Intro
There is a pervasive view that society as a whole has, from liberal social democrats all the way to the most ardent right wing idealogues, that Anarchism is merely the embodiment of chaos. It means complete lack of order and rules where every citizen is defenseless against the onslaught of mobs, criminals and opportunists, all exploiting the lack of authority to do nothing except cause harm to people and property. In this view the Anarchist is nothing more than the black clad protester, equipped with a mask and a molotov, burning cars and violently clashing with riot police. It is violence for violences sake, they say.
So pervasive is this view in fact that I would be willing to bet that the majority of the people who hold it, don’t actually know that Anarchism is an actual political ideology, let alone what the principles and beliefs it has. In this slightly more informed episode I will be delving into the philosophy of Anarcho Communism, there are many other flavours of Anarchism about, but this is probably the most prevalent and influential today. That being said even within the philosophy there are many differences and I am not trying to give a definitive account of their ideology. Rather this will be an overview into the main ideas of Anarcho Communism (which for simplicity's sake I will be referring to as just Anarchism for the rest of the episode).
I have written this because in my view it is important that we all understand the political ideologies around us, whether you wish to support or oppose them, in order to do either of these things properly, you must understand the basic principles of the ideology and equally importantly, what those principles can look like when put into practice.
So I decided to create this podcast to explain just that, I will not be able to cover everything for this is a topic that is both wide and deep, but I hope after listening that you will be just a little more informed.
The Goal of Anarchism
Before we get to the bulk of the theory it is important to ask why Anarchists are suggesting an alternative to both capitalism and the state in the first place. As I will explain later on, Anarchists are critical of capitalism as they see it as something that steals from the working people, creating poverty and misery in order so that the rich can continue to get wealthier. They believe in an alternative to this which would distribute the resources of society more equally and fairly, enabling the elimination of poverty and the minimisation of work to only what is necessary to maintain and improve society rather than having large parts of the population work ultimately pointless jobs in order to enrich the wealthy. However this is not unique Anarchists, what makes them different to other ideologies is that they reject using the state in order to build the new alternative.
The state in Anarchist political philosophy is something that always leads to oppression and suffering no matter who controls it or what its goals are, they believe that the only route to true freedom and equality means freeing man from all forms of external control. The goal is individual liberty, within a society governed all, as equals.
Not only do they want economic equality but they go further and demand that there must be total social and political equality, there can be no bosses elected or otherwise. Only then do they believe that humanity can live without need or oppression.
Socialism
The first main point that must be understood is that all Anarchists are Socialists (although the reverse is not true), so in order to be able to delve into Anarchism we must have an understanding of Socialism. To put it very simply, Socialism advocates for the building of a society where the means of production are under common ownership and where no classes, states or money exists. Once this has been achieved the society would be said to be communist. Now I’m sure many of you are wondering what the hell half that sentence means, don't worry, I shall explain.
The means of production are the tools used in the production of goods and services, and I mean tools in a very broad sense, for example they not only include the machines that a factory worker might use but they also contain the raw materials that are used and for an exclusively modern example, the computers and software used by just about every business in the world. Under a capitalist system these are under private ownership, an individual or shareholders in a company have ownership over them and it is those same people that employ workers to use the means of production in order to create goods and services such as cars or washing machines. These goods and services can then be sold, with all profit going to the owners and the shareholders. Socialists do not like this state of affairs because the employee in this case is not being compensated fully for the work they have done. For example if you are paid £100 a day to produce one washing machine a day that will sell for £300 pounds out of materials that cost £50, then you are creating something worth £300 pounds are not being compensated for the full value of your work. In this case the owner of the company would pocket the £150 profit, this is done because they own the tools that the worker used to create the value, so the owner feels entitled to take the profits in order to compensate them for the investment of buying the tools. Socialism advocates something different, rather than these means of production being privately owned, instead they should be collectively owned. This means that the workers own the means of production, and therefore no profit is taken from them by an external force.
Examples of this in practice exist all over the world in worker cooperatives, which are owned and democratically run by the workers themselves. They can exist under capitalism but they would become the main way of organising workplaces under socialism.
Now we move onto the next key part of what socialism aims to build; that is a classless, moneyless and stateless society. Class in this case refers to the owners and everyone else, if you own the means of production then you are part of the capitalist class, if you do not, then you are part of the working class. Classlessness is the result of the change in ownership of the means of production that I just described, you cannot have one class that has ownership and another that does not, when society as a whole has ownership. A moneyless society is one operating on the principle, which is to quote Marx "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". In practice this would mean that the society as a whole would collectively decide how to distribute the goods and services that have been produced in order to satisfy everyone's needs. This is instead of distributing them according to who can afford them using money. Finally a stateless society is one that does not have a centralised state that organises and runs the society, in its place the society organises itself without the need from an external power ruling over it.
So that is my very brief and probable oversimplification of what Socialism aims to achieve as it's ultimate end goal. Therefore this is very similar to Anarchism's goals, there will of course be some variation, but at the end of the day, the worlds that the two ideologies hope to build are in the broad sense essentially the same.
Anarchism
Now I realise that this podcast is meant to be about Anarchism and so far it has not been but it is important to establish the broader political context in which the ideology exists. None of these ideas came about in a vacuum and there is a considerable amount of mixing between a range socialist ideologies, of which Anarchism is just one of many, albeit a large and particularly influential one.
Now we move onto the key principles of Anarchism.
Hierarchies
The first of these is probably the most misunderstood and controversial, it is the dismantling of hierarchies. Nations, chains of command and the fact that you have a boss at work are all instances of hierarchies, any situation where one person is given power over another or can exercise authority over another person is hierarchical. In order for hierarchies to exist someone must be placed above another person, therefore someone has been placed in the lesser position with less power. Anarchists believe that this situation necessarily leads to the abuse of this power, the very existence of power results in people exploiting it. A rather apt phrase here is “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” and it is something that can be seen in the real world quite clearly. The biggest example being the Soviet Union which was founded ostensibly to create an egalitarian communist society, as we all know, it did not work. Very quickly those in the communist party turned the state into their own personal dictatorship, using the guise of a workers paradise to disguise a brutal military dictatorship that was far more concerned about its own power than the welfare of its people.
The alternative to this is proposed as an horizontally organised society with people cooperating in order to achieve the goals that those same people set. By horizontally organised I simply mean the organisation of people on the basis that they are all equals and that every single person involved in a particular group has equal decision making power within the group. For example in a cooperative workplace like the one we discussed earlier, not only would everyone working there have collective ownership of it, they would also have collective control over it. To return to our washing machine factory metaphor, you as a worker there would have a democratic say along with everyone else who worked there, about how to run the factory. This doesn't mean to say that everyone involved must be part of every single decision because for obvious reasons that would be infeasible, spending your entire day voting is not a desirable state of affairs. So individuals can be delegated in order to represent a larger group of people. This sounds similar to a parliamentary system, however it is not. The delegation is at any moment revocable by those who sent them; if the group does not see their delegate as currently representing them, then they can simply be recalled and another delegate will be chosen. Also it would be treated much more like a civic duty than that of a politician trying to win votes, it would be normal for the delegate to be constantly changing. The final important distinction is that whoever is representing them must be part of that group of people, a group is represented by one of it's own, not by an external person. Someone representing those working in our washing machine factory will be a worker in the washing machine factory.
Federalism
This moves us very nicely onto our next key principle which is very closely related, the idea that those working or living in a particular area or domain are the best people equipped to make decisions in that area or domain. Those who work on the railways are the best able to decide how the railways are to be run, but it is important to remember that this does not occur within a vacuum, these groups must work with one another in order to function, after all the trains could not run with electricity.
Once again our principle of horizontal organisation is applied when looking at interactions between these groups, an interesting example of this is the administering of geographic areas. Instead of their being a centralised state there being decentralised communes that federate together in order to fulfill the people's needs. By commune here I mean a fairly small number of people, a few hundred to a few thousand who live in a particular geographical area. They would make decisions for their area through direct democracy within community meetings and would govern their area themselves through this method.
However they are not self sufficient and will rely on their neighbours for many things as well as the other way around. In order to coherently administer the wider area, upon which all of the communes rely, they can choose to voluntarily join with one another, importantly as equals. Decisions that are made by this federation are made by the delegates of the communes or by direct democracy through a vote of the people in the communes. Delegetes of these larger federations can be selected in the same way and this process can simply continue upwards, with cities federalising together all the way up to a global system of federalised free states that cooperate and negotiate in order to solve common problems. At the base of this entire system is the direct democracy that takes place within a commune or a workplace, at every level, if there is a decision that affects you personally then you will have a say in that decision. All the way from the collection of your bins to global decisions on how to combat climate change.
However to many of you listening I am sure that you might be wondering how different this is from there being a state, after all these communes and federations would have bodies that would control energy production for example. Something which is very superficially similar to any energy department in a current state. The answer to this is two fold, firstly these bodies follow the principle of being accountable and revocable representation so there is far greater democratic control over these bodies, they will be made up of those people directly impacted by decisions made there, people who live or work in the area and energy workers. It is as far as possible self management as opposed to orders given out by a centralised and largely unaccountable bureaucracy which most states today.
The second part of this answer boils down to semantics largely, because it depends how you look at the state, anarchists view the state as a method of controlling a group of people so the function it fills is not the defining attribute of the state. Another form of organisation can fulfil the same function that the state did without being a state itself, just because a federated system can organise bin collections and coordinate energy policy does not mean it is a state, even though it is fulfilling needs that currently only states fulfil. Most importantly in order to tell the difference you need to look at how these functions are carried out, are there minimal hierarchies, fully accountable and revocable representation and decentralised control. It is important to remember these differences, anarchism does not dispense with the functions of states, we all need our bins collected after all, it just puts them in the control of fundamentally different power structures.
Unjust Hierarchy/Prisons
So now we move on to a few more contentious bits of anarchism which generally apply more to the practical side of things, the implementation of the ideas in the real world which as we know is the far more difficult area. Away from the grand ideas about entirely reforming society the concerns now become about more mundane matters, how to organise food distribution for example. Or as is one of the more complex and muddy areas of debate, how to implement a justice system in an Anarchist society. Now in doing the research for the episode I spent a lot of time reading differing attitudes to justice and I must emphasize the number of different viewpoints, this is by no means a cut and dry issue within the philosophy. One of the most common points of contention is related to something I talked about earlier, the abolition of hierarchies. But that doesn’t tell the full story, more accurately you would say anarchists want the abolition of unjust hierarchies, the principle being that hierarchies are bad but in some cases they are necessary, in those cases it is up to the hierarchy to justify its existence. It is on the hierarchy to prove itself necessary, so it is only allowed to exist where it is the only way to adequately fulfil the role and that no other alternatives are sufficient.
One area where this may be the case is prisons. If for the moment we assume that prisons are a case where a hierarchy is justified then we can have a look at one potential option for a justice system in an anarchist society. First and foremost these prisons would only hold those who are a current threat to the safety of others, if they are not a threat the approach would be to help the individual whether it be through treatment for mental illness, drug abuse or job training. As a side note most Anarchists expect these kinds of smaller crimes to decrease due to the eradication of poverty and a society wide focus on ensuring that every individual has their needs met as far as possible.
For those who are a threat to others they would be kept in a prison, but it would not just be bare walls, bars and a bed with strict timetables and limits on activity. As far as is safe the prisoners would be able to live a fairly normal life, even having normal jobs, just within the confines of the prison. The focus is to enable these prisoners to return to wider society as soon as possible. They are removed from the general population to ensure the general populations safety, but aside from to ensure that they stay removed, they are not deprived of other liberties unless there is an immediate threat to the safety of someone else and even then it is a last resort. There is also the fact that these prisons could also be communes and be largely autonomous.
On top of this there are the issues of policing, who would ensure that those who are locked up would stay locked up, and who would be responsible for catching those who have committed crimes in the first place. Obviously police forces as we currently know them would be abolished and their replacement would be a sort of community militia. Where there would be a rotating group of people tasked with enforcing the rules set by the commune at any particular time, they would be overseable and accountable to the democratic body of the local area or commune. And it is likely that they do things like this as a civil duty rather than it being their profession. In a sense the community polices itself according to its own democratically decided rules and procedures and there is not an external force from above enforcing regulation with some higher authority.
To some of you this may sound like a fantasy and to others it might give you pause for thought, but let me be clear, I have just outlined a broad set of principles under which a system might operate but there are enormous debates over everything that I have just laid out, including whether the is even the right approach in general. Some disagreement will be in the specifics and other disagreement will be over the issue of whether a prison system is an unjust hierarchy. Can it be justified that one group of people get to deprive another group of people of their rights even with the safety of the community involved, that is largely an individual decision and many people make it in different ways.
Ultimately how such a system would be implemented would be decided through democratic means by the people who would be affected by them. One of the benefits of this kind of societal organisation is that there is no one size fits all and solutions can be adapted easily by any one group in order to suit their particular needs.
Wages
One important distinction of Anarcho-Communism as described here when compared to other forms of socialism and Anarchism, is that it completely abolished any form of wage or payment for work. Rather than being paid for work in money or something of value that can then be used to buy things they prefer a social contract system. This does sound complicated but it really isn’t, essentially the society has a certain amount of necessary labour that needs doing in order to keep people fed, the lights on and the bins collected. Each person who is part of society is expected to put in a certain amount of work in areas that ensure that the needs of the society are met. For example in order to fulfil their amount of necessary work someone could stock shelves, process food or program the computer systems used to regulate the electricity grid. Anarchists believe that due to the productivity gains made by automation and the fact that there is no extra work done to produce profit, the amount of time spent by each person doing necessary work should be about 4 to 5 hours a day, less if possible. Furthermore because each person can do whatever necessary work they like, there is no central direction, which Anarchists say would mean that everyone is able to work at what they are good at and enjoy, enabling both more productive and enjoyable labour for everyone.
In return for this, each person would be provided food, housing and all other necessities in life up to the highest standard of living that the commune could provide. Where there are plenty of resources to go around, each person can take as much as they wish until they become limited. If a resource is limited, it is simply distributed according to who needs it the most. If someone is able but refuses to do the necessary labour that the society needs, then they will not share in the resources of the society. Most likely they will be provided with the basics needed for existence but no more, they will not live comfortably off the backs of everyone else.
Direct action
Now we return to where we began, the molotov throwing Anarchist. This image of them isn’t entirely unfair, particularly in Europe Anarchists have been a large part of anti facist and protest movements and some are willing to use violence in that context. They do this because they believe in something called direct action, which is where they do things that make material changes to the world around them. But this doesn't have to be violent and the vast vast majority of direct action is not, it is far more likely that they set up soup kitchens or volunteer in homeless shelters. A fantastic example of direct action has been thrown into the spotlight following the Black Lives Matter protest after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police. During the first days where Minneapolis was burning, there was a group called the North Star Health Collective, these medics were on the ground providing emergency healthcare to those present at the protests. They are prepared for anything from washing teergas out of people's eyes to gunshot wounds. They are not getting paid, they do this because it is necessary. And I will be honest, I cannot give you a better example of direct action than that. They are doing something that will materially improve the lives of those people around them by treating them when they are injured. A need is there and these men and women act directly to fulfil that.
So bear that in mind when you think about direct action, it is supposed to improve people's lives by doing something now, rather than promising change at some point through the ballot box.
Outro
I hope you have found this episode to be informative, for many of you I know this will be a first look into a particular brand of ideology that you may not have known much about before. It is to be sure a radical one, but understanding alternatives to the current system is important, all too often we forget that the ideas that currently prevail are not inevitable, nor are they the only option. Anarchists believe a world without capitalism and states is possible, they question the very fabric of society, something which the vast majority of us never do.
So now the next Trump tweet you see yelling about violent black clad Anarchists whose only mission is to turn real life into the purge you will understand that the reality is far more complex than that. And that real Anarchists are not trying to destroy the world, in fact they are trying to implement a complex society free from need or suffering. Whether you think they are lunatics or you agree with them, you are at least now slightly more informed about Anarchists and their ideas.
For those who would like to learn more I would recommend two books in particular that I used heavily while researching this. First, the more accessible of the two: Noam Chomsky’s On Anarchism, which explains many of the aspects of Anarchism in detail, in particular it examines some of the historical examples of Anarchism in practice which is very interesting and worth the read. The second book is probably the defining book of this entire philosophy, Peter Kropotkin’s, The Conquest of Bread. While a little dated is a thorough overview of the philosophy in far more detail than I could provide here and extremely useful for understanding this ideology. I urge you to read that if you want to understand more.
If you have further questions feel free to email us at poorlyinformeddiscussion@gmail.com or simply send me a message. I will do my best to answer them all so please don’t hesitate. Thank you for listening, this has been a Slightly More Informed episode by Will. Goodbye.
