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Anarchism is an anti-authoritarian political philosophy that advocates self-governed societies based on voluntary, cooperative institutions and the rejection of hierarchies those societies view as unjust. These institutions are often described as stateless societies, although several authors have defined them more specifically as distinct institutions based on non-hierarchical or free associations. While anarchism holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary and harmful, opposition to the state is not its central or sole definition. For instance, anarchism can entail opposing authority or hierarchy in the conduct of all human relations.

Anarchism is often considered a far-left ideology and much of its economics and legal philosophy reflect anti-authoritarian interpretations of communism, collectivism, syndicalism, mutualism, or participatory economics. Many types and traditions of anarchism exist, not all of which are mutually exclusive.

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Selected general articles

William Godwin (3 March 1756 – 7 April 1836) was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism and the first modern proponent of anarchism. Godwin is most famous for two books that he published within the space of a year: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, an attack on political institutions, and Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, an early mystery novel which attacks aristocratic privilege. Based on the success of both, Godwin featured prominently in the radical circles of London in the 1790s. He wrote prolifically in the genres of novels, history and demography throughout his lifetime.

In the conservative reaction to British radicalism, Godwin was attacked, in part because of his marriage to the pioneering feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797 and his candid biography of her after her death from childbirth. Their daughter, later known as Mary Shelley, would go on to write Frankenstein and marry the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. With his second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, Godwin set up The Juvenile Library, allowing the family to write their own works for children (sometimes using noms de plume) and translate and publish many other books, some of enduring significance. Godwin has had considerable influence on British literature and literary culture. Read more...
Max Stirner, a respected philosopher among illegalists.

Illegalism is an anarchist philosophy that developed primarily in France, Italy, Belgium and Switzerland during the early 1900s as an outgrowth of individualist anarchism. The illegalists embraced either openly or secretly criminality as a lifestyle. The illegalists use Max Stirner's Egoism as a justification for illegalism. However, not all illegalists are supporters of Max Stirner and his philosophy. Jules Bonnot and the Bonnot Gang have been described as illegalist by some. Illegalism does not specify the type of crime, though it is associated with theft and shoplifting. Read more...
Rewilding means to return to a more wild or natural state; it is the process of undoing domestication. The term emerged from green anarchism and anarcho-primitivism. The central argument is that the majority of humans have been "civilized" or "domesticated" by agrarianism and sedentary social stratification. Such a process is compared to how dogs have been domesticated from what was a common ancestor with wolves, resulting in a loss in health and vibrancy. Supporters of rewilding argue that through the process of domestication, human wildness has been altered by force.

Rewilding encourages the conscious undoing of human domestication and returning to the lifeways of some indigenous human cultures. Though often associated with primitive skills and learning knowledge of wild plants and animals, it emphasizes regenerative land management techniques employed by hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists, as well as development of the senses and fostering deepening personal relationships with members of other species and the natural world. Rewilding intends to create permanently wild human cultures beyond domestication. Read more...
Magonism (Spanish: Magonismo) is an anarchist, or more precisely anarcho-communist, school of thought precursor of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. It is mainly based on the ideas of Ricardo Flores Magón, his brothers Enrique and Jesús, and also other collaborators of the Mexican newspaper Regeneración (organ of the Mexican Liberal Party), as Práxedis Guerrero, Librado Rivera and Anselmo L. Figueroa. Read more...
T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone is a book by anarchist writer and poet Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson) published in 1991 by Autonomedia and in 2011 by Pacific Publishing Studio (ISBN 978-1-4609-0177-9). It is composed of three sections, "Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism," "Communiques of the Association for Ontological Anarchy," and "The Temporary Autonomous Zone." Read more...

Luigi Galleani (Italian: [luˈiːdʒi ɡalleˈaːni]; August 12, 1861 – November 4, 1931) was an Italian anarchist active in the United States from 1901 to 1919. He is best known for his enthusiastic advocacy of "propaganda of the deed", i.e. the use of violence to eliminate those he viewed as tyrants and oppressors and to act as a catalyst to the overthrow of existing government institutions. From 1914 to 1932, Galleani's followers in the United States (known as i Galleanisti), carried out a series of bombings and assassination attempts against institutions and persons they viewed as class enemies. After Galleani was deported from the United States to Italy in June 1919, his colleagues are alleged to have carried out the Wall Street bombing of 1920, which resulted in the deaths of 38 people. Read more...

The Global Carnival Against Capital took place on Friday, 18 June 1999. It was an international day of protest timed to coincide with the 25th G8 summit in Cologne, Germany. The carnival was inspired by the 1980s Stop the City protests and the Global Street Party, which happened at the same time as the 24th G8 Summit in Birmingham, England in 1998. The rallying slogan was Our Resistance is as Transnational as Capital Read more...

Anarchism as a political movement in Vietnam started in the early twentieth century. Its most recognizable proponent was Phan Boi Chau. Read more...

Counter-economics is a term originally used by libertarian activists and theorists Samuel Edward Konkin III and J. Neil Schulman. The former defined it as "the study or practice of all peaceful human action which is forbidden by the State." The term is short for "counter-establishment economics" and may also be referred to as counter-politics. Counter-economics was integrated by Schulman into Konkin's doctrine of agorism. Read more...

Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that emphasizes the moral worth of the individual. Individualists promote the exercise of one's goals and desires and so value independence and self-reliance and advocate that interests of the individual should achieve precedence over the state or a social group, while opposing external interference upon one's own interests by society or institutions such as the government. Individualism is often defined in contrast to totalitarianism, collectivism, and more corporate social forms.

Individualism makes the individual its focus and so starts "with the fundamental premise that the human individual is of primary importance in the struggle for liberation." Classical liberalism, existentialism, and anarchism are examples of movements that take the human individual as a central unit of analysis. Individualism thus involves "the right of the individual to freedom and self-realization". Read more...

Community unionism, also known as reciprocal unionism, refers to the formation of alliances between unions and non-labour groups in order to achieve common goals. These unions seek to organize the employed, unemployed, and underemployed. They press for change in the workplace and beyond, organizing around issues such as welfare reform, health care, jobs, housing, and immigration. Individual issues at work are seen as being a part of broader societal problems which they seek to address. Unlike trade unions, community union membership is not based on the workplace- it is based on common identities and issues. Alliances forged between unions and other groups may have a primary identity based on affiliations of religion, ethnic group, gender, disability, environmentalism, neighborhood residence, or sexuality.

Community unionism has many definitions and practices. It varies according to country, institutional and political contexts, internal organization, leadership, scale, organizing style, sources of funding, and communication structure. In all, there is no "universal" community union; they take on many different forms. In order to simplify the complex structures of community unions, 4 categories have been established (although in practice community unions may blur the boundaries of these classifications): Read more...

Spontaneous order, also named self-organization in the hard sciences, is the spontaneous emergence of order out of seeming chaos. It is a process in social networks including economics, though the term "self-organization" is more often used for physical changes and biological processes, while "spontaneous order" is typically used to describe the emergence of various kinds of social orders from a combination of self-interested individuals who are not intentionally trying to create order through planning. The evolution of life on Earth, language, crystal structure, the Internet and a free market economy have all been proposed as examples of systems which evolved through spontaneous order.

Spontaneous orders are to be distinguished from organizations. Spontaneous orders are distinguished by being scale-free networks, while organizations are hierarchical networks. Further, organizations can be and often are a part of spontaneous social orders, but the reverse is not true. Further, while organizations are created and controlled by humans, spontaneous orders are created, controlled, and controllable by no one. In economics and the social sciences, spontaneous order is defined as "the result of human actions, not of human design". Read more...

Anarchism was an influential contributor to the social politics of Brazil's Old Republic. During the epoch of mass migrations of European labourers at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, anarchist ideas started to spread, particularly amongst the country’s labour movement. Along with the labour migrants, many Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and German political exiles arrived, many holding anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist ideas.

Some did not come as exiles but rather as a type of political entrepreneur, including Giovanni Rossi, who founded an anarchist commune in 1889, named the colony of Cecília, in the interior of Paraná state. The experiment only lasted a few years, but at one point consisted of 200 participants, mostly Italian migrants with urban labour backgrounds who had difficulties learning to work the land. Read more...

Armed workers occupying factories in Milan, September 1920.

The Biennio Rosso (English: "Red Biennium" or "Two Red Years") was a two-year period, between 1919 and 1920, of intense social conflict in Italy, following the First World War. The revolutionary period was followed by the violent reaction of the Fascist blackshirts militia and eventually by the March on Rome of Benito Mussolini in 1922. Read more...

The Trumbullplex, an anarchist intentional community in the Woodbridge neighborhood of Detroit, Michigan

This is a list of anarchist communities representing any society or portion thereof founded by anarchists that functions according to anarchist philosophy and principles. Anarchists have been involved in a wide variety of community experiments since the 19th century. There are numerous instances in which a community organizes itself along philosophically anarchist lines to promote regional anarchist movements, counter-economics and countercultures. These have included intentional communities founded by anarchists as social experiments and community oriented projects, such as collective organizations and cooperative businesses. There are also several instances of mass society "anarchies" that have come about from explicitly anarchist revolutions, including the Free Territory of Ukraine and the Shinmin autonomous region in Manchuria. Read more...

Anarchism is small minority political movement in Azerbaijan, although it has unique roots. Read more...

The left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks (AKA Third Russian Revolution) were a series of rebellions, uprisings, and revolts against the Bolsheviks by oppositional left-wing organizations and groups that started soon after the October Revolution, continued through the years of the Russian Civil War, and lasted into the first years of Bolshevik reign of the Soviet Union. They were led or supported by left-wing groups such as some factions of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and anarchists. Generally, the uprisings began in 1918 because of the Bolshevik siege and cooptation of Soviet Democracy, the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litvosk which many saw as giving huge concessions to the Central Powers, and opposition to Bolshevik socioeconomic policy. The Bolsheviks grew increasingly hard-line during the decisive and brutal years following the October Revolution, and would suppress any socialist opposition whilst also becoming increasingly hostile to inner-party opposition. These rebellions and insurrections occurred mostly during and after the Russian Civil War, until approximately 1924.

The Bolsheviks were being assaulted by forces from the reactionary wing of Romanov monarchists, reformist Social Democrats, former Imperial Army officers and soldiers in the anti-communist White Armies along with several foreign nations sending in interventionist forces, aid and supplies for the White Armies. Despite this, Vladimir Lenin regarded the left-wing opposition as the most threatening the Bolshevik regime faced. Lenin had for example, called the Kronstadt Rebellion one of the most dangerous situations the regime had faced "undoubtedly more dangerous than Denikin, Yudenich, and Kolchak combined." The authority the Bolsheviks commanded, such as the Cheka and other exertions of control and supremacy were primarily used against left-wing oppositionists rather than the reactionary counter-revolution. Read more...

The Free Territory (Ukrainian: Вільна територія vilna terytoriya; Russian: Вольная территория volnaya territoriya) or Makhnovia (Махновщина Makhnovshchyna) resulted from an attempt to form a stateless anarchist society during the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917 to 1921. It existed from 1918 to 1921, during which time "free soviets" and libertarian communes operated under the protection of Nestor Makhno's Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army. The area had a population of around seven million.

The Territory was established with the capture of Huliaipole by Makhno's forces on 27 November 1918. An Insurrectionary Staff was set up in the city, becoming the Territory's de facto capital. Russian forces of the White movement under Anton Denikin occupied part of the Territory and formed a temporary government of Southern Russia in March 1920, resulting in the de facto capital being momentarily moved to Katerynoslav (modern-day Dnipro). In late March 1920, Denikin's forces retreated from the area, being driven out by the Red Army in cooperation with Makhno's forces, whose units conducted guerrilla warfare behind Denikin's lines. The Territory was disestablished on 28 August 1921 when a badly-wounded Makhno and 77 of his men escaped through Romania after several high-ranking officials were executed by Bolshevik forces. Remnants of the Black Army would continue to fight until late 1922. Read more...

Anti-consumerism is a sociopolitical ideology that is opposed to consumerism, the continual buying and consuming of material possessions. Anti-consumerism is concerned with the private actions of business corporations in pursuit of financial and economic goals at the expense of the public welfare, especially in matters of environmental protection, social stratification, and ethics in the governing of a society. In politics, anti-consumerism overlaps with environmental activism, anti-globalization, and animal-rights activism; moreover, a conceptual variation of anti-consumerism is post-consumerism, living in a material way that transcends consumerism.

Anti-consumerism arose in response to the problems caused by the long-term mistreatment of human consumers and of the animals consumed, and from the incorporation of consumer education to school curricula; examples of anti-consumerism are the book No Logo (2000) by Naomi Klein, and documentary films such as The Corporation (2003), by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, and Surplus: Terrorized into Being Consumers (2003), by Erik Gandini; each made anti-corporate activism popular as an ideologically accessible form of civil and political action. Read more...

Spontaneous order, also named self-organization in the hard sciences, is the spontaneous emergence of order out of seeming chaos. It is a process in social networks including economics, though the term "self-organization" is more often used for physical changes and biological processes, while "spontaneous order" is typically used to describe the emergence of various kinds of social orders from a combination of self-interested individuals who are not intentionally trying to create order through planning. The evolution of life on Earth, language, crystal structure, the Internet and a free market economy have all been proposed as examples of systems which evolved through spontaneous order.

Spontaneous orders are to be distinguished from organizations. Spontaneous orders are distinguished by being scale-free networks, while organizations are hierarchical networks. Further, organizations can be and often are a part of spontaneous social orders, but the reverse is not true. Further, while organizations are created and controlled by humans, spontaneous orders are created, controlled, and controllable by no one. In economics and the social sciences, spontaneous order is defined as "the result of human actions, not of human design". Read more...

Individualist anarchism refers to several traditions of thought within the anarchist movement that emphasize the individual and his will over external determinants such as groups, society, traditions and ideological systems. Individualist anarchism is not a single philosophy, but it refers to a group of individualistic philosophies that sometimes are in conflict. Benjamin Tucker, a famous 19th century individualist anarchist, held that "if the individual has the right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny". Read more...

Anarchists have traditionally been skeptical of or vehemently opposed to organized religion. Nevertheless, some anarchists have provided religious interpretations and approaches to anarchism, including the idea that glorification of the state is a form of sinful idolatry. Read more...

The labour movement or labor movement consists of two main wings, the trade union movement (British English) or labor union movement (American English), also called trade unionism or labor unionism on the one hand, and the political labour movement on the other.

The trade union movement consists of the collective organisation of working people developed to represent and campaign for better working conditions and treatment from their employers and, by the implementation of labour and employment laws, from their governments. The standard unit of organisation is the trade union.

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Did you know...

... that a 2017 ruling of the Supreme Court of India about the governance of Delhi stated: "There is no room for absolutism and there is no room for anarchism also"?
... that Puerto Rican anarchists opposed the consumption of alcohol and as a consequence distanced themselves from the European concept of the anarchist "beer hall"?
... that in January 2017, anarchist squatters occupied one of the four London houses of the Russian billionaire Andrey Goncharenko, and used it as a homeless shelter?
... that suspected anarchist Lazarus Averbuch was shot and killed in the home of Chicago's Chief of Police?
... that the Rose Street Club in 19th-century Soho has been described as bridging the political gap between an earlier generation of chartists and a newer trend towards anarchism and socialism?
... that Irish immigrant, anarchist, strike organiser, and New York surgeon Gertrude Kelly is commemorated by a children's park in Chelsea, Manhattan?

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Selected images

Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, Catalan anarchist pedagogue and free thinker
Nestor Makhno with members of the anarchist Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine
Lawrence Jarach (left) and John Zerzan (right), two prominent contemporary anarchist authors, with Zerzan being a prominent voice within anarcho-primitivism and Jarach a noted advocate of post-left anarchy
Which forms of violence, if any, are consistent with anarchist values is a controversial subject among anarchists
Max Stirner (here in a sketch by Friedrich Engels) is usually considered a prominent early individualist anarchist
Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin opposed the Marxist aim of dictatorship of the proletariat in favour of universal rebellion and allied himself with the federalists in the First International before his expulsion by the Marxists
Peter Kropotkin was influential in the development of anarcho-communism
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the primary proponent of anarcho-mutualism and influenced many future individualist anarchist and social anarchist thinkers
Zeno of Citium (c. 334 – c. 262 BC), whose Republic inspired 19th century anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin
French individualist anarchist Émile Armand propounded the virtues of free love in the Parisian anarchist milieu of the early 20th century
Rojava is supporting efforts for workers to form cooperatives, such as this sewing cooperative
May Day 2010 demonstration of Spanish anarcho-syndicalist trade union CNT in Bilbao, Basque Country