What would it mean to overcome or transform this? What have movements imagined, attempted, and built?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes. The school does not resolve the disagreements among traditions. It puts them in front of the room and lets the room think.
This lens asks the largest question the school poses: what would a free society actually look like, and how would it hold together? Kropotkin, Bookchin, and the Zapatistas answer with communes, assemblies, and autonomy; Le Guin answers with a novel that refuses to pretend the answer is easy. And anarchists argue among themselves about how to get there, whether through disciplined organization, a broad synthesis of tendencies, or insurrection without organization at all. Those internal arguments are part of the curriculum.
Anchor questions
- What would a free society actually look like, day to day?
- If not the state, who keeps the peace, builds the roads, cares for the vulnerable?
- Communes, councils, cooperatives, federations: how might people coordinate at scale?
- What do the Zapatistas and Rojava show is possible, and what are their limits?
- Anarchists disagree among themselves. What are the real arguments?
Materials
Free unless marked otherwise. This lens deliberately gathers positions that disagree with each other.
Visions of a free society
- Peter Kropotkin (1842 to 1921), The Conquest of Bread (1892). The classic positive vision of anarchist communism, showing how a society could meet everyone’s needs through voluntary common ownership and distribution according to need. Warm, concrete, and shared with the capitalism theme. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
- Murray Bookchin (1921 to 2006), The Next Revolution (2015). Bookchin’s mature statement of communalism and libertarian municipalism, building a free society through confederated citizen assemblies. The theory behind Rojava, with a foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
- Murray Bookchin, Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview (1991). A short, focused summary of the strategy of neighborhood assemblies and confederal councils, for a group that wants the argument without the full book. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
- EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation), Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona (2005). The Zapatistas’ plainspoken statement of who they are and how they govern themselves from below. A contemporary vision of autonomy grounded in thirty years of practice. Free: enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx
- Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 to 2018), The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974). A novel imagining a functioning anarchist world, Anarres, with honesty about its tensions and failures. The best single prompt for discussing what a free society would feel like to live in. Not free; author page.
The strategic debates within anarchism
The school holds the disagreements open, and anarchism has its own sharp internal ones about organization.
- Errico Malatesta (1853 to 1932), An Anarchist Programme (1920). A concrete organizational statement of anarchist aims and methods, representing the patient, organized, class-struggle current. Shared with The State, Strategy, and Power. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
- Dielo Truda group, Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists (1926). The exiled Russian anarchists’ call for a united, disciplined anarchist organization, the founding text of “platformism.” Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
- Voline (1882 to 1945), The Anarchist Synthesis (1934). The counter-argument to platformism, proposing that anarchist communists, syndicalists, and individualists coexist in one broad federation. Read the two together. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
- CrimethInc., From Democracy to Freedom (2016). An insurrectionary, anti-organizational argument that freedom is not any form of democratic rule but direct self-determination. A sharp contrast with the organized currents above, and a good text to argue over. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
Video
- “How To Build A Solarpunk City” (Andrewism, 2022). Roughly 41 minutes, about 369,000 views. A concrete, hopeful vision of cooperative, ecological, self-governed cities, ideal for the prefigurative and utopian imagination. A bridge to Ecology and the Climate Crisis. youtube.com/watch?v=4UmU1dSe3n0
- “Ursula K. Le Guin’s Defense of Art over Profits” (American Masters, PBS, 2014). Roughly 12 minutes, about 72,000 views. Le Guin’s National Book Award speech, with the line that “we live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable, so did the divine right of kings.” A compact opener to pair with The Dispossessed. youtube.com/watch?v=s2v7RDyo7os
Further reading
For resources behind a paywall, see the note on access.
- Murray Bookchin, Social Ecology and Communalism. Bookchin’s late statement of communalism and social ecology, arguing that ecological crisis originates in human domination and that the answer is confederated municipal assemblies. The free substitute for the Institute for Social Ecology’s paid seminars, and the bridge to the ecology theme. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
Status
First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially accounts of contemporary communes, land projects, and confederations, and speculative and utopian writing beyond Le Guin.