Power is the capacity to affect the world and other people. Everyone exercises power: when you persuade someone, care for someone, build something, organize a group, teach a skill, or refuse a demand, you are exercising power. Power is not something anarchism opposes. What anarchism opposes is a specific arrangement of power: domination — power fixed into hierarchical positions that compel obedience.
The distinction is sometimes expressed as power-over versus power-with. Power-over is the capacity to command and be obeyed — the boss who can fire you, the police officer who can arrest you, the landlord who can evict you. It operates through hierarchy: the person with power-over occupies a structural position above the person they command. Power-with is the capacity to act together — the workers who organize a strike, the community that builds a mutual aid network, the friends who coordinate a project. It operates through self-organization: no one is above or below; power is distributed among participants.
Anarchism’s claim is not that power should not exist but that power-over should be abolished and replaced with power-with. This is not utopian: power-with is how most human cooperation already works. Friends, families, informal groups, communities, and whole societies have coordinated through shared decision-making, mutual aid, and voluntary association without anyone holding authority over anyone else. Power-over is not the natural condition — it is a specific historical arrangement maintained by coercion, property, and the training of obedience.
The concentration of power-over is what defines the major institutions anarchism opposes. The state concentrates the power to make laws and enforce them through violence. Capitalism concentrates the power to control work and extract surplus through property ownership. Patriarchy concentrates the power to define gender roles and punish deviation. Colonialism concentrates the power to dispossess peoples of their land, governance, and ways of life. Each is a system for converting distributed power-with into concentrated power-over — and anarchism opposes each for the same structural reason.
Related terms
- Domination — power-over arranged as a system
- Hierarchy — the structure that concentrates power
- Authority — the claimed right to exercise power-over
- Self-organization — power-with in practice
- Coercion — the mechanism that enforces power-over
- Freedom — the condition of power-with without power-over
- Solidarity — the practice of power-with across struggles