Those who pick up the label of "anarchism" are a bit like Jacob and his coat of many colours. We come in various shades. Social anarchists, revolutionary anarchists, Stirner anarchists and anarchists without adjectives, and various other shades. However we all have one thing in common, we want a society without a state apparatus, without capitalism, without exploitation or hierarchy, and one that sees to the needs of all our people with fairness, a society built on respect for each other and an end to authority of one human over another.
The following article is not new, it was first published in 2015, but I think it is still well worth a read. We might all be different shades, but we are looking in the same direction and with co-operation and solidarity we can get there.
The following is taken from Organise:
[translator's note: Ruymán Rodríguez is a member of FAGC (Federación Anarquistas Gran Canaria or Gran Canaria’s Anarchist Federation), which centres most of its activity on the issues of housing, rent and homelessness. They are known for housing homeless people in squatted buildings run along anarchists’ principles without the members needing to share the same ideology. The biggest one so far, La Esperanza, houses more than 260 people, around 160 of them minors. More recently the FAGC has called for a rent strike to demand better conditions for renters during the COVID-19 crisis. The strike is supported today by more than 60.000 tenants. This is the first of a series of three articles written in 2015 where Ruymán explains how the FAGC sees the way forward for anarchism based on their experience these years]
“Anarchism is not a romantic fable, but a hard awakening [...]”(Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness [Vox Clamantis en Deserto], 1990).
The dichotomies between “anarchisms” evolve periodically. During the late 19th century it was between collectivists and communists, organisation and anti-organisation, individualists and syndicalists, pure syndicalists and anarcho-syndicalists, etc. Today this theoretical brawl, which seems to develop cyclically, has been established between insurrectionism and social anarchism.
In the 19th century some anarchists wanted to unravel the Gordian knot by speaking of “anarchism without adjectives”, and in the late 20th century of “synthesis”. These days it is necessary to go beyond that.
