We think of anarchy as being against centralised power at all costs. But, argues philosopher Melanie Erspamer, for anarchism to be effective in the world, it needs institutionalisation. What is more, our institutions need anarchism - its principles, its strategies and its values - in order to prevent problematic concentrations of power. Anarchy is an anti-power philosophy. But, paradoxically, anarchists must take positions of relative power, in order to counter the monopolistic forces of government and large corporations today.

Like communism, anarchism emerged in mid-19^th century Europe with the new workers' movement, entered the arena of party politics after World War I, and by the end of World War II retreated from the arena of democratic or government politics, becoming a possible current for social movements and eventually academia. By then, in a process beginning already with Marx and Bakunin’s disagreement during the First International, it had distinguished itself from communism, while also having been similarly vilified and diminished, associated with chaos and violence. But as the increasing inequality and political dissatisfaction wrought by Western neoliberalism grows, the kids are turning to communism again: and is it time for anarchism too to make a comeback?

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There are a few founding fathers of anarchism (namely, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin) and several moments of historical significance (like that disagreement between Bakunin and Marx, the 1871 Paris Commune, the Spanish collectivist movement before Franco), but no single text or ideology that encompasses all its currents. We may thus be forgiven for asking what is meant by anarchism exactly. Even excluding a certain strain that shares more with Nozickean libertarianism and is completely detached from anarchism’s origins in the labour movement (anarcho-capitalism), we are left with numerous divergences, so that anthropologist David Graeber for instance denied that anarchism forms a single programme. A basic answer focuses on anarchism’s hostility towards the capitalist state. A more nuanced answer notes anarchism’s hostility towards the general organisational tendency that the capitalist state embodies: sedimented hierarchies based around a transcendental justification. Opposition to the domination inherent to sedimented hierarchies is an important, if solely negative, definition, but I would like to point to two sets of difficulties that beset it.

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