Law and Order Among the Anarchists
13th December 2022
Anarchy gets a bad rap, mainly because the word sounds cool and gets used as a synonym for chaos, disorder and violence. A lot of people will laugh when you bring up the idea of anarchist leadership, or anarchist organizations. When you introduce yourself as an anarchist you often wind up needing to cover a fair amount of rhetorical ground just to convince people you’re not a violent maniac or an adult with the brain of a teenage skateboard punk from a Disney Channel Original movie.
There are a lot of different ways to ‘do’ anarchy, but the general goal is always the same: the dismantling of unjust hierarchies. Murray Bookchin was an American. The ideas that wound up shaping the system in Rojava were originally conceived because they were the system he thought could best take hold in the United States. Bookchin saw massive, dense urban areas making laws for rural mountain-dwellers hundreds of miles away. He saw small-town voters forcing their beliefs on cosmopolitan city-dwellers via legislation. The goal of Libertarian Municipalism was to break down these unfair hierarchies.
Is there such a thing? Read and find out.