Oh shit you got me talking political theory. Here we go...

One thing I've observed when people discuss anarchist theory or practice is that it is frequently imbued with a radical absolutism that isn't applied to other political theories. It's common to see people asking how the world could work without any rules, or punishments, or coercion? You almost never encounter honest questions of a similar type for, say, socialism, e.g. how will I ever get anything done if I need the state to plan everything I do? Or the capitalist case, how would the world work if everything is someone else's property? No serious socialist believes the state should plan everything. No serious capitalist believes that all things should be private property for profit. No serious anarchist believes that the world can be free of all regulation.

So why is this? I have a two part theory. When the socialist revolutions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were unfolding, the socialist camp split between authoritarian and anarchist socialists. In the end the authoritarians (communists) won that conflict and expelled the anarchists. This left the world with two camps, the communists, championed by the Soviet Union, and the capitalists, championed by the United States. Both camps considered anarchists villainous enemies, and both camps spent the next 50+ years producing voluminous propaganda extolling their own virtues, and denigrating their enemies. This meant that anarchists were being dunked on by two super powers for most of the 20th century without anyone of even remotely similar influence to respond. As a result basically everyone's understanding of anarchism is a caricature produced by anarchism's opponents.

The second part of this theory is the fact that there really are a lot of self-described anarchists who adhere to this cartoon version of anarchism! I find this harder to explain. Perhaps it is that anarchism as an active political force was effectively destroyed during this period, and today's anarchists are in some significant part the people who were exposed to the cartoon anarchism propaganda, and thought, hey I like that. It could be that political anarchism has no influence and thus no responsibility to achieve anything, so why not indulge in ideological purity contests. I don't really know.

This bums me out, because I think practical anarchist theory has a lot to like. Not a theory that says I may do whatever I want whenever I want, and anything which impinges on that is oppression. Rather one that says that imbalanced power relations are necessary and sufficient for exploitation and oppression, and so we should build political structures that distribute power as broadly as possible. That we should minimize hierarchy and coercion to enable people to spontaneously organize to solve problems.

And when spontaneous organization isn't sufficient for the problem, an anarchism that has the practical humility to apply different techniques. Utopia is a direction, not a destination.