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Alex Prichard, "Anarchism: a Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2022)

New Books Network

Sat Feb 07 2026

An interview with Alex Prichard

Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Morteza Hajizadeh
Guest: Dr. Alex Prichard (Associate Professor of International Political History, University of Exeter)
Book Discussed: Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2022)

This episode features a deep dive into the history, philosophy, myths, and modern relevance of anarchism. Dr. Alex Prichard, a leading scholar in anarchist political thought, discusses the origins and evolution of anarchism, its complicated relationship to violence, property, nationalism, and its surprising presence in both popular culture and everyday public life. The conversation not only debunks common misconceptions but also explores anarchism's practical alternatives for organizing society.

Main Themes & Discussion Points

Introduction to Dr. Alex Prichard and Anarchism

Dr. Prichard describes his academic journey, initially sparked by his discovery that Proudhon, an early theorist, had written extensively on international politics (01:11).
He explains how most scholarly work misrepresented or misunderstood anarchists, which motivated him—alongside Ruth Kinna and others—to help found the Anarchist Studies Network and "rewrite the history of anarchism in really important ways" (03:47).
This background set the stage for his Very Short Introduction, meant to update and broaden the narrative of anarchism beyond outdated and often mischaracterized perspectives.

Defining Anarchism & Dispelling Myths

Key Definition:
“Anarchism is primarily a political philosophy that is predicated on the denial of any final point of authority … Anarchists deny the legitimacy of all institutions or people that present themselves as a final point of authority, the supreme authority in any particular area.” (07:10)
Dr. Prichard clarifies that anarchists are not simply "anti-authority," "anti-hierarchy," or "anti-power." Instead, they advocate for participation and consensual, non-arbitrary forms of organization.
Common misconception: equating anarchism solely with chaos or disorder.
He stresses that “we already live in something like an anarchy” since no ultimate authority exists, and anarchism is about how we navigate that reality together (09:05).

Anarchism, Terrorism, and Pacifism

Discusses anarchism’s association with terrorism, notably in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but emphasizes:

”The history of this anarchist terrorism is completely out of proportion to the actual extent ... often completely devoid of any connection to reality.” (14:51)
Many acts were reprisals to state violence or even encouraged by agents provocateurs; genuine anarchist terrorism was rare and often counterproductive.
Notably, such violent episodes often “had a stronger hand in creating the nation state through those acts of terrorism than they would have otherwise,” as states used the threat to justify police and surveillance measures (15:22).
Anarchists have robust traditions of pacifism and nonviolent mutual aid rarely discussed in mainstream narratives.

Anarchism and the Nation State

Explores anarchist difficulties in national liberation struggles—then and now (e.g., Ukraine's ongoing war).
"...if you adopt the instruments of the master, that you will eventually be subjected to them and that the state is that instrument." (18:22)
Historically, anarchists aided revolutionary movements but were later purged or suppressed once state power was consolidated, as in Russia and China.

Classical Anarchism & the French Revolution

Anarchism’s roots lie in disappointment with the Revolution's failure to deliver genuine “liberty, fraternity, equality” (20:39).
Innovation: Taking the secular logic of the French Revolution further by aiming to "democratise everything"—not only state laws but workplaces, families, and local communities (21:55).
Anarchism became the lingua franca of the radical left, even before Marxism or social-democracy rose to prominence.

Mutual Aid and Kropotkin

Revisits the biographical background and influence of Peter Kropotkin (23:53), a prince-turned-geographer whose landmark Mutual Aid (1902) argued:

"The most successful animal species are those that cooperate. ... And actually, what you see is not only is it a struggle for survival, but that struggle for survival is quintessentially driven by and sustained through mutual aid." (24:42)
Kropotkin opposed Social Darwinism, showing cooperation, not just conflict, as central to both evolution and human societies.
Anarchism thus foregrounds the practical and ethical necessity of cooperation over competition.

Private Property: Anarchist Views

Anarchists critique the myth of private property as a natural right:

"...private property didn’t drop out of the sky. It’s not a natural right.” (30:30)
Property is fundamentally relational and communal; the state upholds private property with violence or the threat thereof.
Anarchists advocate for collaborative, mutual forms of property relations, not enforced individual ownership.

Globalization, Colonization, and Industrialization

Anarchism spread globally through migratory labor, global trade, and revolutionary movements throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries (35:51).
The consolidation of sovereignty, particularly via colonial ventures (e.g., Africa), was central to state-building—and contesting this process was key to anarchist praxis.

Anarchists & Labor: Syndicalism and Libertarian Communism

Industrialization produced highly mobile, interconnected working classes who established radical, grassroots “syndicates” (unions).
"Anarcho-syndicalism" transformed labor relations, making unions more participatory and accountable (37:37).
Both anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian communism are practical tactics for self-organization, differing mainly in theoretical emphasis rather than practice (41:36).

Anarchism’s Modern Revival

Cold War marginalized the movement but created subcultural and artistic anarchism.
The post-Soviet 1990s and the anti-globalization era revived anarchism’s mass relevance (Seattle 1999 protests, global justice movement):

"All of these sorts of things were anathema to party politics ... but now it is much more part of what we take for granted in how people should be organizing." (46:09)

Anarchism in Popular Culture

Anarchist ethos is “everywhere”—in film (e.g., Matrix, V for Vendetta), music (punk, Chumbawamba), literature (Ursula Le Guin, Iain M. Banks), and especially education.
“...I challenge anyone that's listening ... within a minute you've come up with other anarchist popular culture.” (49:36)
Student-centered, decentralized learning is itself an anarchistic contribution.

Anarchist Alternatives to Public Goods Management

Anarchism offers a third way beyond privatization vs. nationalization: communal self-organization (50:59).
Most people globally already organize in ways that aren't reliant on states or corporations.
Cites Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel-winning work showing success of communal resource management in real-world settings.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

Redefining Anarchism:

“Anarchists are not anti-authority. Anarchists are not anti-hierarchy, anarchists are not anti-power. They are quite happy with all of those things as long as they have a direct say in their exercise.” (08:00, Prichard)
On Terrorism and the State:

"The history of this anarchist terrorism is completely out of proportion to the actual extent ... and often completely devoid of any connection to reality." (14:51, Prichard)
On Popular Culture:

“It’s just everywhere, isn’t it? ... The Matrix wasn’t invented out of nowhere ... you see the anarchist ethos within not just those movies but also within music ... education... I could go on.” (47:32, Prichard)
On Public Goods:

“It doesn’t have to be nationalization or privatization... you can think about organizing public goods through communal self-organization.” (51:02, Prichard)
On Property:

"Private property didn’t drop out of the sky. It’s not a natural right." (30:30, Prichard)

Timeline of Key Segments

| Timestamp | Topic | |-----------|---------------------------------------------------| | 01:02 | Dr. Prichard’s background; aims of the new book | | 07:03 | Defining anarchism; debunking myths | | 11:05 | Anarchism and terrorism/pacifism | | 16:57 | Nation-states, insurrectionary politics | | 20:39 | Classical anarchism and the French Revolution | | 23:53 | Russian anarchism & Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid | | 30:24 | Private property—anarchist views | | 35:51 | Globalization, colonization, industrialization | | 37:37 | Industrial unionism, syndicalism | | 41:36 | Anarcho-syndicalism vs. libertarian communism | | 43:41 | Anarchism’s revival after the Cold War | | 47:32 | Anarchism in popular culture | | 50:59 | Communal alternatives to privatization/nationalization |

Final Thoughts

This episode provides an accessible but rigorous survey of anarchism’s past, present, and possible future. Dr. Prichard presents anarchism not as chaos, but as a pragmatic, historically grounded approach to living together without centralized, unaccountable authority. Listeners come away with a deeper understanding of both the philosophy and real-world practice of anarchism—its global roots, its moral debates, its political strategies, and its often-hidden influence on culture and community organization. The book discussed is highly recommended for further exploration.

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Transcript

A (0:00)

We heard you. Nine years of Bring Back the Snack Wrap and you've won. But maybe you should have asked for more. Say hello to the Hot Honey Snack Wrap. Now you've really won. Go to McDonald's and get it while you can. Welcome to the New Books Network.

B (0:19)

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. And today I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Alex Prichard. Alex Pritchett is an associate professor of International political history in the Department of Politics at Exeter University. He's a leading authority on anarchist political thought and history, with a particular interest in how anarchists theorize war, peace and global order. And today he's here to talk with us about a great book that he published with Oxford University Press last year called Anarchism A Very Short Introduction. Alex, thank you very much for accepting this invitation.

A (1:00)

Thank you very much for inviting me.

B (1:02)

Can you briefly introduce yourself, tell us about your area of expertise and what made you interested in the history of anarchism and how this book came about?

A (1:11)

Sure. So, I mean, it's a long and mostly fortuitous and accidental story that gets most people into PhDs, but mine was sort of. It's a long. I won't go into the details. Okay. But. But essentially I discovered that Proudhon had written all of this stuff on international politics, and I'd done a couple of degrees in international relations and nobody'd ever told me about his writings. And so I thought, oh, well, there's a PhD in this. But the problem that I immediately faced was that not only did nobody know that the work existed, but when I was asked to sort of make sense of this work, I was asked to make sense of it in a contemporary context, which made it very difficult for me to make sense of Proudhon, not only because most people's preconceptions of Proudhon's writings were antiquated and outdated, but also because he wasn't dealing with the problems that we're dealing with today. There are similarities, but because nobody knew anything about Proudhon, the prior or the first thing to do is just to tell everybody what Proudhon had said, try and bring that to people. But immediately when I started reading Proudhon's writings, not only the international relations context is one problem. The other was that most people's preconceptions of Proudhon were completely wrong. And trying to fit Proudhon into anarchism was really difficult because of the way most people thought about anarchism. And much of the Literature about anarchism and sort of the, you know, the end of the last millennium was sort of written by people who'd never been an anarchist, known any. Anarchists certainly didn't write from a position particularly in political philosophy, political theory, international relations. These were scholars who were really interested in the sort of the abstract, you know, you know, can you justify states, what's obligations on, rather than saying this is what anarchists argued in their time. And so what we did was, myself, Ruth Kinner, I was doing my PhD at the time we established the Political Studies Network, the Anarchist Studies Network for the Political. The Anarchist Studies Network for the Political Studies association. And, and what we did was we gathered together a group at that time, about 20, 30 scholars. But you know, subsequently we've grown. There's a. There's a sort of a, should we say a branch in the United States and there's about 2, 300 people now working, broadly speaking in anarchist studies. And what we've done collectively is sort of rewrite the history of anarchism in really important ways. And so, you know, that enabled me to say what I wanted to say about Proudhon in a way that was consistent with the historical record. That enabled us to think about anarchism in much more broad terms. But it also enabled me then to say something substantive about Proudhon in the context of international relations. And then the opportunity emerged. Oxford University Press approached me to write this book. And of course I felt like I was in a really good position to do that because I'd done all of this sort of contextual work, done all of this work to gather together the collaborative effort to bring together all those scholars. And we really felt, or I felt that I had a really, you know, a new sense of what anarchism was and that it really needed updating. And so this book, I mean, in one respect it's an updating, in another, it's very much in the vein of the previous edition. So Colin Ward wrote the original, very short introduction that's published in 2004. He died very soon thereafter. And the book itself was actually quite dated when it was published. So if you think about all of the sort of the anti globalization movement, the re emergence of anarchism around the turn of the millennium, barely any of that features and of course nothing subsequently. So what this book does is it tries to bring together all of that research that's been going on over the last 20 years and try and update that book. But in a way that's consistent with what Colin Ward was trying to do. With his addition, which is to say what I was trying to do was, you know, show anarchism as a lived tradition, not just by anarchists, but by those people who've been abandoned by states who are persecuted by states who are, you know, hounded, those people who've had to remove themselves in order to survive. Those are the people I think Colin Ward would argue are living what he called anarchy in action. And what the book tries to do is, tries to not only show that sort of undercurrent of anarchic anti statist or outside state behavior, but also to try and try and show what the anarchists actually did. Right. Try and bring that ideology to the forefront and to say that this is a coherent body of thought and practice that spans 150 years of modern global history and to try and show the coherence of it and its importance for, for the consolidation of the contemporary world order. And as I say in the preface to the book, you know, this, this derives from a course that I've been teaching at Exeter for the Last sort of 10, 12 years where called Anarchism and World Ordering. And what I tried to do is show how the anarchists were really pivotal in the establishment of the 20th, 21st century. 20th and 21st century. You know, the anarchism has become part of our culture and it's really, you know, we don't recognize that as quickly as we ought to, perhaps.

A (7:03)

Sure. So I've got a very particular take on this, but I think it's a good one. My view is that anarchism is primarily a political philosophy that is predicated on the denial of any final point of authority. By final, I mean, you know, a supreme, the sovereign, you know, a supreme Court, whatever it happens to be. Anarchists deny the legitimacy of all institutions or people that present themselves as a final point of authority, the supreme authority in any particular area. Now, if that's what you are doing, then it's beholden upon you then to find other ways of establishing authority within your community. Right. And so what anarchists do is they look to mutual aid, horizontality, equality, prefiguration and so on. All things I can explain in more detail later perhaps, but it's incumbent upon them to find those alternatives. So, I mean, one of the things I like saying, but probably get me into a lot of trouble, is that anarchists are not anti authority. Anarchists are not anti hierarchy, anarchists are not anti power. They are quite happy with all of those things as long as they have a direct say in their exercise. So anarchists are quite happy, for example, they're pro domination if it's BDSM and everyone's into it, right? And they're pro power as long as they can establish, use that power to establish anarchist communities. And they're pro hierarchies as long as that's functional. So does a hierarchy perform a function that is valuable to that community? And if it does, and it's consensual and it's changeable and so on, then there's really nothing wrong with it. It's the problems with each of those things are when they become arbitrary, when power becomes something that is exercised without oversight, where hierarchy is established simply by, let's say, historical norm or moral norms or by law. Those things are arbitrary insofar as they're not changeable. We didn't consciously accept them, we weren't asked about them. So what the anarchists tried to do in denying a final point of authority is, is find ways of building authority into communities in ways that are not final, but as a consequence must be participatory, mutualist and so on. So my definition of anarchism then is because I start from a different place. It's not about denying all leaders or denying this and that and the other. It's about accepting a particular form of society exists already. As in there really isn't a final point of authority. It doesn't matter where you look, there's always somebody else who thinks they've got more authority or somebody else who's challenging it. There is no final point of authority. As a consequence, we already live in something like an anarchy. The question is how ought we to organize in the absence of a final point of authority, whether that is a God or a state or whatever it happens to be. And the anarchists have got an ideology that help us do that. So unlike every other ideology, they don't rely on formal authority structures that are unquestionable outside of, let's say, five year democratic cycles. And they Demand, therefore, that everybody participates in society to make the best of it together. And that is really what we've been trying to do in our second project, which is to look at how anarchists constitutionalize. We've been doing that now for the last five or six years. But I don't really do that in the very short introduction. I touch on it at the end in the chapter on federalism and world order. But really, this is what I'm doing with Ruth is a separate book project.

A (11:05)

Yeah. So, I mean, anarchism emerged in the 1850s, but it was pretty much global, pretty much immediately. And anarchist movements piggybacked, if you like, or drove forward to, in some instances, revolutionary processes. Don't forget, this was the high point of European empires. Most of the world was colonized by five or six key powers in Europe. And so most of the liberation struggles at that time were insurrectionary. They were violent. They precipitated ultimately two world wars. But by the 1880s, there were three or four, let's say, centers of anarchist terrorism. And Russia was one, France was the other. And then, of course, later in the United States, but also in places like Spain, across. Across Eastern Europe too. Now, the anarchist terrorists, quote, unquote, emerged out of non terrorists. So there's a general philosophy of propaganda by the deed. This was a. Bakunin pioneered this, or at least made most sense of it. So, interestingly, Bakunin was part of the Italian Carbonari movement, who were a sort of revolutionary republican, very highly secretive movement that were around in the 1860s. And he took that ethos of sort of clandestine insurrection into his anarchism, which emerged five, ten years later. And the aim of this propaganda by the deed was to awaken people's consciousness, their understanding of the inequalities and the structures of power that they face through action. Now, that action didn't have to be terroristic, of course, but the dominant narrative for insurrectionary revolutionary projects at those times was that it was militant, it was violent. And that also translated then into revolutionary movements across Europe and North America and elsewhere. Also South Asia, I should say, and Southeast Asia and elsewhere. But the terrorists took a very particular line on this. So people like Nechaev, some of the French terrorists and so on. These were individuals who believed that their there, the only way in which we could rid ourselves of the structures of power was to kill those who were in power. And so there was the targeting of McKinley and he was killed in America, of course, and there was the President. Kano was assassinated in France. There's, broadly speaking, according to Richard Jensen, about a thousand murders by anarchist terrorists over a period of about, about 50 years, from the 1880s through to the 1920s, 30s. And most of those of those, most can't be attributed to what we would call anarchists. So one of the really interesting things about this sort of anarchist period is not that it was conducted by anarchists, but that it was so convincingly told as a story of anarchist terrorism. So of our thousand, most of the explicitly anarchist terrorist attacks were reprisals against state violence that had happened previously, for example, in the Haymarket massacre and others. And these were escalated very quickly, but were incidents that were not driven necessarily by a desire to kill individuals, but by a retaliatory reprisal. There were others, of course, that were led by agents provocateurs, so police activists who were working with anarchists and encouraging them to bomb targets, and others were even less successful. So the Gallienistas are an interesting bunch. So they were some of the few that. Bear in mind that they're just developing dynamite, trying to figure out how it works, trying to consolidate it in a. In a bomb that could be chucked. And they managed to kill more of their own than they did of their targets. Right. So the history of this anarchist terrorism is completely out of proportion to the actual extent of anarchist terrorism at that period, and often completely devoid of any connection to reality. But the fact of the matter is that the anarchists completely failed to achieve their goals through that method. In fact, I'd argue they probably had a stronger hand in creating the nation state through those acts of terrorism than they would have otherwise. So through this act of terrorism, and again, Richard Jensen is the key authority on this, through these acts of terrorism, these acts of terrorism were used by nation states to justify things like Interpol, to justify passports, to justify the FBI, the establishment of paramilitary forces, the consolidation of security guards, the protection units around heads of state, the divorce of the heads of state from society, all of that, and then the consolidation of the boundaries of the state was arguably in large part a consequence of anarchist terrorism, or the myth of anarchist terrorism, should we say. And that's really significant. So how we think about that today, you can see it echoing all over the place. So eco terrorism, Donald Trump always argues that the anarchists, eco terrorists or antifa or whatever, the myth of that terrorism is really valuable to states because they can leverage it to impose really draconian policies. And if you watch V for Vendetta, I mean, that's a classic example. That is the story of V for Vendetta.

A (16:57)

So I mean, I mean, I have to say they, they, they're doing the same thing today, right? So if you look at Ukraine, for example, Ukraine is currently being consolidated through this post imperial conflict, right? Where you know, they're trying to sort divorce themselves from Russia. They're trying, they're consolidating themselves through an act of war. And it's. Anarchists have got, have having a really hard time figuring out where they stand in relation to whether people should fight for their freedom within the context of a nation state or not. Now, in the 1850s, it was a similar argument. It wasn't just one country, of course, it was pretty much the whole world. So again, this is an imperial order. Up until about 1919, there were only really 14 nation states in the world. And then after the League of Nations was founded, that was expanded again, but there were so few nation states. And so everybody wanted one because that was the. At the time, everyone thought that it was only through linking a people with a political order that you could have freedom, right? It was taken from Russo. And in one respect, the anarchists agreed, right, because, you know, you need to be a community. And it's only if you self organize and do that together that you can be free. They disagreed that the nation state was the way forward, because they said that, you know, if you adopt the instruments of the master, that you will eventually be subjected to them and that the state is that instrument. So in spite of the progress made through the French Revolution, it didn't fundamentally undermine the class structures, the wealth structures of that society. And the anarchists were making that argument all the way through that period. They were saying, if you want freedom, you can't do it through the institutions of the nation state. Nevertheless, they were more than willing to support insurrectionary nationalist movements. And on the whole, I would say that up until about the 1880s, the relationship between insurrectionary anarchists and nationalist movements were actually very symbiotic. Think about Mexico or China, particularly China up until the 1920s, actually, or Japan or elsewhere. These were insurrectionary movements, anti Imperial insurrectionary movements that were nationalistic in an attempt to bring power to the people. And anarchists agreed with that. But then as that movement emerged and as that history unfolded, anarchists started getting shot. So of course, as soon as the consolidation of power had taken place, the anarchists are saying, right, okay, now you've had your revolution, let's see how we can pass power back to the people. And of course then it was like, oh well, do you know what, I quite like this cushy number I've got here. And they just started shooting the anarchists. And of course the case in point is the Russian Revolution. Russian Revolution led by in large part these sort of anti statist Soviets. The Kronstadt rebellion being just one of them, but also later the Makhna Vista fighting against Stalin and Ukraine. These were movements that were fighting for the liberation of their peoples who were effectively shot by the revolutionaries that they were trying to support. Mao is another classic example. Somebody started off as an anarchist and then decided just to shoot anyone that didn't agree with the line of the, of the Communist Party as he set it up. So you know, that narrative, I mean the narrative I'm giving is a sort of a summary encapsulation of the sorts of dynamics that really cemented the contemporary world order. And we're still dealing with that today. And there isn't really a clear answer to it.

A (20:39)

So, yeah, so anarchism emerges out of the failure of the French Revolution. Right? And I mean, depends what you mean by failure, of course. But the key fact for the anarchists was that it didn't deliver on this promise of liberty, fraternity, equality. By the 1850s, of course there was a coup d' etat and Napoleon's nephew had taken over. This was, you know, he was the sort of Donald Trump of his period. He was resorting to referenda to cement his populist rule. He was appealing to conservative values to cement what he called social projects and so on. You know, this is, you know, it is a classic populist era. And the anarchists of course are incensed by it. But there is something about that revolutionary movement that was incredibly valuable. So things like secularism, things like the emergence of positive science, things like the secularization of law. So these were really important republican initiatives that sort of disempowered the king and in disempowering the king, who felt, of course, that he was the final point of authority. You know, God, king, that was eight. By doing that, of course, everybody had to secularize their modes of political organization. And if you're not beholden to a king or a God or whatever, you have to do it yourselves. And so the anarchists are saying, that's exactly what we want to do. And so they took that ethos of republican balancing, dividing powers into a much broader, deeper account of power as such. So it wasn't just about whether you should be an individual in a state and that the laws should be there. It's about we should all be radical participators in the laws that affect our lives. And that's not a national project, that is a communal project, that's a familial project. That's a project that we should be taking in our workplaces, that we should be undertaking everywhere. It would democratise everything was the placard that we saw in Occupy Wall Street. I mean, that's the ethos that was established by the Paris Commune in 1871, and it had been percolating for a good 15, 20 years before that. So, you know, it's about taking the insights and the secularization of politics from the French Revolution and expanding that throughout modern society. And it was hugely, hugely, hugely influential. I mean, the anarchists changed so much over that period of about 100 years, you know, because Marxism didn't really exist. Social democracy wasn't really a thing until the 20th century. And by that time, the anarchists had been around for 50, 60 years. So, you know, this was a. This was the sort of lingua franca of the, you know, excuse the pun. This was the lingua franca of the radical left right up until the Russian Revolution, if not beyond.

A (23:53)

So this is. I'm basically repeating work that my colleague and mentor, Ruth Kinner has done on Kropotkin. But Mutual Aid was one of the first books I read and it was hugely impressive. I think the key thing is that Russia. I think it's important to recognize that, first of all, Kropotkin was a prince. He's the anarchist formerly known as Prince Peter Kropotkin, right. And he established his career early on in the military, but as an ethologist. So he was a geographer. He studied animals and their behavior was deeply influenced by not only the neurodnic movement in Russia, which was a sort of communal self autonomy movement, but also by the latest scientific advances trying to understand why animals behave the way that they do. And Darwin was the foil, or rather Thomas Huxley was the foil. So Thomas Huxley argued that nature is red in tooth and claw. And on the basis of their studies of the Galapagos, they said, you know, it was like this Malthusian hell where all these animals packed into these tight spaces and they're just constantly warring with each other and, you know, blah, blah. And this is an analogy or it's exactly the same in human species, they said, Hopkins said, just, I mean, I don't know, I've been, I've been studying the Siberian steppe for, he says, you know, for sort of 10 years. I've never seen any of that. Why is that? What am I not seeing? And so his studies of Arabic behavior were in a completely different context, right. And he was influenced by a very different set of ideas about how people cooperate under conditions of scarcity and structures of, you know, where there are no structures of power, for example, but there is intense scarcity. He says that what you see more often is cooperation and mutual aid. And that what Darwin had hinted towards it, but what Thomas Huxley had missed was that it's not interspecies conflict that you're seeing. So it's not conflict between lizards in the Galapagos, it's conflict between lizards and other species. And actually conflict within those species is, is not violent and deadly. It's only humans that do that. So he said, right, so what is going on? Why do humans kill each other in conditions of scarcity, but nobody else does? And he looks and he says, well, actually if you think about that, when you look at the most successful animal species, the most successful animal species are those that cooperate. And those that cooperate in vast numbers are the ones that proliferate. And he says, if you look at human society, you see the same. And actually what you see is not only is it a struggle for survival, but that struggle for survival is quintessentially driven by and sustained through mutual aid. And that mutual aid is what is galvanizing communities, enables them to persist over time. And if we miss that important element of evolution, then we can't account for the Persistence of human societies. And so he says, right, so what is it that makes us fight each other? And so then he goes back to the Middle Ages and has a look at the way in which the old guild systems and the city states of Italy were set up and the autonomy that they had in the Middle Ages and says that what, we've lost all of that because suddenly the profit motive takes over. People are expropriated from their communal lands, power and authority is centralized, and all of those things produce crises that it's very difficult for individuals and communities to sustain. So if you're facing a condition of scarcity in Italy in the 1600s, the 15, 1400s, you know, it's very difficult. You're subsistence most of the time. If you're overtaxed and you hit a bad year of harvest, you know you're in real trouble. But all of that is exacerbated when you have parasitical overlords who are taking their cut and offering nothing back to the society. And he says that essentially the nation state is that writ large. Right? So that process then, over a period of 300 years, was essentially the consolidation of power to protect the interests of the few who contribute nothing to society, at least in its day to day reproduction, and then demand their cut and can produce nothing else. And so the society is always on the back foot. We're always mortgaged to these payments we have to make to those that don't contribute to society. So whether that's landlordism or whether that's your boss at work, your pay is only ever enough to keep you alive. It's not enough to allow you to take over the factory, it never would be. And so that dynamic becomes structural and that mutual aid that we need becomes stretched and strained. And it's because we're then always under pressure that we find it harder and harder to support each other. But we've always find a way, he says. So revolutionary moments then are those moments where mutual aid comes to the fore, where we realize that we've been expropriated. These parasites are taking off. That's the moment the French Revolution then is that moment where people understand that power is theirs if they cooperate. The world moves fast, your workday even faster. Pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data. Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create and summarize so you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your your best work. Learn more@Microsoft.com M365Copilot this episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. 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A (30:24)

Yeah, I mean, it depends how you define private property, of course, and it depends how you define anarchism. I mean, you know, there are some anarchists who are pro private property. There are some who are anti private property. There are some who say they're anti private property, but who actually defend it, and there are those who say they're for it. But actually, when you look at the detail, there's no such thing as private property there. I mean, it's complicated. I think we need to understand what private property is. So private property is essentially something. Where to start, Private property didn't drop out of the sky. It's not a natural right. It's not something that was given to us as a. I mean, throughout the Enlightenment period, the argument was made that actually private property was something that God had given us, particularly the industrious, particularly white people in the European Northwest. Right. And that private property was the gift that they were giving to the rest of the world. Because you're stabilizing property relations and, you know, you're enforcing them and so on, and everybody's going to be happy. This is balmy. You know, nothing dropped out of the sky. The private property rights don't enforce themselves. And the dominion that's at the heart of private property is the problem. Now it gets complicated. But cutting a long story short, most anarchists argue that property relations are communal by definition. Okay, so I only respect your property rights because I do. Sorry, let me rephrase that. You only have property rights because I respect them. It may be that I respect your property rights because there's somebody over there holding a gun. I get that. But in principle, it doesn't change the principle that I have to respect that in order for your property rights to persist. And that is the same across all forms of society. Fundamentally, property rights are relational, communal, and defined. More often than not through an implicit threat of violence. And I should imagine that that would be the same for an anarchist society, whatever it is, whether you can take violence completely out of societies. I mean, that's perhaps for another podcast, but this is my view, is that there would be some form of implicit threat of violence that would sustain all property relations. But under an anarchist position, property rights do not inher in the individual. So it's not me, it's not my property, it's our property. It's because of that communal recognition of property relations that it's our property. So it's only because you can assert it as mine with a gun that it becomes private in that respect. I mean, it's not empirically, it's not private, obviously, because you need that man to hold the gun. So. Right. So this is, if you think about that in the context of the state, right? So the only reason that the landed bourgeoisie have access to huge amounts of land is because they're willing to pay taxes to the state that will defend those property rights through the use of paramilitary forces, the police, the army, whatever it happens to be. That relationship is symbiotic. You can't have one without the other. So the state wouldn't exist without the bourgeoisie because they need to pay taxes, they need to buy the state debt and so on for the state to persist and vice versa. And both of them are parasitical upon the people who have to do the work to make those things create value. So what the anarchists are arguing is that private property in principle doesn't exist. This is certainly Proudhon's argument. It doesn't exist. There's no such thing as privateness. There is only communal relationships. The question then is, how should we organise them? And if you care about things like fraternity, mutual aid, equality, horizontality, then that would make you an anarchist, and then this implies particular forms of property relations. If, on the other hand, you're a communist, you would argue that everything has to be centralized, that there has to be a principle of, let's say, distributed justice that determines who should get what when and where. And that ought to drive the communalization of property. So, for example, in China, there is no such thing as private property as such, because the state owns all the land. That means that then they have to come up with principles that determine how you can own and transfer property independently of that state ownership of the land. This is the fudge that they've been trying to deal with for the last 50, 60 years. So the anarchists have a very different Approach. Right. It's just that we always need to collaboratively, to collaboratively determine the property relations that we think best suit our needs. So I'm not going to come into your room and take your toothbrush or use it and then put it back in the pot, you know, I'm not going to. And that's, you know, it's not because it's your property that I wouldn't do that. It's because that's just a really dumb thing to do. And those sorts of rules around property use are implicit, they're implied, they're part of normal practice. You know, they don't take much to enforce. It's the more tricky ones, like, you know, should I always leave my front door open? Or, you know, those sorts of things are much harder to determine. But the principle of property is not the best one for resolving those questions. Best one that the anarchists say for resolving that problem of whether you should open the door or not is a principle of collaborative mutual aid in your neighbourhood to ensure that you feel safe with your neighbours or with non neighbours for that matter. And that is a much more important way of addressing questions of, let's say, property infringement and so on, than resorting always to the idea that your property rights are sacrosanct.

A (37:37)

Sorry, yeah, no, no, that's it, yeah. I mean, so the solution at the time was to bear in mind it wasn't just about colonization. It was also about the emergence of the industrial revolution in the 19th century, about the development of factories, the industrialization of production, of distribution, and of course, massive infrastructural works like railroads. The Suez Canal is a great example because sort of driven by European colonization. But the workers there were radical anarchists often. So much of the Egyptian anarchist movement has its origins in that construction of the Suez Canal. And the interesting thing about this is of course that some of the most literate, well educated people at the time were the industrial working class, but they were also the most mobile. So they would move around the world and as they moved around the world, they developed these syndicates of workers and that eventually became the anarchist syndicalist movement. So those small syndicates then decided to join mass movements. Sorel has a really great chapter on this where the anarchists joined the movement. So there's a whole lot of stuff. Fernand Peloutier has written about this too. There's so much writing on the way the anarchists transformed industrial relations at the beginning of the 20th century by sort of anarchizing unions, by making them grassroots, by making them answerable to their members. And that transformed labour relations because suddenly bosses couldn't rely on union leaders to keep the workers in control or in line. And the anarchists were driving forward radical progressive movements like, you know, the fight for the eight hour day, the fight for the five day week, or you know, you know, gender representation, opening labor unions to minority communities or majority communities. You know, these were radical progressive movements that were led within unions. And the anarcho syndicalist union became the sort of microcosm of, of the new society. So your union wasn't just the place where, you know, you organized your workplace. Your union, because you paid subs, was also going to give you education, provide you with medical insurance, would also pay for movement for all Sorts of things. The union provided the law and it was seen as the sort of the embryo of the new society. And of course, classically in the IWW constitution it says, you know, building the new in the shell of the old. This was a classic statement, sort of an archa syndicalist direct action or propaganda by the deed or pre figuration at that period. But of course it was hugely, hugely challenging for the authorities. And so, you know, what you see all the way through the 1920s up to the Second World War is really an attempt to stamp down and crush those revolutionary syndicalist unions all the way through to the Spanish Revolution where you had 2 million anarchists in the CNT. You know, this was, this is an existential threat to Europe. It's why Hitler and Mussolini went into Spain as quickly as they did. Because if you, you know, if, if they'd won those 2 million members in the CNT, you know, this would have radically transformed Europe, you know, 50 years, 100 years before. You know, we're seeing some of that today, but you know, it still feels pretty authoritarian. But at the time this was existential. So why the Americans and the British never got involved in the Spanish Civil War, they would have much rather that Mussolini and Franco and Hitler smashed the anarchists and have to deal with that revolutionary movement on their own home soil.

A (43:41)

Well, I mean, actually it's not quite that simple. So during the Cold War, I mean this was anarchism's sort of the, the down, the lowest point, if you like. I mean, you know, there were anarchist subcultural movements, don't get me wrong, okay, so all the way through the Cold War, the emergence of punk music, for example, in the 70s, you know, there was anti authoritarian non aligned movements that were, that were anarchist and there were a whole bunch of Maoist anarchist terrorist organizations through the 80s. But it wasn't a mass movement as such until the end of the Cold War. And things changed. And the reason for that of course is because the Soviet Union collapsed and the Soviet Union had a monopoly that it enforced on socialist doctrine. They also funded radical movements that were more in line with the Comintern and that in turn marginalized the anarchist movement. So when the Soviet Union collapsed, that opened up a space for the anarchists once more. And so what you find then from the end of the 1980s through to the early 1990s is on the one hand you've got this emergence of the sort of new liberal era, the end of history, where suddenly the world is going to become globalized in a sort of European way. And on the other hand you have this flourishing, this anti establishment, anti globalization, anti liberal anarchist infused radical left movement that is no longer aligned to the Soviet Union. And this was a surprise to a lot of people. So it was Seattle. 99 is the moment that people often sort of attribute. Suddenly everybody sees the anarchists again. That's not entirely true because they've been around forever. I think the really key thing is that this was anarchist organization. It wasn't just the rioting or the property damage that occurred in Seattle. It was also the. The massive coalitions that had been organized between labor unions, indigenous movements, you know, food sovereignty movements, you know, anti imperialist movements, anti. You know, I mean, there were so many different cohorts, and they'd been more or less organized on a broadly horizontal basis. And that really transformed the way in which people thought about the possibilities of radical action. And then from 99 through to the early 2010s, you know, that's when you see a new heyday of anarchist anti globalization movement. You know, the anarchists are everywhere, essentially, and much more prominent in the public imagination than perhaps they were in terms of brute numbers. But nevertheless, you know, what you're seeing is that slowly, slowly, anarchist ideas become part of the normal language of the left. You know, it's much more common these days that you'll be talking about participation, participatory modes of politics, horizontality, consensus. All of these sorts of things were anathema to party politics, to the Politburo, to the Comintern, analysis and practice of revolutionary politics. But now it is much more part of what we take for granted in terms of how people should be organizing, inviting as many views as possible, trying to find consensus, trying to undermine hierarchies so that people have an opportunity to have a voice. That's what's behind all sorts of struggles for recognition in contemporary politics worldwide. And much of that has a much more anarchist ethos than it does a more conventional, let's say, liberal or communist one.

A (47:32)

Yeah, I mean, it's just everywhere, isn't it? I mean, that's the. I mean, it's hard to recognize it if you're not looking for it, right? But consider, for example, I mean, if you go to the end of the credits of the Matrix movie, okay, the first one, the second one, and the third, you will see that the production company that the Wachowskis set up to produce those movies was called A Narcos Productions, okay? Now if you think about the legacy, the Matrix wasn't invented out of nowhere. It has echoes in the Ghost in the Shell Japanese anime also written by an anarchist. You also see this as echoes from surrealism. This is also echoes from the sort of radical science fiction of people like Ursula Le Guin, but also further back and more recently, people like E and M. Banks, you know, you see the anarchist ethos within not just those movies, but also within music. Think, you know, don't even have to think about punk. I mean, you know, John Cage is one of the most famous American composers of the 20th century, was most definitely an anarchist. And you think about, then, you know, it's, God, I just get overwhelmed by how much of modern culture seems to be an anarchist influenced. And it's really striking that we don't see it that way. And it's often the case that the people that produce this sort of material don't self identify as anarchists, at least not openly. And yet they infuse their works with these sort of libertarian, anti authoritarian ethos that is part and parcel of what we would call maybe a liberal society. But the politics of it is so much stronger if you dig in and have a look at where, where they're directing their anger. And the V for Vendetta, of course, that came out during the war on terror and you can see how terrorism and the use of state terror to suppress populations. Originally this was written during the poll tax riots in the UK in the 1980s, but as it was rewritten and broadcast during the War on Terror, you get a very different sense of what the power dynamics are in society and how they're used to suppress us. And it's written by an anarchist. It's not particular. I mean, you can't tell it's an anarchist unless I can't remember if V actually calls himself an anarchist. But it's not just there. I was overwhelmed by the details a second ago, now gone completely blank about. I challenge anyone that's listening to this to have a think. And I bet you within a minute you've come up with other anarchist popular culture. Chumbawamba all right. Tub thumping I get knocked out and I get up again. They are an anarchist band, okay? And it's one of the, you know, highest selling songs of the 90s. It's like a, you know, it's an anthem, more or less. I mean, you know, I could, I could go on, but anyway, I'll leave it to your listeners to have a think about it, but think about anarchism and Art, anarchism in education, it's transformed education. The way we think about, you know, student centered learning, I mean, that's anathema to most centralized learning thinking that students can actually direct their own learning. You know, this is norma practice in most decent schools. And that's what, you know, that's broadly an anarchist position that's been around since William Godwin in the, in the 1780s.

A (50:59)

Yeah, so the very short introduction has four chapters that kind of deal with, you know, how do anarchists deal with public goods? Well, how do they provide law and order? How do anarchists think about education, about the, you know, the regulation of work and health as well. And one of the key things, I suppose the key message is that, you know, it doesn't have to be nationalization or privatization. There is another way of thinking about this. You can think about organizing public goods through communal self organization. And in fact, most of the world is currently organized in that way. So some of the most recent research by a guy called Thomas Risser and his wife Tanya Bertzel, they've demonstrated that something like, let's say 80% of people on this planet exist without a Weberian state. Somebody who can use legitimate force to govern the distribution of goods or to regulate the distribution of public utilities. Most people on the planet don't have any of those things, and yet they get by. So Eleanor Ostrom's written a lot about this. She won a Nobel Prize or the fake Nobel in economics for her work on this. The anarchists really are trying to systematize a way of thinking that is implicit in all non state activities throughout human history. So wherever there's not been a final point of authority, in one small a sense, that is anarchistic. So whether that's, you know, collecting dustbins, whether that is, you know, providing health, providing health insurance or communal health centers, you know, you don't need a state to do those things. And what we're, the anarchists argue is that we're giving up our autonomy to the state and allowing the state to dominate, or private property for that matter. If we privatize those public goods, we are essentially divesting ourselves in the autonomy we need in order to make the world that we want to see. And so in each of those areas, anarchists argue that deploying principles of mutual aid, prefiguration, equality, horizontality all of those things bring a form of community that enables us to work together better to achieve the goals that we set for for ourselves in ways that are less damaging to the environment because it's small scale, less damaging to the environment because it's not high intensive use of fossil fuels in order to fuel consumerist societies and so on and so forth. I mean, I could go on forever, but I'd encourage you to read the book instead, perhaps.