"A" Is For Anarchism

Dervish.

Tolstoyan.



While abolition of the State is a utopian ideal, an achievable objective--indeed, one that is achieved by ordinary people everywhere and all the time--is to make the State largely irrelevant to the manner in which daily life is conducted. Those who contribute to the foundation and strengthening of the institutions of civil society (formal and informal, temporary or enduring) provide ordinary citizens with bulwarks against State power. In doing so, they cut space for the exercise of individual freedoms. That they do this to benefit not only themselves but others makes them socialists, sometimes wittingly but most often unwittingly. Anarchism is not a theory of political chaos but of realized self-determination through the exercise of self-governance.