Anarchism

No tradition is more closely tied to abolition than this one. When people argue to abolish the police or empty the prisons, the underlying analysis is usually anarchist even when the speakers reach for other words to describe it.

Since Hurricane Sandy, relief on the ground in the US has more than once been run through openly anarchist mutual-aid networks: Occupy Sandy, Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. They worked well enough that mainstream emergency-management agencies, not natural allies, started paying attention and showing up at the same meetings.

Take a building, organize the tenants, hold the property in common: squatting, tenant unions, and housing cooperatives make up the standard anarchist program here. The Berlin and Barcelona models, the current US tenant-organizing scene, and community land trusts all trace back to it.

Neither the capitalist firm nor the state-owned enterprise satisfies anarchists; the preferred answer is workers running the place themselves, owning it together, and coordinating across shops by federation. Mondragón in the Basque country and Argentina's recovered-factory movement are the usual proof points.

On climate the tradition reaches for direct action against fossil-fuel infrastructure, mutual-aid networks for people displaced by warming, and the bioregion as the right scale to manage an ecosystem. Carbon markets and state-led climate policy both draw its suspicion, on the grounds that they leave the command structure intact.

Anarchism is a political tradition that rejects the state and most other forms of hierarchical authority, betting that humans freed from coercive command will out-organize the institutions currently claiming to organize them. The modern movement crystallized between 1840 and 1872, anchored by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's What Is Property? (1840), Mikhail Bakunin's break with Karl Marx at the Hague Congress, and Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid (1902). It is not chaos; it is a wager on horizontal coordination.

Mainstream anarchism is left-wing. The tradition is anti-capitalist as well as anti-state, with Kropotkin's communism, Bakunin's collectivism, and the Spanish CNT's syndicalism all rejecting private ownership of the means of production. Anarcho-capitalism, which kept the anti-state half and dropped the anti-capitalist half, is a separate twentieth-century American tradition that most social anarchists do not regard as part of the same family at all.

In casual usage 'anarchic' just means disordered, but the political meaning is more specific: a society without rulers, without the state, without standing executive authority. The word comes from the Greek 'an-archos', meaning 'without a ruler'. Proudhon flipped the term in 1840 from a bourgeois insult into a self-description, and the tradition has been arguing about exactly how a non-coercive order would actually work for about 180 years now.

Anarchism is the broader family; anarcho-communism is the largest faction inside it. Kropotkin's vision in The Conquest of Bread (1892) was a federation of communes organized on the principle 'from each according to ability, to each according to need', with money and wages abolished. Other anarchist currents (mutualism, individualism, syndicalism) accept varying degrees of market exchange and individual property. The Spanish Revolution of 1936 ran mostly on anarcho-communist and anarcho-syndicalist lines.

There is no single founder. William Godwin sketched a proto-anarchist position in 1793, but Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is usually credited with founding the modern tradition when he answered 'what is property?' with 'property is theft' in 1840 and claimed the word 'anarchist' as a self-description. Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin then built the recognizably modern movement between 1860 and 1910. Emma Goldman extended it to questions of gender, sexuality, and prisons that the other founders had mostly avoided.

It has worked at scale, briefly. Revolutionary Catalonia in 1936-1937 saw industrial Barcelona run by anarcho-syndicalist unions, with factories under worker control, trams operated as cooperatives, and millions of people living inside the largest anti-capitalist mass mobilization any industrial society has produced. The Makhnovshchina ran an autonomous zone in Ukraine in 1918-1921. Rojava in northeastern Syria has been running on libertarian-municipalist lines since 2012. Each was eventually crushed by external military force, which is the structural pattern anarchism still owes an answer to.

Both want a classless society without private ownership of the means of production. The split is over the state. Marx and the Bolsheviks argued you need to capture state power first and use it to abolish class relations, with the state withering away later. Bakunin and Kropotkin argued any state powerful enough to abolish class relations will refuse to wither, and that the workers' state will just become a new ruling class. The 1872 expulsion of Bakunin's faction from the First International is when the two traditions formally split. The twentieth-century history did not settle the argument cleanly for either side.

The diagnostic is whether your default suspicion is the police rather than the protester, the boss rather than the worker, the prison rather than the person inside it. If you instinctively reach for mutual aid before you reach for state intervention, treat any standing authority as something that has to justify itself rather than something whose legitimacy is assumed, and find both Republican and Democratic politicians equally unconvincing because both want to run a state, you are already inside the tradition. The harder check is whether your daily commitments match the instinct.