Put 10 anarchists in a room and you’ll leave with 15 different understandings of Anarchy and Anarchism.
One understanding of Anarchy & Anarchism is as two different but interrelated things: on one hand, the historical movement to destroy the state, capitalism and all forms of hierarchy and domination. This some call Anarchism. On the other hand, a particular ethic and way of life that seeks the greatest amount of individual freedom within freely created social groupings built upon bonds of solidarity and mutual aid that assures full, free and equitable access to the collective wealth and resource of all living beings. This some call Anarchy.
Anarchy is not a closed book, a solved equation, it does not presuppose a way of life to be imposed but is based on the particulars of individuals and groupings precisely because it is individuals who must make anarchy for themselves according to their needs and desires.
Anarchists are not content to just dream of different worlds, but to realize them. But one comes up against limits – one cannot talk of freedom in a prison, one cannot experiment with freedom in a world where all time and space is held in the grip of domination. Anarchism is the movement of the exploited – autonomous and conscious individuals who come together – to tear time and space out of the grip of domination so that new relations – new worlds – can begin to take their own time to develop.
Below are various quotes that flesh out more deeply Anarchy and Anarchism.
Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for 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 the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.
Emma Goldman, Anarchism: What it Really Stands For
So anarchists keep asking themselves the same question: What is anarchism? What does it mean to be an anarchist? Why? Because it is not a definition that can be made once and for all, put in a safe and considered a heritage to be tapped little by little. Being an anarchist does not mean one has reached a certainty or said once and for all, ‘There, from now on I hold the truth and as such, at least from the point of view of the idea, I am a privileged person’. Anyone who thinks like this is an anarchist in word alone. Instead the anarchist is someone who really puts themselves in doubt as such, as a person, and asks themselves: What is my life according to what I do and in relation to what I think? What connection do I manage to make each day in everything I do, a way of being an anarchist continually and not come to agreements, make little daily compromises, etc? Anarchism is not a concept that can be locked up in a word like a gravestone. It is not a political theory. It is a way of conceiving life, and life, young or old as we may be, whether we are old people or children, is not something final: it is a stake we must play day after day. When we wake up in the morning and put our feet on the ground we must have a good reason for getting up, if we don’t it makes no difference whether we are anarchists or not. We might as well stay in bed and sleep. And to have a good reason we must know what we want to do because for anarchism, for the anarchist, there is no difference between what we do and what we think, but there is a continual reversal of theory into action and action into theory. That is what makes the anarchist unlike someone who has another concept of life and crystallises this concept in a political practice, in political theory.
Alfredo M. Bonanno, The Anarchist Tension
What is anarchism by definition?
It is the struggle for a condition of society where the only link among individuals is solidarity, basically the solidarity of material and moral interests, which leads to the elimination of the vicious daily competitions between individuals and among peoples. (A very sad era, and one that, except during periods of famine or of love, the so-called inferior animals have surpassed a long time ago, to our shame.) And it calls upon them to unite for a greater and more noble struggle against the adverse forces of nature in order to realize superior, more complete and more secure forms of social life.
The condition and character of solidarity are spontaneity and freedom. But whereas the bourgeois regime is the domination of a majority over the minority, we aspire to realize the autonomy of the individual within the freedom of association, the independence of his thought, of his life, of his development, of his destiny, freedom from violence, from caprice and from the domination of the majority, as well as of various minorities; and when we refer to libertarian communism, a term which our descendants will take care to amend, we are trying to find an economic ubi consistam [where should I stand] in which this political autonomy of the individual may find an enlightened and happy reality.
Luigi Galleani, The End of Anarchism?
Between communism (of course, understood, not as another aspect of the State, compelled to reproduce in itself all the iniquities of the preceding governments, but as a free, united co-operation of all people for production) and individualism (in the sense that no institutional authority, neither that of the majority nor of a minority, can interfere with the development and freedom of the individual or in any way diminish his autonomy) there is no contradiction, no incompatibility. Communism is simply the;foundation by which the individual has the opportunity to regulate himself and carry out his functions.
They are two terms which complement each other.
Every anarchist who is faithful to his denial of any privilege, especially of the most fundamental and nefarious of all privileges, that of the private ownership of the means of production and exchange, and who, for this reason, aspires to realize an economic regime where land, mines, factories and every other Labour or exchange tool, all means of production, will be indivisible common property, is, in his economic aspirations, a communist. Likewise, if he is faithful to his denial of authority and supports a regime which will realize the complete independence and autonomy of the individual from any economic, political and moral boss, he is inevitably an individualist.
Luigi Galleani, The End of Anarchism?
Anarchist Communism maintains that most valuable of all conquests — individual liberty — and moreover extends it and gives it a solid basis — economic liberty, without which political liberty is delusive; it does not ask the individual who has rejected god, the universal tyrant, god the king, and god the parliament, to give unto himself a god more terrible than any of the preceding — god the Community, or to abdicate upon its altar his independence, his will, his tastes, and to renew the vow of asceticism which he formerly made before the crucified god. It says to him, on the contrary, “No society is free so long as the individual is not so. Do not seek to modify society by imposing upon it an authority which shall make everything right; if you do, you will fail as popes and emperors have failed. Modify society so that your fellows may not be any longer your enemies by the force of circumstances: abolish the conditions which allow some to monopolize the fruit of the labor of others; and instead of attempting to construct society from top to bottom, or from the center to the circumference, let it develop itself freely from the simple to the composite by the free union of free groups. This course, which is so much obstructed at present, is the true forward march of society: do not seek to hinder it, do not turn your back on progress, but march along with it. Then the sentiment of sociability which is common to human beings, as it is to all animals living in society, will be able to develop itself freely, because our fellows will no longer be our enemies, and we shall thus arrive at a state of things in which each individual will be able to give free rein to his inclinations, and even to his passions, without any other restraint than the love and respect of those who surround him.”
Peter Kropotkin, The Place of Anarchism in Socialistic Evolution