What's the absolute minimum someone has to believe in order to be an Anarchist

I used to believe that the minimum you need to be an Anarchist is the conviction that the state is an organ of oppression and needs to be abolished. So, even though I was an Anarchist-Communist, I accepted that not all Anarchists were anti-capitalist. Later I realised that inherently capitalism is oppressive because it's a class system, and therefore it's inconsistent to be an 'Anarchist' that supports capitalism, even if it were possible to have capitalism without a state.

What then is a state? Isn't the free post-revolutionary society a 'state' of sorts? Classically the state is seen by Ananrchists as an organ for a minority to oppress a majority, so once the majority is in control then it's not a state any more.

Of course then you get people claiming to be Anarchists who reject the 'tyranny of the majority'. I don't think there's much can be done about them, personally. Seems to me that anyone who rejects the notion of human society is trying to be other than human. Good luck to 'em. Can't see the sense in it myself.

In my very humble opinion someone qualifies as anarchist if they fulfill the minimum requirement of the rejection of the state (also as a form of transitory society) and capitalism.

That of course leaves the field open to all kinds of pro-market people (who see capitalism as some kind of hierarchic deviation from simple commodity production or whatever...), and individualists. I have no real problem with them calling themselves anarchists actually, even if I respectfully disagree with their political positions. Appleton is in the grey area, on the border to 'looney statist in denial'...

What you do is another thing, you don't have to be an activist or a great writer, just don't do anything contrary to your own beliefs and you're golden (here of course one has to face the fact that not buying coke will not bring down Coca Cola, and other shenanigans)

Then again I don't care about labels. And to make this a question of identity is a bit misleading, I think.

It's either all or nothing tbh, though I appreciate everyone's learning and hopefully improving (including myself) I don't think you can be an anarchist if your a racist douche, believe in a matriarchal conspiracy or are transphobic. Though as Railyon said it's not really how one identifies, its more if one acts in ways so as to reproduce the said shittiness. Just my two pennies worth...

I would say that its more on how you act. A "communist" who hires labor isn't a anarchist, but a "capitalist" who fights for immigrant rights is closer to it.

IMHO, anarchism is political philosophy that is based around maximising an individuals liberty within a social context, but not without reference to justice. To make this work, we have to pull together, and this means organising society on libertarian communist lines.
Demands for the end of the State and capitalism are not exclusively anarchist ideals.

Really I think there are two questions here. The minimum criteria necessary to be an anarchist I believe is that you need to be opposed to the existence of the state and hierarchy, and opposed to any institution which necessitates a state or hierarchy (like capitalism, nations, racism, patriarchy, etc).

That said, being an anarchist is necessary a good thing in my view (see: individualists, primitivists, etc). So if the question is what are the absolute minimum criteria to be a revolutionary, then I would probably agree with these ones which we wrote collaboratively:
http://libcom.org/library/basic-principles-revolutionary-organisation

I'm suspicious of attempts at defining anarchism (or any other political tendency) in terms of a set of beliefs an individual might hold. I think it's much more useful to say that anarchism is a set of practices, beliefs, associations, etc. rooted in a particular history, and that what it means to be an anarchist is to be a self-conscious participant in that historical movement.

Building such self conscious revolutionary traditions is our task, and it may be the case that 'anarchism', as a historical phenomenon, doesn't have much juice left in it. Which would be no disaster. The deaths of Council Communism, or Operaismo, or Chartism, or whatever, as living traditions don't mean we can't learn from and draw on them, nor should the death, if and/or when, it happens of anarchism (in as much as it is still a living tradition).

The glue that binds the political perspective of this site, I think, is the understanding that capitalism produces a social force(/subjectivity) we can call communism, whatever form that communism might take. So most posters here will argue that the communist movement is something we can all participate in as long as capitalism exists. I think it's more important for revolutionaries who share this understanding to ask 'where is the communist movement happening right now' than to cling to instances of it from the past.

Having said all that, anarchism does exist as a real movement, albeit much smaller than it once was, and I also call myself an anarchist from time to time for sake of ease of communication, despite not really seeing myself as part of an anarchist 'movement'.

So, in conclusion, its all very messy, but I think laying out some eternal 'minimal anarchist profession of faith' probably is not that helpful. Best to try and understand the world as it is and then locate yourself in it and it's dynamics.

How about this: 'man (and woman, I s'pose) is fulfilled through voluntary cooperation, but frustrated by all coercion' (courtesy of Roger Scruton and his Dictionary of Political Thought). It does nail it for me pretty succinctly.
As a consequence, I don't share the fairly common resolute rejction of the State - State is fine by me, as long as it is not vested with or arrogates to itself any coercive powers, there should be no problem. Wether a collection of official institutions without any coercive powers is still a state would be the next question. Discuss... Slothjabber... anybody...
Ditto for hierachy. Sailing a large ship across the Seven Seas or flying a commercial airliner from London to Capetown would probably always require some sort of pyramidical command structure, as would coordinating a search for a lost group of bushwalkers involving hundreds of volunteers on foot, motorbikes, 4-wheel drives, helicopters, fuel depots, catering units, ambulances etc. As long as nobody is coerced (shanghaied, gangpressed, victimised, bastardised, raped), there should not arise any insurmountable problems.
Therefore, the basic mission for anarchists (should you accept it) is to generate as much opportunity for voluntary cooperation as possible and to seek out, hunt down and eliminate coercive pressure, wherever it occurs.

Journeyman, a "state" without coercive powers wouldn't be a state: it would be an organisation.

Hi Steve,
sure, except that a state would also always be an organisation, as are the EU and NATO, UNESCO, the South Timbuktoo Philatelist Society, the Tallahassee chapter of the Ku Klux Clan, the Newcastle RSPCA and the 1.FC Bayern Muenchen - what I'm trying to say is that assigning the descriptor 'organisation' does not tell us anything about the coercive potential or aim of that organisation.
Anyway, it was not my intention to kick loose a scholarly debate on semantics with my call to 'discuss' (though I myself can be a right royal pedantic pain about semantics, when I believe it to be warranted). Rather, I was aiming at the assertion that the stateless society will come about as an incidental consequence of the successsful negation of coercion, not the other way round. I believe this to be quite important because:
a) coercion is doing quite well outside of the state, thank you very much, and getting rid of the state will create a power vacuum, that non-government coercion will be more than happy to fill. Is that not also the main thrust of arguments directed against Murray Rothbard's Anarcho-Capitalism: that the mere privatisation of coercion does not generate access to the freedoms of anarchism?
b) the corollary to a: not all institutions of the state are primarily coercive in nature and aim - schools, hospitals, social services, parks and wildlife services etc, do not have primarily repressive functions, and I believe that a great number of workers on the government payroll genuinely want to make a positive contribution to peoples' lives and help, not hinder.
I therefore believe it ill advised to aim our ideological and activist blunderbuss at the state indiscriminately and let non-state coercion off the hook, But this is not what anarchists do in reality anyway - but then why does so much anarchist rethoric take aim at the state reather than at coercion?

Because the anarchist definition of the state is its repressive wing: the armed forces, prisons, police and the legal system.

I work for the government! As do a large number of anarchists. We're not against all the things that the state does, just against the existence of a body of organised violence under the control of a small minority of society.

I think your mistake is taking what "the state" is at face value, rather than looking at what anarchists actually mean by it.

Good post RedEd.

Just wanted to state that we could also ask the same question about the "anarchist movement" as in where is the movement towards anarchism? Might be just as important.

I do also have a reservation with such language too, though I know it is just a device to get us thinking about where actually existing movements towards the abolition of the current state of things are happening, but I worry that many from a Marxist perspective use this to "other"-ize such movements that they see distant from themselves as more truly revolutionary, etc.

I've seen this from Maoists looking towards whatever third world movement "is actually making a revolution" to left communists seeing no agency for struggling around issues in their own daily lives, because any such thing would be voluntarist, and we have to look towards the class vanguard which is talked about as if it could never include pro-revolutionaries, though it is often sometimes the case (or at least perceived to be so).

To me, anarchism is the rejection of any institutions that necessitate involuntary subordination to continue in existence. The State and capitalist mode of production could not exist if not for the involuntary subjugation of an individual's will to the State or claims of the capitalist; a small commune based on voluntary cooperation could, and would, thrive without it.

Not the most sophisticated analysis, but there it is.

You might want to take a look at the history of some of those again and their primary aims. As for the intentions of its workers, they matter nought to this conversation since only their actions as part of the State system actually have any impact on society.

If we look beyond the "patriotism of the label" - i.e. people are generally categorised as anarchists because they self-indentify as such, and make reference to the legacy, organisational and theoretic, of the historical anarchist movement - then I think it is possible to tease out a couple of distinctive principles. But they may not be the ones people would normally think of - e.g. solidarity, class struggle, mutual aid, direct action, communism as the abolition of wage labour (without indeterminately long "transitional periods") etc. All of the previous principles or ideas could be accepted by one or other post-Leninist tendencies of what we sometimes refer to as "authoritarian socialism", by shorthand (ok, except maybe the "transitional period" bit). Even the libertarian vs authoritarian socialism dichotomy doesn't hold up very well in this day and age, when every post-Stalinist is keen to express their "radical democratic" credentials - who now would accept or admit the label of "authoritarian socialist"? Certainly not the SWP, SPEW, etc. Hence their insistence on making strawman arguments about "the State", to draw the sting of the only remaining label that still sticks - "state socialist".

The differentiating principles I would propose are - prefiguration and asymmetry - which are of course entangled. You could add "horizontalism" to that pair, but I don't think it adds much analytically - athough from the point of view of having a conversation or dialogue, the latter word is less unfamiliar and more grounded in recent history (Argentina).

First of all, asymmetry. At this point, perhaps it's best to quote from the opposition. The prosecution calls... Tony Cliff:

ref

and again

ref

Symmetrism is the basic urge to mimic the enemy. They have a stick? We need a stick too! They have hierarchy, cops and prisons? We need them too! Irish republicans are past masters at this. In their eternal quest to challenge British administration of capitalism in Ireland, they first mimc the Brits military forms, then their political forms and then, hey presto, they end up being in charge of administering capitalism in Ireland in the Brits stead, as their compradors. The excluded reps wail about betrayal, and begin the cycle afresh.

Asymmetry is the recognition that the class war is a war fought most sucessfully by means of asymmetric warfare. From the simple "march on the boss" to larger and more elaborate forms of struggle, we always seek to make use of the asymmetry between us - they have the money but we have the numbers.

But also, the asymmetric perspective recognises that, socialised as we are into the forms, culture and ideology of existing society, every attempt at self-organisation always runs, as a primary danger, the risk of recreating the very forms and hierarchies that shape the society that shaped us. The DNA of capitalist alienated relations lies within each and every one of us, and in order to prevent the development of organs of counterpower being simply subverted and recuperated into adjuncts to the established power, a conscious effort must be made, to break the symmetry, break the chain of the endless reproduction of "more of the same".

In this line, we shade into the other principle of action - prefiguration. Prefiguration, in the shape of the 1872 Sonvilier circular, can lay claim to being at the very origins of the Marxist/Anarchist split of the First International. Its basic insight is that the instrumentalist principle that "the means justifies the ends" is fatal to any project for real social change. That is, prefiguration sees that the means cannot be in contradiction to the ends, they must at least be compatible with them. However, in my opinion, prefiguration needs to be distinguished from utopianism - the idea that simply pretending that the new world already exists, and acting accordingly. This distinction is going against the grain a bit, given the current popularity of taking the instrumentalist's identification of prefiguration with utopianism at face value, and simply inverting its valence (see for e.g. Weeks, Graeber, Kaufman, etc). But that's another argument...

Anyway, that's my tuppence-worth. Despite the obscurantist terminology, it's my experience that in virtually any political encounter, regardless of whether the participants have any awareness of left political ideas at all, if you listen carefully to what people are saying in their contributions, you will find people making "symmetrical" arguments, and other people baulking at them, similarly with "means justifies the end" type arguments. These are usually a pretty good indicator of where people are at, in terms of their latent politics, and who's likely to end up in the allies vs obstructors camps in the future.

short version: asymmetric prefiguration FTW!

I wasn't aware of the Cliff quotes, but that seems a good way of thinking about it. Much of what's often decried as 'authoritarian' would probably better be described as 'symmetric'.

I think also in terms of having conversations or taking part in discussions, a question like "so, if I understand you right, you see it that for us to be more effective, we need to be a bit more like 'them' in how we organise ourselves?" is a better way of teasing out the issues, rather than name-calling by calling someone "an authoritarian". Also its more in keeping with the starting assumption that everyone in the conversation is being open and honest about how they sincerely see things. Which (apart from being good manners, and a prefigurative practice) is a much better approach than the unfortunate sectarian habit of going into a discussion with the intention of "unmasking" your (presumed) opponent as an "evil-doing deceiver" - which just makes you look like a someone into chemtrails and fluoridation. You don't need to use words like "symmetry" and "asymmetric" to address the "common sense" ideas behind them.

Incidentally, re SWP thinking. I think that second Cliff piece - "Why do we need a revolutionary party?" - was recently reprinted by them, iirc, as part of their last but one (i.e. before the Molyneux book) attempts at "anti-anarchist inoculation" of their rank and file.

Lastly - horizontalism, when it contrasts itself to "verticalism", is implicitly making an asymmetry argument.

Did I say lastly? Silly me.

On reflection, a third principle that suggests itself, is anti-representationalism.

http://insipidities.blogspot.ca/2012/10/when-you-come-to-end-of-lollipop-plop.html
no minimum-maximum programme

Thank you. But I don't see where you can really say the cut-off line is between "looney statist in denial" and "individualist anarchist". If there is a specific criterion (or criteria) that anarchists need to meet by definition then I don't see how there can be any grey area in that. I am against the state, but I support individual ownership of the means of production (which is a misleading Marxist term anyway). I think that makes me an individualist anarchist, not a "looney statist in denial"...

you cant have individual ownership of the means of production and no state. and anarchism has to involve opposition to all social hierarchies, not just the state.

Bullshit. People have to be allowed to leave the collective, otherwise there is no difference between being in a collective and being in a prison. And people outside the collective can't be denied a means of supporting themselves independently or in their own groups. You are confusing anarchism with collectivist anarchism, which is only a variant of anarchism to which you subscribe.

Did this a while back, but never got round to using it. Now seems as good a time as any to post it seen as how Appleton found this thread through a vanity search (I presume).

(Click for biggy.)

By your logic, collectivist anarchism shouldn't even be considered a form of anarchism. Then again, since you're conflating capitalism with simple property ownership, I wouldn't doubt that you also think that anarchism is just anti-statism.

Individuals are certainly free to try and rough it as a survivalist. Why they would, who knows? The important thing is that they're allowed to do whatever as long as it does not result in the subordination of other individuals against their will. No one wants to rob the peasant of whatever bit of land he uses by himself.

If you think capitalist property ownership can be justified on the grounds that it's an individual leaving the collective, then you have no idea how the fuck capitalist property ownership works, and are obvlivious to the fact that capitalist property ownership necessitates collective action. There are no individuals.

tl;dr: Property ownership != Capitalist property ownership.

Of course all you can do is laugh and ridicule because your actual argument doesn't have a leg to stand on. If you had any sort of logical basis to oppose what I am saying you would have used it long ago, but alas, there was nothing precisely where your argument should have been.

This is an old technique communist and collectivist anarchists have used - trying to "define individualist anarchists out of existence".

This technique is a very unfortunate modern phenomenon because 100 years ago Kropotkin at least had the cojones to admit communists did not have a monopoly on the use of the term anarchy and acknowledged that though he did not agree with their line of reasoning, individualist anarchists were also anarchists.

What happened? Now you come back after how many weeks? Did you recover from all of your self-contradictions and solipsism? Were you making a quick surveillance, trying a find a way back in? I hope you don't want another self-defeating debate on your part.

Oh, now I see what you mean. You want to be an independent capitalist who's allowed to 'own' a 'group' of workers to live off. And while we subscribe to only one variant of anarchism, you subscribe to many: anarcho-pacifism, anarcho-vegetarianism, individualist anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-egoism, Smithian-Randianism, mutualism, and lots more to come. You have collected a lot of labels, which makes you ahead of the game. I'm impressed.

Yeah, but Appleton is beyond your puny notions of "logic" and "reason".1 Behold: The Mindfuck Thread!2

• 1. No, really! He's actually said as much.
• 2. Warning: reading The Mindfuck Thread may cause insanity, stupidity and baldness.

I don't really want to start this debate all over again, so I will just make a few comments below and direct you to the anarchist writings of Spooner, Tucker, Proudhon, and modern proponents of individualist anarchist and mutualism such as Kevin Carson or this great collection of essays: http://radgeek.com/gt/2011/10/Markets-Not-Capitalism-2011-Chartier-and-Johnson.pdf

Collectivist anarchism is anarchism, but I oppose it on individualist grounds. It would be nice if instead of constant bitching communists could just say to me "individualist anarchism is anarchism, but we oppose it on communist/collectivist grounds". That would be a gesture of common respect, you know.
And anarchism means, according to a useful definition by Henry Appleton "[being] opposed to the arbitrary rule of self-elected usurpers outside of the Individual". I am not conflating capitalism with property ownership. Instead it seems that everyone here is accusing me of defending capitalism because I support property ownership - so you are the ones doing the conflating, not me!

Well then you have just admitted private property. So what is the problem?

I know how capitalist property ownership works - to that extent I agree with Proudhon - La propriete, c'est le vol! But you are again conflating terms. Property is the sense it is being used now within the legalist paradigm of the state is not property at all, it is just usurpation and exploitation. Property is only just where the producer owns the product of his labour and the necessary means of production.