What is anarchism?

[ColonelCossack]

I am a leninist, but i know relatively little about anarchism. What is it? What are the main ideological foundations of it?

[Victus Mortuum]

This is an incredible valuable resource if you want to learn about anarchism:

http://www.infoshop.org/page/AnAnarchistFAQ

[PoliticalNightmare]

What it is:


Anarchism is a definite intellectual current of social thought, whose adherents advocate the abolition of economic monopolies and of all political and social coercive institutions within society. In place of the capitalist economic order, Anarchists would have a free association of all productive forces based upon cooperative labour, which would have for its sole purpose the satisfying of the necessary requirements of every member of society. In place of the present national states with their lifeless machinery of political and bureaucratic institutions, Anarchists desire a federation of free communities which shall be bound to one another by their common economic and social interests and arrange their affairs by mutual agreement and free contract.

How it differs from the theory of the theme of the dictatorship of the proletariat as expounded upon by Marx:


This disposes also of the theory maintained by Marx and his followers that the state, in the form of a proletarian dictatorship, is a necessary transitional stage to a classless society, in which the state, after the elimination of all class conflicts and then the classes themselves, will dissolve itself and vanish from the canvas. For this concept, which completely mistakes the real nature of the state and the significance in history of the factor of political power, is only the logical outcome of so-called economic materialism, which sees in all the phenomena of history merely the inevitable effects of the methods of production of the time. Under the influence of this theory people came to regard the different forms of the state and all other social institutions as a "juridical and political superstructure on the economic edifice" of society, and thought that they had found in it the key to every historic process. In reality every section of history affords us thousands of examples of the way in which the economic development of countries was set back for centuries by the state and its power policy.

Why change cannot be brought about by parliament or through the state(a historically coercive regime):


Political rights do not originate in parliaments; they are rather forced upon them from without. And even their enactment into; law has for a long time been no guarantee of their security. They do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace. Where this is not the case, there is no help in any parliamentary opposition or any Platonic appeals to the constitution. One compels respect from others when one knows how to defend one's dignity as a human being. This is not only true in private life; it has always been the same in political life as well.

All political rights and liberties which people enjoy to-day, they do not owe to the good will of their governments, but to their own strength. Governments have always employed every means in their power to prevent the attainment of these rights or render them illusory. Great mass movements and whole revolutions have been necessary to wrest them from the ruling classes, who would never have consented to them voluntarily. The whole history of the last three hundred years is proof of that. What is important is not that governments have decided to concede certain rights to the people, but the reason why they had to do this. Of course, if one accepts Lenin's cynical phrase and thinks of freedom merely as a "bourgeois prejudice', then, to be sure, political rights have no value at all for the workers. But then the countless struggles of the past, all the revolts and revolutions to which we owe these rights, are also without value. To proclaim this bit of wisdom it hardly was necessary to overthrow Tzarism, for even the censorship of Nicholas II would certainly have had no objection to the designation of freedom as a bourgeois prejudice.

- Rudolf Rocker, The Ideology Of Anarchism

Anarchists propose a more spontaneous form of working class action than Marxists and other state socialists. They believe that if we are to build a society based upon a stateless, classless federation of workers' associations (this is the ideal of any communist ideology), that we need to focus our energies building such a society under the domain of capitalism, and with the aid of the working class, rather than trying to bring about change from the state.

However, generally speaking Anarchists agree with the Marxist critique of capitalism and other core ideals of socialism. We represent the libertarian, if you will, branches of socialism.

[Anarchia]

Short version: Introduction to Anarchist-Communism (http://www.zabalaza.net/pdfs/leafs/leaflet_introduction_to_anarchist_communism_awsm.p df) (.pdf, A4 trifold leaflet of the text from a talk of the same name given by me last year).

Longer version: Introduction to Anarchist-Communism (http://afed.org.uk/ace/afed_introduction_anarchist_communism.pdf) (.pdf, 44 A5 pages pamphlet by the Anarchist Federation in the UK)