Anarchy:About

Contact

In general, please email questions, suggestions, and feedback to Dan. Technical issues concerning this website (e.g. broken links) should be directed to Diggity.

About This Website

This website is a resource for anyone to research and write about how and when anarchy can work. Anarchy, coming from the Greek words an (without) and archos (ruler) refers to a situation without domination, without coercive hierarchy.

We sort the examples by their scale and focus. The list of societies encompasses federations of residential communities. The list of communities includes communes, towns and neighborhoods small enough for people to make decisions at face-to-face meetings. The movements and uprisings category includes large-scale movements, rebellions, campaigns and mobilizations. The organizations category includes groups and their federations. Everyday anarchy lists anarchic projects and phenomena that exist all around us even in capitalist societies. Somewhat playfully, we add two further categories. In a nod to the naturalist Peter Kropotkin who saw cooperative activity as a factor of evolution, we add nonhuman anarchy to explore power relations in nonhuman animal and ecological communities. Lastly, we add the category of fictional anarchy, which includes, for example, the planet Anarres from Ursula K. LeGuin's novel The Dispossessed.

Types of anarchy. Anarchism refers to a political theory and practice that arose in the 19th century, aimed at abolishing coercive hierarchy. Anti-authoritarianism (also known as libertarianism, libertarian socialism, or small-a anarchism) refers to a broader category of politics including Anarchists but also groups such as the Wobblies and Zapatistas that eliminate coercive hierarchy in their practice and in the world they're trying to build. . None of the Anarchist or anti-authoritarian experiments in our study have fully succeeded in abolishing coercive hierarchy; what makes them anti-authoritarian according to our definition is their attempt to extend anarchy to everyone, through horizontal means. Third, a participatory category includes examples such as the classical Athenian polis where anarchy is extended to many but not to all or even necessarily to most of society. Participatory politics encompasses anti-authoritarianism, which encompasses Anarchism (with the important caveat that Anarchists don't always succeed in living up to their ideals). Finally, the autonomous category refers to self-governed entities that shift power relations in a participatory direction, such as the Paris Commune, which fell short of participatory governance.

We also sort these examples into four main organizational categories: Anarchism, Anti-authoritarianism, Participatory, and Autonomous. See the "Types of Anarchy" sidebar for definitions and explanations of how these categories overlap and relate to each other. Also see the Definitions page. By looking for anarchy beyond "big-A" Anarchist projects (although we're interested in those too!), we respond to Maia Ramnath's call in Decolonizing Anarchism to "locate the Western anarchist tradition as one contextually specific manifestation among a larger-indeed global-tradition of antiauthoritarian, egal­itarian thought/praxis".

In our articles, we try to explore how horizontal societies and communities deal with culture, decisions, economy, environment, crime, revolution, and neighboring societies. We do not claim or attempt to present evidence that anarchy is possible in all situations. Nor do we deny humans' innate potential for hierarchy and indeed for extreme cruelty. We present this resource for open-minded people to collaboratively explore the question of whether a horizontally-run world is possible and what this world might look like.

Many of the examples come from the following books:

An Anarchist FAQ (excerpt)

Anarchy in Action by Colin Ward

Anarchy Works by Peter Gelderloos

Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism by Michael Schmidt

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution by Peter Kropotkin

People Without Government: An Anthropology of Anarchy by Harold Barclay

The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism by Janet Biehl with Murray Bookchin (excerpt)

The website started as a project by Dan Fischer and Capitalism vs. the Climate, now known as Dragonfly Climate Collective, with web development assistance from Diggity and getlibre.org.

This wiki is done entirely by volunteers, and we encourage you to check our work and help us to constantly improve it. If you see misinformation, please contact us right away so that we can either fix it or assist you in setting up an account so you can edit the page directly. Additionally, if you are a member of an organization or another group described on this website, please feel free to send us information on current campaigns, and we will include it so that our readers will know how to get involved or participate in solidarity efforts.

Note on colonialism and representation

Part of our goal with this website is to challenge Eurocentric conceptions of anarchy by situating the European-derived practice of Anarchism within a much broader global set of anti-authoritarian, participatory and autonomous practices. Much is missed by ignoring the multitude of anarchies that have existed outside of the Anarchist tradition. There are several dangers, however.

First, we run the risk of misrepresenting non-European groups and/or exploiting them as a means for our preconceived political ends. As Peter Gelderloos puts it, "we could easily fall into the accustomed eurocentric pattern of manipulating and exploiting these other cultures for our own ideological capital." To counteract this tendency, we aim to always quote and cite voices from the groups we study, and we make note of the inevitable biases that European authors carry when they/we write about colonized cultures. Moreover, we acknowledge that many of the non-European cultures we're studying still carry on vital struggles against domination, and we try to provide information on how readers can get involved in solidarity efforts. As Gelderloos writes, " After all, if we are inspired by certain other societies, shouldn’t we do more to recognize and aid their ongoing struggles?" See "The_Tricky_Topic_of_Representation".

A second trap involves our inclusion on this website of "participatory" and "autonomous" examples that practiced and/or practice slavery, sexism, and settler-colonialism. Some could argue that to classical Athens, the New England town meetings, and the Zionist kibbutzim on this website is to whitewash what they did. We think their inclusion is extremely important, however, since such examples offer important insights into when anarchy can and cannot work. One of our working theses is that colonial attitudes and practices have been a primary reason for the failure of many of the examples included on this website.

Our Culture is Free Culture

• When we say "free" we mean freedom. Libre, not simply gratis. Think free software, not the watered-down term, "open-source".
• We're proud hackers, people who enjoy "playful cleverness". If you see that term here, know what it means before you criticize.
• Our Equation: You + Your Computer(s) == Empowerment & Self-Defense.

User Accounts

To edit this wiki you must request an account, since we've been spammed too often already :/

Searching

This website uses the MediaWiki search engine as the default. Unsuccessful searches are often caused by searching for common words like "have" and "from", which are not indexed, or by specifying more than one search term (only pages containing all of the search terms will appear in the result). You may also search this website with DuckDuckGo.

Software Requirements

Ogg Theora Movie Player

This website contains high-quality movies in Ogg Theora format. A current version of VLC Media Player is recommended. For other options, refer to this list.

PDF Viewer

This website contains PDF documents. A current version of Evince is recommended for best compatibility. For alternatives, see this comparison.

Newer Browser

• A current version of Firefox is recommended for best compatibility. Other options include Chromium, Midori, SeaMonkey, Camino, or Konqueror.
• See our Web browser tips for info on making your browser smarter and more secure.

JavaScript & SSL

Enabled by default in most browsers.

• How to enable JavaScript. You may choose to disable JavaScript (e.g. if you're using NoScript and don't want to whitelist our domain), but you will miss out on some MediaWiki features/extensions like the advanced editor.
• Enable SSL. It's important to browse the Web with HTTPS as much as possible, and HTTPS Everywhere will help.

Privacy

We're currently working on a detailed privacy statement. One of the focuses of this wiki is privacy on the Web, so we take it very seriously. Be sure that we don't share or sell your data, spam you, data-mine you, or other nasty practices practiced by entities like Facebook. However:

1. Search engines like Google may spider this website and archive information from it.
2. MediaWiki keeps detailed logs of edits to this wiki. Even pages/edits that are deleted remain for a very long time (maybe indefinitely) and accounts are never deleted, just blocked.
3. We are hosted by DreamHost and can't make promises for them or guarantee they wouldn't submit to legal or police action. As far as we can tell, DreamHost is a privacy-respecting Web host.

• DreamHost policies:
  • Privacy Policy
  • Acceptable Use Policy
  • Terms of Service.
• Most DreamHost policies only apply to their customers. For users/editors of this site, this statement is probably most important:
  • "[DreamHost] may also collect the URL from which you linked into our site, your IP address, and your browser type and version, all of which are collected in an anonymous manner without being linked to any of your personal information."

The Internet is a big place and information wants to be free. So, as a general rule, don't post anything potentially illegal or anything you wouldn't want made public.

Development

This website is developed and maintained by:

• Diggity

Copyright and Licensing

This website is powered by MediaWiki and features icons based upon the Tango Icon Library. The skin(template) is based upon Cavendish-MW.

MediaWiki is free software available under the GNU General Public License. Tango icons and the Cavendish-MW skin are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

All other content on this site is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, unless otherwise stated. Please contact Diggity for copyright and licensing inquiries.

Submissions

All edits and other contributions to this site (i.e. anything you add or change on this wiki) are considered released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. Please be aware of this when you post. We have some nice boilerplate text below the editing window that states this, so don't say we didn't warn you :)