Anarchy is, and always has been, a romance. It is also clearly the only morally sensible way to run the world." — Alan Moore Of all the political philosophies that have existed throughout history, anarchism is perhaps the most misunderstood. With general impressions ranging from the idea that Anarchy Is Chaos to scary images of Bomb-Throwing Anarchists from popular fiction, what most probably don't realise is there's actually a wealth of complex and multilayered ideas associated with anarchism that have had an impact on radical politics, the arts, and even mainstream culture.

The definition of anarchism to most people means "belief the state is bad and shouldn't exist." However, while all anarchists are anti-statists, it is not the only or, in most cases, even the primary part of their ideology.

Anarchism is the belief that rulership as a whole, not just the state, should not exist – as indicated in its Greek roots, an- [no] -arkhos [ruler] – and that people should instead organize their social relations and institutions though voluntary cooperation without hierarchies of power. So what characterises anarchism is not anti-statism so much as anti-authoritarianism. note

This means that most anarchists would not welcome a reduction in state power if it meant an increase of other kinds of authoritarianism as a result. For example, privatising a public health service may weaken the state, but increase the power of corporations, and thus anarchists would probably oppose doing so. Though generally speaking, they don't support state or private management of things. Instead, anarchists push for voluntary, localised, and cooperative institutions organised from the bottom-up through decentralised networks and run via processes of participatory democracy and workplace self-management.

Another way of thinking about anarchism is that it's "democracy without the state" or "socialism when it occurs on a voluntary basis". This tends to confuse many who

associate the word democracy with representative government; and especially those who associate the word socialism with statism. In fact, the word democracy originally meant direct democracy, like in Ancient Greece. And the word socialism originally referred to a number of economic systems in which economic institutions were run by those who actually worked in them. It's the earlier meanings of both words that anarchists use when talking about them. This also applies to their use of the word libertarian. Which, despite its modern Anglo-American use to mean laissez-faire capitalist, was actually first used by anarchist socialists to mean "anti-authoritarian". A frequently used synonym for social anarchism is libertarian socialism.

In addition to the systems of centralised power found in statism and capitalism, anarchists also support dissolving all forms of social hierarchy and domination (i.e., rulership) - such as sexism, racism, queerphobia, ableism, speciesism, and the domination of nature - and restructuring society on a decentralised and horizontalist basis.

There are two main categories of political anarchist thought, divided chiefly by what kind of economic system they want to build.

Market Anarchists want a stateless free market economy made up of producer and consumer cooperatives and self-employed professionals instead of private corporations and wage-labour. While once very popular, especially in America, market anarchism has ended up becoming a minority in the larger anarchist canon. Social Anarchists, on the other hand, want what could be called a "free commons", note in which systems of decentralised and localised planning of the economy (by directly-democratic popular assemblies and worker-controlled enterprises) replace traditional market relations. In terms of numbers, this is by far the most prominent anarchist tradition and is what most people are referring to when they talk about "anarchism" without prefixes. Both of these in turn are sub-divided into four overall proposals for different economic systems, each associated primarily with a different anarchist "founding father", with the first two being forms of market anarchism and the later two social anarchism:

Mutualist anarchism (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) Individualist anarchism (Benjamin Tucker) Collectivist anarchism (Mikhail Bakunin) Communist anarchism (Peter Kropotkin) Despite their differences, they all share a social commitment to the ideal of organising things on the basis of "voluntary, non-hierarchical cooperation".

Anarchism was extremely popular in labour movements around the world in the late 19th and early 20th century, so much so that for a time it surpassed Marxism as the principal philosophy of working class struggles. Historian Benidict Anderson makes the case that anarchism was in fact the first "anti-systemic" movement that was fully global in scale, having influence in areas Marxism didn't reach for decades, like Japan, the Philippines, Latin America, Egypt, and Southern Africa.

Its popularity waned somewhat after the Russian Revolution in which Marxists took power for the first time. Then after a last hurrah in the late 1930s, in which there was an anarchist revolution in Spain and Catalonia, it flickered out in terms of appeal in the Global North except for occasional influences within environmental, anti-war, and student movements, though it still maintained an active presence in other parts of the world.

After a long time in a relative political wilderness, anarchism has seen something of a resurgence in worldwide political and social movements since the 1999 World Trade Organisation protests in Seattle over corporate-led globalisation policies, and especially since the 2011 "squares movements" around the world like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street.

The anthropologist David Graeber has opined that most social movements in the present day - structured through horizontal networks of cooperation rather than top-down hierarchies - are basically anarchist in their principles, even if they don't necessarily use the word to describe themselves.

For those new to anarchist ideas, there's been a massive project aimed at explaining everything about (social) anarchist theory, practice, and history called An Anarchist FAQ available at this link, and a series of introductory videos on social anarchist/left-libertarian ideas is available here and here. A more narratively-framed primer can be found at Anarchy Works. Some good book-length intros can be found in Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall, Anarchy in Action by Colin Ward, Red Emma Speaks by Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Its Aspirations by Cindy Milstein, and A Living Spirit of Revolt by Ziga Vodovnik.

(Note: As social anarchism is by far the majority tendency within anarchism as a whole, most of the following article will address primarily what social anarchists believe, but with occasional explanations of what market anarchists desire when the two differ.note )