I had never came across anarchism before that. How did you become interested in the subject? So it is there, it exists, but you’re right that it doesn’t exist very publicly, at least not in the mainstream. There’s a huge literature now on anarchism there are publishers and cooperative movements that call themselves anarchist. Certainly since the rise of the social justice movement in the late 1990s, there has been a much greater sense in which the grassroots Left is defined by anarchist ideas. The Industrial Workers of the World, for example, is essentially an anarchist union in terms of its membership, even if it doesn’t sign up to a particular ideology. There are also certainly social movements which call themselves anarchist, or labour organisations that are full of people who call themselves anarchists, even though the union doesn’t call itself that. So there are people who call themselves anarchist. She talks about anarchist movements, endorses anarchist practices. There are still public intellectuals who label themselves as anarchists Noam Chomsky is one of them, or Naomi Klein-who I’m not sure has said that she is anarchist, but has clearly expressed views that are anarchistic. Is this why it has become rare to hear people, especially public intellectuals, describing themselves as anarchists? While socialism and communism, despite their equally tainted history, seem to still have many people openly supporting them? It becomes very difficult for anarchists to get away from it but they also sometimes play with it. It attracts a lot of attention in literature, and later in films, which helps perpetuate it. The image is quite powerful, and becomes almost romantic in a way. It becomes easy to point to evidence that anarchists are these terroristic, aggressive, destructive, nihilistic individuals, simply because you can point to various assassins and groups who argue for violent means in order to overthrow existing institutions. The early history of anarchist practice gets caught up in this: when anarchists react to the repressive force that’s used against them in the late 19th century, they get into those cycles of violence and gain a reputation for being the very thing that they say they’re not. And the way that the anarchist movement emerges in the post-French and post-American revolutionary context makes it look as if they’re much more threatening than other critical groups, because they’re not playing by the rules of the game. Anarchists come along with the idea that anarchy is order, and what exists is disorder. It’s very difficult for political theorists to think about anarchism in any other way than negative, because it seems to contradict everything that politics is based on: the idea that we need a constructed and defined order, and that we can’t coordinate our actions unless somebody helps us do it. And anarchists think that it is through this cooperation that we will build our institutions. It may be in a very sociable way, in the sense that we have friendly relations, or it might mean in a thinner way, that we can cooperate despite our anxieties, antagonisms, and conflicts. Anarchists start from a very different foundation: that we naturally cooperate. Most of the ways we think about our institutions, constitutions and political organisations are framed in a particular way: at a minimum, the theoretical premise is that we need some kind of structure in order to make citizens compliant and to make us cooperate. It’s very difficult for people who come from other kinds of politics, within the mainstream, to make sense of anarchism. It’s possibly the political theory burdened by the most misconceptions, and the greatest contrast between how it’s defined by theorists, and what a random person on the street would think when they hear the word ‘anarchy.’ Why do you think that is? It is a bounded political movement, but it’s defined by the way that its advocates, those who call themselves anarchists, engage with those traditions and cultures, and change their practices over time. I think anarchism describes a set of practices it describes politics it also describes a tradition, and within that tradition there is a set of cultures. To start with, can you try to give us your own definition of anarchism?
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