A Beginner's Guide to Anarchism (And How I Discovered It)

"Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic "libertarianism" of the far-right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism's principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solitary, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories."- Ursula K. Le Guin, Forward to "The Day Before the Revolution," The Wind's Twelve Quarters.

There is probably no political philosophy in history that has been as thoroughly misunderstood as anarchism. As with virtually every leftist philosophy, this is especially true in America. Ask any average Joe in my home country what anarchism is and what its adherents believe. Chances are that the answer will be something like this:

Basically, they’re a bunch of people who have no actual beliefs besides 1) total abolishment of all government and 2) everyone is free to do whatever the hell they want, free from consequences.

Of course, it’s nowhere near as simple as that. As I have discovered over the past several months, anarchism is actually a vibrant philosophy with very sophisticated ways of operating a socialist society that doesn’t suffer the centralized bureaucracies of places like Soviet Russia. Indeed, I believe this “libertarian socialism,” as some call it, might be the only way forward as capitalism slowly begins to collapse under its own weight. But first, a little of my personal history.

My Political History (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Socialism)

Back in the years when I was still, as my grandfather calls it, a “brain-dead teenager,” I used to think that Glenn Beck was one of the most incredible men who ever lived. He exposed me to shocking revelations about people like Barack Obama, George Soros, and Van Jones, who were ruining our country, he said, with lies about global warming, systemic racism, and the need to redistribute wealth so they could undermine American freedoms. I loved tuning in every weekday at 5 to watch his entertaining deconstructions of everything he claimed was consuming America from within like gangrenous cancer. I even borrowed his novel The Overton Window when it made its way to my local library. It seemed I was well on my way to becoming a full red-blooded Trump-supporting constitutional conservative like my father and his father before him.

That skinned knee you got from tripping on the sidewalk? Obama's fault! That bee that stung you on the eyelid? Cass Sunstein sent it! People in your family say be nice to liberals? Mind control devices funded by Soros!

But then Beck left his daily show on Fox News in June of 2011, and I didn't follow him onto the Internet where he continued his show. I did follow his online newspaper, The Blaze, for a while, but I didn't know where to watch his new show, so I just drifted apart from him. I stopped paying attention to politics, except whenever Dad ranted about something Obama did that pissed him off. Then I rediscovered Watership Down during my senior year of high school and dedicated my following college tenure to honing my writing talents. Throughout my college tenure, I kept my center-right beliefs, safe in the knowledge that America would always remain the greatest country in the world.

Then everything changed when the MAGA nation attacked.

I didn’t leap to full-blown leftism immediately upon Trump’s election. It was a relatively gradual process that didn’t complete itself until about a year after I graduated. I spent a rather large part of this period as a “social liberal, fiscally conservative” (i.e., right-wing libertarian) because while I found pretty much all conservative views on social issues like abortion, drug policy, criminal justice, and LGBTQ+ rights to be morally repugnant, I was still under the impression that the only economic alternative to capitalism was Soviet-style communism.

However, my pathological need to hear some of my favorite personalities on YouTube dunk on Trump eventually led me to the so-called “Breadtube” or “Lefttube” creators, who began introducing me to left-leaning philosophies that differed from the Soviet dystopia that Glenn Beck warned me that all leftists wanted to turn the U.S. into. The turning point for me came when Leon Thomas of Renegade Cut recommended a book called After Capitalism in a comment to one of his videos. Although he didn’t specify which one he was talking about, I chose the one authored by Dada Mahesvarananda, which blew me away. And it’s all been downhill since.

“But Preston,” I hear you ask from beyond your keyboards, “what could possibly be so bad about capitalism that we need to replace it? Things seem perfectly fine to me!”

Why Anarchists Believe the Current System Blows

In contrast to its chaotic public image, anarchism is really libertarian socialism, as opposed to the authoritarian socialist systems of places like Soviet Russia, Maoist China, and present-day North Korea. Whereas those places pretend to be collectivist societies while placing all economic and political decisions in a governing elite’s hands, anarchism proposes to trust the individual to make those decisions. You know, what American libertarianism pretends to do while actually handing power over to ruthless multinational corporations whose CEOs take all the profits for themselves while underpaying their workers and taking every loophole they can to avoid paying taxes?

Like this Gargamel-looking motherfucker right here?

“But how exactly do you anarchists propose to do that?” you might ask skeptically.

An anarchist society, at its core, rejects unjust hierarchies like the ones that have formed under capitalism. In their view, capitalism is inherently unfair because it naturally leads to a tiny number of people gathering an obscenely large amount of wealth.

Plus, an obscenely large amount of those lucky people happen to be white, which is... suspicious, to say the least.

Conservatives will argue that all that wealth is justified because they believe that more money in rich people’s hands means more money to invest in new business ideas. I remember Glenn Beck in particular (in his book Arguing with Idiots) comparing it to a mountain where water trickles down from the snowy top to sustain people’s villages below. Pretty nice metaphor, Glenn, but what happens when the rich decide to dam up that water so they can store it in tax havens and gamble it in the stock market instead of, you know, actually paying their workers?!

Seriously, what's what the rich people of this world are. They're like Immortan Joe from Max Max: Fury Road.

“Do not become addicted to water, my friends! It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!”
And do you know what all that money buys? Politicians, who will do whatever you want for all those sweet, sweet campaign donations. Want to build an oil pipeline that threatens to poison an Indian reservation’s water supply? Boom, done! Want to stop an uppity leftist political party from undermining your business prospects in a foreign country? Send in the military! Want to convince people that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax, despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary? You literally have all the money in the world! What the hell is stopping you?
Environmental devastation is also an inevitable consequence of a system like capitalism constantly seeking infinite growth in a finite system. The big multinationals are too lazy or uncaring to move away from oil and other nonrenewable resources because they have become increasingly averse to risk. That’s a big reason they invest money in the stock market instead of new business ventures: most new businesses fail, so why risk losing money on something that probably won’t go anywhere?
All of this adds up to pretty much everything that’s wrong with the world right now. Politicians spend massive amounts of money on military interventions to satisfy their corporate backers’ whims. All that money ($721.5 billion every year, last time I checked) adds to our national debt ($25 *trillion*, last time I checked), undermining our economic stability. Meanwhile, Congress passes tax cuts on the wealthiest individuals so they can steal more money from people who actually need it.
Poverty grows, and with it, crime. And instead of actually fixing the social problems that led to that increase in crime in the first place, America takes the easy way out by throwing them all in prison. And since prisons in this country are shitholes, they do not rehabilitate criminals. They just make them more violent and antisocial. Plus, America has a deeply racist past that it has failed to face up to time and time again, so about 60% of the male prison population consists of black and Hispanic men.
And the right wonders why we want a change.
How Anarchism Proposes to Fix It
But enough about how capitalism sucks. Why don’t we answer the real question I intended to answer in the last section but then got sidetracked by my anti-capitalist screed: What do anarchists believe is the best system to replace it?
That is, admittedly, kind of a tricky question for two reasons. The first is that no actual anarchist society has survived for a long time. This isn’t because of any flaws in the systems themselves. Usually, it’s because an outside power came along and destroyed it. The most famous anarchist society was founded in Catalonia, Spain, during the Spanish Civil War. That one only lasted three years before the fascist government of Francisco Franco and Soviet volunteers sent by Josef Stalin crushed it in February 1939.
The Bolshevik revolutionaries also dismantled several worker-owned collectives in Russia in the wake of the 1917 overthrow of Nicholas II, including the Makhnovia Free Territory in Ukraine, because it would not submit to the U.S.S.R.’s authoritarian regime. French troops also crushed the Paris Commune of 1871 in May of that year. Many indigenous tribes around the world also operated on what could be described in hindsight as anarchist principles until white European imperialists came along and “civilized” them.
The second reason is that many anarchists favor an experimental approach to forming new societies. I think Noam Chomsky put it best in response to an interview question in which he was asked what kind of society he would establish to replace capitalism:
I think that the economic institutions ought to be run democratically-by their participants and by the communities in which they live. And I think that through various forms of free association and federalism, it's possible to imagine a society that works like that. I mean, I don't think you can lay it out in detail- nobody's smart enough to design a society; you've got to experiment. But reasonable principles on which to build such a society are quite clear.
-Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power
What exactly are those principles? In Pyotr Kropotkin’s *The Conquest of Bread* (often considered the Bible of the anarcho-communist branch of libertarian socialism), he argues for two central tenets that an anarchist society should be based on; mutual aid and voluntary cooperation. This entails flattening all unjust hierarchies into a decentralized, egalitarian social order. Anarchists propose to achieve this via popular assemblies and worker-controlled cooperative enterprises.
Indeed, this is the complete opposite of the “government should be run like a business” philosophy of many conservatives. In fact, many anarchists would argue that businesses should be run like the government. Wouldn’t it be amazing if workers could vote out their supervisors instead of simply suffering under incompetent or capricious ones?

Another way of explaining the basic philosophy of anarchism can be found in this essay from the website The Anarchist Library, which lists the tenants of anarchism as an escalating “if X then Y” statement that goes like this:

If mankind is born free, then slavery is murder. If slavery is murder, then property is theft. If property is theft, then government is tyranny. If government is tyranny, then anarchy is liberty.
-Albert Meltzer, Anarchism: Arguments for and against

I should probably clarify that anarchism does not view all governments as oppressive or even all hierarchies as unjust. Indeed, it would be hard to argue that, say, the captain of a ship doesn’t deserve their authority over their less experienced crew (that is, as long as they aren’t monomaniacal tyrants like Captain Ahab or Wolf Larsen from Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf).

You know, mateys, it occurs to me that maybe we shouldn't have replaced the captain with a cabin boy who couldn’t tell port from fucking starboard!

An anarchist government would probably be similar to the US Congress but on a much smaller scale. Societies would no longer be organized into countries. Instead, they would form into communes with a maximum population of about 10,000-20,000 each. These communes would be divided into about 70 wards, each sending two representatives to the commune’s governing council. This would result in a governing board totaling 150 representatives.

This model is based on the studies of anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who studied various human societies and how they were organized. He argues that the maximum number of humans who can successfully work together is 150.

Why is it limited at 150? The answer is twofold, actually. Partly, it's a cognitive challenge just to keep track of more people. The other side of this is a time budgeting problem. You just don't have time in everyday life to invest in each of those people to the extent where you can have a real relationship with them.
-Robin Dunbar

Another reason for this relatively small number is that issues with trust and familiarity tend to arise in larger groups.

Of course, communes can also join unions of communes, including millions or even billions of people. This is similar to the various cooperative enterprises that multinational corporations enter under capitalism. Of course, the difference is that those cooperatives only help the capitalist class’ profits, while anarchist cooperatives would work for the social welfare of everyone.

How Anarchist Workers Would... Well, Work

Unlike a capitalist workplace, where a person is held under the whim of a boss who can fire you for any reason (or none at all), an anarchist workplace would seek mutual aid for all parties. No person would be able to wield power over another.

Money would be abolished in favor of contracts. A new member joining an anarchist commune would make a contract with that commune, agreeing to perform a rotating series of jobs in return for life’s basic necessities. No one would be stuck in a single soul-sucking job for their entire life like under capitalism. A commune member will alternate relatively normal jobs like desk work and construction with the kind of stuff you’d see on Dirty Jobs to break up the monotony and out of fairness to the rest of the commune.

Last month I was cleaning out restrooms at the local Dairy Queen. Next month I get to work at the local Ben & Jerry's stand.

This system would not just uphold traditional human rights like freedom of speech and religion. Anarchists also believe in positive human rights, meaning that every human being is entitled to have their material needs met in full. This includes everything humans need to survive: food, water, shelter, clothing, electricity, running water, healthcare, the Internet, etc. Any commune member would receive this through a reasonable contribution, like working a maximum of 5 hours a day and participating in the local government, barring any physical, mental, or developmental disabilities or personal circumstances.

Naturally, a capitalist (like Mike Rowe, the guy pictured above) might balk at these ideas, accusing anarchists of rewarding lazy people who won’t work. Of course, the anarchists would argue that that argument stems from the Protestant work ethic, which states that you are only valuable in the eyes of God if you’re a hard worker, something that certainly wouldn’t fly in a more secular anarchist society. They would also argue that the widespread laziness that conservatives decry in modern society is actually a product of capitalism. Those who struggle to keep up with the system eventually give up as they realize they will never reap the rewards, so they turn to crime, drugs, or the hikikomori lifestyle.

This anarchist overhauling of the workplace would also help eliminate what anthropologist David Graeber rather bluntly calls “bullshit” jobs in his 2018 book of the same name. These “bullshit jobs,” like receptionists, telemarketers, lobbyists, survey administrators, and others, came about as a result of capitalism twisting the benefits of automation to their own ends, Graeber says, forcing people to work jobs that robots or computers could very easily take over if we gave up on the Protestant work ethic. In contrast, an anarchist system would utilize automation in a way that helps take the burden off the working man, reducing their workday so that they have more time for leisure.

Anarchist Police and Military

As stated above, police officers are not the heroic defenders of the innocent that capitalist propaganda portrays them as. Instead, they are defenders of the capitalist hegemony, punching down at those who wish to change the system while protecting white-collar criminals from prosecution.

Something that has become all too obvious at the time I'm writing this.

Anarchists propose a policing system based on these four principles: harm prevention, emergency response, forensics, and rehabilitation over revenge.

Harm prevention means preventing crimes before they happen by curing the social ills that cause them, like income inequality and a lack of social capital.

Emergency response will be needed to deal with sudden and unexpected acts of violence that will undoubtedly be inevitable at first, given the centuries of oppression and coercion that have preceded this current century.

Forensics will be essential in helping to solve violent crimes like murder and sexual assault.

And finally, rehabilitation over revenge means getting rid of prisons, where 2.3 million Americans are now detained, half of them due to drug offenses, non-violent or otherwise.

My grandfather has stated his belief that prisons should be places that you never want to go back to, that they need to be Hell on Earth because, otherwise, the prisoner gets so comfortable that they commit crimes upon release to get back in. However, anyone who knows anything about human behavior would realize that it's those harsh conditions that cause recidivism, not humanitarian aid.

Have not prisons- which kill at will and force of character in men, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with in any spot on the globe- always been the universities of crime? Is not the court of a tribunal a school of ferocity?
-Pyotr Kropotkin, Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal

Again, though, America's single-minded focus on individuality and personal responsibility means that all crime is viewed as a moral failing rather than a social illness.

Anarchists instead propose a law enforcement system that focuses on education and psychotherapy instead of vengeance and torture. They want to work with the criminal to understand why they did what they did instead of just locking them away and being done with it.

Of course, there will still be special hospitals for the Ted Bundys of the world who commit crimes out of incurable mental or biological defects rather than social ills.

As for the military, anarchists propose a service based on voluntary contracts rather than coercive drafts. Of course, hierarchy would be necessary for the military like it is now, but officers would be voted out if they abused their power.

George Orwell describes an anarchist military based on his experiences fighting for the anarcho-syndicalists of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War:

The essential point of the system was social equality between officers and men. Everyone from the general to the private drew the same pay, ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and mingled on terms of complete equality. If you wanted to slap the commanding general on the back and ask him for a cigarette, you could do so, and no one thought it was curious. In theory, at any rate, each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy... Of course, there was no perfect equality, but there was a nearer approach to it than I had ever seen or that I would have thought conceivable in time of war.
-George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

Other models for an anarchist military might include the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the freedom fighters in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (or Rojava), or the Zapatista movement of Chiapas, Mexico.

At the most basic level, anarchists think the military and police departments should operate more like the fire department. After all, firefighters don't constantly patrol the streets looking for fires that might start. So why are the police doing the same with crimes?

Art and Luxury Under Capitalism

Before I end this essay, I want to discuss art and luxury and how they might be achieved under anarchism.

Once again, capitalists may balk at such a suggestion. They might say we've never had so much luxury under any other system. Did communism ever give their citizens king-size mattresses or pearl necklaces? Pyotr Kropotkin highlights similar critiques in chapter 9 of The Conquest of Bread:

How will men act in a society, whose members are properly fed, to satisfy certain individuals desirous of possessing a piece of Sevres china or a velvet dress?
-Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

If one was to replace "Sevres china" and "velvet dress" with, say, "PlayStation 4" or "iPhone," you basically get what criticism of anarchist or any other leftist ideology might look like today.

Similarly, capitalists ask how artists would create art under a system that lacks capitalism's nonconformist nature. They either don't realize or don't care that capitalism breeds its own form of conformity.

This type of conformity makes itself very clear in the realm of art and science. Artists can create art only if they have a lot of capital or are willing to sell their art to those with the capital to commodify it as they see fit. Art as pure expression has no place in this system.

One can try to join a neoliberal-type "artistic improvement program," but those usually focus on making the art more "marketable," i.e., more palatable to the capitalist class. One can also go independent, but that would put you in a more financially precarious position unless you are willing to still work within market trends.

As for science, capitalism stymies that, too, if any scientific innovations that happen under its watch are innovations they cannot profit from. For example, pharmaceutical companies will only fund drugs they can profit from. Tech companies tend to focus on profit problems instead of technical ones, most notoriously through the practice of planned obsolescence. In particular, Uber notoriously stole workers from one of the nation's top robotics labs to make better self-driving cars.

Replace "Heaven" with "underground lab," and you have my theory of how Uber got them in the first place.

Most humans agree that we need art, entertainment, and scientific innovation to be truly happy. Perhaps Robin William’s character in Dead Poets Society put it best:

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.
-John Keating, Dead Poets Society

Meeting material but not spiritual needs in humans works like locking them in solitary confinement. Sure, we give the prisoners materials to stay alive, but eventually, the solitude reduces them to caged and mentally unstable animals.

Capitalism, driven by the Protestant work ethic, seeks to ensure the worker’s scant free time is spent resting and preparing for the next day’s work. While capitalism usually provides physical needs to those who work, it leaves little to no time for workers to explore their personal needs. The Protestant work ethic stipulates that goofing off and having fun is a waste of time and a sin in the eyes of God. But it’s not! It’s a vital concern for any society to survive and thrive.

Ultimately, capitalism is so focused on profit that the worker’s identity is often reduced to how they make money. It makes us waste our time on jobs we care little to nothing about instead of things we would much rather do, like spending time with our families.

No doubt, nowadays, when hundreds and thousands of human beings are in need of bread, coal, clothing, and shelter, luxury is a crime; to satisfy it the worker's child must go without bread! But in a society in which all can eat sufficiently the needs which we consider luxuries today will be the more keenly felt.
-Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

Anarchists propose that artist / scientist-owned organizations not beholden to any larger government agency or corporation are the solution. Their members will be working members of the anarchist commune who pursue literature, musicianship, printing, painting, engraving, etc. They will all follow a common aim- the propagation of ideas dear to them.

The worker will discharge first his task in the field, the factory, and so on, which he owes to society as his contribution to the general production. And he will employ the second half to his day, his week, his year, to satisfy his artistic or scientific needs, or his hobbies. Thousands of societies will spring up to gratify every taste and every possible fancy.
-Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

Of course, capitalists would argue that certain people are naturally destined to work all their lives in fields or sweatshops. If geniuses were equally distributed among all social classes in all nations, they say, then the system would surely recognize that talent and lift them out of poverty. And yet none seem to show up in the inner city ghettos or the world’s developing nations.

However, these capitalists fail to recognize that it is not an inherent flaw in these people’s nature that keeps them in poverty. It’s the centuries of systemic racism that many countries (America especially) have failed to deal with properly. I think Stephen Jay Gould puts it best:

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
-Stephen Jay Gould, "Wide hats and narrow minds," New Scientist, March 8th, 1977 (pg. 777)

Conclusion

I hope, by now, I have made my case that better things are possible in a world beyond capitalism. I especially hope that I’ve convinced you that there is far more to socialist philosophy than what capitalist propaganda would have us believe. Make no mistake: capitalism will end someday, just like feudalism did before it. At this point, we have only two choices in the future: socialism and fascism.

If you don't believe me, try replacing "Muslims" with "Jews" every time you hear Trump mention them.

So do we flatten the unjust hierarchies that have ruled over us for centuries, as leftists like myself want? Or do we double down on them even as they spiral further into chaos and discord, thus letting the capitalists and their fascist bodyguards rule over us forevermore?

I don't know about you, but I think more happiness and less poverty are good. A life of luxury and leisure is possible for more than just the privileged few. As Pyotr "Bread Santa" Kropotkin says once again in The Conquest of Bread:

We see that the worker compelled to struggle painfully for bare existence is reduced to ignorance of these higher delights, the highest within man's reach, of science, and especially of scientific discovery; of art, and especially of artistic creation. It is in order to obtain these joys for all, which are now reserved for the few; in order to give leisure and the possibility of developing intellectual capacities, that the social revolution must guarantee daily bread to all. After the bread has been secured, leisure is the supreme aim.
-Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

Ho! Ho! Ho! And what do you want for Christmas, my little comrade?

Of course, Bread Santa's book was only one of the inspirations that helped me write this piece. Emerican Johnson of the YouTube channel Non-Compete was the one who really made this possible, as he explained anarchist societies better than anyone else I'd listened to over the years in his How Anarchism Works playlist.

If exploitation could be taken out of the equation, everyone could have a lot more fun. If we weren't living so precariously close to financial ruin, we would all have much better faculties and much higher expectations for enjoying life.
-Emerican Johnson, How do Anarchists LUXURY? How Anarchism Works Part 5

Before you ask, yes, that is his real name, as far as I can tell. Please don't ask why, I'm not his parents.

However, if you’d prefer the same topics condensed into a single video essay, might I recommend “Welcome to Slime World” by fellow anarchist Youtuber Matt/Mildred of Thought Slime? This video, made to ring in the new year in January 2022, describes the world that Mildred hopes to help usher in with their videos. While they don’t actually use the words “anarchism” or “anarcho-communism” anywhere in the video, what Mildred describes is virtually identical to the one E.J. describes in the “How Anarchism Works” playlist. So maybe give it a watch. And also, perhaps you can check out the list of smaller channels spotlighted in their regular end-of-video segment, “The Eyeball Zone,” which is certainly nice of them.

I also highly recommend the channel Andrewism (formerly Saint Andrewism), a native of Trinidad and Tobago that broadly presents a much more international look at anarchist tendencies and leftist struggles. He also explains better than any other leftist Youtuber I’ve come across how best to lead the revolution against the capitalist power structures that rule over us and what the society we create after the fall of capitalism might look like. I cannot recommend his channel highly enough.

And that’s all I have to say about that. Until next time beautiful watchers, remember to stay safe, wear your mask, wash your hands, and do everything in your power to make the capitalist class’ hegemony a little more difficult!