Chris Wyatt
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Social anarchism
Classical to contemporary
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The chapter begins by introducing the key ideals and principles central to social anarchist discourse. It then suggests there are certain ideas in Cole’s guild socialist writings that, suitably revised, offer a sound base upon which to build a new model of social anarchism. This serves as the essential premise upon which to frame a specific anarchist-Marxist dialogue, which seeks to breathe new life into the classical anarchist project. Bakunin and Kropotkin received Marx’s argument that the relations within and between social classes are the foundational inequalities through which capitalism systematically reproduces itself sympathetically, yet at the same time they defined class more extensively, and they fiercely rejected his prescribed role for a communist revolutionary state, spearheaded by an authoritarian vanguard. Here the chapter puts forward a rationale for rejecting state communism whilst retaining Marx’s penetrating critique of the capitalist mode of production. Both anarchism and Marxism are committed to instigating a world beyond inequality and exploitation, where production need not be an alienating experience. Although tensions between the two schools of anti-capitalist thought remain, especially on the question of prefigurative politics, the chapter explains that at the same time, there are certain ideal and maxims that are held in common, which consist of themes central to social anarchism and non-statist communism. The resulting conception constellation regards Marx’s sophisticated analyses of political economy and the anarchist suspicion of the main institutions of the modern state as mutually enriching. It is this amalgamation that permeates the entire constitution of associational anarchism. In sum, associational anarchism’s plural democracy is the practical application of the key ideals of class-struggle anarchism, and it is the libertarian edge of democratic Marxism.

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Associational anarchism

Towards a left-libertarian conception of freedom

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