Posed similar questions about communism in the past. I’m just trying to understand, I ask because I know there is a reasonable contingent of anarchists here. If you have any literature to recommend I’d love to hear about it. My current understanding is, destruction of current system of government (violently or otherwise) followed by abolition of all law. Following this, small communities of like minded individuals form and cooperate to solve food, safety, water and shelter concerns.
That’s about correct. You miss the final stage: rise of a group of leaders, who quickly manipulate the other members, take over power and (in the absence of law) create a dictatorship.
anarchism isn’t a system. it’s a guiding principle.
True anarchy would not be possible until every human being on the planet is on the same page and doesn’t hate another for stupid reasons like what pronouns they want to be referred to by or what color their skin is, and also with zero absence of greed.
On the small scale, a co-op is basically anarchist. Nobody is really in charge, everyone pitches in. It works incredibly well small scale. The bigger the group, the more likely corruption will fuck everything up.
Just like all the animals in the wilderness live without government people would do the same thing
Big disagree. That’s the mainstream/normie concept of anarchism, but that’s not what anarchist theory actually suggests anarchism should be, when organising society along anarchist lines. I believe that commited anarchists generally put more thought into how they should re-arrange society than just “we’ll live like animals.” (The idea of “wilderness” suggests you’re thinking of something like anarcho-primitivism. My own home or homestead isn’t a wilderness, for instance, it’s just a very small settlement.)
First thing you have to understand is that anarchism is basically a precursor-idea to communism. They share the intention of giving common people en-masse autonomy over the running of their society. A few implications of this:
A) If implemented, they would both require workers to seize means of production. Unless…
- We turn away from industrial production (anarcho primitivism), or
- Industrialists round up slave-labour ( anarcho capitalism)
B) Our first difference arises - socialists seek to govern through various means, e.g trade unions and/or the most educated in society, whereas anarchists don’t seek to govern at all since they have dismantled or collectively opted out of the elective framework. Which is a profoundly democratic thing to do.
C) no “imperialism,” or more simply put, war waging. Two ways of looking at this: if anarchism OR Communism was implemented worldwide, there would likely be no nation-state distinctions. Also, if everyone is behaving anarchically, there would be no state and army apparatus to serve under.
Second thing to consider is all of those “plot holes” that the normie idea of anarchy - which I like to attribute to how they live in the walking dead or another post apocalyptic world - raises.
A) how do people access, for example, medical services? Either they don’t (APrimitiv again) or ALL the doctors and nurses need to stick to their jobs as they commit to this new anarchist world. They can achieve this as long as they themselves organise co-operation between, e.g, medicine producers, the ambulance drivers, surgical blade and clean fabrics factories.
So the goal of anarchism is autonomy, but it usually isn’t the case that anarchists want to do away with all things we live with in today’s society. Hospitals provide an example of when anarchists might behave more… “Socialist,” where the route to a doctor’s autonomy would be the doctors seizing control of a hospital and running it as a council or a series of co-habiting but independent wards in the same building.
That brings us to what’s actually the biggest plot hole of anarchism, the question of efficiency in organisation. You can see that the former conclusion, that doctors form a hospital council, is going to be more efficient then ordering in supplies only for their own ward.
B) the plot-hole of wanton Violence - how to prevent it?
To preface: In our current, statist society, we often associate anarchy with criminals. Mainly because career criminals live the most detached from state structure of any humans, thus are seemingly the most successful at actually being anarchists.
We see these people constantly utilising random acts of violence as they compete with state-subjects for access to resources and services which the state has a monopoly on. Commonly this is the State’s currency.
Career criminals are always unproductive people. People see their lack of access to resources or production-means and presume it will be the case for all anarchists - in which case, wanton violence would be common.
So we’ve already addressed 2 solutions; first, people should access and utilise production means themselves. Secondly, they should co-operate, in order to maximise prosperity and hence avert acts of violence from resource competition.
But how else? How do we deal with criminals who attack people for
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you could “legalise crime,” but then why should anyone partake in your particular rules of anarchy, and why shouldn’t they just attack you?
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you can “just kill em!” But that leaves you open to vengeance from their friends and family.
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clearly the best way would be to prosecute them in some way - but we abolished the state, and with it, the punitive system, the legal system, the judicial system.
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so, collaboratively, we have to work out punishments that nearby anarchists agree with… Oh wait! That sounds similar to socialism!
- How compatible is Anarchism with capitalism, really? If it doesn’t play nice with capitalism, what does that make it?
As an exercise to the reader I’ll allow you to try and imagine anarcho capitalist society playing out. Picture yourself trying to build a corporate empire if you want. What happens at the end of this simulation?
Well, either you get everything stolen from you because a state doesn’t exist to protect your wealth, or you start implementing adequate protective measures.
But at that point, you have become your own state - you have a monopoly on violence, to protect people working in your organisation and the value they have produced for you. To me that’s the definition of a state - monopoly on violence and decision making power.
The same is still true if you share your big industrial enterprise among your buddies, or even your workers! We know from modern states that they don’t need to serve one person at the top.
My point here is just that anarchism and capitalism are not compatible. Capitalism really does rely on the state’s monopoly on violence, in order to keep Microsoft and Apple from firing nukes at each other.
So if anarchism is decidedly not capitalist, for capitalism is decidedly not anarchist (not long-term, anyway, LOL), what does that make anarchism? It’s either communist, socialist or economically-centrist. I’d argue it can be either of those.
You realize the animals in the wilderness kill each other constantly and frequently starve to death when the slightest thing goes wrong, right?
As I understand it, anarchism is less about eliminating laws and more about eliminating hierarchy. It’s bottom-up governance that requires lots of participation from everyone involved. You and your peers can establish laws for your neighborhood/town/etc., but everyone affected by that law needs to directly participate in its writing and there must be broad consensus before it is enacted. Law enforcement must be communal; you cannot outsource it to a police force, lest the police become oppressive.
When I think of anarchism I sometimes think of colonial New England: small towns that are largely autonomous, where communal decisions are made at town hall meetings and the locals manage themselves. It’s not a perfect analogy since there were higher levels of government, but day-to-day governance was very grass-roots.
That makes sense, funny you bring up colonial New England making communal decisions. Makes me think about the witch trials right away lol. Guess there wouldn’t really be checks/balances stopping that kind of thing, youd just move to a different place if you didnt like it?
If we learned anything from 2025 it’s that checks and balances only work when a critical mass of people agree to them. One of the US’s major political parties has abandoned rule of law and sent ICE on a modern day witch hunt against immigrants and perceived enemies. If you don’t like it, time to move. An anarchist would say this situation is a great example of why we shouldn’t outsource governance to entities that have power over us.
Thats a pretty fantastic point.
Anarchism is essential education, but highly impractical. It works on a fictional premise of good faith actors internally, while not maximizing power for threats externally. Because neither of these conditions are met, Anarchism remains relegated to ephemeral pop-ups and subsequent collapses. I wish it didn’t have to be so, it is a noble system.
Except it takes “faith in good faith actors” to want to invest some with power.
No it doesn’t. Plenty of people do it out of fear or even laziness.
I was part of a protest camp with around 5000 people that was organized according to anarchist ideals, for one week.
We organized in groups of ~10 people who each selected one delegate to attend a daily “village” plenum.
There were 5 villages, and each plenum would select a speaker to coordinate with the other villages.Everyone in a plenum had the same right to speak, and every decision had to be reached unanimously.
The decisions were non-binding since there was no way to enforce them.
Sometimes it got frustrating when a delegate was clearly intoxicated or rambled incoherently and there was no one with authority to stop them speaking.
But in general, it worked really well as a tool to have everyone’s voice heard, inform everyone about news, and coordinate daily life, schedules, protest marches, and chores in the camp.Until an outside threat appeared.
Police threatened to storm the camp and the plenum couldn’t reach a consensus to refrain from using molotov cocktails against them (in a tent city with children and disabled people sleeping inside).
The group advocating for violence (“black block”) stopped attending the meetings.
The remaining delegates split over the question whether the black block could be evicted from the camp, and most people stopped attending after that.The police raid never happened.
Yep. Anarchy sounds great on a small scale, but cannot work on a larger scale (country level and above). Any complex enough task requires delegation, and at least a semblance of hierarchy, providing a level of authority to certain people within a group.
Just think about it. Building a simple carriage? That’s something you can do with 2-3 other people, no hierarchy needed. A modern car? Even to just assemble one you need 6-10 people doing the physical work and 2-3 “leaders” who coordinate these people, to do so effectively. And to build a rocket that can actually reach space? You need hundreds of people working in lockstep from design to manufacturing and to final assembly. With redundancies and checks and whatnot all planned for. Try to built a rocket without any hierarchy and you’ll just never reach the goal.
Anarchy is something people should strive for, but it’s not something we can achieve truly. It’s more a guiding principle rather than a concrete goal.
Check out The Conquest of Bread by Kropotkin. It’s an easy read, I had no trouble with it in high school. It doesn’t need to be violent at all. Very much a “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” kind of book. People focus a lot on “Why should that person have what I have, when I worked so hard?” when the real question is “Why should that person go without what all of us have, when it’s completely unnecessary?”
I’ll look into it, thanks!
I can also recommend Anarchy Works by Peter Gelderloos.
Thanks!
I don’t know but there would probably be trains.
That’s Autism, not anarchism
The co-occurrence is surprisingly high
It’s a spectrum.
The spectrum:
Me and my homies:
Not an anarchist, but the common thread among those I’ve talked to is the elimination of hierarchical structures (whether government or otherwise).
Other types of organization are fine, as long as there are no asymmetric institutional relationships.
I’d be interested to figure out what type of organization are compatible.
Cooperatives, mutual aid networks like Food Not Bombs, rank-and-file/leaderless unions like the IWW, etc. There is a limited number of modern day examples because such organizations have historically faced systematic repression, but the list grows much longer if we look to the past. Such organization also tends to form spontaneously during natural disasters and the like when there is little to no state intervention, and quickly dissolve whenever the state intervenes.
For organizations with broader scope and on longer timescales, the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico and Rojava in north and east Syria are good examples.
Keep in mind of course that the real world is messy and full of conflict, and that results in there not being any perfectly pure example of anarchist ideals in practice in the same way that there is no perfectly pure example of any ideology in practice. In addition, many of the groups I listed above do not make explicit reference to anarchism and are doing their own thing that just so happens to map onto anarchist ideas, and they often don’t call themselves anarchist or even have an aversion to ideological labels entirely.
https://anarwiki.org/wiki/List_of_Anarchist_Societies
This might be of interest.
I love that list of examples, because they’re either not anarchist, or are very limited communes that function because of (and under the laws of) the larger democratic governments around them. Or they don’t exist anymore
Yes, that’s generally the caveat.
Anarchism works really well in groups where everyone knows everyone else personally, the community is protected from outside attacks by a non-anarchist superstructure, and everyone is free to leave if they don’t like it.
You can have an anarchist commune, village or town, but not an anarchist nation-state surrounded by other nation-states.I’d even claim that small homogeneous communities naturally gravitate towards anarchism (without outside force), but large communities naturally gravitate towards authoritarianism.
Democracy in its ideal form combines the two: A state with well-defined, legitimized, limited authority handling the big stuff, giving the maximum amount of freedom possible to local communities for handling their own stuff the way they want to.
Thats pretty cool, thanks!
Anarchism generally holds that nobody is superior to another. Society then functions because everyone recognises good ideas and will just cooperate to do them, and because everyone will be thusly motivated, nobody will want anything they can’t receive.
Modern western society is already founded on the belief that nobody is inherently superior to anyone else. Now of course in practice this has not always been the case, and there still exist a lot of people who really don’t believe this is true. But the ethos is still there, and most people would tell you they believe in it.
To continue that, and to your second point, one of the biggest flaws in any system we create is that humans are not perfectly logical and rational actors. You can’t count on everyone always doing the right thing, even if they could all agree what “right” even means.
Yeah, the holes are pretty damned obvious. Anarchism really only exists in the complete absence of stressors.
everyone recognises good ideas
It is like communism, it would work perfectly well if everyone was smart and reasonable and had the same goal.
Every system of government would work when everyone was smart and reasonable and had the same goals.
Any social and community structure is successful or not depending on how it handles those that want to abuse or undermine the system.
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Not very well. At least not for large communities, or ones that want to live modern lives in the developed world.
Yes it’s quite possible to have small communities where everyone knows each other, then you can enforce rules through consensus and social pressure.
But it would be impossible to have large societies or to live in a modern developed world with no hierarchical structures.
There’s a lot of unsaid assumptions going on here. If you’re talking about turning our society completely without any preparation, I’d agree. If you’re talking about having similar levels of healthcare or I strongly disagree
Not very well. At least not for large communities, or ones that want to live modern lives in the developed world.
Yes it’s quite possible to have small communities where everyone knows each other, then you can enforce rules through consensus and social pressure.
Wouldn’t viewing a large community as a federation of small ones solve the problem? Federations pop up when needed. When they don’t reach consensus, they break up into smaller parts, some of which give the idea a try?
Seems very natural to me, similar to how open source repositories interconnect. People collaborating, differing of opinion, forking or restarting.
That works in isolation, but a federation where everyone is free to cooperate or refrain from doing so will always be weaker militarily than a neighbor who can press everyone into the army.
So any anarchist federation that is successful enough will attract outside aggressors who want to expand, take their shit or force them to join.
Thats kind of what I’d assume but I’ve never talked about it with someone knowledgeable.
The Federation of War Unions
Is this really a serious lifestyle? I thought anarchism only exists to make jokes about communism.
With “communism” I mean the pure form without property or government.
