Anarchism: Order Without Rulers

Follows: The Political Spectrum, Fairly Presented and Communism: The Idea, the States, and What Happened

In this deep dive
1. What anarchism is, and isn't
2. The founders: Godwin, Proudhon, and Bakunin against Marx
3. Kropotkin, Goldman and the economics of mutual aid
4. Anarchism in practice: Ukraine 1918–21 and Spain 1936–39
5. The individualists, the anarcho-capitalists, and Elinor Ostrom's commons
6. Living experiments: the Zapatistas and Rojava, as of 2026
7. The strongest critiques, and the anarchists' replies

In July 1936 a general's coup failed in Barcelona. Workers had stormed the barracks, and in the weeks that followed their unions took over factories, transport, shops and cafés; even the bootblacks were collectivised. When George Orwell arrived that December he found waiters who "looked you in the face and treated you as an equal", nobody saying "Señor", and a city where, he wrote, "the working class was in the saddle." He did not understand all of it, and some of it he did not like, but he "recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for."

Within a year it was mostly over, and within three Franco had won the war. But for a few months, one of Europe's great industrial cities was run in large part by anarchist trade unions, with no bosses, while in some of the villages around it money itself was abolished.

Anarchism is the political economy that rejects not only capitalism's owners but also communism's planners. The previous deep dive, Communism, followed the Marxists who took state power to abolish private property. Anarchists predicted, sixty years before the Gulag, that this would create a new ruling class. This piece asks what they proposed instead: who would own things, who would decide what gets made, how it would be shared, and what happened when people tried.

The Social Contract (in Politics, Democracy & Government) covers philosophical anarchism, the argument that no state has proved its right to be obeyed. The Great Political Traditions, in the same category, places libertarianism among the political families. This piece is about anarchism as an economic and social system.

Part 1 — What anarchism is, and isn't

The word comes from the Greek an-arkhos, "without a ruler". Benjamin Tucker, an American anarchist editor, insisted in 1888 that it meant "not necessarily absence of order, as is generally supposed, but an absence of rule."

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines anarchism as "a political theory that is skeptical of the justification of authority and power", usually grounded in the value of individual liberty "conceived as freedom from domination", and paired with a positive vision of "equality, community, and non-coercive consensus building."

Two misunderstandings get in the way. Anarchism is not a rejection of organisation: most anarchists have been obsessive organisers of unions, co-operatives, federations and assemblies. What they reject is organisation by command, where some people give orders backed by force and others must obey. And anarchism is not one economic programme. Its schools disagree as sharply with each other as with anyone.

The first four are often grouped as social anarchism. The last is the most contested member of the family: most social anarchists say a defence of private capital is not anarchism at all, and Murray Rothbard himself suggested calling his position "non-archism" to avoid the confusion.

What the schools share

Under the disagreements, a few commitments run through almost every kind of anarchism.

• No rule by command. Cooperation is welcome; obedience to someone with the power to punish you is not. That covers the state, but social anarchists extend it to the boss, the landlord and, often, the patriarchal family. Anarchists usually call this kind of relationship hierarchy or domination.
• Federation from below. Large-scale coordination should come from small units, such as a workshop, a village or a neighbourhood, sending delegates upward with specific instructions, rather than from a centre sending orders down. Delegates can be recalled at any time.
• Means shape ends. You cannot reach a free society through a dictatorship, a party machine or an army of conscripts, because the methods will become the result. This is the root of the quarrel with Marxism told in Part 2.
• Direct action. Rather than petitioning those in power, people should do the thing themselves: occupy the factory, run the co-operative, build the clinic. Strikes, boycotts and occupations are its classic tools; to many anarchists, voting for representatives is not.

How it differs from its neighbours

It helps to place anarchism next to the traditions it borders. Liberals accept a state but want it limited by law and rights. Marxists accept a state, a workers' one, as a temporary tool that will one day wither away. Minimal-state libertarians accept a state for police, courts and defence only. Anarchists of every school reject the state as such, though, as the rest of this piece shows, they differ over what should take its place. (The Political Spectrum, Fairly Presented sets these positions on a map.)

Part 2 — The founders: Godwin, Proudhon, and Bakunin against Marx

William Godwin: reason instead of government

The first systematic anarchist was an English former dissenting minister who had lost his faith. In An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (February 1793), William Godwin argued, as the Stanford Encyclopedia summarises, that government is "a corrupting force in society, perpetuating dependence and ignorance," but that it will become increasingly unnecessary as knowledge spreads. His tool for change was not revolution but the "rigorous exercise of private judgment, and its candid expression in public discussion."

Godwin pushed impartiality to startling lengths. In his famous "fire case", you can save only one person from a burning room: the Archbishop Fénelon, about to write a book that will benefit millions, or a chambermaid who turns out to be your mother. Godwin said you should save the archbishop. He also distrusted any arrangement that bound people's judgment in advance, from law and private property to marriage and even orchestral concerts.

His influence was literary as much as political. He married the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, became Percy Bysshe Shelley's father-in-law, and provoked a famous reply: Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was in large part an argument that Godwin's equal society would breed until it starved. The objection that abundance will not last, because people will multiply or stop working, has followed anarchism ever since.

Proudhon: "property is theft", and what he meant

The first person to call himself an anarchist was a self-taught French printer. In What Is Property? (1840), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon imagines being asked his politics. A republican? "That word specifies nothing." A democrat? "No." A monarchist? "No." "What are you, then?" "I am an anarchist."

His most famous line answers the book's title question: property is theft (la propriété, c'est le vol; Benjamin Tucker's 1876 translation gives "robbery"). It sounds like a demand to abolish all ownership. It isn't. Proudhon distinguished two things:

• Possession: the right to use what you actually occupy and work, such as your house, your tools, the field you farm. "Possession is a right," he wrote.
• Property in his special sense: the "right of increase", the power to collect income from something you do not use yourself, as rent, interest or profit. "Property is against right."

His programme fits in a sentence: "Suppress property while maintaining possession, and, by this simple modification of the principle, you will revolutionize law, government, economy, and institutions."

Proudhon was not against your house or your workshop. He was against the landlord who owns a hundred houses and the shareholder who never visits the workshop.

Proudhon was just as hostile to communism. "Property is the exploitation of the weak by the strong," he wrote; "Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak." His alternative, mutualism, was a market society of independent producers and workers' associations, exchanging goods at their labour cost and financed by a bank with no shareholders that would lend without interest, which he tried to set up after the revolution of 1848.

Karl Marx at first admired Proudhon, then savaged him. When Proudhon published a book called The Philosophy of Poverty (1846), Marx answered with The Poverty of Philosophy (1847). The quarrel between the two traditions had begun.

Bakunin against Marx

The quarrel became a split inside the first great international workers' movement. The International Working Men's Association, the First International, was founded in London in 1864. Its two most famous members were Marx and the Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin.

Both wanted to abolish capitalism and, eventually, the state. The disagreement was about the road. Marx held that workers must first win political power, through parties and, if necessary, a "dictatorship of the proletariat", before the state could wither away. Bakunin held that any state, even a workers' state, would create a new ruling class, and that the revolution must abolish the state at once and replace it with a free federation of workers' associations and communes.

His most famous statement of the principle came in 1867: "liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and... socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality."

In Statism and Anarchy (1873) Bakunin predicted what a Marxist government would become. The ruling minority, the Marxists say, will consist of workers.

"Yes, possibly of former workers, who, as soon as they become the rulers of the representatives of the people, will cease to be workers and will look down at the plain working masses from the governing heights of the State; they will no longer represent the people, but only themselves and their claims to rulership over the people." — Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy (1873)

Marx copied this passage into his notebook and answered it in the margin. A worker who became a representative, he wrote, would no more stop being a worker than a factory owner stops being a capitalist by becoming a town councillor. To anarchists, the history of the twentieth century settled which of them was right. Marxists reply that Bakunin was predicting the outcome of a revolution in a backward country under siege, which is not what Marx proposed.

The organisational fight ended at the Hague Congress of the International in September 1872. A committee accused Bakunin of running a secret organisation inside the International, and the congress voted to expel him. It also moved the General Council to New York, by 30 votes to 14, where it soon died. Bakunin's supporters formed their own International. The socialist movement had split into the two families that would face each other, sometimes with guns, in Russia and Spain.

Part 3 — Kropotkin, Goldman and the economics of mutual aid

Kropotkin: cooperation is natural

If Bakunin supplied anarchism's fire, Peter Kropotkin supplied its science. A Russian prince and trained geographer who had explored Siberia, he became anarchism's most influential economist.

His best-known book began as a reply to Thomas Huxley, Darwin's great defender. In 1888 Huxley had written that, from the moralist's point of view, the animal world was "on about the same level as a gladiators' show", and many readers took this as proof that competition is the law of life. Kropotkin answered with a series of articles in The Nineteenth Century from 1890, collected in 1902 as Mutual Aid. Drawing on his observations of animals and peasant communities, he argued that species survive by cooperating as much as by fighting:

"Those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest... mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle." — Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (1902)

Modern evolutionary biology has a much richer theory of cooperation than either Huxley or Kropotkin, but it confirms Kropotkin's core point: cooperation among animals, and especially among humans, is common and evolves for good reasons.

The Conquest of Bread: from each, to each

Kropotkin's economic programme, set out in The Conquest of Bread (1892), is anarcho-communism. Since every product depends on the accumulated work of generations, he argued, nobody can measure one person's share: "All belongs to all." So he rejected not only private property but wages, including the labour certificates of Marx's first phase.

His allocation rule was simple: "no stint or limit to what the community possesses in abundance, but equal sharing and dividing of those commodities which are scarce or apt to run short." Village commons, public libraries and free bridges were his evidence that people already lived this way for some goods.

The weakness is obvious and anarchists have argued about it ever since: who decides what is scarce, and what happens if too few people want to do the unpleasant work? Kropotkin's answer was that work freed from bosses and overwork would become attractive, and that shorter hours shared by all would cover the rest.

Emma Goldman: freedom in everyday life

Emma Goldman, a Jewish immigrant from Kaunas in the Russian Empire (now Lithuania), to the United States, became the most famous anarchist of the early twentieth century. Her definition, from Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), is one of the clearest: "The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary."

Goldman broadened anarchism from economics into personal life: free speech, birth control, sexual freedom, opposition to conscription. Jailed for opposing the First World War draft, she was deported in December 1919 with Alexander Berkman and more than two hundred others to Soviet Russia. She arrived hopeful and left disillusioned, above all after the crushing of the Kronstadt rising in March 1921. On 28 February the sailors of the battleship Petropavlovsk, many of whom had fought for the revolution in 1917, had passed a resolution demanding new elections to the soviets by secret ballot and freedom of speech and press "to anarchist and left socialist parties". The Red Army stormed the island fortress across the ice. Goldman left Russia that December and wrote My Disillusionment in Russia (1923).

Her most famous line, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution", is probably not hers. It was put on a T-shirt in the 1970s, loosely based on a story in her autobiography in which a comrade told her that dancing did not suit an agitator.

Part 4 — Anarchism in practice: Ukraine 1918–21 and Spain 1936–39

Anarchist societies have existed at scale only twice, both times in the middle of civil wars. That fact matters to every argument about them.

The Makhnovshchina: free soviets in Ukraine

In southern Ukraine, around the town of Huliaipole, a peasant anarchist named Nestor Makhno led a movement known as the Makhnovshchina. From 1918 it fought the German and Austrian occupiers, Ukrainian nationalists, the White armies and, at different times, the Bolsheviks. In the territory it held, it seized landlords' estates, set up agricultural communes and called regional congresses of peasants, workers and insurgents to run local affairs through "free soviets", councils without a party above them.

More than once the Makhnovists allied with the Red Army against the Whites, and each time the Bolsheviks turned on them. By August 1921 the movement was crushed, and Makhno escaped abroad; he died of tuberculosis in Paris in 1934, aged 45.

The record is contested. Anarchist historians stress the movement's popular base, its self-government and Makhno's ban on anti-Jewish pogroms. Critics note that it was in practice an army under a charismatic commander, fighting a war in which every side requisitioned food and shot enemies, and that there was little time or peace to show what free soviets could do in normal life.

Spain: the largest anarchist revolution

Spain had the strongest anarchist movement in history. Its union, the CNT (National Confederation of Labour), had about 1.5 million members in July 1936, alongside the FAI, a federation of committed anarchists. When generals rebelled against the Republic on 17–18 July 1936, workers' militias defeated them in Barcelona and much of eastern Spain. The state's authority collapsed, and the unions took over.

What followed was anarcho-syndicalism in practice:

Estimates of how many people lived in the collectives vary from about 1.5 million to 3 million.

Whether the collectives were voluntary is the central dispute. The historian Burnett Bolloten argued that many small farmers joined only under heavy pressure, in a climate in which "fascists" were being shot. Ronald Fraser's oral history found both "spontaneous" and "forced" collectives. Others, such as Antony Beevor and Graham Kelsey, point out that most villages contained both collectivists and individual farmers who stayed out, which they take as evidence that coercion was not the rule. The historian Michael Seidman found that even anarchist-run workplaces struggled to get people to work: the CNT ruled that workers could be sacked for "laziness or immorality" and that each should have a file recording their "professional and social personalities", much as bosses had kept.

The revolution also had a dark side that its admirers often skip. In the months after the coup, militias of many parties, anarchists among them, killed tens of thousands of people in the Republican zone, including about 6,800 Catholic clergy by the most cited count. Most historians judge the repression on Franco's side to have been larger and more systematic, but the Republican killings were real.

How it ended

The revolution was undone first by its own side. To fight Franco, the CNT agreed to join the government; in November 1936 four anarchists became ministers, among them Federica Montseny. The Republic, increasingly dependent on Soviet arms and on the Communist Party, set about rebuilding the state. In Orwell's account, the militias were broken up and key industries taken back by the government.

On 3 May 1937, government forces tried to take the CNT-held Barcelona telephone exchange, and street fighting broke out across the city. Orwell was there. After these May Days, the anti-Stalinist POUM party was outlawed, and in August 1937 the government dissolved the anarchist-led Council of Aragon and sent troops to break up many of its collectives. Franco's victory in 1939 ended what was left.

Anarchists draw one lesson from Spain: the revolution worked until it was destroyed by both its enemies and its allies. Critics draw another: a society without a state could not defend itself, so it had to rebuild one.

Part 5 — The individualists, the anarcho-capitalists, and Elinor Ostrom's commons

American individualists: markets without monopolies

A different anarchism grew up in the United States, from Josiah Warren in the 1820s to Benjamin Tucker, editor of the journal Liberty from 1881. Tucker called anarchists "unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats" who took "the best government is that which governs least" to its conclusion.

Tucker's economics were pro-market and anti-capitalist at once. He argued that the rich got rich not through free markets but through four state-backed monopolies: the money monopoly (laws restricting who may issue currency and credit, which kept interest high), the land monopoly (state enforcement of title to land nobody used), tariffs, and patents. Abolish those, he believed, and competition would drive rent, interest and profit towards zero, so workers would receive their full product. It was Proudhon's mutualism with an American accent.

Anarcho-capitalism: markets for everything

In the 1960s and 1970s American economists revived the individualists' love of markets while dropping their hostility to profit and interest.

Murray Rothbard, a student of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, argued that taxation is theft and that every service the state provides could be supplied by voluntary exchange. Against philosophers who justified the state by an imagined social contract, he replied that "no existing state has been immaculately conceived."

David Friedman, son of Milton Friedman, gave the most concrete economic picture in The Machinery of Freedom (1973). Imagine there are no police, he wrote, but competing protection agencies. Your television is stolen, your agency's camera shows a man named Joe carrying it out, and Joe's own agency says he's innocent. Rather than fight, which is expensive, the two agencies agree in advance on an arbitrator. Over time, different agencies and arbitrators would offer different legal codes, and customers would choose among them.

"Systems of law would be produced for profit on the open market, just as books and bras are produced today." — David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom (1973)

Friedman studied medieval Iceland, which had courts and law but almost no state executive, as a historical example.

Friedman is unusually candid about the weak point. His chapter on national defence is titled "The hard problem." Defence against a foreign army is a public good: it protects everyone in a territory whether or not they pay, so a voluntary market may not supply enough of it.

The philosopher Robert Nozick, in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), argued that competing protection agencies would tend to merge into one dominant protective association that, without anyone intending it, becomes a minimal state. (The Great Political Traditions covers Nozick's case for the minimal state.) Rothbard replied that even this state would violate rights by taxing people and forbidding competitors.

Elinor Ostrom: the commons can work (but she was not an anarchist)

The most important empirical evidence on self-governance comes from someone who was not an anarchist at all.

In 1968 the biologist Garrett Hardin argued that a pasture open to all would be overgrazed, because each herder gains from adding a cow while the cost is shared by all: the tragedy of the commons. The usual conclusions were privatise it or let the state run it.

Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist at Indiana University, spent her career showing that there is a third way. In Governing the Commons (1990) and hundreds of field studies of fisheries, forests, irrigation systems and pastures, she found communities that had managed shared resources sustainably for centuries without either private owners or a central state. In 2009 she shared the Nobel Prize in economics "for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons", the first woman to receive it.

She found that long-lasting commons shared certain design principles. In the updated list in her Nobel lecture:

1. Clear boundaries around who may use the resource, and what the resource is.
2. Rules that fit local conditions, with costs in proportion to benefits.
3. Most users can take part in making and changing the rules.
4. Monitors who are users themselves or answer to them.
5. Graduated sanctions: penalties that start small and grow for repeat offenders.
6. Quick, cheap, local ways of resolving conflicts.
7. The government recognises the users' right to make their own rules.
8. For larger systems, governance "organized in multiple nested layers".

Anarchists cite Ostrom constantly, and with reason: she showed that people can make, monitor and enforce their own rules far more often than economists assumed. But principle 7 shows why she was not one of them. Her successful commons usually existed within states that recognised them, and her own term for the ideal was polycentric governance: many centres of decision-making, local and national, nested together. Her lecture is titled Beyond Markets and States, not Without them, and her warning that "one-size-fits-all" policies fail applies to anarchist blueprints as much as to state ones.

Part 6 — Living experiments: the Zapatistas and Rojava, as of 2026

Two modern movements are often discussed as anarchist or near-anarchist experiments. Neither uses the word about itself, and both have been shaped by armed conflict. What follows is drawn from their own documents and from dated reporting.

The Zapatistas of Chiapas

On 1 January 1994 the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), a mostly indigenous Maya force in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, rose in arms with the declaration "Hoy decimos ¡basta!" ("Today we say: enough!"). After brief fighting, it turned to building autonomous self-government in the communities that supported it.

In August 2003 the Zapatistas set up Juntas de Buen Gobierno ("good government councils"). From then on, by their own account, the EZLN's military leadership stopped giving orders in civilian matters, and communities practised mandar obedeciendo, "to command by obeying": officials serve in rotation and can be recalled by the assemblies that chose them. The communities run their own affairs through assemblies and rotating councils.

In November 2023 the Zapatistas announced a sweeping reorganisation. They dissolved their autonomous municipalities and the twelve good-government councils and shifted power down to thousands of Local Autonomous Governments (GAL), one in each community, which combine as needed into larger collectives. As of October 2026 the movement remains active, publishing communiqués and hosting international gatherings in Chiapas.

The Zapatistas' language is not anarchist: they speak of autonomy, indigenous dignity and the struggle against capitalism, and they began as, and remain, an army with commanders. Many anarchists admire them; the Zapatistas have kept their own name for what they do.

Rojava: democratic confederalism in north-east Syria

During Syria's civil war, Kurdish-led forces took control of much of north-east Syria from 2012 and built the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), widely known as Rojava. Its ideology came from Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned founder of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), who in prison abandoned the goal of a Kurdish nation-state for what he called democratic confederalism: "a non-state political administration or a democracy without a state", built from communes and councils.

Its 2023 Social Contract describes a society based on "an ecological democratic society, co-chairing, communal economy, social justice, and the principle of democratic confederalism." Offices were held jointly by a man and a woman (the co-chair system), and local communes handled many everyday decisions. Supporters admired its record on women's rights and religious and ethnic pluralism. Critics, including a 2016 Chatham House study, argued that real power was concentrated in one party, the PYD; Amnesty International accused its forces in 2015 of forcibly displacing residents of some villages; Arab residents in some areas protested against forced conscription and Kurdish dominance; and Turkey regarded the administration's armed forces as an extension of the PKK, which the United States has listed as a terrorist organisation since 1997.

After the fall of the Assad government in December 2024, the administration negotiated with Syria's new interim government. In January 2026 government forces launched an offensive and took much of Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor provinces, and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces agreed to withdraw to Hasakah province (CNN, 18 January 2026). On 29 January the two sides agreed a roadmap to integrate the region's forces and civilian institutions into the Syrian state; by May, four brigades of former SDF fighters had joined the national army (Rudaw, 2 May 2026). In early August a regional official said integration was about 70% complete, though the final dissolution of the administration had not yet happened (Perspektive, August 2026). On about 20 August 2026 the SDF commander, Mazloum Abdi, said military, security and administrative integration into state institutions was complete (Enab Baladi, 21 August 2026), and days later, at a press conference in Damascus after meeting President Ahmad al-Sharaa, he announced "the end of the mission of the Syrian Democratic Forces and their dissolution as an independent military force" (Jordan News, 27 August 2026).

As of late 2026, then, Rojava's experiment in self-administration has largely been folded into the Syrian state. Whether any of its communal institutions survive inside the new arrangement remains to be seen.

Both experiments survived only by having armies. That is either proof that anarchism needs a defence it cannot supply, or proof that anyone who challenges a state must be ready to defend themselves. Which one you see depends on where you start.

Part 7 — The strongest critiques, and the anarchists' replies

1. Security: who stops the strongest?

Thomas Hobbes's answer to anarchism came two centuries before anarchism had a name. Without a common power to keep everyone in awe, he wrote in Leviathan (1651, ch. 13), the life of man is "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." Nozick's version is gentler: competing protection agencies will tend to merge until one dominates and becomes a state. History seems to agree. Both large anarchist experiments, in Ukraine and Spain, were destroyed by better-organised armies, and both had already built military hierarchies to survive. Even David Friedman calls defence "the hard problem."

Anarchists reply that the comparison is unfair. The previous deep dive in this series counted the millions killed by states in the twentieth century, and those were states doing what states do: concentrating force. The question, they argue, is not whether anarchy is perfectly safe but whether it is more dangerous than the Leviathan.

2. Collective action: free riders

The economist Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action (1965) explains why voluntary groups struggle with public goods. A union's wage gains, a lobby's laws or a country's defence benefit every member whether they paid or not, so each has a reason to let others pay. Olson concluded that "small and large organizations support themselves in entirely different ways": small groups can rely on peer pressure, but large groups need compulsion or special incentives, which is why governments tax and unions sought closed shops.

The anarchist reply leans on Ostrom: people solve these dilemmas surprisingly often when they can talk, monitor each other and punish cheats. But note her conditions: clear boundaries, local knowledge, and usually small groups nested inside larger institutions.

3. Scale: villages and megacities

The successful examples of self-government without a state, from Swiss alpine pastures to Zapatista communities, are mostly small and stable. A modern economy depends on long supply chains, power grids, pandemics and trade among strangers who will never meet. Critics ask how an assembly-based federation would build a semiconductor plant or coordinate a national electricity grid.

Anarchists answer with federation: small units delegating specific tasks upward to recallable delegates, never handing over general authority. Critics reply that the federation's upper levels would become a state in all but name.

4. Hidden power: the tyranny of structurelessness

One of the sharpest critiques came from inside the radical left. In a talk first given in May 1970, the feminist Jo Freeman argued that groups that reject formal structure don't end up structureless; they end up with informal, unaccountable cliques. A "laissez faire" group, she wrote, "is about as realistic as a 'laissez faire' society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky." Many anarchist organisations now answer her with rotating roles, written procedures and recall.

5. Coercion by other means

Without a state, someone must still decide what happens to a farmer who refuses to join the collective or a factory that won't share its output. The Spanish experience suggests that social pressure, rationing and the denial of benefits can coerce as effectively as police. Social anarchists reply that community enforcement is closer and more accountable than distant bureaucracy. Anarcho-capitalists reply that private property and contract settle such questions, and social anarchists answer that a society of private protection agencies would simply let wealth buy force.

What remains

Even sceptics grant anarchism several lasting contributions. Its prediction of what a Marxist state would become was strikingly accurate. Its insistence that means shape ends, so that a free society cannot be built by unfree methods, haunts every revolutionary movement. And Ostrom's research vindicated the anarchist intuition that ordinary people can govern shared resources without either a master or a market, even if not without any state at all.

The live disagreement is about how far that intuition stretches: from the village to the region, from the commons to the whole economy, from peacetime to war.

The takeaway

Anarchism is the tradition that rejects rule by command, both the capitalist's and the state's, and proposes instead an order built from voluntary association. Its economic schools disagree deeply: Proudhon wanted markets of independent producers without landlords or lenders ("property is theft" meant income from ownership, not your house); Bakunin wanted collective ownership; Kropotkin wanted free sharing by need; American individualists wanted markets without state monopolies; and anarcho-capitalists want markets for everything, including law. Its two large experiments, in Ukraine (1918–21) and Spain (1936–39), showed that workers and peasants could run farms and factories, and also that they struggled with coercion and could not survive a civil war without rebuilding hierarchy. Elinor Ostrom, who was not an anarchist, showed that communities can govern shared resources by their own rules, usually nested within a state. The strongest critiques concern security, free riders, scale and hidden power, and they remain unanswered rather than refuted.

Try this: find one thing near you that people govern without a boss or a market: a shared allotment, a sports club, a group chat with rules, a volunteer project. Check it against Ostrom's eight principles. Which does it have, which is it missing, and what happens when someone breaks the rules?

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Anarchism" (Andrew Fiala, revised 4 December 2025): definition, schools, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, Stirner, Rothbard ("non-archism"; "no existing state has been immaculately conceived").
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "William Godwin" (revised 2025): Political Justice (1793), private judgment, the fire case, Wollstonecraft, Malthus.
- P.-J. Proudhon, What Is Property? (1840), trans. B. R. Tucker (1876), Project Gutenberg eBook #360: ch. 1 ("Property is robbery"), the "right of increase", ch. 5 ("I am an anarchist"; possession and property; "Communism is oppression and slavery").
- Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) and Conspectus of Bakunin's Statism and Anarchy (1874–75); M. Bakunin, Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism (1867) and Statism and Anarchy (1873); Resolutions of the Hague Congress of the IWMA, 2–7 September 1872 (all at marxists.org).
- P. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (1902), Project Gutenberg #4341 (introduction and ch. 1); The Conquest of Bread, Project Gutenberg #23428.
- Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), Project Gutenberg #2162; Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) and other Kronstadt documents in the marxists.org Kronstadt archive. Goldman's deportation and the origin of the "dance" quotation, from the Wikipedia article "Emma Goldman" (lead to Alix Kates Shulman's account).
- The Makhnovshchina, CNT membership in 1936, collectivisation estimates (Leval, Richards, Mintz), the coercion debate (Bolloten, Fraser, Beevor, Kelsey, Seidman), the CNT ministers, the May Days, the Council of Aragon and the Republican-zone killings, from the Wikipedia articles "Makhnovshchina", "Nestor Makhno", "Spanish Revolution of 1936", "May Days" and "Red Terror (Spain)" (used as leads to the named works).
- George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938), chs. 1, 5 and 10 (Project Gutenberg Australia).
- B. R. Tucker, "State Socialism and Anarchism", Liberty, 10 March 1888 (The Anarchist Library).
- David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom (2nd ed., 1989; first ed. 1973), author's PDF: private protection agencies, "National defense: the hard problem", medieval Iceland.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Robert Nozick's Political Philosophy" (dominant protective association).
- Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences 2009, facts and press release; Elinor Ostrom, "Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems", Nobel lecture (8 December 2009), design principles as updated by Cox, Arnold and Villamayor-Tomás (2009).
- Harvard University Press, description of Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action; Jo Freeman, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" (jofreeman.com); Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ch. 13, Project Gutenberg #3207.
- EZLN, Primera Declaración de la Selva Lacandona (1 January 1994), Sexta Declaración de la Selva Lacandona (2005), and "Novena parte: la nueva estructura de la autonomía zapatista" (12 November 2023), all at enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx; Enlace Zapatista home page (consulted October 2026).
- Abdullah Öcalan, Democratic Confederalism (2011, The Anarchist Library); Rojava Information Center, "AANES Social Contract, 2023 edition"; CNN, "Syria military takeover of Kurdish SDF areas, explained" (18 January 2026); Rojava Information Center emergency update (22 January 2026); Rudaw, report on SDF brigades (2 May 2026); Perspektive Online, report on integration (August 2026); the August 2026 completion statement and dissolution announcement as reported by Al Arabiya, Enab Baladi (21 August 2026) and Jordan News (27 August 2026); US State Department, list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (PKK, designated 8 October 1997).

Go deeper
- 🌐 SEP: Anarchism — a careful, recently revised map of every school and every major objection. Start here.
- 📘 Mutual Aid — Peter Kropotkin. Read the introduction and the chapters on medieval cities; then ask what modern biology would add.
- 📘 What Is Property? — P.-J. Proudhon. Chapter 1 and the conclusion of chapter 5 are enough to see what "property is theft" really meant.
- 📘 Homage to Catalonia — George Orwell. An eyewitness of the Spanish revolution at its height and of its destruction in the May Days; honest about what he did and didn't understand.
- 🌐 The Machinery of Freedom — David Friedman. The anarcho-capitalist case at its clearest, free from the author, including the chapter on why defence is the hard problem.
- 🌐 "Beyond Markets and States" — Elinor Ostrom's Nobel lecture. The evidence on self-governed commons, from someone who was neither a free-marketeer nor an anarchist.
- 🌐 "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" — Jo Freeman. Twenty minutes that every group without a boss should read.
- 🌐 Companion pieces in this library: The Social Contract and The Great Political Traditions (Politics); and in this series Socialism: The Many Kinds, Communism: The Idea, the States, and What Happened and The Mixed Economy.