •Green and social ecology strands, which link domination of people to domination of nature
- •Anarcho-capitalism, which proposes replacing the state with private contract and private protection agencies, and which most of the older tradition rejects as not anarchist at all because it retains the employment hierarchy and property enforcement the tradition exists to criticise
Where it has been tried
The practical record is thin, contested and not empty. Revolutionary Catalonia from 1936 to 1937 saw large-scale collectivisation of industry and agriculture under anarcho-syndicalist unions during the Spanish civil war, with accounts by participants and observers including George Orwell describing functioning worker-run enterprises and services, before it was suppressed by Republican and communist forces and then defeated by Franco. The Free Territory in Ukraine from 1918 to 1921 under Makhno attempted something comparable before being destroyed by the Bolsheviks. Smaller and longer-running examples include the Zapatista autonomous municipalities in Chiapas since 1994 and the administration in north-eastern Syria, both of which draw on anarchist and libertarian socialist ideas without describing themselves purely in those terms. Anarchist organising methods have also had influence disproportionate to the movement's size, supplying the consensus decision-making, affinity group structure and refusal of formal leadership visible in many protest movements since the 1990s.
The objections
The serious criticisms are worth stating without caricature. The scale problem holds that face-to-face assembly and consensus work for hundreds and break down for millions, and that the coordination modern societies require, including infrastructure, epidemic control and large-scale redistribution, needs durable institutions with the power to compel. The defence problem holds that a stateless society is vulnerable to any neighbour that is not, which is what happened in every historical case. The free rider problem holds that voluntary contribution is unstable for public goods. The tyranny of structurelessness argument, made by Jo Freeman about movements rather than against anarchism as such, holds that abolishing formal hierarchy produces informal hierarchy that is less accountable because it is unacknowledged. Anarchist responses exist for each, and what none of them has yet is a demonstration at scale over time, which supporters attribute to suppression and critics to the theory itself.
The takeaway
Anarchism holds that hierarchical authority must justify itself and that most of it cannot, proposing voluntary federation and directly accountable delegates rather than the absence of organisation. Its currents disagree sharply, particularly over property, and most of the tradition rejects anarcho-capitalism as retaining the hierarchies it exists to criticise. Revolutionary Catalonia and the Free Territory are its largest practical experiments, both destroyed militarily. The standing objections concern scale, defence and informal hierarchy replacing formal.