I believe the technical term for that attitude is "dudeliness."

they are not all 'feminist' protesters as such, or even protesters at that. there was a female vietcong member in there. in fact, most left wing revolutionary armies have a very high proportion of female soldiers.

i see your point, but i dont like it when all left-wingers are called 'liberal', though i know in the USA its generally accepted, because the left wing hardly ever goes further than liberalism. just keep in mind that anarchism and socialism are NOT liberalism, they are distinct theories, and although we have many common goals, i at least dont want to be called a 'liberal'.

fort worth represent!

i totally agree! the tokenization (i think i made that word up...) is HORRENDOUS. its like they know they are all white and that it makes them look exclusive. rather then looking inwards at what is causing the exclusivity they just latch onto a few poc folks that are a part of the movement and use them to show how inclusive they are.

but how often are those people of color in positions of power or leadership? hardly ever. and as you pointed out, we are the ones who will be cleaning up or targetted by the prison industrial complex when shit really goes down.

Or anyone, for that matter...

I agree. Unless we totally, completely erase sexism from people's minds, which isn't possible, I have a feeling that anarchy might end up being not so great for women.

yepp, thats one of the flaws of anarchism- that it is naive (however much they try to deny it)

Whether or not you like or agree with a particular philosophy I think that it is quite rude to call it silly. I don't want to assume that you are ignorant about anarchism, because there are plenty of well-informed people that disagree with it, but in my experience, 9/10 people who deride anarchism as silly, absurd, or ridiculous actually know very little about it. Furthermore, there are a wide range of theories and positions which fall under the general heading of anarchism.

How is the general philosophy of anarchism "silly"?

It encompasses theories that are largely based on the idea of humanism and advocates practices that are quite reasonable and could be functional.

Don't generalize based on who the media presents as advocates of anarchy.

Anarchists are not advocates of primal chaos, but rather people who believe that, essentially, society would be better if it functioned not under systems of governmental oppression, but basic human cooperation and mutual understanding.

First thing, there are several different forms of anarchy, who disagree, essentially, one the nature of private property as a right. I'm most familiar with market anarchy, but there are others, which are all essentially socialist in nature but which try to get out of calling themselves that by being socialist on a very small scale.

If you want recommendations, I'd have to suggest The Ethics of Liberty, by Murray Rothbard. I haven't read much of it and so can't really comment on its content, but the views espoused therein seem to be regarded as representative of what market anarchists mean when they identify themselves as such.

Oh, and also, Man, Economy, and State, also by Murray Rothbard, and which is incidentally available on for free online. It covers a lot of economics before getting to where it argues against the state, but since economics and social organization are inseparable, I'd think it is essential to understand a philosophy's stance on both economics and politics to understand it at all.

Emma Goldman, "Anarchy and Other Essays"

Derrick Jensen, too.

I always recommend INCITE!'s Color of Violence and Andrea Smith's Conquest. Essays of Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre. Cindy Milstein. Go to wikipedia for the bare bones of anarchism [and hopefully whatever it says this week is accurate enough].

And there is no shortage of food on this planet. I could write a whole damn book on it, but those books have already been written. Look up Vandana Shiva titles.

Hey if you want to tell me where you live then I could let you know whether there's a good infoshop (radical bookstore/hangout spot) that would have all kinds of great books and probably some free zines and papers too. They could totally recommend things for you as well. If you live in a city I would totally recommend getting involved in the local anarchist scene, it's as good a way as any to find out what anarchists are all about.
You could also try this website to find out if there's anything in your area : http://slingshot.tao.ca/rclist.php

The label "anarchism" has been used pretty wildly, but there are few core ideas that all anarchists believe.

I hope this not too incoherent or boring or too long, cause it's my first attempt at writing it down like this. I tried to read it over few times, to catch mistakes, but some will probably sneak in.

I'm going to speak for all anarchists which is a bit pretentious, but it would take to long to sort it out otherwise.

What anarchists believe:

1) opposition to all forms of domination

(this is vague I know). It includes both domination that is directly backed by threat of violence (slavery, control by fathers/husbands in a patriarchal family) and the kind of domination that people "accept" (you must obey your asshole boss, you must not argue with the police if you're on the bottom of the social hierarchy, you must dress modestly or what you get is what you deserve, etc.)

Anarchists oppose all forms of ideologies of supremacy: male, racial, national, ethnic, religious, etc. This is a no-brainer.

2) opposition to private property.

Private property is not things like your own house (owning your house only affects yourself and people you care about), but things that give you real social power - things like owning ideas (patents, copyright), water, land, copper mines, workplaces of all sort, means of communication and so on. Anarchists believe that natural resources and collectively produced property (like a car factory that takes a thousand of workers to build) should be totally free for anyone to use, just as water and land once were. There are glimpses of that sort of world right here and now. There is freely edited Wikipedia, or the Paris Commune when it existed and the anarchist controlled parts of Spain (people got by fine) during the Spanish revolution.

Capitalism tries to take what we produce by working together and to place it private hands. It doesn't matter if we produce it under their terms (at work for a wage) or as a society (like a new genre of underground music). Our work ends up enhancing the social power of few private owners. So anarchist oppose that.

Anarcho-capitalist are people who support private capital and everyone having an equal chance to be a capitalist. Most anarchists do not consider them to be anarchists at all, because they believe in "freely chosen" domination. In the 150 years of anarchism it has always been the most powerful when it was a part of worker's movement (when it was socialist).

3) opposition to the state

The government and their institutions like police, prisons, social workers, schools, military and others. Anarchist oppose these institutions (not equally, as social workers for example can be annoying, but can also be helpful, while militaries kill people as their job) we oppose them because their purpose is to shape and control our activity in order preserve the existing social order.

This order is based on oppression and domination, so the state does what it can to preserve that. some people believe the state can be changed to maintain a different order, one based on equality, but anarchists don't think this is workable.

the state has to be a separate power to maintain anything (equality or domination). it has to control society towards that purpose. so it's already unequal, because the administrators of the state have to be more powerful than ordinary people to enforce equality on ordinary people. it might involve policing, making listening to certain ideas mandatory (their methods can be as benign as schools or as bad as forced brain washing), prisons, etc. so there can be no equality if one class of people (state administrators) are more powerful.

the oppressions we experience helps the preserve this system of domination, it helps it function. it works to buy off the loyalty of the losers who are getting dominated themselves. like the dirt poor white folk who supported slavery, cause at least they were white and so had "dignity". like a schoolyard bully getting bullied by his father. we all know we have to deal with the bigger bully first. anarchists think the state is the biggest bully. also, oppression makes the experience of submission the near universal (excluding straight middle class white guys) - that is equally helpful to the state and its administrators.

also, when the state collapses, you don't get anarchism - you get civil war or warlordism. that's because you get several people competing to be the new state. places like Somalia have nothing to do with anarchy (in the anarchist sense), because those states collapsed from competing powers within (the worst case for any state), not from ordinary people taking over the country.

during the Katrina distaster, informal organization of local people and some anarchist/activist from around the country were the most effective sources of aid. they operated on anarchist basis (people deciding on the spot most of the time or in assemblies for larger decisions instead of waiting for the decisions to trickle down from their leaders) for the sake of faster response and greater efficiency. they got there quicker than Red Cross or the government and they did not come in armed in tanks. Check out the Common Ground collective for an example.

anarchism worked during the Spanish revolution because of a hundred years of cooperative tradition and organization building - anarchist ideas were widespread by then.

3) insistence that only we can liberate ourselves.

this doesn't mean that only women can end patriarchy (because ending patriarchy would liberate men too), but it means opposition to politicians and leaders in society and in our movements. natural leaders may always exist (I dunno), but we must retain democratic control because even progressive leaders will try to integrate our struggles into the existing social hierarchy (where they will get more recognition and media respect), but this will neutralize our struggles. if we are against the social hierarchies then we only engage with them because we've hit a limit in the existing society, not because it's a victory. for example, many black leaders of the civil right struggle got snugly integrated into the white power structure. once officially in power, they diverted black people's radical demands for justice into calls for better leaders (for justice). they even put down strikes by the same black unions they had fought for earlier in their careers.

4) a belief that we all benefit if we work together.

this is grade school stuff I know, but so many people believe that we benefit the most when people compete for rewards (the capitalist take on human nature), so it's worth repeating this truism endlessly. everybody 'knows' that there are others are looking to talk advantage of them, so why not be the first one? working together shows us that this is false and suddenly we have less desire to dominate or be dominated, we become more willing to share our stuff and abilities freely and begin to trust that others will do the same. And so everyone does.

"to each according to the need and from each according to the abilities" stops sounding like a disastrous accounting formula, or some idealistic nonsense and begins sounding more like a sensible rule of thumb.

most people know this rule in their family (unspoken) and less often among friends (depending on culture). the hierarchical society tries to undermine it, cooperation and opposition to the basis of that society (competition and domination, capitalism and the state) expands the scope of this rule.

So that's my take on anarchism. there are many different strains of anarchism too, the one I've described should be called anarchist-communism if you care. nothing to do with cuba or soviet union, which are as communist as the republicans.

For a different take here's a way better written pamphlet "WORK. COMMUNITY. POLITICS. WAR"

http://www.prole.info/wcpw/

I'm glad to see people talking about anarchism on feministing. I would like this site had more radical, working class feminist content.

The best is the stuff about ordinary people taking matters into their own hands against patriarchy.

The worst is stuff like the story about corporate foundations trying to help women get better wages. I just don't trust them being nice, because they make more profit if they pay women less. Since their funding corporations exist to make profit, it would hurt them to raise wages across the board for women. I don't have the time to speculate why they might try to do that anyway, but I know the whole history of capitalism is filled with bloody struggles over wages by women and men and those struggle haven't gone away anywhere.

the one called OpportunityNYC sounds very offensive and patronizing frankly.

yessss. i agree.

i also think i need to start writing more community posts about radical ideas...especially anti-police anti-prison industrial complex.

you should write some stuff on the community blog too! and get feministing readers acquainted with anarchism, as it seems there is not a really legit understanding amongst some readers here...