Historical

How did this come to be? What were the conditions, struggles, and contingencies that produced the current arrangement?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

Anarchism is usually caricatured as chaos and bomb-throwing. Its actual history is a history of construction: millions of people running farms, factories, schools, and whole regions without bosses or a state. This lens traces that history, from Proudhon naming the tradition, through the Spanish collectives of 1936 and the Makhnovist free soviets, to the living experiments of the Zapatistas and Rojava. These are not utopias on paper. People built them, defended them, and in most cases had them crushed, and the record of how they worked is the strongest argument the tradition has.

Anchor questions

• Anarchism is often caricatured. What did anarchists actually believe and do?
• In Spain in 1936, millions ran farms and factories without bosses. How, and what happened?
• What did the Zapatistas build in Chiapas, and how has it lasted thirty years?
• Why do the histories we inherit leave the cooperative and anarchist experiments out?
• When have ordinary people governed themselves, and what did it look like?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise. “Free to borrow” means a free Internet Archive account and a renewable one-hour loan.

Books

• Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809 to 1865), What is Property? (1840). The book that made “anarchist” a self-chosen label, arguing “property is robbery” and sketching a society of free contract and mutualist association rather than command. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
• Sam Dolgoff (1902 to 1990), The Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936 to 1939 (1974). Firsthand accounts of the CNT-FAI agrarian and industrial collectives, the fullest large-scale anarchist experiment in constructive, prefigurative economics. The anchor for this lens. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
• Gaston Leval (1895 to 1978), Collectives in the Spanish Revolution (1975). A detailed eyewitness study of how villages, factories, and public services actually ran themselves under collectivization. Concrete ground for discussing what mutual aid looks like at scale. Free: libcom.org
• Peter Arshinov (1887 to 1937), History of the Makhnovist Movement (1918 to 1921) (1923). An insider history of the Ukrainian peasant anarchist insurgency around Nestor Makhno, its free soviets and land practices, and its crushing by the Bolshevik state. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
• Emma Goldman (1869 to 1940), Living My Life (1931). Goldman’s autobiography, the classic inside narrative of the US anarchist movement, its organizing, repression, and internal life from the 1880s onward. Free, and in the public domain: its US copyright was never renewed. theanarchistlibrary.org

Anarchism outside Europe

The experiments above are Spanish, Ukrainian, and Mexican. The tradition is wider than that, and the history has mostly been written as though it were not.

• Alan MacSimoin, The Korean Anarchist Movement (1991). The Shinmin autonomous region in Manchuria ran a federated zone of roughly two million people through village, district, and area councils from 1929 to 1931, until the Japanese army and Stalinists between them destroyed it. It is the second-largest anarchist experiment ever attempted and almost nobody has heard of it. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
• libcom.org, Shifu and the Possibilities for Chinese Anarchism (2005). Liu Shifu organized the Cock Crow Society in Guangzhou in 1912 and printed anarchist anthologies five thousand at a time. Anarchism shaped the early Chinese labour movement before the Communist Party eclipsed it and then wrote it out. Free: libcom.org
• libcom.org, Kotoku Shusui: Founder of Modern Anarchism in Japan (2005). A journalist who turned anarchist reading Kropotkin in prison, wrote an early critique of imperialism, and was hanged in the 1911 High Treason Incident on evidence the state largely invented. Free: libcom.org

For African stateless traditions and for Zomia, see the theoretical lens, where Mbah and Igariwey’s African Anarchism and Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed make the argument that statelessness is something people chose and built rather than something they had not got round to leaving.

The women of the Spanish Revolution

• Martha A. Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain (1991). Mujeres Libres had 20,000 members, ran its own literacy schools and its own newspapers, and was told by the movement around it that the woman question could wait until after the revolution. Ackelsberg built the book on interviews with the women who did not wait. Read it directly against Dolgoff and Leval above, who describe the same revolution with the women mostly offstage. Free to borrow: archive.org

Primary sources

• Peter Kropotkin (1842 to 1921), The Commune of Paris (1880). A short anarchist reading of the 1871 Commune as a living, if incomplete, prefiguration of federated self-government, and of the lessons its defeat holds for later movements. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
• EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation), First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle (1994). The New Year’s Day 1994 declaration that opened the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, the founding document of the most influential recent experiment in indigenous autonomy and self-government. Free PDF: schoolsforchiapas.org

Films and documentaries

• “Rojava, Syria’s Secret Revolution” (Darius Bazargan, BBC Our World, 2014). Roughly 23 minutes, about 432,000 views. A reputable on-the-ground look at the Kurdish-led experiment in stateless, egalitarian self-government in northern Syria. youtube.com/watch?v=fKhjJfH0ra4
• “The Zapatista Uprising, 30 Years Later” (Modern Insurgent, 2024). Roughly 42 minutes, about 210,000 views. A recent documentary on the EZLN’s three decades of Indigenous autonomy in Chiapas, a companion to the First Declaration. youtube.com/watch?v=bQaJYlgKp_A

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially histories of anarchism in Latin America beyond the Zapatistas, in South Asia, and in the Middle East, and of everyday cooperative and communal experiments. The Korean, Chinese, and Japanese movements are now here but each rests on a single short account; longer histories would be worth more.