Terms developed or deployed within anarchist analysis. This glossary is designed to be self-contained — a reader starting from any entry should be able to follow links to understand every concept they encounter.
What anarchism opposes
- Domination — one party’s self-determination constrained by another’s power
- Hierarchy — the arrangement of positions that produces domination
- Authority — the claimed right to command
- Coercion — the use of force or deprivation to compel behavior
- Obedience — the trained habit of complying with authority
- The state — the institutional monopoly on legitimate force
- Capitalism — the economic system of private ownership and wage labor
- Property — ownership claims enforced against everyone else
- Class — the division between owners and workers
- Exploitation — the extraction of value from others’ work
- Colonialism — the domination and dispossession of one people by another
- Patriarchy — the structure of gendered domination
- Violence — whose force counts as legitimate and whose as criminal
- Ideology — the ideas that make domination appear natural
What anarchism claims
- Self-organization — people’s capacity to coordinate without command
- Freedom — living without domination
- Autonomy — self-governance at individual and collective scales
- Voluntary association — social bonds without coercion
- Power — the capacity to act, distinguished from domination
Practices
- Mutual aid — horizontal cooperation among equals
- Direct action — acting without appealing to authority
- Solidarity — standing together against shared domination
- Prefigurative politics — means embodying ends
- Armed joy — the experience of freedom in the act of resistance
- The general strike — collective withdrawal of labor
- Informal organization — non-permanent, non-bureaucratic organizing
- Revolution — the transformation of social relations
- Refusal — withdrawing compliance as a political act
- Consensus — decision-making without hierarchy
- Federation — horizontal coordination through revocable mandates
- Affinity group — small trust-based organizing unit
- Dual power — building alternative institutions alongside the existing order
- Propaganda of the deed — action as communication of political ideas
- Expropriation — collective reclamation of wealth and means of production
- Illegalism — refusal to recognize the authority of law
Currents
- Anarcho-communism — collective ownership, distribution by need
- Anarcho-syndicalism — labor organizing through worker-run unions
- Insurrectionary anarchism — informal organization, immediacy of attack
- Anarcha-feminism — gender domination as inseparable from other hierarchies
- Green anarchism — ecological destruction as inseparable from social domination
- Anarcho-nihilism — resistance without the requirement of hope
Conditions and structures
- Labor — human effort, and its commodification under capitalism
- Bureaucracy — hierarchy made administrative
- Speed — velocity as a structure of domination
- Temporal autonomy — self-determined relationship to time
- Legitimacy — manufactured consent concealing domination
- The commons — resources governed collectively, destroyed by enclosure
- Recuperation — how dominant systems absorb radical practices
- The symbolic order — the system of meaning that makes domination appear natural
- The pleasure principle — homeostatic management of satisfaction; what drive exceeds
- Affect — the felt, bodily dimension of domination and resistance
- Psychoanalysis — the theoretical framework for desire, drive, and the symbolic order