Why we are anarchists

IF YOU get all your information from the mass media, you may think that anarchism is all about violence or chaos – but in fact the opposite is true.

Anarchists want a peaceful, happy society – but know that this is not possible under the corrupt, hypocritical, power-crazed system we currently live under.

We say that most human beings are basically decent and responsible and that, left to our own devices, we are quite capable of existing in harmonious societies, much like the rest of the natural world.

But something has gone wrong. Badly wrong. Across the world today people are suffering from poverty, from horrific living conditions, from war, from oppression, from pollution and from the sheer misery of existing in a society spiralling constantly downwards from disaster to disaster.

What sort of future is there for our children and grandchildren?

Anarchists understand that this mess is not going to be solved by voting for useless political parties at elections, by tinkering with a few details or introducing compromise reforms.

We aim for nothing less than the restoration of true democracy – power arising from below, from the grassroots, from the people. Government imposed from above is a crime against us all.

Some ill-informed critics see a contradiction between opposing the state and opposing the powerful financiers and Big Business interests that enslave humanity and wreck our environment.

But, if you think about it, states and governments are in fact the very tools with which the capitalists dominate and rob us.

Corporations don’t have to pay to protect their own financial interests.

Instead, they rely on governments to do it for them, whether by sending armies to secure natural resources (like oil), in foreign countries or by unleashing police violence to crush democratic protest against injustice.

And, as a final insult, these governments are funded by the hard work and taxes of the ordinary people – while the Fat Cats themselves use all kinds of tricks to wriggle out of paying their share of the taxes which are used for their benefit.

To find out more about the anarchist struggle for freedom and justice in theory and in practice, try some of the websites in the links section.