True Anarchists, people who have studied the political philosophy of a government free society disdain the customary use of "anarchy" to mean "chaos" or "complete disorder". For those who have come to understanding of the term it implies absence of a ruler or rulers, a society of true equals, self-managed communities, usually resembling the co-operative commonwealth that most socialists have traditionally sought, a more orderly society than the disorganisation and chaos of the over legislated societies of the free world could ever be. An anarchist society would be more ordered because the political theory that underpins anarchism advocates organisation from the bottom up with the federation of the self-governed entities – as opposed to order being imposed from the top down upon unwilling individuals or groups.
Though the hypocrites of the "progressive left" talk of freedom, equality and civil rights their idea of freedom is best summed up the the phrase used in George Orwell's novel 1984, "Freedom is slavery". Think in terms of the opposite, "slavery is freedom", A contradiction you might think, a slave cannot move around freely, a slave cannot change jobs a slave cannot do many of the things we in democratic societies take for granted without obtaining the permission of the master, so how can a slave be free? The slave is freed of all personal responsibility. They cannot exercise free will but neither are they responsible for their actions. A free man is a slave to responsibilities then, in a modern society a slave to the mortgage which must be paid in order to keep a roof over the family's head, a wage slave bound to the job because as well as the mortgage or rent there are groceries and other necessities to buy, bills to be paid. A true slave in the traditional sense of the word has none of those obligations, they are borne by the slave owner.
It is quite wrong therefore to dismiss the anarchist as a chaotic, lawless person too weak to accept the responsibilities that go with being a member of a community. A true anarchist, somebody who has made an informed choice, has to be strong enough to say "I will be responsible for myself, I will answer for my actions". Conformists on the other hand are wreak, they seek the shelter of the herd, doing what others do, even thinking what others think or at least saying in public they do.
The problem with anarchy is like most other political philosophies that have been created by scholars rather than evolving to meet the changing needs of human societies, including Marxism, utilitarianism, socialism and Trotskyism, it look great on paper but is never going to work in reality. Therefore people like myself, while anarchist in principle must settle for being anarchistic, classical liberals who argue for personal freedom even if that freedom permits people to do things, hold views or express opinions we personally do not like.
The historic anarchist movement was a grass roots workers' movement which flourished from the 1860s down to the end of the 1930s. While socialist parties like the British Labour Party had begun their political life as movements run by the workers for the workers, by the time Labour won its first General Election in Britain the party had been hijacked by upper middle class academics and professionals and they were telling the party's poorer supporters how to live their lives just as the old upper class hierarchy of the nobility and landed gentry had. The working classes wanted a political movement of their own.
Anarchist precursors can be traced back to Chinese Taoism and Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, as well as to classical Greece and Zeno of Citium. It has been argued convincingly that the Mu'tazilite and Najdite Muslims of 9th-century Basra were anarchists. Examples begin to multiply in Europe from the Reformation of the 16th century and its forebears (for example, the Bohemian Taborites and German Anabaptists), the Renaissance (François Rabelais and Etienne de la Boétie). In the mid-17th century, the English revolution proved the launch for a number of social dissenters, not only the The Levellers and their founder "Freeborn" John Lilburne. Similar to Lilburne's Levellers were <A > The Diggers and their leader Gerrard Winstanley can be considered among the founders of modern anarchistic thinking.
Some 18th-century figures are even more obviously anarchist: Rousseau in A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), William Blake (1757–1827) throughout his oeuvre and William Godwin in his highly regarded Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) promote anarchistic ideals. Unlike Blake, whose ideas made no impact on his contemporaries, Godwin exerted considerable influence, most markedly on his future son-in-law, Shelley, who went on to become, in Peter Marshall's words, "the greatest anarchist poet by putting Godwin's philosophy to verse". Marshall goes far beyond this fairly conventional wisdom by claiming both Blake and Godwin as "founding fathers" of British anarchism.
A significant point is that Godwin was not recognised as an anarchist thinker until the very end of the 19th century (and William Blake not for another hundred years) both after the rise of the Romanticism movement which became a spiritual revolution as the protestant reformation and the "age of reason" had spawned social upheavals. Anarchism first needed to be named as such, as it first was by Proudhon in 1840 in What Is Property? where he not only calls himself an "anarchist" – "I am (in the full force of the term) an anarchist" – but also attempts to appropriate "anarchy" as a positive concept, emphasising that he is "a firm friend of order". Further, anarchism had to come into being as a social movement, which it only did from the third quarter of the 19th century. Kropotkin could then call Godwin "the first theorist of stateless socialism, that is, anarchism".
Anarchism is notorious for its diversity. Its accepted varieties range from the egoism of Max Stirner, through the individualism of such Americans as Tucker and the mutualism of Proudhon, both of whom accepted (within strict bounds) the institution of private property, to the collectivism of Bakunin, communism of Kropotkin and revolutionary trade unionism of the syndicalists. What connects almost all of these into a coherent political stance is unremitting hostility to the state and parliamentarianism, employment of direct action as the means of attaining desired goals, and organisation through co-operative associations, built and federated from the bottom upwards. Of these it is the first that is entirely distinctive to anarchism. The state is rejected not just as integral to the current order but crucially as the means to any desirable transformation; and whereas Marxists and other socialists have had ingenuous faith in its eventual "withering away", the anarchists' pessimism that the survival of the state in any post-revolutionary society will lead to the exact opposite has been historically confirmed with the amassment of tyrannic power by communist states.
For a century and a half anarchists have been overwhelmingly socialist, despite the concurrent existence of small numbers of individualists in Europe and the USA. A fruitful approach to understanding anarchism is to recognise its thoroughly socialist critique of capitalism, while emphasising that this has been combined with a liberal critique of socialism, anarchists being united with
classical liberals in their advocacy of autonomous associations and the freedom of the individual.<P>
In the past anarchists were commonly associated with beards and bomb-throwing and in the current vernacular with mayhem on the streets, rioting and looting but in reality they disagree widely over the means to be used to attain their ends, ranging from extreme violence to the passive resistance originally used by Mohandas K Gandhi in the second decade of the twentieth century (NB Americal Liberals, Gandhi not MLK who tried to usurp Gandhi's political intelligence as he usurped the bravery and courage of Rosa Parkes), the non-resistance of Tolstoy and taking in all points between with the exception of legal, constitutional action.
In the decade following World War 2 anarchism appeared to be a spent force, both as a political movement and a political philosophy. Since the 1960s however and the great social upheaval of that decade there has been a resurgence in Europe and North America of anarchistic ideas. These were deeply embedded in the "new social movements" of the last quarter of the 20th century, although the activists of the peace, women's and green movements were commonly unaware of it (and were probably so stoned they were hardly aware of anything.). Anarchist groups and attitudes continue to characterise much environmental activism at the beginning of the 21st century. Rioters and looters in London and the gang culture among a certain type of young men of the lower classes is nothing to do with anarchy however, it is plain and simple lawlessness with the goal of material gain.
Britain almost certainly has a greater number of conscious anarchists nowadays than at any previous point in its history and, in addition, there are many more natural anarchists: that is people who, while not identifying themselves as anarchists, think and act or express a desire to act in identifiably anarchist ways.
