ANARCHISM, A LONG PEDIGREE.

       How far back does capitalism go? It has been practised as an economic system for several hundred years, over that time it has developed and refined its procedures and institutions but has failed utterly to eliminate poverty in any one country, even the most developed, America and Britain for example. As it draws wealth to the centre, the periphery suffers, be it city, country or continent, it does not and cannot spread wealth evenly. It is a system that never has and never will see to the needs of all the people. It has been tried and it has failed miserably.

       Anarchism goes back much further, at least to the first century BC. It has only been tried in small pockets on the planet and though where tried, it did see to the needs of all its people, it was always crushed by the power hungry authoritarians. A way of organising society that has persisted for more than 2,000 years, which advocates tolerance and self-sufficiency, is surely worth a try today.

     The earliest  anarchist were probably the Cynics of ancient Greece who scorned all power structures, wealth and adherence to to convention.

     The following is a short extract from Fearless Speech by Michel Foucault, page 120, published by SEMIOTEXT(E)

     There is, however, very little positive doctrine in Cynic preaching: no direct affirmation of good or bad. Instead, the Cynics refer to freedom (eleutheria) and self-sufficiency (autarkeia) as the best criteria by which to assess any kind of behaviour or mode of life. For the Cynics, the main condition for human happiness is autarkeia, self-sufficiency or independence, where what you need to have or what you decide to do is dependent on nothing other than yourself. As a consequence -- since the Cynics had the most radical of attitudes--they preferred a completely natural life-style.  A natural life was supposed to eliminate all of the dependencies introduced by culture, society, civilization, opinion and so on. Consequently, most of their preaching seems to have been directed against social institutions, the arbitrariness of rules of law, and any sort of life-style that was dependent upon such institutions or laws. In short, their preaching was against all social institutions insofar as such institutions hindered one's freedom and independence.

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"ANARCHY", IN COMMON PARLANCE, CHAOS, VIOLENT DISORDER!!

        I have always maintained that if you ask 100 people what the meaning of anarchy is, you'll get 100 different answers. Most will be wrong and will be answers like chaos and disorder, and will be based on ignorance of all things anarchistic. The establishment, state, mainstream media are all involved in perpetuating that line of thought, probably because they see anarchism as their greatest threat.

This from The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest:

In common parlance “anarchy” refers to a state of chaos or violent disorder and “anarchism” to the rebellious or merely perverse pursuit of this state. Indeed, the word “anarchist” was first used in the seventeenth century as an epithet against the defeated Levellers in the English Civil War. While the ideas and practices that would become known as anarchism were distinctly foreshadowed by movements such as the Diggers and the Ranters in the seventeenth century as well as by eighteenth-century thinkers such as William Godwin (and arguably by far more ancient schools of thought, from the Cynics of the fifth century bce to the Taoists of a century later), it was not until Pierre-Joseph Proudhon turned this epithet into a positive self-description that we can speak of anarchism per se, as a historical entity. Historically speaking, however, anarchism is the name for a movement, originating in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, characterized by its vision of a society of generalized self-management, its opposition to all forms of hierarchy and domination, and its particular emphasis on means of transformative action that prefigure the desired ends. The word also serves to name the goal of the movement – substantive and universal freedom, sometimes called “anarchy” – elements of which may be found in every society that has ever existed, particularly among peoples living without private property and the state.

Principles and Practices

Popular misunderstandings concerning anarchism, fed by more than a century and a half of sensationalistic media representations, are widespread – and, unfortunately, many scholarly accounts of anarchism do little to correct these distortions. The association of anarchy with chaos and senseless violence, while owing something to a certain phase in anarchist history (that of “propaganda by the deed”), is readily dispelled by even a cursory reading of works by actual self-described anarchists: “Anarchism … is not bombs, disorder, or chaos,” writes Alexander Berkman (1870–1936). “It is not a war of each against all. It is not a return to barbarism … Anarchism is the very opposite of all that” (Berkman 2003: xv). Similarly, Emma Goldman (1869–1940) defines anarchism as “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” (1910: 56). The entry on anarchism that Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) wrote for the 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica defined it as “a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government” (2002: 284). These three explanations of anarchism – it would be difficult to find any more widely accepted by anarchists – show that anarchism is a form of social order rather than mere disorder or absence of organization; the form of social order anarchism represents is intended to maximize freedom, and to do so without recourse to the kinds of coercive institutions that are typically assumed to be necessary, variously called “government,” “law,” or “authority”; and in place of these institutions, anarchists propose to produce social order through a system of “free agreements” to meet individuals' “needs.”

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