Anarchism is the most consistently misrepresented political tradition in modern Western culture. The popular association is with chaos, lawlessness, hooded protesters, and 19th-century bomb-throwing. The actual tradition has very little to do with any of these. It is a serious body of political thought, with a 200-year history, a substantial record of working examples (most of which were crushed by state violence), and a set of analytical contributions that even its critics increasingly acknowledge.

This piece is a short primer. The minimum definition that survives most strands. Where the tradition came from. The main internal variants and what they actually argue. The historical practice, including the working examples and what happened to them. What anarchism gets right that other left traditions have often underestimated. Where it is genuinely vulnerable. And where the anarchist current runs in Irish political life today, which is smaller than the equivalent in some other countries but real and worth knowing.

A definition that survives most strands

Anarchism is the political and philosophical tradition that seeks to organise human cooperation without coercive hierarchy, particularly without the state. The defining commitment is not opposition to organisation. It is opposition to domination. Anarchists are typically in favour of voluntary association, mutual aid, federated decision-making, and direct democracy at the scale where it can work, and against the institutional concentration of coercive power in the hands of any small group, whether that group is monarchical, state, capitalist, party, or technocratic.

The slogan most anarchists would accept is "as little hierarchy as possible, no more than is necessary, and only with explicit consent". This is a stricter standard than most political traditions apply, and it produces a different set of organisational principles: federation rather than centralisation, recallable delegation rather than representation, consensus or majority decision at the level where the decision affects, and the explicit refusal of permanent positions of command.

This is not the absence of structure. Anarchist organisations have constitutions, by-laws, decision-making procedures, accountability mechanisms, and dispute-resolution processes. They are typically more procedural and more deliberate about institutional design than the looser social-democratic and liberal organisations they exist alongside. The point is not that there are no rules. The point is that the rules are designed to prevent the concentration of power that anarchists understand as the recurrent failure mode of human societies.

This commitment, the rejection of coercive hierarchy as the basic organising principle of social life, is what links the various anarchist strands. They differ on what specifically they want instead.

Where the tradition came from

The pre-history of anarchism runs through the Diggers and Levellers of the English Civil War, the various peasant uprisings of the medieval and early modern period, the communalist religious movements of the Reformation, and the libertarian currents in the radical Enlightenment. The word itself, from the Greek for "without rule", was used as an insult before it was used as a self-description.

The first major figure to embrace the term was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the French mutualist whose What Is Property? (1840) is the founding text of organised anarchism. Proudhon's answer to the title's question was the famous "property is theft", by which he meant specifically that the kind of property which produces income without labour (rents from land, interest from money, profit from owning capital) is a form of structural extraction that ought to be abolished. Personal property and small-scale productive property were not the targets. The argument was an early articulation of what would become the anarchist critique of capitalism as itself a hierarchical system, alongside the critique of the state.

Proudhon was followed by Mikhail Bakunin in the 1860s and 1870s, who carried the argument into the First International alongside Karl Marx. The split between Bakunin and Marx in 1872, over the question of whether the working class should seek to capture the state or abolish it, produced the long-running division between the anarchist and Marxist branches of the socialist tradition. Bakunin predicted, with what turned out to be considerable accuracy, that the dictatorship of the proletariat would become the dictatorship of the party apparatus and that workers' states would reproduce the very domination they were intended to abolish. The 20th century vindicated this prediction repeatedly.

Peter Kropotkin in the late 19th and early 20th centuries developed the anarchist tradition into its most systematic theoretical form. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) argued, against the Spencerian and social-Darwinist ideologues of the period, that cooperation is at least as central a force in biological and social evolution as competition. Modern evolutionary biology and anthropology have substantially vindicated the empirical claim. The Conquest of Bread (1892) is Kropotkin's positive programme for an anarchist communist society, organised around free distribution and federated cooperative production.

The 20th century saw the tradition develop further through Errico Malatesta in Italy, Emma Goldman in the United States and Russia, the syndicalist movements of Spain, France, and Latin America, and later through Murray Bookchin's social ecology, David Graeber's anarchist anthropology, and the various contemporary currents in housing, anti-debt, climate, and indigenous-solidarity organising.

The main internal variants

Worth distinguishing because the differences are large.

Mutualism, the Proudhonian strand, is the most market-friendly. The vision is a society of federated cooperatives, small producers, and individual artisans, with exchange mediated by mutualist banks providing interest-free credit and with property restricted to what one personally uses. The strand has historical influence on the cooperative movement and on the credit-union tradition, including parts of the modern Irish credit-union sector.

Collectivist anarchism, the Bakuninist strand, holds that the means of production should be owned collectively by the workers who use them, and that distribution should be according to labour contribution. It is closer to socialism in its economic prescription but rejects the state-mediated path that Marxist socialism took.

Anarchist communism, the Kropotkinist strand, extends collectivism by removing the labour-contribution accounting and distributing according to need. The slogan is "from each according to ability, to each according to need", which Marx also used but which Kropotkin meant in a stateless, federated, voluntary context rather than a vanguard-party transitional one.

Anarcho-syndicalism is the strand that treated revolutionary trade-union organising as the route to anarchist society. The union, in this vision, is not just an instrument for negotiating with employers but the embryonic form of the post-revolutionary cooperative economy. The Spanish Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) in the 1930s are the largest historical example. James Connolly's Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, in the period when Connolly and Larkin were both active, drew significantly on this tradition through Larkin's earlier American IWW connections.

Anarcho-pacifism, associated with Tolstoy, Dorothy Day, and various Quaker and other religious traditions, is the strand that combines anarchist political analysis with non-violent practice. It is a smaller but persistent tradition, and is the most theoretically coherent of the various non-violent radical positions.

Social ecology and libertarian municipalism, developed primarily by Murray Bookchin from the 1960s onwards, is the strand that combines anarchist political theory with serious ecological commitment. The vision is of confederated municipal democracies organised around face-to-face deliberation, with ecological accountability built into the structure. Bookchin's late work has substantially shaped the Kurdish revolutionary movement in Rojava.

Anarcha-feminism, with Emma Goldman as the canonical historical figure and various more recent theorists continuing the tradition, applies the anarchist critique of hierarchy to gender relations and to the household. The argument is that patriarchy is itself a hierarchical structure that anarchism has to address explicitly rather than treat as a derivative of class.

Individualist anarchism, descended from Max Stirner and Benjamin Tucker, emphasises the individual against all collectivisation, anarchist or otherwise. It is a smaller and more philosophically separate strand and overlaps in some respects with the broader libertarian tradition.

Anarchist anthropology, developed by David Graeber in books including Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004) and The Dawn of Everything (with David Wengrow, 2021), is the contemporary scholarly extension of anarchism into the historical and ethnographic record. The argument is that the conventional progressive history of human societies (small bands, then chiefdoms, then states) is empirically wrong, that human societies have been politically diverse and creative for tens of thousands of years, and that the centralised hierarchical state is one option among many rather than an inevitable consequence of complexity. The work has been influential well beyond anarchist circles.

A note on anarcho-capitalism, associated with Murray Rothbard, David Friedman, and parts of the libertarian-right tradition. Most actual anarchists, across all the strands listed above, reject this as a misuse of the term, on the ground that anarchism's defining commitment is opposition to coercive hierarchy and that capitalism in their analysis is itself a system of coercive hierarchy. The "anarcho-capitalism" label is therefore, in their view, oxymoronic. The argument is contested but worth knowing about because the muddying of the term has been one of the more successful rhetorical operations of the libertarian-right tradition.

The historical practice

Anarchism has been more historically practical than its critics often acknowledge.

The Spanish Revolution of 1936-1939 is the largest example of a functioning anarchist society in modern history. In Catalonia and parts of Aragón, in the period between the start of the Spanish Civil War and the eventual fascist victory, several million people lived for two to three years in collectivised workplaces, federated municipalities, and worker-controlled industries. The Barcelona public-transport system, much of Catalan agriculture, large fractions of Spanish industry, and substantial parts of the urban service economy were operated, during this period, on broadly anarchist organisational principles. The record is mixed (there were internal coercions and violations of anarchist principles, as in any large social experiment under wartime conditions) but the working economic and social outcomes were better than the conventional historical narrative tends to acknowledge. The collectives were destroyed by a combination of fascist military victory, Stalinist suppression of the anarchist forces from within the Republican coalition, and the broader exhaustion of the war. They did not collapse from internal failure. They were crushed.

The Ukrainian Free Territory of 1918-1921, organised under Nestor Makhno and the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine, was an earlier and more turbulent example. Several million peasants in eastern Ukraine lived for three years under conditions of approximate anarchist self-organisation, with federated village assemblies, no taxation, no central state, and a defence force that simultaneously fought the White Army, the Red Army, German occupation forces, and various Ukrainian nationalist factions. The Makhnovshchina was eventually destroyed by the Red Army, which had previously allied with it against the Whites and turned on it once the strategic threat had been removed. The pattern of being crushed by larger state forces is the recurrent shape of anarchist historical practice.

The Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, from 1994 to the present, is a smaller but more sustained example. The Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional and the broader autonomous-municipality structure that has developed around it represent indigenous anarchism (or libertarian-municipalism, the ideological label is contested) in continuous practice for over thirty years. The Zapatistas have not held the territory militarily against any serious Mexican state offensive, but they have built a working autonomous administration that has resisted the slow pressure of state encroachment for a generation.

Rojava in northern Syria, since 2012, is the largest current functioning example. The Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, drawing explicitly on Bookchin's social ecology and libertarian municipalism, has built confederated democratic structures across a region of several million people. The viability of the project depends on the broader strategic situation in Syria and on the relationship with the United States and Turkey, both of which are unstable. The internal achievements (gender-equality commitments, multi-ethnic administration, ecological policy) have been substantial.

Various smaller intentional communities, autonomous zones, and federated cooperatives continue across multiple countries, including the Mondragón cooperative federation in the Basque Country (which is technically market-socialist rather than anarchist but draws on overlapping organisational principles), various indigenous autonomous regions in Latin America, and a number of smaller cooperative housing networks across Europe.

The pattern: anarchist practice has been demonstrably possible at small and medium scale, has produced viable economic and social outcomes when given the chance, and has been repeatedly crushed by state-organised military force. Whether this represents an inherent limitation of the anarchist model or a contingent feature of the particular periods in which anarchist experiments have occurred is a serious open question.

What anarchism gets right

Worth being explicit about, because the dominant cultural framing makes much of this hard to acknowledge.

The Bakuninist prediction about the Marxist-Leninist trajectory was correct. Bakunin argued in the 1870s that any project that captured the state in the name of the working class would, through the institutional dynamics of the captured state, produce a new ruling class composed of the captors. The 20th century evidence on this is extensive and largely vindicates the prediction. Workers' states became party states. Vanguard parties became permanent ruling apparatuses. The withering away of the state did not occur. Anarchists were ahead of their Marxist-socialist contemporaries by about fifty years on this question.

The Kropotkin claim about mutual aid as a real social and biological force has been substantially vindicated by modern evolutionary biology, primatology, and anthropology. The Spencerian "nature red in tooth and claw" framing that dominated the late 19th and early 20th centuries is now widely understood to have been a one-sided ideological reading. Cooperation, reciprocity, and group-level coordination are central in the actual evolutionary record, and Kropotkin's empirical claim was sounder than his contemporaries credited.

The Graeber-Wengrow argument that human societies have been politically diverse, creative, and self-conscious for tens of thousands of years, rather than fitting into a simple progressive scheme, has substantially shifted the historical and anthropological consensus. The conventional narrative that complexity inevitably produces hierarchical states has been undermined by extensive archaeological and ethnographic evidence of large-scale complex societies organising themselves on more egalitarian and federated lines for sustained periods. This is a recent shift in scholarly understanding and the implications are still being worked out.

The institutional analysis of the failure modes of hierarchical organisation (groupthink, bystander effects, the abuse of position, the protection of incumbents, the bureaucratic capture of mission) is well-developed in the anarchist tradition and is increasingly acknowledged in mainstream organisational studies. The anarchist principles of federalism, recallable delegation, and structural rotation of position are not naive utopianism. They are responses to specific empirical failure modes that hierarchical organisations consistently produce.

These are not small empirical claims. A serious analysis of modern political economy that does not engage with them is incomplete.

Where anarchism is vulnerable

Worth being honest about.

The scale problem is real and unresolved. Anarchist organisation has worked at small and medium scale for sustained periods. It has not yet demonstrated viability at the scale of nation-states for sustained periods. The historical examples (Spain 1936-39, Ukraine 1918-21) were destroyed too quickly to test the scaling question. Whether a federated anarchist confederation could match the coordinating capacity of a modern industrial nation-state on questions like infrastructure, defence, public health, and large-scale environmental policy is an open empirical question on which the evidence is genuinely mixed.

The defence problem is closely related. Every major anarchist experiment has been destroyed by external state-organised military force. Whether this is because anarchist societies cannot defend themselves, because state forces happened to be available to crush them, or because anarchist societies were too short-lived to develop adequate defence, is contested. The pattern is real. The lesson is not entirely clear.

The transition problem is the question of how a society moves from current capitalist nation-state arrangements to anarchist alternatives. Anarchist tradition has generally rejected the vanguard-party route of Marxism-Leninism on principled grounds, but the alternatives (gradual prefiguration, dual power, mass insurrection) all have their own difficulties. No anarchist tradition has produced a fully convincing operational programme for transition at scale.

The free-rider problem is the standard objection that anarchist organisation depends on voluntary cooperation, that voluntary cooperation has limits where strong defection incentives exist, and that some functions (defence, large-scale infrastructure, climate response) require the kind of coercive coordination that anarchism rejects. This is the most analytically substantive objection and the one that anarchist tradition has the least fully resolved response to.

The contemporary muddying of the term by "anarcho-capitalism" is a presentation problem rather than a problem with the underlying tradition. It is real and consequential because many readers encounter the word "anarchism" first through Rothbardian material that is, by the standards of the actual tradition, not anarchism in any meaningful sense.

These are not fatal. They are the live questions for the tradition.

What it is commonly mistaken for

Three persistent confusions.

First, anarchism is regularly conflated with chaos and lawlessness. This is wrong on every count. Most anarchist practice is highly procedural, with elaborate decision-making structures, written constitutions, accountability mechanisms, and dispute-resolution processes. The point is not the absence of rules but the absence of dominators.

Second, anarchism is associated with the late-19th-century "propaganda of the deed" period of bombings and assassinations. This was a small minority current in the tradition, prominent in the public imagination because of its dramatic visibility, but never representative of the broader anarchist movement. Most anarchist organising across the last 150 years has been in the form of trade-union activity, mutual-aid networks, cooperative production, intentional community, and educational and cultural work.

Third, "anarcho-capitalism" is, in the view of most anarchists, a misuse of the term. The reasoning is that the central anarchist commitment is opposition to coercive hierarchy, that capitalism in the anarchist analysis is itself a system of coercive hierarchy, and that combining the two terms produces a position that is internally incoherent. This is contested by self-described anarcho-capitalists. The mainstream of the anarchist tradition does not accept the label.

Where you find anarchism in Irish politics

Ireland has a smaller anarchist tradition than several comparable European countries, and a larger one than commonly realised.

The historical Irish anarchist current runs through several threads. The syndicalist influence on James Larkin's Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, drawing on Larkin's earlier American IWW connections, brought genuine anarcho-syndicalist organisational principles into Irish labour politics in the 1900s and 1910s. Connolly's Irish Citizen Army, while not formally anarchist, drew on the same syndicalist current and its organisational form was substantially more anti-hierarchical than the Irish Volunteers it operated alongside. The 1913 Lockout was the high-water mark of this period of Irish syndicalist organising.

The mid-20th century saw most of this tradition suppressed under the combined weight of the new Irish state's conservative consensus, the Catholic Church's anti-radical politics, and the broader European pattern of left-tradition decline under fascism and Stalinist hostility to anarchism. There was little organised anarchist activity in 20th-century Ireland for several decades.

The Workers' Solidarity Movement (WSM, founded 1984, dissolved 2021) was the main organised Irish anarchist platform of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Active in housing campaigns, anti-water-charges organising, abortion-rights campaigning, and broader trade-union and community work. Its decision to dissolve in 2021 was openly explained as a strategic move to free its members for participation in broader anti-eviction, climate, and housing-justice movements rather than as evidence of the tradition's failure. The broader Irish anarchist scene has continued in less centralised form.

Current Irish anarchist activity is dispersed across multiple smaller collectives and project-based organisations. Indymedia Ireland, various independent housing-action networks, the climate-camp tradition, anti-eviction support, mutual-aid networks (which expanded substantially during Covid and have not entirely contracted since), and various student and community organising projects. The Anarchist Federation Ireland exists in a small organisational form. The broader influence of anarchist organising principles on Irish extra-parliamentary politics is greater than the formal anarchist organisation count would suggest.

Anarchist analysis in Irish public discourse is still substantially marginalised relative to its analytical merits. The Irish Times occasionally hosts a mainstream-left columnist with anarchist sympathies. The smaller-circulation Irish socialist publications (Rebel, Irish Marxist Review) engage with the tradition more directly. The academic Irish anarchist scene is small but real, with some work coming out of UCC, NUIG, and Maynooth in recent years. The tradition is more visible in Irish housing-justice and climate organising than in formal political-philosophical discussion.

The relationship to Irish Republicanism is interesting and largely under-explored. Connolly's own theoretical work was Marxist with strong syndicalist influences, sitting close to the anarcho-syndicalist line of his period. Subsequent Irish Republicanism mostly took the parliamentary-statist route through Sinn Féin's various incarnations rather than the anti-state route, but the intellectual link to the anarchist tradition through Connolly remains. Modern Irish Republican-anarchist hybridism is small but does exist in some northern community-organising contexts.

Why this matters for the citizen

A citizen frustrated with the standard parliamentary politics, with the institutional unresponsiveness of state agencies, with the slow capture of nominally democratic institutions by entrenched interests, with the persistent failure of conventional political parties to deliver on stated commitments, may find that the anarchist analysis of why hierarchical organisations fail in these specific ways is useful. It is not necessary to accept the full anarchist programme to find the diagnostic apparatus valuable.

The anarchist tradition has done substantial empirical and theoretical work on the question of why power concentrates, why institutions drift from their stated missions, why participatory promises are systematically unfulfilled, and what kinds of organisational design might mitigate these patterns. Some of this work has been absorbed into mainstream organisational studies, public administration, and management theory, often without acknowledgement. The full version is sharper and more politically engaged.

For Irish politics specifically, the anarchist tradition is most useful as a critical lens on how Irish institutions actually operate. The chronic capture of regulators by regulated industries, the slow drift of social partnership into managerial centrism, the persistent failure of political parties to remain accountable to their stated programmes after entering government, are all phenomena the anarchist tradition has spent 150 years analysing. The diagnostic apparatus is available. The question of whether the alternatives are practical at scale remains open. The specific use of anarchist organising principles in housing-justice and climate organising provides at least some current Irish data points for that question.

Further reading

If you have an evening: Colin Ward, Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction (2004). The most accessible introductory text by one of the most readable 20th-century anarchist thinkers.

If you have a week: Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902). The most empirically substantive piece of classical anarchist writing and the one most relevant to current debates in evolutionary biology, anthropology, and political economy.

For the foundational texts: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property? (1840); Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy (1873); Errico Malatesta, Anarchy (1891).

For the Spanish Revolution: George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938) is the classic eyewitness account. Sam Dolgoff, The Anarchist Collectives (1974) is the standard scholarly treatment.

For contemporary work: David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything (2021), is essential reading and one of the more important books published this decade. Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (1982), is the major statement of social ecology. James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State (1998), while not formally anarchist, develops a closely related analysis of state failures that overlaps substantially with the anarchist tradition.

For the Irish-specific story: there is no comprehensive single-volume Irish anarchist history. The Workers' Solidarity Movement's archived publications at wsm.ie and the various Irish anarchist journals from the 1980s and 1990s are the best primary sources. Robert Stradling's work on Irish involvement in the Spanish Civil War provides useful context on the period in which Irish anarchist solidarity was most visible. Brian Hanley and Scott Millar, The Lost Revolution (2009) covers the Workers' Party period and indirectly illuminates the anarchist current that ran alongside it.

The thing anarchism asks, that other left traditions have often dodged, is whether the structures that capture the state in the name of liberation become themselves the liberation's grave. The 20th century answered that question in favour of the anarchist suspicion. What follows from the answer is still being worked out. Anyone serious about modern political theory has to engage with the tradition that asked the question first and most clearly.

Related in the Political Literacy series

  • What Is Socialism? — the broader left tradition anarchism is one strand of
  • What Is Communism? — the state-mediated alternative the anarchist tradition warned against
  • What Is Distributism? — the Catholic-tradition cousin that shares wide-distribution-of-property commitments
  • Daniel Schmachtenberger — civilisational-systems thinker whose Game B framing has anarchist parallels
  • George Monbiot — environmental journalist whose rewilding and political-economy work overlaps substantially

Plus the framing piece, What Do Ireland's Parties Actually Stand For?, and the full Political Literacy archive.