Anarchy:About

From Anarchy In Action
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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 confederations of residential communities. The list of communities includes communes, towns and neighborhoods small enough for people to make decisions at face-to-face meetins. 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. Playfully but still seriously, 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 and establishing a libertarian socialist society in its place. Anti-authoritarianism (or libertarianism) refers to a broader category of politics including groups such as the Wobblies and Zapatistas that do not necessarily call themselves Anarchists but, like the Anarchists, oppose coercive hierarchy and attempt to implement libertarian socialism. 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. (In other words, we split apart the concept of participatory democracy and assert that a society can be participatory but not democratic.) Significantly, participatory examples have historically relied on oppressive systems of enslavement and colonialism, and yet these examples may still be useful for the study of how large people groups of people can engage in horizontal self-rule. Participatory politics encompasses anti-authoritarianism, which encompasses Anarchism. Finally, the autonomous category refers to self-governed communities that shift power relations in an anti-authoritarian 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. 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".[1]

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, with web development assistance from getlibre.org.

We aim to run this website itself as an example of anarchy in action. Currently, Capitalism vs. the Climate administrates the wiki, but if there is interest, we would like to switch over to having all contributors be able to vote on rules and elect and instantly recall administrators.

Our Culture is Free Culture

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  1. ↑ Maia Ramnath, Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History of India's Liberation Struggle (AK Press, 2011), 6.
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