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Anarchism " has made !eeting appearances in several
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media outlets in the last couple of months, and the ! Email Format
Occupy Wall Street protests seem largely responsible for html
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those appearances. Before about two weeks ago, I text
understood anarchism to advocate a lack of any authority
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(and I incorrectly assumed this meant an absence of
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social order), and I had some vague association between
FEATURED JOURNAL
anarchism, violence, and labor unions in the 1920s. But
#
anarchism and its history is far more complicated, and far
more interesting as a series of social movements, as an
approach to social order, and as a study in the origins
and development of ideas.
Part of the misunderstanding of anarchism may stem
from the great diversity of both thought and practice that
falls into the category of anarchism. Anarchist thought
spans a continuum from extreme individualist versions,
which stem from a philosophy of the complete
sovereignty of the individual and her property over the
state or groups and communities, and resembles what Public Administration Review
we think of as libertarianism, to social variants.
(Individualist anarchism is mainly theoretical in the sense
that it has rarely been part of anarchist social
movements.) In social versions of anarchy, individual
freedom depends on equality, community and mutual
aid. Private property, as the source of inequality, is
undesirable, and decisions should be made
democratically. Versions of (and nomenclature for)
anarchism have proliferated: anarcho-syndicalism,
anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-communism, anarcha-
feminism, anarcho-naturism, Christian anarchism, post-
left anarchism. (For explanations of each of these, try Journal of Historical Sociology
here ".)
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Studies
The main principle, however, is an opposition to centrally
governed, state-based societies in favor of non-
hierarchical voluntary association. In one of its most
utopian formulations, Emma Goldman " argued in
Association for Public Policy
Anarchism and Other Essays " that “Anarchism stands for
and Management
a social order based on the free grouping of individuals
for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order
that will guarantee to every human being free access to
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according to individual desires, tastes, and Wiley Sociology
@SociologyLens
inclinations.” Di"erent types of anarchists have
The effect of restricting sleep
historically disagree on the tactics that should be on emotional reactions - new
employed toward social change: many advocate non- study from Journal of Sleep
Research @ESRS_Sleep via
violent forms of resistance, while others support coercion @NeuroscienceNew #sleep
through violence or propaganda. As Drake Bennett ow.ly/iCma50ziVaQ
writes ", a central tenet of modern anarchism is that
“revolutionary movements relying on coercion of any kind
only result in repressive societies.”
Reporters covering Occupy Wall Street have observed Restricting sleep may…
anarchist thought and principles in the protest. In a Experiencing inadequat…
neurosciencenews.com
recent essay " in The New York Review of Books, Michael
Greenberg related his interactions with some of the 25 Apr 2020
organizers he met at Zuccotti Park. Some of the these
Wiley Sociology
organizers, he observed, seemed guided toward a kind of @SociologyLens
faith and optimism, part of which “seemed to derive from How to study emotion in court,
a place where it is claimed to
the fact that anarchism, as they loosely conceived of it, be absent?
had hardly been tried. It o"ered a process of mutual @TheHowardLeague
ow.ly/c5An50zmmmI
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cooperation, not ideologies or even #xed goals.” Occupy
Wall Street’s General Assembly structure, which lacks
hierarchy among participants and is based on consensus
decision making, draws on principles of anarchism. ENERGY COLONIALISM AND
THE ROLE OF THE GLOBAL IN
And media attention " to the role of David Graeber, an LOCAL RESPONSES TO NEW
academic anthropologist and anarchist activist who ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURES IN
THE UK
recently published a expansive history of debt ", in the
organization of the protests, and in discussions of
Occupy Wall Street, have highlighted anarchist thought as South West C…
well. (For his dissertation, Graeber studied a rural
community in Madagascar that the central government
abandoned in the aftermath of IMF-imposed spending
cuts. Graeber found that the community of 10,000
created an egalitarian social system governed by Video abstract for the paper
by Susana Batel and Patrick
consensus.)
Devine-Wright (University of
Regardless of whether you think the philosophical basis Exeter) Read the paper here.
of anarchism is valuable, for many people, anarchism
necessarily fails in the execution. As Bennett reports in
his article on Graeber ", economist Tyler Cowen found
Graeber’s recent work on the history of debt persuasive.
Anarchism however, makes less sense to Cowen, who
“sees little alternative to the modern state. ‘Look at
Somalia. If there’s a vacuum, something has to #ll it.’”
Graeber acknowledges such a sentiment: “’Most people
don’t think anarchism is a bad idea. They think
it’s insane’…Yeah, sure it would be great not to have
prisons and police and hierarchical structures of
authority, but everybody would just start killing each
other. That wouldn’t work, right?’ Graeber’s father,
however, had seen it work. ‘So it wasn’t insane. I was
never brought up to think it was insane.’”
When I #rst visited Occupy Wall Street in September, I
was struck by how much energy went into sustaining the
community itself as opposed to developing strategic
plans, or formulating policy recommendations. But
understanding the threads of anarchism present in the
OWS protests (though, of course, not everyone in the
core of the protests are anarchists), helped me
understand that at least for some participants in OWS,
the entire goal was to create an egalitarian community
governed by consensus in part as a demonstration that
such a thing was possible and preferable. Formulating
policy recommendations for the state to act on does not
make sense in an anarchist framework: policies are state
tools for action. If you do not believe the state should
organize social life, then proposing tools for the state are
not even in the realm of consideration.
In my next post, I’ll discuss more of the history of
anarchism in social movements, the forms of social
organization advocated by anarchism as a replacement
for the state, and what a sociological account of ideas can
tell us about the philosophy behind anarchism.
More about anarchism " and individualist
anarchism ".
Image by arimoore ".
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