Anarchism 101

Even more than with other words, there can be no definitive understanding of what 'anarchism' is. But what it means to me is a radical rejection of coercion, in all its forms.

This necessarily involves a rejection of violence, because violence is coercive. Masochism aside, physical pain is precisely 'that which we don't want to feel,' and violence causes pain. Violence takes away freedom of choice for those who suffer it, coercively overriding and ignoring their desires, starting with their desire not to suffer pain. Of course, the coercion of violence usually extends far beyond simply inflicting pain. The threat, example, or experience of the pain that violence causes generally exists in order to force people to do the will of the violent. Sometimes the violent settle for damaging and killing those in their way, so that they can they do as they please. In any case, violence says to its victim 'I know better than you, and I have a right to force you to do — or at least suffer — what I want.'

Also, 'a radical rejection of coercion' goes beyond just promoting a stateless society — though that's certainly part of it too. Promoting coercion-free politics would be a better way of putting it, as long as politics is understood as embracing much more than 'the words and actions of rulers and would-be rulers of the state' (be they democratically-elected or not). That might be what we usually mean by 'politics' in the modern West, but that's a bit silly because, for one thing, hunter-gatherers clearly have politics too. (And by the way, 'economy' does not just equal 'money' because hunter-gatherers and mostly-cash-free agrarian societies have economies too).

Really, 'politics' (anthropologically, and as I'm using it) just refers to 'collective decision-making' — in other words 'how groups of people decide to do stuff,' including most importantly, how they decide to live alongside one another.

Anarchism as I understand it, then, says that all our collective interactions, relations, and decision-making, should be free of coercion. Or to state it positively, they should be co-operative and voluntary, and I believe by extension, personal and small-scale.