Anarchism is a political philosophy that advocates
self-governed societies based on voluntary
institutions. These are often described as
stateless societies, although several authors
have defined them more specifically as institutions
based on non-hierarchical or free associations.
Anarchism holds the state to be undesirable,
unnecessary and harmful.While opposition to
the state is central, anarchism specifically
entails opposing authority or hierarchical
organisation in the conduct of all human relations.
Anarchism is usually considered a far-left
ideology and much of anarchist economics and
anarchist legal philosophy reflects anti-authoritarian
interpretations of communism, collectivism,
syndicalism, mutualism, or participatory economics.Anarchism
does not offer a fixed body of doctrine from
a single particular world view, instead fluxing
and flowing as a philosophy. Many types and
traditions of anarchism exist, not all of
which are mutually exclusive. Anarchist schools
of thought can differ fundamentally, supporting
anything from extreme individualism to complete
collectivism. Strains of anarchism have often
been divided into the categories of social
and individualist anarchism or similar dual
classifications.
== Etymology and terminology ==
The word "anarchism" is composed from the
word "anarchy" and the suffix -ism, themselves
derived respectively from the Greek ἀναρχία,
i.e. anarchy (from ἄναρχος, anarchos,
meaning "one without rulers"; from the privative
prefix ἀν- (an-, i.e. "without") and ἀρχός,
archos, i.e. "leader", "ruler"; (cf. archon
or ἀρχή, arkhē, i.e. "authority", "sovereignty",
"realm", "magistracy")) and the suffix -ισμός
or -ισμα (-ismos, -isma, from the verbal
infinitive suffix -ίζειν, -izein). The
first known use of this word was in 1539.
Various factions within the French Revolution
labelled opponents as anarchists (as Maximilien
Robespierre did the Hébertists) although
few shared many views of later anarchists.
There would be many revolutionaries of the
early nineteenth century who contributed to
the anarchist doctrines of the next generation,
such as William Godwin and Wilhelm Weitling,
but they did not use the word "anarchist"
or "anarchism" in describing themselves or
their beliefs.The first political philosopher
to call himself an anarchist was Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon, marking the formal birth of anarchism
in the mid-nineteenth century. Since the 1890s
and beginning in France, the term "libertarianism"
has often been used as a synonym for anarchism
and its use as a synonym is still common outside
the United States. On the other hand, some
use libertarianism to refer to individualistic
free market philosophy only, referring to
free market anarchism as libertarian anarchism.
== History ==
=== Origins ===
The earliest anarchist themes can be found
in the 6th century BC among the works of Taoist
philosopher Laozi and in later centuries by
Zhuangzi and Bao Jingyan. Zhuangzi's philosophy
has been described by various sources as anarchist.
Zhuangzi wrote: "A petty thief is put in jail.
A great brigand becomes a ruler of a Nation".
Diogenes of Sinope and the Cynics as well
as their contemporary Zeno of Citium, the
founder of Stoicism, also introduced similar
topics. Jesus is sometimes considered the
first anarchist in the Christian anarchist
tradition. Georges Lechartier wrote: "The
true founder of anarchy was Jesus Christ and
[...] the first anarchist society was that
of the apostles". In early Islamic history,
some manifestations of anarchic thought are
found during the Islamic civil war over the
Caliphate, where the Kharijites insisted that
the imamate is a right for each individual
within the Islamic society.
The French Renaissance political philosopher
Étienne de La Boétie wrote in his most famous
work the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude
what some historians consider an important
anarchist precedent. The radical Protestant
Christian Gerrard Winstanley and his group
the Diggers are cited by various authors as
proposing anarchist social measures in the
17th century in England. The term "anarchist"
first entered the English language in 1642
during the English Civil War as a term of
abuse, used by Royalists against their Roundhead
opponents. By the time of the French Revolution,
some such as the Enraged Ones began to use
the term positively in opposition to Jacobin
centralisation of power, seeing "revolutionary
government" as oxymoronic. By the turn of
the 19th century, the English word "anarchism"
had lost its initial negative connotation.Modern
anarchism emerged from the secular or religious
thought of the Enlightenment, particularly
Jean-Jacques Rousseau's arguments for the
moral centrality of freedom.
As part of the political turmoil of the 1790s
in the wake of the French Revolution, William
Godwin developed the first expression of modern
anarchist thought. According to Peter Kropotkin,
Godwin was "the first to formulate the political
and economical conceptions of anarchism, even
though he did not give that name to the ideas
developed in his work" while Godwin attached
his anarchist ideas to an early Edmund Burke.Godwin
is generally regarded as the founder of the
school of thought known as philosophical anarchism.
He argued in Political Justice (1793) that
government has an inherently malevolent influence
on society and that it perpetuates dependency
and ignorance. He thought that the spread
of the use of reason to the masses would eventually
cause government to wither away as an unnecessary
force. Although he did not accord the state
with moral legitimacy, he was against the
use of revolutionary tactics for removing
the government from power. Rather, he advocated
for its replacement through a process of peaceful
evolution.His aversion to the imposition of
a rules-based society led him to denounce
as a manifestation of the people's "mental
enslavement" the foundations of law, property
rights and even the institution of marriage.
He considered the basic foundations of society
as constraining the natural development of
individuals to use their powers of reasoning
to arrive at a mutually beneficial method
of social organisation. In each case, government
and its institutions are shown to constrain
the development of our capacity to live wholly
in accordance with the full and free exercise
of private judgement.
The French Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is regarded
as the first self-proclaimed anarchist, a
label he adopted in his groundbreaking work
What is Property?, published in 1840. It is
for this reason that some claim Proudhon as
the founder of modern anarchist theory. He
developed the theory of spontaneous order
in society, where organisation emerges without
a central coordinator imposing its own idea
of order against the wills of individuals
acting in their own interests. His famous
quote on the matter is "Liberty is the mother,
not the daughter, of order". In What is Property?,
Proudhon answers with the famous accusation
"Property is theft". In this work, he opposed
the institution of decreed "property" (propriété),
where owners have complete rights to "use
and abuse" their property as they wish. He
contrasted this with what he called "possession",
or limited ownership of resources and goods
only while in more or less continuous use.
However, Proudhon later added that "Property
is Liberty" and argued that it was a bulwark
against state power. His opposition to the
state, organised religion and certain capitalist
practices inspired subsequent anarchists and
made him one of the leading social thinkers
of his time.
The anarcho-communist Joseph Déjacque was
the first person to describe himself as "libertarian".
Unlike Proudhon, he argued that "it is not
the product of his or her labour that the
worker has a right to, but to the satisfaction
of his or her needs, whatever may be their
nature". In 1844, the post-Hegelian philosopher
Max Stirner published in Germany the book,
The Ego and Its Own, which would later be
considered an influential early text of individualist
anarchism. French anarchists active in the
1848 Revolution included Anselme Bellegarrigue,
Ernest Coeurderoy, Joseph Déjacque and Proudhon
himself.
=== First International and the Paris Commune
===
In Europe, harsh reaction followed the revolutions
of 1848, during which ten countries had experienced
brief or long-term social upheaval as groups
carried out nationalist uprisings. After most
of these attempts at systematic change ended
in failure, conservative elements took advantage
of the divided groups of socialists, liberals
and nationalists along with anarchists to
prevent further revolt. In Spain, Ramón de
la Sagra established the anarchist journal
El Porvenir in La Coruña in 1845 which was
inspired by Proudhon's ideas. The Catalan
politician Francesc Pi i Margall became the
principal translator of Proudhon's works into
Spanish and later briefly became President
of Spain in 1873 while being the leader of
the Federal Democratic Republican Party. According
to George Woodcock: "These translations were
to have a profound and lasting effect on the
development of Spanish anarchism after 1870,
but before that time Proudhonian ideas, as
interpreted by Pi, already provided much of
the inspiration for the federalist movement
which sprang up in the early 1860's". According
to the Encyclopædia Britannica: "During the
Spanish revolution of 1873, Pi y Margall attempted
to establish a decentralised, or "cantonalist,"
political system on Proudhonian lines".In
1864, the International Workingmen's Association
(sometimes called the First International)
united diverse revolutionary currents including
French followers of Proudhon, Blanquists,
Philadelphes, English trade unionists, socialists
and social democrats. Due to its links to
active workers' movements, the International
became a significant organisation. Karl Marx
became a leading figure in the International
and a member of its General Council. Proudhon's
followers, the mutualists, opposed Marx's
state socialism, advocating political abstentionism
and small property holdings. Woodcock also
reports that the American individualist anarchists
Lysander Spooner and William Batchelder Greene
had been members of the First International.
In 1868, following their unsuccessful participation
in the League of Peace and Freedom (LPF) Russian
revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin and his collectivist
anarchist associates joined the First International,
which had decided not to get involved with
the LPF. They allied themselves with the federalist
socialist sections of the International, who
advocated the revolutionary overthrow of the
state and the collectivisation of property.
At first, the collectivists worked with the
Marxists to push the First International in
a more revolutionary socialist direction.
Subsequently, the International became polarised
into two camps, with Marx and Bakunin as their
respective figureheads. Bakunin characterised
Marx's ideas as centralist and predicted that
if a Marxist party came to power, its leaders
would simply take the place of the ruling
class they had fought against.Anarchist historian
George Woodcock reports: "The annual Congress
of the International had not taken place in
1870 owing to the outbreak of the Paris Commune,
and in 1871 the General Council called only
a special conference in London. One delegate
was able to attend from Spain and none from
Italy, while a technical excuse – that they
had split away from the Fédération Romande
– was used to avoid inviting Bakunin's Swiss
supporters. Thus only a tiny minority of anarchists
was present, and the General Council's resolutions
passed almost unanimously. Most of them were
clearly directed against Bakunin and his followers".
In 1872, the conflict climaxed with a final
split between the two groups at the Hague
Congress, where Bakunin and James Guillaume
were expelled from the International and its
headquarters were transferred to New York.
In response, the federalist sections formed
their own International at the St. Imier Congress,
adopting a revolutionary anarchist programme.The
Paris Commune was a government that briefly
ruled Paris from 18 March (more formally,
from 28 March) to 28 May 1871. The Commune
was the result of an uprising in Paris after
France was defeated in the Franco-Prussian
War. Anarchists participated actively in the
establishment of the Paris Commune. They included
Louise Michel, the Reclus brothers (Élie
Reclus and Élisée Reclus) and Eugene Varlin
(the latter murdered in the repression afterwards).
As for the reforms initiated by the Commune,
such as the re-opening of workplaces as co-operatives,
anarchists can see their ideas of associated
labour beginning to be realised. Moreover,
the Commune's ideas on federation obviously
reflected the influence of Proudhon on French
radical ideas. The Commune's vision of a communal
France based on a federation of delegates
bound by imperative mandates issued by their
electors and subject to recall at any moment
echoes Bakunin's and Proudhon's ideas (Proudhon,
like Bakunin, had argued in favour of the
"implementation of the binding mandate" in
1848 and for federation of communes), thus
both economically and politically the Paris
Commune was heavily influenced by anarchist
ideas. George Woodcock states that "a notable
contribution to the activities of the Commune
and particularly to the organization of public
services was made by members of various anarchist
factions, including the mutualists Courbet,
Longuet, and Vermorel, the libertarian collectivists
Varlin, Malon, and Lefrangais, and the bakuninists
Elie and Elisée Reclus and Louise Michel".
=== Organised labour ===
The anti-authoritarian sections of the First
International were the precursors of the anarcho-syndicalists,
seeking to "replace the privilege and authority
of the State" with the "free and spontaneous
organization of labour". In 1886, the Federation
of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the
United States and Canada unanimously set 1
May 1886 as the date by which the eight-hour
work day would become standard.
In response, unions across the United States
prepared a general strike in support of the
event. On 3 May, a fight broke out in Chicago
when strikebreakers attempted to cross the
picket line and two workers died when police
opened fire upon the crowd. The next day on
4 May, anarchists staged a rally at Chicago's
Haymarket Square. A bomb was thrown by an
unknown party near the conclusion of the rally,
killing an officer. In the ensuing panic,
police opened fire on the crowd and each other.
Seven police officers and at least four workers
were killed. Eight anarchists directly and
indirectly related to the organisers of the
rally were arrested and charged with the murder
of the deceased officer. The men became international
political celebrities among the labour movement.
Four of the men were executed and a fifth
committed suicide prior to his own execution.
The incident became known as the Haymarket
affair and was a setback for the labour movement
and the struggle for the eight-hour day. In
1890, a second attempt—this time international
in scope—to organise for the eight-hour
day was made. The event also had the secondary
purpose of memorialising workers killed as
a result of the Haymarket affair. Although
it had initially been conceived as a once-off
event, by the following year the celebration
of International Workers' Day on May Day had
become firmly established as an international
worker's holiday.In 1907, the International
Anarchist Congress of Amsterdam gathered delegates
from 14 different countries, among which were
important figures of the anarchist movement,
including Errico Malatesta, Pierre Monatte,
Luigi Fabbri, Benoît Broutchoux, Emma Goldman,
Rudolf Rocker and Christiaan Cornelissen.
Various themes were treated during the Congress,
in particular concerning the organisation
of the anarchist movement, popular education
issues, the general strike or antimilitarism.
A central debate concerned the relation between
anarchism and syndicalism (or trade unionism).
Malatesta and Monatte were in particular disagreement
themselves on this issue as the latter thought
that syndicalism was revolutionary and would
create the conditions of a social revolution
while Malatesta did not consider syndicalism
by itself sufficient. He thought that the
trade union movement was reformist and even
conservative, citing as essentially bourgeois
and anti-worker the phenomenon of professional
union officials. Malatesta warned that the
syndicalists aims were in perpetuating syndicalism
itself, whereas anarchists must always have
anarchy as their end and consequently refrain
from committing to any particular method of
achieving it.In 1881, the Spanish Workers
Federation was the first major anarcho-syndicalist
movement—anarchist trade union federations
were of special importance in Spain. The most
successful was the Confederación Nacional
del Trabajo (National Confederation of Labour,
CNT), founded in 1910. Before the 1940s, the
CNT was the major force in Spanish working
class politics, attracting 1.58 million members
at one point and playing a major role in the
Spanish Civil War. The CNT was affiliated
with the International Workers Association,
a federation of anarcho-syndicalist trade
unions founded in 1922, with delegates representing
two million workers from 15 countries in Europe
and Latin America. In Latin America in particular,
"[t]he anarchists quickly became active in
organising craft and industrial workers throughout
South and Central America, and until the early
1920s most of the trade unions in Mexico,
Brazil, Peru, Chile, and Argentina were anarcho-syndicalist
in general outlook; the prestige of the Spanish
C.N.T. as a revolutionary organisation was
undoubtedly to a great extent responsible
for this situation. The largest and most militant
of these organisations was the Federación
Obrera Regional Argentina [...] it grew quickly
to a membership of nearly a quarter of a million,
which dwarfed the rival socialdemocratic unions".
=== Propaganda of the deed and illegalism
===
Some anarchists, such as Johann Most, advocated
publicising violent acts of retaliation against
counter-revolutionaries because "we preach
not only action in and for itself, but also
action as propaganda". Scholars such as Beverly
Gage contend that this was not advocacy of
mass murder, but targeted killings of members
of the ruling class at times when such actions
might garner sympathy from the population,
such as during periods of heightened government
repression or labor conflicts where workers
were killed. However, Most himself once boasted
that "the existing system will be quickest
and most radically overthrown by the annihilation
of its exponents. Therefore, massacres of
the enemies of the people must be set in motion".
Most is best known for a pamphlet published
in 1885, The Science of Revolutionary Warfare,
a how-to manual on the subject of making explosives
based on knowledge he acquired while working
at an explosives plant in New Jersey.By the
1880s, people inside and outside the anarchist
movement began to use the slogan, "propaganda
of the deed" to refer to individual bombings,
regicides and tyrannicides. From 1905 onwards,
the Russian counterparts of these anti-syndicalist
anarchist-communists become partisans of economic
terrorism and illegal "expropriations". Illegalism
as a practice emerged and within it "[t]he
acts of the anarchist bombers and assassins
("propaganda by the deed") and the anarchist
burglars ("individual reappropriation") expressed
their desperation and their personal, violent
rejection of an intolerable society. Moreover,
they were clearly meant to be exemplary invitations
to revolt". France's Bonnot Gang was the most
famous group to embrace illegalism.
However, important figures in the anarchist
movement distanced themselves from such individual
acts as soon as 1887. Peter Kropotkin thus
wrote that year in Le Révolté that "a structure
based on centuries of history cannot be destroyed
with a few kilos of dynamite". A variety of
anarchists advocated the abandonment of these
sorts of tactics in favour of collective revolutionary
action, for example through the trade union
movement. The anarcho-syndicalist Fernand
Pelloutier argued in 1895 for renewed anarchist
involvement in the labour movement on the
basis that anarchism could do very well without
"the individual dynamiter".State repression
(including the infamous 1894 French lois scélérates)
of the anarchist and labour movements following
the few successful bombings and assassinations
may have contributed in the first place to
the abandonment of these kinds of tactics,
although reciprocally state repression may
have played a role in these isolated acts.
The dismemberment of the French socialist
movement into many groups and—following
the suppression of the 1871—Paris Commune
the execution and exile of many communards
to penal colonies favoured individualist political
expression and acts.Numerous heads of state
were assassinated between 1881 and 1914 by
members of the anarchist movement, including
Tsar Alexander II of Russia, President Sadi
Carnot of France, Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas
del Castillo of Spain, Empress Elisabeth of
Austria, King Umberto I of Italy, President
William McKinley of the United States, King
Carlos I of Portugal and King George I of
Greece. McKinley's assassin Leon Czolgosz
claimed to have been influenced by anarchist
and feminist Emma Goldman.
=== Russian Revolution and other uprisings
of the 1910s ===
Anarchists participated alongside the Bolsheviks
in both February and October revolutions and
were initially enthusiastic about the Bolshevik
revolution. However, following a political
falling out with the Bolsheviks by the anarchists
and other left-wing opposition the conflict
culminated in the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion,
which the new government repressed. Anarchists
in central Russia were either imprisoned,
driven underground or joined the victorious
Bolsheviks; the anarchists from Petrograd
and Moscow fled to Ukraine. In the Free Territory,
they fought in the civil war against the Whites
(a grouping of monarchists and other opponents
of the October Revolution) and then the Bolsheviks
as part of the Revolutionary Insurrectionary
Army of Ukraine led by Nestor Makhno, who
established an anarchist society in the region
for a number of months.
Expelled American anarchists Emma Goldman
and Alexander Berkman were among those agitating
in response to Bolshevik policy and the suppression
of the Kronstadt uprising, before they left
Russia. Both wrote accounts of their experiences
in Russia, criticising the amount of control
the Bolsheviks exercised. For them, Bakunin's
predictions about the consequences of Marxist
rule that the rulers of the new "socialist"
Marxist state would become a new elite had
proved all too true.The victory of the Bolsheviks
in the October Revolution and the resulting
Russian Civil War did serious damage to anarchist
movements internationally. Many workers and
activists saw Bolshevik success as setting
an example and communist parties grew at the
expense of anarchism and other socialist movements.
In France and the United States, for example,
members of the major syndicalist movements
of the General Confederation of Labour and
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) left
the organisations and joined the Communist
International.The revolutionary wave of 1917–1923
saw the active participation of anarchists
in varying degrees of protagonism. In the
German uprising known as the German Revolution
of 1918–1919 which established the Bavarian
Soviet Republic, the anarchists Gustav Landauer,
Silvio Gesell and Erich Mühsam had important
leadership positions within the revolutionary
councilist structures. In the Italian events
known as the biennio rosso, the anarcho-syndicalist
trade union Unione Sindacale Italiana "grew
to 800,000 members and the influence of the
Italian Anarchist Union (20,000 members plus
Umanita Nova, its daily paper) grew accordingly
[...] Anarchists were the first to suggest
occupying workplaces." In the Mexican Revolution,
the Mexican Liberal Party was established
and during the early 1910s it led a series
of military offensives leading to the conquest
and occupation of certain towns and districts
in Baja California with the leadership of
anarcho-communist Ricardo Flores Magón.In
Paris, the Dielo Truda group of Russian anarchist
exiles, which included Nestor Makhno, concluded
that anarchists needed to develop new forms
of organisation in response to the structures
of Bolshevism. Their 1926 manifesto, called
the Organisational Platform of the General
Union of Anarchists (Draft), was supported.
Platformist groups active today include the
Workers Solidarity Movement in Ireland and
the North Eastern Federation of Anarchist
Communists of North America. Synthesis anarchism
emerged as an organisational alternative to
platformism that tries to join anarchists
of different tendencies under the principles
of anarchism without adjectives. In the 1920s,
this form found as its main proponents Volin
and Sebastien Faure. It is the main principle
behind the anarchist federations grouped around
the contemporary global International of Anarchist
Federations.
=== Conflicts with European fascist regimes
===
In the 1920s and 1930s, the rise of fascism
in Europe transformed anarchism's conflict
with the state. Italy saw the first struggles
between anarchists and Benito Mussolini's
fascists. Italian anarchists played a key
role in the anti-fascist organisation Arditi
del Popolo, which was strongest in areas with
anarchist traditions and achieved some success
in their activism, such as repelling Blackshirts
in the anarchist stronghold of Parma in August
1922. The veteran Italian anarchist Luigi
Fabbri was one of the first critical theorists
of fascism, describing it as "the preventive
counter-revolution". In France, where the
far-right leagues came close to insurrection
in the February 1934 riots, anarchists divided
over a united front policy.Anarchists in France
and Italy were active in the Resistance during
World War II. In Germany, the anarchist Erich
Mühsam was arrested on charges unknown in
the early morning hours of 28 February 1933,
within a few hours after the Reichstag fire
in Berlin. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda
minister, labelled him as one of "those Jewish
subversives". Over the next seventeen months,
he would be imprisoned in the concentration
camps at Sonnenburg, Brandenburg and finally,
Oranienburg. On 2 February 1934, Mühsam was
transferred to the concentration camp at Oranienburg
when finally on the night of 9 July 1934,
Mühsam was tortured and murdered by the guards,
his battered corpse found hanging in a latrine
the next morning.
=== Spanish Revolution ===
In Spain, the national anarcho-syndicalist
trade union CNT initially refused to join
a popular front electoral alliance and abstention
by CNT supporters led to a right-wing election
victory. In 1936, the CNT changed its policy
and anarchist votes helped bring the popular
front back to power. Months later, conservative
members of the military, with the support
of minority extreme-right parties, responded
with an attempted coup, causing the Spanish
Civil War (1936–1939). In response to the
army rebellion, an anarchist-inspired movement
of peasants and workers, supported by armed
militias, took control of Barcelona and of
large areas of rural Spain where they collectivised
the land. However, the anarchists were losing
ground even before the fascist victory in
1939 in a bitter struggle with the Stalinists,
who controlled much of the distribution of
military aid to the Republicans cause from
the Soviet Union. According to Noam Chomsky,
"the communists were mainly responsible for
the destruction of the Spanish anarchists.
Not just in Catalonia—the communist armies
mainly destroyed the collectives elsewhere.
The communists basically acted as the police
force of the security system of the Republic
and were very much opposed to the anarchists,
partially because Stalin still hoped at that
time to have some kind of pact with Western
countries against Adolf Hitler. That failed
and Stalin withdrew the support to the Republic.
They even withdrew the Spanish gold reserves".
The events known as the Spanish Revolution
was a workers' social revolution that began
during the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War
in 1936 and resulted in the widespread implementation
of anarchist and more broadly libertarian
socialist organisational principles throughout
various portions of the country for two to
three years, primarily Catalonia, Aragon,
Andalusia and parts of Levante. Much of Spain's
economy was put under worker control and in
anarchist strongholds like Catalonia the figure
was as high as 75%, but lower in areas with
heavy Communist Party of Spain influence as
the Soviet-allied party actively resisted
attempts at collectivisation enactment. Factories
were run through worker committees, agrarian
areas became collectivised and run as libertarian
communes. Anarchist historian Sam Dolgoff
estimated that about eight million people
participated directly or at least indirectly
in the Spanish Revolution, which he claimed
"came closer to realising the ideal of the
free stateless society on a vast scale than
any other revolution in history". Spanish
Communist Party-led troops suppressed the
collectives and persecuted both dissident
Marxists and anarchists. The prominent Italian
anarchist Camillo Berneri, who volunteered
to fight against Francisco Franco was killed
instead in Spain by gunmen associated with
the Spanish Communist Party. The city of Madrid
was turned over to the Francoist forces by
the last non-francoist mayor of the city,
the anarchist Melchor Rodríguez García.
=== Post-war years ===
Anarchism sought to reorganise itself after
the war and in this context the organisational
debate between synthesis anarchism and platformism
took importance once again especially in the
anarchist movements of Italy and France. The
Mexican Anarchist Federation was established
in 1945 after the Anarchist Federation of
the Centre united with the Anarchist Federation
of the Federal District. In the early 1940s,
the Antifascist International Solidarity and
the Federation of Anarchist Groups of Cuba
merged into the large national organisation
Asociación Libertaria de Cuba (Cuban Libertarian
Association). From 1944 to 1947, the Bulgarian
Anarchist Communist Federation reemerged as
part of a factory and workplace committee
movement, but was repressed by the new Communist
regime. In 1945 in France the Fédération
Anarchiste and the anarchosyndicalist trade
union Confédération nationale du travail
was established in the next year while the
also synthesist Federazione Anarchica Italiana
was founded in Italy. Korean anarchists formed
the League of Free Social Constructors in
September 1945 and in 1946 the Japanese Anarchist
Federation was founded. An International Anarchist
Congress with delegates from across Europe
was held in Paris in May 1948. After World
War II, an appeal in the Fraye Arbeter Shtime
detailing the plight of German anarchists
and called for Americans to support them.
By February 1946, the sending of aid parcels
to anarchists in Germany was a large-scale
operation. The Federation of Libertarian Socialists
was founded in Germany in 1947 and Rudolf
Rocker wrote for its organ, Die Freie Gesellschaft,
which survived until 1953. In 1956, the Uruguayan
Anarchist Federation was founded. In 1955,
the Anarcho-Communist Federation of Argentina
renamed itself as the Argentine Libertarian
Federation. The Syndicalist Workers' Federation
(SWF) was a syndicalist group in active in
post-war Britain, and one of Solidarity Federation's
earliest predecessors. It was formed in 1950
by members of the dissolved Anarchist Federation
of Britain (AFB). Unlike the AFB, which was
influenced by anarcho-syndicalist ideas but
ultimately not syndicalist itself, the SWF
decided to pursue a more definitely syndicalist,
worker-centred strategy from the outset.Anarchism
continued to influence important literary
and intellectual personalities of the time,
such as Albert Camus, Herbert Read, Paul Goodman,
Dwight Macdonald, Allen Ginsberg, George Woodcock,
Leopold Kohr, Julian Beck, John Cage and the
French Surrealist group led by André Breton,
which now openly embraced anarchism and collaborated
in the Fédération Anarchiste.Anarcho-pacifism
became influential in the Anti-nuclear movement
and anti war movements of the time as can
be seen in the activism and writings of the
English anarchist member of Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament Alex Comfort or the similar activism
of the American catholic anarcho-pacifists
Ammon Hennacy and Dorothy Day. Anarcho-pacifism
became a "basis for a critique of militarism
on both sides of the Cold War". The resurgence
of anarchist ideas during this period is well
documented in Robert Graham's Anarchism: A
Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas,
Volume Two: The Emergence of the New Anarchism
(1939–1977).
=== Contemporary anarchism ===
A surge of popular interest in anarchism occurred
in western nations during the 1960s and 1970s.
Anarchism was influential in the Counterculture
of the 1960s and anarchists actively participated
in the late sixties students and workers revolts.
In 1968, in Carrara, Italy the International
of Anarchist Federations was founded during
an international anarchist conference held
there in 1968 by the three existing European
federations of France (the Fédération Anarchiste),
the Federazione Anarchica Italiana of Italy
and the Iberian Anarchist Federation as well
as the Bulgarian federation in French exile.In
the United Kingdom in the 1970s, this was
associated with the punk rock movement as
exemplified by bands such as Crass and the
Sex Pistols. The housing and employment crisis
in most of Western Europe led to the formation
of communes and squatter movements like that
of Barcelona, Spain. In Denmark, squatters
occupied a disused military base and declared
the Freetown Christiania, an autonomous haven
in central Copenhagen. Since the revival of
anarchism in the mid-20th century, a number
of new movements and schools of thought emerged.
Although feminist tendencies have always been
a part of the anarchist movement in the form
of anarcha-feminism, they returned with vigour
during the second wave of feminism in the
1960s. Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber
and anarchist historian Andrej Grubacic have
posited a rupture between generations of anarchism,
with those "who often still have not shaken
the sectarian habits" of the 19th century
contrasted with the younger activists who
are "much more informed, among other elements,
by indigenous, feminist, ecological and cultural-critical
ideas" and who by the turn of the 21st century
formed "by far the majority" of anarchists.Since
the 1980s, anarchism has grown into a strong
political force in Latin America, with the
development of Fejuve (1979), CIPO-RFM (1980s),
Zapatistas (1994), Horizontilidad (2001) and
the Oaxaca Uprising (2006). Around the turn
of the 21st century, anarchism grew in popularity
and influence as part of the anti-war, anti-capitalist,
and anti-globalisation movements. Anarchists
became known for their involvement in protests
against the meetings of the World Trade Organization
(WTO), Group of Eight (G8) and the World Economic
Forum (WEF). Some anarchist factions at these
protests engaged in rioting, property destruction,
and violent confrontations with police. These
actions were precipitated by ad hoc, leaderless,
anonymous cadres known as black blocs—other
organisational tactics pioneered in this time
include security culture, affinity groups
and the use of decentralised technologies
such as the internet. A significant event
of this period was the confrontations at WTO
conference in Seattle in 1999. According to
anarchist scholar Simon Critchley, "contemporary
anarchism can be seen as a powerful critique
of the pseudo-libertarianism of contemporary
neo-liberalism [...] One might say that contemporary
anarchism is about responsibility, whether
sexual, ecological or socio-economic; it flows
from an experience of conscience about the
manifold ways in which the West ravages the
rest; it is an ethical outrage at the yawning
inequality, impoverishment and disenfranchisment
that is so palpable locally and globally".
International anarchist federations in existence
include the International of Anarchist Federations,
the International Workers' Association and
International Libertarian Solidarity. The
largest organised anarchist movement today
is in Spain in the form of the Confederación
General del Trabajo (CGT) and the CNT. CGT
membership was estimated at around 100,000
for 2003.Anarchist ideas have been influential
in the development of the Democratic Federation
of Northern Syria (DFNS), more commonly known
as Rojava, a de facto autonomous region in
northern Syria. Abdullah Öcalan—a founding
member of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK)
who is currently imprisoned in Turkey—is
an iconic and popular figure in the DFNS whose
ideas shaped the region's society and politics.
While in prison, Öcalan corresponded with
(and was influenced by) Murray Bookchin, an
anarcho-communist theorist and philosopher
who developed Communalism and libertarian
municipalism. Modelled after Bookchin's ideas,
Öcalan developed the theory of democratic
confederalism. In March 2005, he issued his
"Declaration of Democratic Confederalism in
Kurdistan", calling upon citizens "to stop
attacking the government and instead create
municipal assemblies, which he called 'democracy
without the state'".
== Anarchist schools of thought ==
Anarchist schools of thought had been generally
grouped in two main historical traditions,
individualist anarchism and social anarchism,
which have some different origins, values
and evolution. The individualist wing of anarchism
emphasises negative liberty, i.e. opposition
to state or social control over the individual,
while those in the social wing emphasise positive
liberty to achieve one's potential and argue
that humans have needs that society ought
to fulfil, "recognising equality of entitlement".
In a chronological and theoretical sense,
there are classical—those created throughout
the 19th century—and post-classical anarchist
schools—those created since the mid-20th
century and after.
Beyond the specific factions of anarchist
thought is philosophical anarchism, which
embodies the theoretical stance that the state
lacks moral legitimacy without accepting the
imperative of revolution to eliminate it.
A component especially of individualist anarchism
philosophical anarchism may accept the existence
of a minimal state as unfortunate, and usually
temporary, "necessary evil" but argue that
citizens do not have a moral obligation to
obey the state when its laws conflict with
individual autonomy. One reaction against
sectarianism within the anarchist milieu was
"anarchism without adjectives", a call for
toleration first adopted by Fernando Tarrida
del Mármol in 1889 in response to the "bitter
debates" of anarchist theory at the time.
In abandoning the hyphenated anarchisms (i.e.
collectivist-, communist-, mutualist– and
individualist-anarchism), it sought to emphasise
the anti-authoritarian beliefs common to all
anarchist schools of thought.
=== Mutualism ===
Mutualism began in 18th-century English and
French labour movements before taking an anarchist
form associated with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
in France and others in the United States.
Proudhon proposed spontaneous order, whereby
organisation emerges without central authority,
a "positive anarchy" where order arises when
everybody does "what he wishes and only what
he wishes" and where "business transactions
alone produce the social order." Proudhon
distinguished between ideal political possibilities
and practical governance. For this reason,
much in contrast to some of his theoretical
statements concerning ultimate spontaneous
self-governance, Proudhon was heavily involved
in French parliamentary politics and allied
himself not with anarchist but socialist factions
of workers' movements and, in addition to
advocating state-protected charters for worker-owned
cooperatives, promoted certain nationalisation
schemes during his life of public service.
Mutualist anarchism is concerned with reciprocity,
free association, voluntary contract, federation,
and credit and currency reform. According
to the American mutualist William Batchelder
Greene, each worker in the mutualist system
would receive "just and exact pay for his
work; services equivalent in cost being exchangeable
for services equivalent in cost, without profit
or discount". Mutualism has been retrospectively
characterised as ideologically situated between
individualist and collectivist forms of anarchism.
Proudhon first characterised his goal as a
"third form of society, the synthesis of communism
and property".
=== Social anarchism ===
Social anarchism calls for a system with common
ownership of means of production and democratic
control of all organisations, without any
government authority or coercion. It is the
largest school of thought in anarchism. Social
anarchism rejects private property, seeing
it as a source of social inequality (while
retaining respect for personal property) and
emphasises cooperation and mutual aid.
==== Collectivist anarchism ====
Collectivist anarchism, also referred to as
revolutionary socialism or a form of such,
is a revolutionary form of anarchism, commonly
associated with Mikhail Bakunin and Johann
Most. Collectivist anarchists oppose all private
ownership of the means of production, instead
advocating that ownership be collectivised.
This was to be achieved through violent revolution,
first starting with a small cohesive group
through acts of violence, or propaganda by
the deed, which would inspire the workers
as a whole to revolt and forcibly collectivise
the means of production.However, collectivisation
was not to be extended to the distribution
of income as workers would be paid according
to time worked, rather than receiving goods
being distributed "according to need" as in
anarcho-communism. This position was criticised
by anarchist communists as effectively "uphold[ing]
the wages system". Collectivist anarchism
arose contemporaneously with Marxism, but
opposed the Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat
despite the stated Marxist goal of a collectivist
stateless society. Anarchist, communist and
collectivist ideas are not mutually exclusive—although
the collectivist anarchists advocated compensation
for labour, some held out the possibility
of a post-revolutionary transition to a communist
system of distribution according to need.
==== Anarcho-communism ====
Anarcho-communism (also known as anarchist-communism,
libertarian communism and occasionally as
free communism) is a theory of anarchism that
advocates abolition of the state, markets,
money, private property (while retaining respect
for personal property) and capitalism in favour
of common ownership of the means of production,
direct democracy and a horizontal network
of voluntary associations and workers' councils
with production and consumption based on the
guiding principle: "From each according to
his ability, to each according to his need".Some
forms of anarchist communism such as insurrectionary
anarchism are strongly influenced by egoism
and radical individualism, believing anarcho-communism
is the best social system for the realisation
of individual freedom. Most anarcho-communists
view anarcho-communism as a way of reconciling
the opposition between the individual and
society.Anarcho-communism developed out of
radical socialist currents after the French
Revolution but was first formulated as such
in the Italian section of the First International.
The theoretical work of Peter Kropotkin took
importance later as it expanded and developed
pro-organisationalist and insurrectionary
anti-organisationalist sections. To date,
the best known examples of an anarchist communist
society (i.e. established around the ideas
as they exist today and achieving worldwide
attention and knowledge in the historical
canon), are the anarchist territories during
the Spanish Revolution and the Free Territory
during the Russian Revolution. Through the
efforts and influence of the Spanish anarchists
during the Spanish Revolution within the Spanish
Civil War, starting in 1936 anarchist communism
existed in most of Aragon, parts of the Levante
and Andalusia as well as in the stronghold
of anarchist Catalonia before being crushed
by the combined forces of the regime that
won the war, Hitler, Mussolini, Communist
Party of Spain repression (backed by the Soviet
Union) as well as economic and armaments blockades
from the capitalist countries and the Spanish
Republic itself. During the Russian Revolution,
anarchists such as Nestor Makhno worked to
create and defend—through the Revolutionary
Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine—anarcho-communism
in the Free Territory of the Ukraine from
1919 before being conquered by the Bolsheviks
in 1921.
==== Anarcho-syndicalism ====
Anarcho-syndicalism is a branch of anarchism
that focuses on the labour movement. Anarcho-syndicalists
view labour unions as a potential force for
revolutionary social change, replacing capitalism
and the state with a new society democratically
self-managed by workers. The basic principles
of anarcho-syndicalism are workers' solidarity,
direct action and workers' self-management.
Anarcho-syndicalists believe that only direct
action—that is, action concentrated on directly
attaining a goal as opposed to indirect action,
such as electing a representative to a government
position—will allow workers to liberate
themselves. Moreover, anarcho-syndicalists
believe that workers' organisations (the organisations
that struggle against the wage system, which
in anarcho-syndicalist theory will eventually
form the basis of a new society) should be
self-managing. They should not have bosses
or "business agents"—rather, the workers
should be able to make all the decisions that
affect them themselves. Rudolf Rocker was
one of the most popular voices in the anarcho-syndicalist
movement. He outlined a view of the origins
of the movement, what it sought and why it
was important to the future of labour in his
1938 pamphlet Anarcho-Syndicalism. The International
Workers Association is an international anarcho-syndicalist
federation of various labour unions from different
countries. The Spanish CNT played and still
plays a major role in the Spanish labour movement.
It was also an important force in the Spanish
Civil War.
=== Individualist anarchism ===
Individualist anarchism refers to several
traditions of thought within the anarchist
movement that emphasise the individual and
their will over any kinds of external determinants
such as groups, society, traditions and ideological
systems. Individualist anarchism is not a
single philosophy, but it instead refers to
a group of individualistic philosophies that
sometimes are in conflict.
In 1793, William Godwin, who has often been
cited as the first anarchist, wrote Political
Justice, which some consider the first expression
of anarchism. Godwin was a philosophical anarchist
and from a rationalist and utilitarian basis
opposed revolutionary action and saw a minimal
state as a present "necessary evil" that would
become increasingly irrelevant and powerless
by the gradual spread of knowledge. Godwin
advocated individualism, proposing that all
cooperation in labour be eliminated on the
premise that this would be most conducive
with the general good.
An influential form of individualist anarchism,
called "egoism", or egoist anarchism, was
expounded by one of the earliest and best-known
proponents of individualist anarchism, the
German Max Stirner. Stirner's The Ego and
Its Own, published in 1844, is a founding
text of the philosophy. According to Stirner,
the only limitation on the rights of individuals
is their power to obtain what they desire,
without regard for God, state, or morality.
To Stirner, rights were "spooks" in the mind
and he held that society does not exist, but
"the individuals are its reality". Stirner
advocated self-assertion and foresaw unions
of egoists, non-systematic associations continually
renewed by all parties' support through an
act of will, which Stirner proposed as a form
of organisation in place of the state. Egoist
anarchists argue that egoism will foster genuine
and spontaneous union between individuals.
"Egoism" has inspired many interpretations
of Stirner's philosophy. It was re-discovered
and promoted by German philosophical anarchist
and homosexual activist John Henry Mackay.
Josiah Warren is widely regarded as the first
American anarchist, and the four-page weekly
paper he edited during 1833, The Peaceful
Revolutionist, was the first anarchist periodical
published. For American anarchist historian
Eunice Minette Schuster, "[i]t is apparent
[...] that Proudhonian Anarchism was to be
found in the United States at least as early
as 1848 and that it was not conscious of its
affinity to the Individualist Anarchism of
Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews [...] William
B. Greene presented this Proudhonian Mutualism
in its purest and most systematic form". Henry
David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an important
early influence in individualist anarchist
thought in the United States and Europe. Thoreau
was an American author, poet, naturalist,
tax resister, development critic, surveyor,
historian, philosopher and leading transcendentalist.
He is best known for his books Walden, a reflection
upon simple living in natural surroundings,
as well as his essay, Civil Disobedience,
an argument for individual resistance to civil
government in moral opposition to an unjust
state. Benjamin Tucker later fused Stirner's
egoism with the economics of Warren and Proudhon
in his eclectic influential publication Liberty.
From these early influences, individualist
anarchism in different countries attracted
a small yet diverse following of Bohemian
artists and intellectuals, free love and birth
control advocates (see anarchism and issues
related to love and sex), individualist naturists
and nudists (see anarcho-naturism), freethought
and anti-clerical activists as well as young
anarchist outlaws in what became known as
illegalism and individual reclamation (see
European individualist anarchism and individualist
anarchism in France). These authors and activists
included Oscar Wilde, Emile Armand, Han Ryner,
Henri Zisly, Renzo Novatore, Miguel Gimenez
Igualada, Adolf Brand and Lev Chernyi among
others.
=== Post-classical anarchist schools of thought
===
Anarchism continues to generate many philosophies
and movements, at times eclectic, drawing
upon various sources and syncretic, combining
disparate concepts to create new philosophical
approaches.Insurrectionary anarchism is a
revolutionary theory, practice, and tendency
within the anarchist movement which emphasises
insurrection within anarchist practice. It
is critical of formal organisations such as
labour unions and federations that are based
on a political programme and periodic congresses.
Instead, insurrectionary anarchists advocate
informal organisation and small affinity group
based organisation. Insurrectionary anarchists
put value in attack, permanent class conflict
and a refusal to negotiate or compromise with
class enemies.Green anarchism (or eco-anarchism)
is a school of thought within anarchism that
emphasises environmental issues, with an important
precedent in anarcho-naturism and whose main
contemporary currents are anarcho-primitivism
and social ecology. Writing from a green anarchist
perspective, John Zerzan attributes the ills
of today's social degradation to technology
and the birth of agricultural civilization.
While Layla AbdelRahim argues that "the shift
in human consciousness was also a shift in
human subsistence strategies, whereby some
human animals reinvented their narrative to
center murder and predation and thereby institutionalize
violence". Thus, according to her, civilization
was the result of the human development of
technologies and grammar for predatory economics.
Language and literacy, she claims, are some
of these technologies.Anarcha-feminism (also
called anarchist feminism and anarcho-feminism)
combines anarchism with feminism. It generally
views patriarchy as a manifestation of involuntary
coercive hierarchy that should be replaced
by decentralised free association. Anarcha-feminists
believe that the struggle against patriarchy
is an essential part of class struggle, and
the anarchist struggle against the state.
In essence, the philosophy sees anarchist
struggle as a necessary component of feminist
struggle and vice versa. L. Susan Brown claims
that "as anarchism is a political philosophy
that opposes all relationships of power, it
is inherently feminist". Anarcha-feminism
began with the late 19th-century writings
of early feminist anarchists such as Emma
Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre.
Anarcho-pacifism is a tendency that rejects
violence in the struggle for social change
(see non-violence). It developed mostly in
the Netherlands, Britain and the United States
before and during the Second World War. Christian
anarchism is a movement in political theology
that combines anarchism and Christianity.
Its main proponents included Leo Tolstoy,
Dorothy Day, Ammon Hennacy and Jacques Ellul.
Religious anarchism refers to a set of related
anarchist ideologies that are inspired by
the teachings of (organized) religions, but
many anarchists have traditionally been skeptical
of and opposed to organized religion. Many
different religions have served as inspiration
for religious forms of anarchism, most notably
Christianity as Christian anarchists believe
that biblical teachings give credence to anarchist
philosophy. Non-Christian forms of religious
anarchism include Buddhist anarchism, Jewish
anarchism and most recently Neopaganism.
Synthesis anarchism is a form of anarchism
that tries to join anarchists of different
tendencies under the principles of anarchism
without adjectives. In the 1920s, this form
found as its main proponents the anarcho-communists
Voline and Sébastien Faure. It is the main
principle behind the anarchist federations
grouped around the contemporary global International
of Anarchist Federations.Platformism is a
tendency within the wider anarchist movement
based on the organisational theories in the
tradition of Dielo Truda's Organisational
Platform of the General Union of Anarchists
(Draft). The document was based on the experiences
of Russian anarchists in the 1917 October
Revolution, which led eventually to the victory
of the Bolsheviks over the anarchists and
other groups. The Platform attempted to address
and explain the anarchist movement's failures
during the Russian Revolution.
Post-left anarchy is a recent current in anarchist
thought that promotes a critique of anarchism's
relationship to traditional left-wing politics.
Some post-leftists seek to escape the confines
of ideology in general also presenting a critique
of organisations and morality. Influenced
by the work of Max Stirner and by the Marxist
Situationist International, post-left anarchy
is marked by a focus on social insurrection
and a rejection of leftist social organisation.Post-anarchism
is a theoretical move towards a synthesis
of classical anarchist theory and poststructuralist
thought, drawing from diverse ideas including
post-left anarchy, postmodernism, autonomism,
postcolonialism and the Situationist International.
Queer anarchism is a form of socialism which
suggests anarchism as a solution to the issues
faced by the LGBT community, mainly heteronormativity,
homophobia, transphobia and biphobia. Anarcho-queer
arose during the late 20th century based on
the work of Michel Foucault The History of
Sexuality.
Left-wing market anarchism strongly affirm
the classical liberal ideas of self-ownership
and free markets while maintaining that taken
to their logical conclusions, these ideas
support strongly anti-corporatist, anti-hierarchical,
pro-labour positions and anti-capitalism in
economics and anti-imperialism in foreign
policy.Anarcho-capitalism advocates the elimination
of the state in favour of self-ownership in
a free market. Anarcho-capitalism developed
from radical anti-state libertarianism and
individualist anarchism, drawing from Austrian
School economics, study of law and economics
and public choice theory. There is a strong
current within anarchism which believes that
anarcho-capitalism cannot be considered a
part of the anarchist movement due to the
fact that anarchism has historically been
an anti-capitalist movement and for definitional
reasons which see anarchism as incompatible
with capitalist forms.Anarcho-transhumanism
is a recently new branch of anarchism that
takes traditional and modern anarchism, typically
drawing from anarcho-syndicalism, left-libertarianism
or libertarian socialism and combines it with
transhumanism and post-humanism. It can be
described as a "liberal democratic revolution,
at its core the idea that people are happiest
when they have rational control over their
lives. Reason, science, and technology provide
one kind of control, slowly freeing us from
ignorance, toil, pain, disease and limited
lifespans (aging)". Some anarcho-transhumanists
might also follow technogaianism.
== Internal issues and debates ==
Anarchism is a philosophy that embodies many
diverse attitudes, tendencies and schools
of thought and as such disagreement over questions
of values, ideology and tactics is common.
The compatibility of capitalism, nationalism
and religion with anarchism is widely disputed.
Similarly, anarchism enjoys complex relationships
with ideologies such as Marxism, communism,
collectivism, syndicalism/trade unionism and
capitalism. Anarchists may be motivated by
humanism, divine authority, enlightened self-interest,
veganism or any number of alternative ethical
doctrines.
Phenomena such as civilisation, technology
(e.g. within anarcho-primitivism) and the
democratic process may be sharply criticised
within some anarchist tendencies and simultaneously
lauded in others.
On a tactical level, while propaganda of the
deed was a tactic used by anarchists in the
19th century (e.g. the nihilist movement),
some contemporary anarchists espouse alternative
direct action methods such as nonviolence,
counter-economics and anti-state cryptography
to bring about an anarchist society. About
the scope of an anarchist society, some anarchists
advocate a global one, while others do so
by local ones. The diversity in anarchism
has led to widely different use of identical
terms among different anarchist traditions,
which has led to many definitional concerns
in anarchist theory.
== Topics of interest ==
Intersecting and overlapping between various
schools of thought, certain topics of interest
and internal disputes have proven perennial
within anarchist theory.
=== Free love ===
An important current within anarchism is free
love. Free love advocates sometimes traced
their roots back to Josiah Warren and to experimental
communities, viewed sexual freedom as a clear,
direct expression of an individual's sovereignty.
Free love particularly stressed women's rights
since most sexual laws discriminated against
women, see for example marriage laws and anti-birth
control measures. The most important American
free love journal was Lucifer the Lightbearer
(1883–1907), edited by Moses Harman and
Lois Waisbrooker, but also there existed Ezra
Heywood and Angela Heywood's The Word (1872–1890,
1892–1893). Free Society (1895–1897 as
The Firebrand; 1897–1904 as Free Society)
was a major anarchist newspaper in the United
States at the end of the 19th and beginning
of the 20th centuries. The publication advocated
free love and women's rights and critiqued
"Comstockery"—i.e. censorship of sexual
information. Also M. E. Lazarus was an important
American individualist anarchist who promoted
free love.In New York City's Greenwich Village,
bohemian feminists and socialists advocated
self-realisation and pleasure for women (and
also men) in the here and now. They encouraged
playing with sexual roles and sexuality and
the openly bisexual radical Edna St. Vincent
Millay and the lesbian anarchist Margaret
Anderson were prominent among them. Discussion
groups organised by the Villagers were frequented
by Emma Goldman, among others. Magnus Hirschfeld
noted in 1923 that Goldman "has campaigned
boldly and steadfastly for individual rights,
and especially for those deprived of their
rights. Thus it came about that she was the
first and only woman, indeed the first and
only American, to take up the defence of homosexual
love before the general public". Before Goldman,
heterosexual anarchist Robert Reitzel (1849–1898)
spoke positively of homosexuality from the
beginning of the 1890s in his Detroit-based
German language journal Der arme Teufel (English:
The Poor Devil). In Argentina, anarcha-feminist
Virginia Bolten published the newspaper called
La Voz de la Mujer (English: The Woman's Voice),
which was published nine times in Rosario
between 8 January 1896 and 1 January 1897
and was revived briefly in 1901.In Europe,
the main propagandist of free love within
individualist anarchism was Emile Armand.
He proposed the concept of la camaraderie
amoureuse to speak of free love as the possibility
of voluntary sexual encounter between consenting
adults. He was also a consistent proponent
of polyamory. In Germany, the Stirnerists
Adolf Brand and John Henry Mackay were pioneering
campaigners for the acceptance of male bisexuality
and homosexuality. Mujeres Libres was an anarchist
women's organisation in Spain that aimed to
empower working class women. It was founded
in 1936 by Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Mercedes
Comaposada and Amparo Poch y Gascón and had
approximately 30,000 members. The organisation
was based on the idea of a "double struggle"
for women's liberation and social revolution
and argued that the two objectives were equally
important and should be pursued in parallel.
In order to gain mutual support, they created
networks of women anarchists. Lucía Sánchez
Saornil was a main founder of the Spanish
anarcha-feminist federation Mujeres Libres
who was open about her lesbianism. She was
published in a variety of literary journals
while working under a male pen name, she was
able to explore lesbian themes at a time when
homosexuality was criminalised and subject
to censorship and punishment.
More recently, the British anarcho-pacifist
Alex Comfort gained notoriety during the sexual
revolution for writing the bestseller sex
manual The Joy of Sex. The issue of free love
has a dedicated treatment in the work of French
anarcho-hedonist philosopher Michel Onfray
in such works as Théorie du corps amoureux.
Pour une érotique solaire (2000) and L'invention
du plaisir. Fragments cyréaniques (2002).
=== Libertarian education and freethought
===
For English anarchist William Godwin, education
was "the main means by which change would
be achieved". Godwin saw that the main goal
of education should be the promotion of happiness.
For Godwin, education had to have a "respect
for the child's autonomy which precluded any
form of coercion", a "pedagogy that respected
this and sought to build on the child's own
motivation and initiatives" and a "concern
about the child's capacity to resist an ideology
transmitted through the school". In his Political
Justice, he criticises state sponsored schooling
"on account of its obvious alliance with national
government". Early American anarchist Josiah
Warren advanced alternative education experiences
in the libertarian communities he established.
Max Stirner wrote in 1842 a long essay on
education called The False Principle of our
Education in which Stirner names his educational
principle "personalist", explaining that self-understanding
consists in hourly self-creation. Education
for him is to create "free men, sovereign
characters", by which he means "eternal characters
[...] who are therefore eternal because they
form themselves each moment".In the United
States, freethought was a basically anti-Christian,
anti-clerical movement, whose purpose was
to make the individual politically and spiritually
free to decide for himself on religious matters.
A number of contributors to Liberty (anarchist
publication) were prominent figures in both
freethought and anarchism. The individualist
anarchist George MacDonald was a co-editor
of Freethought and, for a time, The Truth
Seeker. E.C. Walker was co-editor of Lucifer,
the Light-Bearer and many anarchists were
"ardent freethinkers; reprints from freethought
papers such as Lucifer, the Light-Bearer,
Freethought and The Truth Seeker appeared
in Liberty... The church was viewed as a common
ally of the state and as a repressive force
in and of itself".In 1901, Catalan anarchist
and free thinker Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia
established "modern" or progressive schools
in Barcelona in defiance of an educational
system controlled by the Catholic Church.
The schools' stated goal was to "educate the
working class in a rational, secular and non-coercive
setting". Fiercely anti-clerical, Ferrer believed
in "freedom in education", education free
from the authority of church and state. Murray
Bookchin wrote: "This period [1890s] was the
heyday of libertarian schools and pedagogical
projects in all areas of the country where
Anarchists exercised some degree of influence.
Perhaps the best-known effort in this field
was Francisco Ferrer's Modern School (Escuela
Moderna), a project which exercised a considerable
influence on Catalan education and on experimental
techniques of teaching generally". La Escuela
Moderna and Ferrer's ideas generally formed
the inspiration for a series of Modern Schools
in the United States, Cuba, South America
and London. The first of these was started
in New York City in 1911. It also inspired
the Italian newspaper Università popolare,
founded in 1901. Russian christian anarchist
Leo Tolstoy established a school for peasant
children on his estate. Tolstoy's educational
experiments were short-lived due to harassment
by the Tsarist secret police. Tolstoy established
a conceptual difference between education
and culture. He thought that "[e]ducation
is the tendency of one man to make another
just like himself [...] Education is culture
under restraint, culture is free. [Education
is] when the teaching is forced upon the pupil,
and when then instruction is exclusive, that
is when only those subjects are taught which
the educator regards as necessary". For him,
"without compulsion, education was transformed
into culture".A more recent libertarian tradition
on education is that of unschooling and the
free school in which child-led activity replaces
pedagogic approaches. Experiments in Germany
led to A. S. Neill founding what became Summerhill
School in 1921. Summerhill is often cited
as an example of anarchism in practice. However,
although Summerhill and other free schools
are radically libertarian, they differ in
principle from those of Ferrer by not advocating
an overtly political class struggle-approach.
In addition to organising schools according
to libertarian principles, anarchists have
also questioned the concept of schooling per
se. The term deschooling was popularised by
Ivan Illich, who argued that the school as
an institution is dysfunctional for self-determined
learning and serves the creation of a consumer
society instead.
== List of anarchist societies ==
Kibbutz (1909–present)
Federation of Neighborhood Councils-El Alto
(Fejuve; 1979–present)
Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca "Ricardo
Flores Magón" (CIPO-RFM; 1980s–present)
Landless Workers' Movement (MST; 1982–present)
Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities
(MANEZ; 1994–present)
Barbacha (2001–present)
Villa de Zaachila (2006–present)
Cheran (2011–present)
Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (Rojava;
2013–present)
== Criticisms ==
Criticisms of anarchism include moral criticisms
and pragmatic criticisms. Anarchism is often
evaluated as unfeasible or utopian by its
critics.
== See also ==
Anarchism by country
Antinomianism
Governance without government
List of anarchist political ideologies
== References ==
== 
Sources ==
=== Primary ===
Armand, Émile (1926). Realism and Idealism
Mixed. Paris: International Library. translated
by J, 2004. The texts in this anthology come
from the book Anarchist Individualist Initiation,
published by The Friends of Armand, Florence,
Italy, 1956. To live one’s own life: from
the book Realism and Idealism Mixed, by Emile
Armand. Published by the International Library,
Paris, 1926 (Spanish version). Lemon Drops:
Fragments from the book Amorous Camaraderie.
A Full Life: in Free love and subversive sexuality
— voluntary procreation. Conscious Generation
Editorial Library, Valencia, 193? Reflections
on poetic language and its modes of expression
and Poems: from the book, So sang an “outsider”,
1925. Commentary without pretensions: Article
published in the magazine Zenith, #98, February
1959.
Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich (1882). God
and the State.
"IAF principles". International of Anarchist
Federations. Archived from the original on
5 January 2012.
Kropotkin, Pëtr (1898). Anarchism: Its Philosophy
and Ideal. Independently. ISBN 978-1-5495-4530-6.
Kropotkin, Peter (2002). Anarchism: A Collection
of Revolutionary Writings. Courier Dover Publications.
p. 5. ISBN 0-486-41955-X.
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1849). The State:
Its Nature, Object, and Destiny.
The Anarchist FAQ Editorial Collective (2017).
"An Anarchist FAQ".
=== Secondary ===
Brooks, Frank H. (1994). The Individualist
Anarchists: An Anthology of Liberty (1881–1908).
Transaction Publishers. ISBN 1-56000-132-1.
Flint, Colin (23 April 2009). "Anarchism".
In Derek Gregory; Ron Johnston; Geraldine
Pratt; Michael Watts; Sarah Whatmore. The
Dictionary of Human Geography (PDF) (5th ed.).
Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-3287-9. Archived
from the original (PDF) on 23 May 2015.
Fowler, R.B. (1972). "The Anarchist Tradition
of Political Thought". Western Political Quarterly.
University of Utah. 25 (4): 738–752. doi:10.2307/446800.
JSTOR 446800.
Graham, Robert (2005). Anarchism: a Documentary
History of Libertarian Ideas: from Anarchy
to Anarchism. Montréal: Black Rose Books.
ISBN 1-55164-250-6. Archived from the original
on 30 November 2010. Retrieved 5 March 2011.
Guerin, Daniel (1970). Anarchism: from theory
to practice. Monthly Review Press.
Joll, James (1964). The Anarchists. Harvard
University Press. ISBN 0-674-03642-5.
Kahn, Joseph (2000). "Anarchism, the Creed
That Won't Stay Dead; The Spread of World
Capitalism Resurrects a Long-Dormant Movement".
The New York Times (5 August).
Marshall, Peter (2010). Demanding the Impossible:
A History of Anarchism. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
ISBN 978-1-60486-064-1.
Morris, Christopher W. (29 July 2002). An
Essay on the Modern State. Cambridge University
Press. ISBN 978-0-521-52407-0.
Moynihan, Colin (2007). "Book Fair Unites
Anarchists. In Spirit, Anyway". New York Times
(16 April).
Nettlau, Max (1996). A Short History of Anarchism.
Freedom Press. ISBN 0-900384-89-1.
McLaughlin, Paul (2007-11-28). Anarchism and
Authority: A Philosophical Introduction to
Classical Anarchism (PDF). Aldershot: Ashgate.
ISBN 978-0-7546-6196-2. Archived from the
original (PDF) on 4 August 2018.
Sheehan, Sean (1 June 2003). Anarchism. London:
Reaktion Books. p. 85. ISBN 978-1-86189-169-3.
Sylvan, Richard (2007). "Anarchism". In Robert
E. Goodin; Philip Pettit; Thomas Pogge. A
Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy
(PDF). Blackwell Companions to Philosophy.
5 (2nd ed.). Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 978-1-405-13653-2.
Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 May
2017.
Suissa, Judith (2006). Anarchism and Education:
A philosophical perspective (PDF). New York:
Routledge. p. 7. ISBN 978-0-415-37194-0. Archived
from the original (PDF) on 2 April 2015.
=== Tertiary (Encyclopedias and Dictionaries)
===
Woodcock, Gerorge. "Anarchism". The Encyclopedia
of Philosophy.
Craig, Edward (2005-03-31). "Anarchism". The
Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
p. 14. ISBN 978-0-415-32495-3. .
Kropotkin, Peter (1910). "Anarchism". "Anarchism".
Encyclopædia Britannica.
McLean, Iain; McMillan, Alistair (2003). The
Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics. Oxford
University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-280276-7.
Ostergaard, Geoffrey. The Blackwell Dictionary
of Modern Social Thought. Blackwell Publishing.
"Anarchism". Origin and meaning of anarchism
by Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved
2018-09-15.
"Definition of ANARCHY". Definition of Anarchy
by Merriam-Webster. 2018-09-10. Retrieved
2018-09-15.
"Definition of ANARCHY". Definition of Anarchy
by Merriam-Webster. 2018-09-10. Retrieved
2018-09-15.
"Dictionnaire des usages socio-politiques
(1770–1815)". Google Books (in French).
Retrieved 2018-09-15.
== Further reading ==
Barclay, Harold, People Without Government:
An Anthropology of Anarchy (2nd ed.), Left
Bank Books, 1990 ISBN 1-871082-16-1.
Carter, April, The Political Theory of Anarchism,
Harper & Row. 1971. ISBN 978-0-06-136050-3.
Federici, Silvia, Caliban and the Witch: Women,
the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, Autonomedia,
2004. ISBN 9781570270598.
Guérin, Daniel, Anarchism: From Theory to
Practice, Monthly Review Press. 1970. ISBN
0-85345-175-3.
Harper, Clifford, Anarchy: A Graphic Guide,
(Camden Press, 1987): An overview, updating
Woodcock's classic and illustrated throughout
by Harper's woodcut-style artwork.
Le Guin, Ursula, The Dispossessed, New York
: Harper & Row, 1974. ISBN 0-06-012563-2 (first
edition, hardcover).
Nettlau, Max, Anarchy through the times, Gordon
Press. 1979. ISBN 0-8490-1397-6.
Sartwell, Crispin (2008). Against the state:
an introduction to anarchist political theory.
SUNY Press. ISBN 978-0-7914-7447-1. Archived
from the original on 9 May 2016. Retrieved
29 October 2015.
Scott, James C., Two Cheers for Anarchism:
Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and
Meaningful Work and Play, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0691155296.
The Invisible Committee (2007). The Coming
Insurrection. Semiotext(e). ISBN 978-1584350804.
Woodcock, George, ed., The Anarchist Reader
(Fontana/Collins 1977; ISBN 0-00-634011-3):
An anthology of writings from anarchist thinkers
and activists including Proudhon, Kropotkin,
Bakunin, Malatesta, Bookchin, Goldman and
many others.
== External links ==
Anarchism at Curlie.
Anarchism on In Our Time at the BBC
