So what is anarchism? Anarchism is a radical, revolutionary leftist political philosophy that advocates for the abolition of government, hierarchy, and all other unequal systems of power. It seeks to replace what its proponents view as inherently oppressive institutions — like a capitalist society or the prison industrial complex — with nonhierarchical, horizontal structures powered by voluntary associations between people.
Anarchists organize around a key set of principles, including horizontalism , mutual aid , autonomy, solidarity, direct action , and direct democracy , a form of democracy in which the people make decisions themselves via consensus as opposed to representative democracy , of which the United States government is an example.
Anarchism has ancient roots , with the word itself stemming from the ancient Greek anarchos, or "without rulers," but it fully bloomed as a political philosophy in Europe and the United States during the 19th century. But Proudhon was far from the only prominent thinker to advance the cause of anarchy. But perhaps because of recent state failures, there is something of an anarchist spirit in the air. To discuss what anarchism really means, I spoke with James C. Scott, a professor of political science and anthropology at Yale.
In his book Two Cheers for Anarchism , he makes the case for an anarchist approach to both political activism and everyday life. We discussed the recent protests, how anarchism got such a bad name, and whether anarchism could ever get a Bernie Sanders—style rebranding. This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. James Scott: Yes. I think when Trump talks about antifa [the commonly used shorthand for anti-fascist activists], he imagines, I suppose, a kind of organization that is plotting and then directing from some command structure, telling its minions to go out and do this or that.
It seems to me that when you look at almost all of modern—and I mean modern going back to the French Revolution—progressive movements, social uprisings, almost all of them begin as grassroots phenomena without any leadership, or a leadership that grows organically from the streets.
Organizations then carry a legislative or an actual program forward, but the organizations are the product of an eruption of anger. That was true for the civil rights movement with [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee]. It was true for all the wildcat strikes during the New Deal as well. This event was indeed organised by a number of anarchist groups — and there were limited outbreaks of violence — but the equation of chaos and violence with anarchism is about as productive as the equation of circles with squares.
It is a crude and bizarre misrepresentation. What is anarchism anyway? It is a radical and revolutionary political philosophy and political economy. While there are many definitions and many anarchisms, most would agree to the definition formulated by Peter Kropotkin.
It stands for the absence of domination, hierarchy and power over others. Anarchism is a process whereby authority and domination is being replaced with non-hierarchical, horizontal structures, with voluntary associations between human beings. It is a form of social organisation with a set of key principles, such as self-organisation, voluntary association, freedom, autonomy, solidarity, direct democracy, egalitarianism and mutual aid.
Based on these principles and values, anarchism rejects both a capitalist economy and a nation state that is governed by means of a representative democracy. It is a utopian project that aspires to combine the best parts of liberalism with the best parts of communism. At its heart is a mix of the liberal emphasis on individual freedom and the communist emphasis on an equal society.
Anarchism is notorious for its diversity. Its accepted varieties range from the egoism of Stirner, through the individualism of such Americans as Tucker and the mutualism of Proudhon, both of whom accepted within strict bounds the institution of private property, to the collectivism of Bakunin, communism of Kropotkin and revolutionary trade unionism of the syndicalists. What connects almost all of these into a coherent political stance is unremitting hostility to the state and parliamentarianism, employment of direct action as the means of attaining desired goals, and organisation through co-operative associations, built and federated from the bottom upwards.
Of these it is the first that is entirely distinctive to anarchism. The state is rejected not just as integral to the current order but crucially as the means to any desirable transformation; and whereas Marxists and other socialists have had ingenuous faith in its eventual "withering away", the anarchists' pessimism that the survival of the state in any post-revolutionary society will lead to the exact opposite has been historically confirmed with the amassment of tyrannic power by communist states.
For a century and a half anarchists have been overwhelmingly socialist, despite the concurrent existence of small numbers of individualists in Europe and the USA. A fruitful approach to understanding anarchism is to recognise its thoroughly socialist critique of capitalism, while emphasising that this has been combined with a liberal critique of socialism, anarchists being united with classical liberals in their advocacy of autonomous associations and the freedom of the individual.
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