Crash Course: Political Theory

This is what anarchism looks like.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Italians gathered across their balconies to sing, and Iranians performed poetry on theirs.

Groups of people self-organized to pick up medicines and deliver groceries, and people taught free classes online.

Around the world, mutual aid groups sprang up to raise emergency funds and support their communities with all kinds of direct services.

All of that was a form of political anarchism.

Even the singing Italians.

Hi!

I'm Ellie Anderson and this is Crash Course Political Theory.

[THEME MUSIC] Twentieth-century feminist revolutionary Emma Goldman didnt want to define anarchism for us, because she said anarchism isall about thinking for yourself.

But she threw us a bone.

She described anarchy as The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law. And also, crucially, the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary. Most of the political theories weve talked about in this series assume that societies require a central authority to keep the peace, and that without one, everything would collapse.

Remember Hobbes?

He thought life without government would be, quote, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Which is also how I describe myself when I haven't had enough coffee.

But anarchists sort of turn that on its head.

They believe that governments, with their hierarchies and tanks, are inherently tyrannical.

And humans are naturally cooperative, rather than naturally violent or competitive.

Still, its hard for me to imagine life without governments.

I mean, where else are nerds like me supposed to spend their prom nights if not their local public libraries?

But seriously, apart from some small-scale experiments by groups like the Paris Commune or the Zapatistas in Mexico, we can literally only imagine it.

Because its not exactly easy to poof governments away for the sake of experiment.

Except in rare moments, like after natural disasters or during a pandemic, when a bunch of our systems fall apart.

Then, writers like Rebecca Solnit argue, we can see a glimpse through the new forms of organizing that emerge to meet peoples needs without government oversight.

Anarchists point out that people have organized themselves since long before states existed.

Of the roughly three hundred thousand years that modern humans have been doing their thing, state-level societies have been around for only five thousand of those years.

And we still naturally organize ourselves, even when were not in crisis.

According to anthropologist David Graeber, daily life is full of anarchy: we wait in line to board the bus, even if the police arent there to make us, and we voluntarily join organizations, like sports teams and book clubs.

But it makes me curious.

If weve always naturally organized ourselves, then why do states exist?

As it turns out, for anarchists, it all goes back to private property.

Once we opened that can of worms, and land and resources no longer belonged to everyone like they did in many hunter-gatherer societies, property owners wanted to hang on to their wealth.

So, in the anarchist worldview, the state doesnt keep everyone safe from chaos it just keeps the rich, rich.

Or, in the words of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a French journalist whose work became the basis of anarchist theory in the mid-nineteenth century, property is theft. A fire catchphrase.

Almost as good as the famous line from the Godfather: when youre here, youre family. Or, wait, I think thats something else?

Anyway, all property, Proudhon believed, represents the labor of many, claimed by a single owner.

Thats because the value of a factory isnt just created by the person who owns it its also created by those who built it and those who work there.

Proudhon said that property should be owned by everyone who gives it value; otherwise there cant be equality.

If your Marx senses are tingling, thats because anarchism is also deeply influenced by socialism.

Both theories agree that economic exploitation hinders freedom.

But Marxists believe we can create a government that protects its people from this exploitation by giving power to the workers.

Anarchists, on the other hand, believe that its impossible to have any form of centralizing power without economic exploitation.

So, the ideas of Proudhon and others would develop into classical anarchism, which calls to abolish the state and replace it with free associations of workers.

They would trade goods and services, and cooperate with other regions through a union of self-governing communities.

A lot like those mutual aid groups that popped up during the pandemic.

Proudhons ideas were picked up by Mikhail Bakunin, who took things a couple steps further, opposing hierarchies of all kinds.

He wanted no bosses, no landlords, no kings, and no library late fees.

OK, that last one was just me.

And he railed against the oppression not just of workers but also of women and children, believing that all people who labored should benefit from that labor.

He argued for individual workers to organize themselves into groups that share resources and decision-making power, a concept known as collectivism.

And he wanted to challenge the state directly through violent revolution, if it came to that which, it did.

He brought his ideas right to the barricades of the 1848 revolutions that were erupting across Europe.

Meanwhile, the Russian aristocrat and geographer Peter Kropotkin had a slightly different take.

He was swayed to anarchism after visiting a group of self-governing Swiss watchmakers.

Now thats my kind of vacation.

Kropotkin built on Bakunins idea of collectivism.

But where Bakunin thought each according to his labor, Kropotkin thought, each according to his need. Which was basically a way of saying, you dont have to prove youre worthy of having your needs met.

He imagined a society run kind of like a public library I know, I know, just wait it gets better.

He says: The librarian does not ask what services you have rendered to society before giving you the book, and he comes to your assistance if you do not know how to manage the catalogue. I think we can all agree that no matter what political system were talking about, it really should be run by librarians.

Anyway, this vision is called anarchist communism its a lot like communism but without a centralized state, not even a centralized state made of workers.

These days, theres still tons of debate over anarchism.

One of the main critiques is, sure, a stateless society sounds cool in theory, but how could it exist in reality?

Its impractical!

And folks have all sorts of ways of responding to this.

Like, OG anarchist influencer Emma Goldman, who we mentioned at the start, said that whats really impractical is clinging to a bad system and expecting different results.

The only logical response to a problem, she argued, is to try something new.

We saw a real-life attempt at something new in the Occupy movement, which sprang up in September 2011 in New York City, and eventually spread to more than a hundred US cities and 25 other countries.

Their rallying cry was: We are the ninety-nine percent. It was a response to extreme wealth disparities, and the fact that super-wealthy people the one percent hold so much political power.

Thousands of protesters marched on Wall Street, the financial capital of the country, and then built a live-in community in Zuccotti Park.

They cooked and cleaned and loaned out books, and every evening they formed a general assembly to talk about the future and propose new ideas.

But despite all the steam, the encampment fizzled out in just fifty-nine days, and the media moment was all but over.

They wanted to do politics differently, so they never came up with a list of demands, and when they couldnt reach consensus, they split into a bunch of different interest groups.

Which is itself a major critique of the theory of anarchy.

By design, no one litigates what counts as anarchy and what doesnt.

And so, anarchist groups can sometimes lose political momentum.

This lack of central authority also explains why and how a wide swath of political perspectives have laid claim to anarchy.

Perspectives that are in some cases far removed from the ideas of political theorists.

Like, while a lot of anarchist theory grew out of Marxist arguments, some self-proclaimed anarchists have quite the opposite approach.

Take for example crypto-anarchists.

Their main goal is to use technology like cryptocurrency to get rid of the need for a state, allowing folks to exchange money without regulation by governments or banks.

So, hardcore anti-capitalists and pro-capitalist crypto-finance bros can all consider themselves anarchists, because resisting state authority can take a lot of different forms.

For example, one of the major divisions among anarchists concerns violence: whether its okayor even necessaryto use it.

While anarchist beliefs can fuel movements like Occupy, they are not universally peaceful.

Goldman herself was involved in plotting the attempted assassination of steel magnate Henry Clay Frick.

When it came to revolution, she considered violence a justifiable means to an end.

And weve seen violent players aligning themselves with anarchism more recently as well.

For example, the Boogaloo movement has been known to capitalize on moments of political turmoil, like the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, to incite violence, often under the mantle of an imminent second civil war.

Their anti-government views led some far-right followers to get involved in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021.

Still, not all anarchists believe that the state must be destroyed to make way for anarchy; others argue that building anarchistic communities within existing states will reduce the governments power over time.

And that doesnt necessarily look like spray-painting tunnels or throwing hand grenades.

It looks more like talking to their neighbors and volunteering at community gardens and soup kitchens.

Providing services that governments might otherwise provide, or might be failing to provide.

In this way, anarchist thinkers such as Colin Ward have pointed out, theres such a thing as everyday anarchism.

Meaning, life is full of people who help each other.

Which makes me wonder, what would the world look like if we nurtured these seeds of anarchism with simple, everyday gestures of mutual aid?

Although stateless societies have rarely existed in the modern world, anarchist ideas live on.

They exist in autonomous communities like the Zapatistas in Mexico, in social movements like the Arab Spring, and in pockets within communities, in response to both global disasters and local needs.

Meanwhile, anarchists continue to debate the best way forward: revolution, or book clubs, or both?

A perennial debate which Goldman reminds us, is central to anarchism itself so that it can be ever-flexible to fit the needs of the time and place.