A Mediocre And Unprofessional Beginners Guide To Anarchism
Give me a break, it was my first article.
Anarchism, at first glance, is a scary ideology. This fear is only compounded by poor media representation, where depictions of anarchy are often little other than chaos and crime. However, in reality, anarchism is nothing like this when done correctly. Since anarchy is becoming more relevant as of late, with the events of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone last year, now is a better time than ever to learn about it.
So, enough beating around the bush, what is anarchism? To oversimplify a bit, it is a heavily decentralized society in which people are treated as equals (to a reasonable extent.) There would be little to no central government, with much smaller, citizen-run councils being used instead. Additionally, there would be no form of currency; private property (not personal property) and markets would be abolished.
Work would not be required, save for potentially during dire times, but would be encouraged, with all workers getting the full value of their labor. Everybody would be given what they need to live, with commodity production only taking place after all necessities can be securely and reliably produced. There would be no law enforcement or standing military, both of which are replaced with community-run militias. There are more anarchist concepts, but these are among the most important.
Now, I’m sure this leaves you with another question: what problems would anarchism fix? I have an answer for that as well. The decentralization of society would rid the world of unjust hierarchies, most prominently that between the poor and rich, as well as those between minorities and non-minorities. This is the end goal of most other leftist ideologies as well, but it is most prominent in anarchism. Issues such as famine, homelessness, and poverty would also be solved through the increased emphasis on manufacturing and distributing necessities.
Police brutality would, quite obviously, be solved through not having police. One might think that this would cause crime to increase, and under capitalism, it would. However, under anarchism, this would not be the case. By far the largest cause of crime is desperation, and the aforementioned necessity production would remove that. For the few remaining crimes, there would still be the community militia to prevent that.
Of course, this is far from a perfect explanation. I am definitely not the best person to explain these concepts, but I hope this could at least be helpful to any people who do not understand anarchism. For further reading, I would recommend using the Anarchist Library website, which provides anarchist literature and theory at no cost.
Also, please note that this is from my perspective as a social anarchist. Individualist anarchism is an ideology with similar yet different beliefs, and is not described here. For more information on individualist anarchism, please look through the aforementioned Anarchist Library, or ask an anarchist learning community, such as the Anarchy101 subreddit.
