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Most anarchists have long believed that what they call a general strike could play a large part in crumbling the state. That is, a collective refusal to work. If you’re against all government, you must be against democracy. If democracy means that people control their own lives, then all anarchists would be, as American anarchist Benjamin Tucker called them, “unterrified Jeffersonian democrats” — they would be the only true democrats. But that’s not what democracy really is. In real life, a part of the people (in America, almost always a minority of the people) elect a handful of politicians who control our lives by passing laws and using unelected bureaucrats and police to enforce them whether the majority likes it or not. As the French philosopher Rousseau (not an anarchist) once wrote, in a democracy, people are only free at the moment they vote, the rest of the time they are government slaves. The politicians in office and the bureaucrats are usually under the powerful influence of big business and often other special interest groups. Everyone knows this. But some people keep silent because they are getting benefits from the powerholders. Many others keep silent because they know that protesting does no good and they might be called “extremists” or even “anarchists” (!) if they tell it like it is. Some democracy! Well, if you don’t elect officials to make the decisions, who does make them? You can’t tell me that everybody can do as he personally pleases without regard for others. Anarchists have many ideas about how decisions would be made in a truly voluntary and cooperative society. Most anarchists believe that such a society must be based on local communities small enough for people know each other, or people at least would share ties of family, friendship, opinions or interests with almost everybody else. And because this is a local community, people also share common knowledge of their community and its environment. They know that they will have to live with the consequences of their decisions. Unlike politicians or bureaucrats, who decide for other people. Anarchists believe that decisions should always be made at the smallest possible level. Every decision which individuals can make for themselves, without interfering with anybody else’s decisions for themselves, they should make for themselves. Every decision made in small groups (such as the family, religious congregations, co-workers, etc.) is again theirs to make as far as it doesn’t interfere with others. Decisions with significant wider impact, if anyone is concerned about them, would go to an occasional face-to-face community assembly. The community assembly, however, is not a legislature. No one is elected. Anyone may attend. People speak for themselves. But as they speak about specific issues, they are very aware that for them, winning isn’t everything. They value fellowship with their neighbors. They try, first, to reduce misunderstanding and clarify the issue. Often that’s enough to produce agreement. If that’s not enough, they work for a compromise. Very often they accomplish it. If not, the assembly may put off the issue, if it’s something that doesn’t require an immediate decision, so the entire community can reflect on and discuss the matter prior to another meeting. If that fails, the community will explore whether there’s a way the majority and minority can temporarily separate, each carrying out its preference. If people still have irreconcilable differences about the issue, the minority has two choices. It can go along with the majority this time, because community harmony is more important than the issue. Maybe the majority can conciliate the minority with a decision about something else. If all else fails, and if the issue is so important to the minority, it may separate to form a separate community, just as various American states have done. If their secession isn’t an argument against statism, then it isn’t an argument against anarchy. That’s not a failure for anarchy, because the new community will recreate anarchy. Anarchy isn’t a perfect system — it’s just better than all the others. We can’t satisfy all our needs or wants at the local level. Maybe not all of them, but there’s evidence from archaeology of long-distance trade, over hundreds or even thousands of miles, in anarchist, prehistoric Europe. Anarchist primitive societies visited by anthropologists in the 20th century, such as the San (Bushmen) hunter-gatherers and the tribal Trobriand Islanders, conducted such trade between individual “trade-partners”—although it was more like exchanging gifts than what we think of as commerce. Practical anarchy has never depended on total local self-sufficiency. But many modern anarchists have urged that communities, and regions, should be as self-sufficient as possible, so as not to depend on distant, impersonal outsiders for necessities. Even with modern technology, which was often designed specifically to enlarge commercial markets by breaking down self-sufficiency, much more local self-sufficiency is possible than governments and corporations want us to know. One definition of “anarchy” is chaos. Isn’t that what anarchy would be — chaos? Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first person to call himself an anarchist, wrote that “liberty is the mother, not the daughter of order.” Anarchist order is superior to state-enforced order because it is not a system of coercive laws, it is simply how communities of people who know each other decide how to live together. Anarchist order is based on common consent and common sense. When was the philosophy of anarchism formulated? Some anarchists think that anarchist ideas were expressed by Diogenes the Cynic in ancient Greece, by Lao Tse in ancient China, and by certain medieval mystics and also during the 17th century English Civil War. But modern anarchism began with William Godwin’s Political Justice published in England in 1793. It was revived in France by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in the 1840s (What Is Property?). He inspired an anarchist movement among French workers. Max Stirner in The Ego and His Own (1844) defined the enlightened egoism which is a basic anarchist value. An American, Josiah Warren, independently arrived at similar ideas at the same time and influenced the large-scale movement at the time to found thousands of American utopian communities. Anarchist ideas were developed further by the great Russian revolutionary Michael Bakunin, by the respected Russian revolutionary and scholar Peter Kropotkin, and by the great Russian author Leo Tolstoy. (Several influential American anarchists, such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, were also Russian-born.) Anarchists hope that their ideas continue to develop in a changing world. This revolutionary stuff sounds a lot like Communism, which nobody wants. Anarchists and Marxists have been enemies since the 1860s. Although they have sometimes cooperated against common enemies like the Czarists during the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Fascists during the Spanish Civil War, the Communists have always betrayed the anarchists. From Karl Marx to Joseph Stalin, Marxists have denounced anarchism. Some anarchists, followers of Kropotkin, call themselves “communists” — not Communists. But they contrast their free communism, arising from below — the voluntary pooling of land, facilities and labor in local communities where people know each other — to a Communism imposed by force by the state, nationalizing land and productive facilities, denying all local autonomy, and reducing workers to state employees. How could the two systems be more different? Anarchists welcomed and in fact participated in the fall of European Communism. Some foreign anarchists had been assisting Eastern Bloc dissidents — as the U.S. Government had not — for many years. Anarchists are now active in all the former Communist countries as well as in other formerly authoritarian countries (whose regimes the U.S. Government did support) such as Greece, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Argentina, the Philippines, etc. The Communist collapse certainly did discredit much of the American left, but not the anarchists, many of whom do not consider themselves leftists anyway. Anarchists were around before Marxism and we are still around after it. Don’t anarchists advocate violence? Does anybody advocate violence for its own sake? Not anarchists, certainly. Anarchists aren’t nearly as violent as Democrats, Republicans, liberals and conservatives. Those people only seem to be nonviolent because they use the state to do their dirty work—to be violent for them. But violence is violence. Wearing a uniform or waving a flag does not change that. The state is violent by definition. The police routinely commit acts of violence which are crimes when they are committed by anybody else than the police. Without violence against our anarchist ancestors—hunter-gatherers and farmers—there would be no states today. Some anarchists advocate violence, and a few of them engage in it—but all states engage in violence all the time. Some anarchists, in the tradition of Tolstoy, are pacifist and nonviolent on principle. A relatively small number of anarchists believe in going on the offensive against the state. Most anarchists believe in self-defense and would accept some level of violence in a revolutionary situation. The issue is not really violence vs. nonviolence. The issue is direct action. Anarchists believe that people — all people — should take their fate into their own hands, individually or collectively, whether doing that is legal or illegal and whether it has to involve violence or it can be accomplished nonviolently. What exactly is the social structure of an anarchist society?