What if the way you build the new world matters as much as taking the old one apart? This theme covers anarchism in its many forms, mutual aid as practice and theory, prefigurative politics, cooperatives, communes, and the long tradition of building what you want to see while resisting what you do not. It puts these traditions in conversation with the strategic debates in The State, Strategy, and Power, and it is, of all the themes, the most about doing.
How to use this theme
This folder organizes resources by lens. See the Pedagogy document for what the lenses do and why they are structured this way.
- Experiential: What is your experience with this? What does the room already know?
- Historical: How did this come to be?
- Theoretical: How do we understand and analyze it?
- Practical: What is happening on the ground and what are people doing about it?
- Liberatory: What would it mean to overcome or transform this?
A session does not need to use all five lenses. A study circle may move across them. Use what serves the room.
Anchor questions
These questions have proven useful for opening up this theme. They are starting points, not a script. Take the ones that fit the room and leave the rest.
- When have you seen people take care of each other without being told to, or paid to?
- What do you already share, trade, or do for free with the people around you?
- Have you ever been part of something run without a boss? How did decisions get made?
- What does the word “anarchy” bring up for you? Where did that picture come from?
- What have people built to meet needs that neither the market nor the state would meet?
- What would it mean to start living the world you want now, instead of waiting?
- Can people really run their own lives together, without rulers? What would it take?
Recommended sequences
Suggested arcs for groups new to this theme. Adapt freely. Every session opens with a check-in and closes with reflection (see the pedagogy document). Because this theme is about doing, consider ending the arc by actually starting or joining a project.
Single-session entry point (2 hours). Start experiential: a time someone was helped, or helped others, with nothing expected back, and a time they made decisions in a group without a boss. Read Graeber’s two-page Are You an Anarchist? aloud. Watch a short explainer together (Andrewism’s What is Mutual Aid?). Close by asking what the room could build. See the single-session template.
Six-week study circle. Week 1 experiential and framing (the cooperation we already practice; what are we studying and why). Week 2 historical: the great experiments, using Dolgoff on the Spanish collectives and the Zapatista materials. Weeks 3 to 4 theoretical: what anarchism and mutual aid are, reading Kropotkin, Malatesta, and Graeber. Week 5 practical: how to do it, working through the consensus and mutual-aid handbooks. Week 6 liberatory: visions of a free society and the internal debates, staging platformism, synthesis, and insurrection against each other. See the six-week template.
Weekend intensive. Compress the arc above into a Friday-evening-through-Sunday structure, with the historical and theoretical work on Saturday and the practical and liberatory work on Sunday. A screening of Living Utopia or No Gods No Masters works well as a Saturday-evening anchor. See the weekend-intensive template.
Related themes
This theme connects closely to several others:
- The State, Strategy, and Power holds the debate over the state that this theme answers with prefiguration and dual power.
- Labor, Work, and Organizing shares the syndicalist and council traditions and the practice of workers running production themselves.
- Ecology and the Climate Crisis takes up Bookchin’s social ecology and the solarpunk vision of an ecological, self-governed society.
- Critical Pedagogy and the Practice of Liberation shares the commitment to horizontal, non-hierarchical ways of learning and deciding together.
- How Capitalism Works introduces Kropotkin and the anarchist-communist vision this theme develops.
- Origins: Dialectics, Marx, and the Workers’ Movement holds the other side of the First International’s great split, Bakunin against Marx.
- Revolution in Power carries the libertarian-socialist critique of the party-state and the memory of Kronstadt.
Status
First pass across all five lenses, and it may be a while before there is a second. If you have run a session on this theme, consider contributing back what you used and what you learned.