Anarchism

Anarchism is a political ideology that holds the state and all forms of hierarchical, coercive authority to be both unjust and unnecessary, envisioning a society organised instead through voluntary cooperation, mutual aid and federations of self-governing communities or workplaces. On property, anarchist currents differ sharply: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's mutualism held that property was legitimate only as the fruit of an individual's own labour and condemned rent and interest as theft, while collectivist and communist anarchists such as Mikhail Bakunin called for the outright abolition of private property in the means of production. Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid (1902) gave the movement's cooperative vision its most influential scientific grounding, arguing from evidence across the animal and human world that cooperation, not conflict, is the chief factor in evolution and social development. Its legitimacy claim is negative rather than institutional: no government, however constituted, can rightfully claim authority over an individual who has not freely consented to it, which is why anarchism rejects electoral participation as a route to its own goals rather than merely a tactic open to debate. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the first person to call himself an anarchist, in his 1840 work What Is Property?, and the movement grew through the nineteenth century into an organised current within the wider socialist and labour movement before splitting from Marxism at the First International over Marx's support for a transitional workers' state. Anarchism positions itself against both capitalism, for its private concentration of economic power, and Marxist socialism, for retaining rather than abolishing the state during a transitional phase.