http://www.anarchistcommunitarian.net/whatisanarchism.shtml What Is Anarchism? First off, all notions that anarchism stands for chaos, disorder, violence, laissez-faire capitalism, structurelessness, terrorism, and "everyone for themselves" needs to be abandoned in order for one to have a clear understanding of what anarchism is actually about. In fact, it can be said that anarchism is actually the opposite of all of that. However, despite this fact, a great many mis-conceptions, mis-understandings, slander, and media-portrayals of negative stereotypes of anarchists has occurred all over the world for hundreds of years. The cumulative effect of all of this has led to most people considering anarchism, especially "anarchy", as one of those things that I listed above. With most people having this negative prejudice towards anarchism, many naturally do not want to try and learn anything about it, and hence the cycle of ignorance is perpetuated. Anarchism is the social, economic and political theory that all forms of hierarchy, domination, authority, and coercion are wrong and should be abolished and replaced with new forms of inter-acting that are based on voluntary cooperation, direct participatory democracy, free association and mutual aid. Because of these core beliefs, anarchism advocates the complete abolition of all forms of capitalism, government, racism, sexism and homophobia. Anarchism sees capitalism and government as being institutions fundamentally based upon hierarchy, domination, authority, and coercion, whereas it views racism, sexism and homophobia as being inter-personal expressions of the same things. Anarchism sees order and organization without authority and government as being possible, desirable and, to some extent, already existing in some small forms today. Anarchism seeks to create new forms and structures of relating and organizing without government and authority, as well as expanding upon the already existing ones. There is a wide and diverse variety of anarchists, anarchist beliefs, tactics, and visions of a future anarchist society. There are eco-anarchists, union-centered anarchists, anti-God anarchists, Christian and Jewish anarchists, pacifist anarchists, animal rights-centered anarchists, class struggle-centered anarchists, pro-technology anarchists, anti-technology anarchists, etc etc. However, the things that unites all of these anarchists is the core beliefs that I wrote above(although each individual anarchist would think about and express this core unifying sentiment in a different and unique way). To learn more about anarchism, I suggest that you read this essay. For an even larger and more in-depth introduction to anarchism, I recommend that you visit An Anarchist FAQ. Some good, useful and informative anarchist web-sites that I recommend are: Liberty For The People Anarchy Archives Spunk Library Infoshop.org
