My explanation begins with a thought experiment. Picture a defeated incumbent in, say, Sweden. He summons his cronies to say, "So we lost a stupid election. Big deal! I say we refuse to cede power. If anyone protests, let's kill them." How would his cronies respond?

At first, the cronies would think their leader was joking. A bad joke, but a joke. If he persisted, though, the cronies would deem their leader crazy. The only help they'd offer would be to call his family... or a psychiatrist. If the Swedish leader pulled out a pistol and said, "If you're not with me, you're against me," his cronies would summon the police. If he kept waving his pistol around, the Swedish police would arrest him. End of coup.

Reasonable classical liberals can digest this scholarship and disagree about how well an “ordered anarchy” might work. But whether you cling to Hobbesian notions of a nasty, brutish, and short life in anarchy, or believe anarchy would be libertarian paradise, you have answered only half of the question about anarchy’s desirability. The other half of the question is, “Compared to what government”?

The usual debate involves contrasting a set of beliefs about what anarchy would be like with some version of a minimal state. But nowhere in the world do we observe a pure classical-liberal minimal state. So comparing a belief about anarchy to an unrealized ideal leaves us in the land of irrelevance.

The suggestions, heard often, that the U.N. has promoted peace, pluralism and opportunities for diplomacy are belied at every turn by the institution’s complicity, indeed active fostering, of a new colonialism.

Market anarchists hold what is perhaps a unique perspective on “redistribution,” as it were, one that leans less on easy rhetorical distinctions and rather more on the substantive facts of the relationship between the state and powerful corporate actors. Attacks on individual liberty and free competition actually do translate into an enormous overall redistribution of wealth — yet the redistribution is “upward,” that is, from the vast majority of people, who incidentally produce the vast majority of wealth, to the small few who benefit from American capitalism.

There is no law other than natural law. There is no law other than Justice. There is no law other than the moral law of Right and Wrong, which applies equally to all, whether they purport to represent the People or the State or not, whether they join with a thousand or a million others to do some act or act alone. Anarchism is the rejection of the Divine Right of Kings. Even those who think we should obey the “laws” dictated by the U.S. government think we should do so because it is Right to do so. (Those who think this are of course Wrong, but this is what they think.)

So if you wonder why your CEO has no qualms about collecting a $20 million bonus while downsizing half the workforce and increasing the workloads of everyone else, the answer is simple. On an emotional level, she’s long ago convinced herself that you aren’t even human. People in authority, in their organizational roles, tend to experience the functional equivalent of a psychotic break with reality, and to act like sociopaths toward their subordinates.

Power over others, by its very nature, degrades those who wield it, turns them into monsters, and poisons their every relationship with their fellow human beings. There’s no “reform” that can change that, short of abolishing authority itself. And that’s what we anarchists want to do.

The right wing of the free market movement sees nothing problematic in this. It takes such contracts at face value, treating them as genuine examples of the free, uncoerced contracts between equals so dear to libertarianism. That every aspect of our lives is dominated by giant, powerful, hierarchical institutions is just how things turned out in the “free market;” such institutions are more efficient, see?

Those of us on the left who advocate freed markets beg to differ. The power of these giant authoritarian institutions, whether nominally “private” or not, didn’t “just happen.” It results from a rigged game, an unholy corporatist alliance between big business and the state dating back 150 years or more. Our society and economy came to be dominated by an interlocking directorate of government and corporate oligarchies through the deliberate use of power.

This May Day, take a moment to reflect upon the questions of who actually benefits from the game of politics and what kind of economy we actually have. Have ordinary people seen most of the benefits of state involvement in the economy? Do we have a free market, or a very unfree one?

The answers may surprise many of those in both the mainstream labor and libertarian movements. They may even bring new meaning to the phrase, “workers of the world unite!”

Our rejection of politics is not a product of acedia, but of a careful and deliberate observation of events; we actively, as opposed to passively, abstain from engaging with the “proper channels” of the political process.

The protests materializing around the world in this moment are a reaction, consciously or not, to the chaos bred by political authority. If the state is in fact meant to build the conditions of law and order, then we have to wonder why we live in a world covered by states like Yemen and China, ruled by people like Vladimir Putin.

Though depicted as utopians, obsessed with pie in the sky daydreams, or as bomb-throwing provocateurs of pandemonium, anarchists petition simply for a society in which freedom is the guiding principle. Granted, on its own, that doesn’t mean much, but without aggression against innocents, the state could not exist.

ATS-UK is a blog founded to promote alternative-anarchism within a UK-specific context. Our intention is to form a coalition of dissident tendencies from across the left/right spectrum united in opposition to the British state.

Why pick on anarchists? Why do politicians think you’ll find us scary? Because they find us scary, of course … and with good reason!

If we all were self-reliant and self sufficient, if no forced welfare existed, if taxation was abolished, if positive law was not a part of society, would the manner of men change? If no standing armies were allowed, would wars cease? If the only act of force tolerated were for self-defense, would crime lessen? If none could benefit at the expense of another, would cooperation replace extortion? If no man ruled another, would there be incentive for peaceful and voluntary behavior? In my view, the answer to all these questions is a resounding yes! Would this kind of society be perfect … Of course not, because people are not perfect. No societal system can be perfect. But a system without the state would at least offer us the best chance for a long and peaceful existence, and one without the chains of governmental tyranny.

People who favor markets, as I do, often defend anarchism by arguing that the state’s monopoly of force and law and its taxation of its subjects violate people’s rights. Without dismissing this sort of argument at all, I want to argue that principled people on the political left—the sort of people who could be expected to listen, at least, to arguments from bleeding heart libertarians—should find anarchism attractive precisely because the state unavoidably harms people on a vast scale through its attacks on the poor, its support for corporate privilege, its war making, and its assaults on personal freedom.

If they were forced to admit they are lying about their excuse for imposing government, would they be honest about the true reasons? I doubt it. Would they really admit that they want the power to make people do what they want them to do, and reserve the power to kill those who don't comply. Would they admit that they think they know better how you should run your life than you do. Would they admit, that deep down, they hate people? Or are they even fooling themselves?

There is but one effective way to rid ourselves of the oppressive power of the state. It is not to shoot it to death; it is not to vote it to death; it is not even to persuade it to death. It is rather to starve it to death. Power feeds on its spoils, and dies when its victims refuse to be despoiled. There is much truth in the well-known pacifist slogan, "Wars will cease when people refuse to fight." This slogan can be generalized to say that "government will cease when people refuse to be governed." As Tucker put it, "There is not a tyrant in the civilized world today who would not do anything in his power to precipitate a bloody revolution rather than see himself confronted by any large fraction of his subjects determined not to obey. An insurrection is easily quelled; but no army is willing or even able to train its guns on inoffensive people who do not even gather in the streets but stay back at home and stand back on their rights."

If freedom is really what we anarchists crack it up to be, it shouldn't be necessary to force it down the throat of anyone. What an absurdity! Even so superficial a writer as Agatha Christie recognized that "if it is not possible to go back [from freedom], or to choose to go back, then it is not freedom." A. J. Muste used to say that "there is no way to peace—peace is the way." The same thing is true about freedom: the only way to freedom is by freedom. This statement is so nearly tautological that is should not need saying. The only way to realize anarchy is for a sufficient number of people to be convinced that their own interests demand it. Human society does not run on idealism—it runs on pragmatism. And unless people can be made to realize that anarchy actually works for their benefit, it will remain what it is today: an idle pipe dream; "a nice theory, but unrealistic." It is the anarchist's job to convince people otherwise.

The task of anarchism, as the individualist sees it, is not to destroy the state, but rather to destroy the myth of the state. Once people realize that they no longer need the state, it will—in the words of Frederick Engels—inevitably "wither away" (Anti-Duhring, 1877) and be consigned to the "Museum of Antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe" (Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884). But unless anarchists can create a general and well-grounded disbelief in the state as an institution, the existing state might be destroyed by violent revolution or it might fall through its own rottenness, but another would inevitably rise in its place. And why shouldn't it? As long as people believe the state to be necessary (even a "necessary evil", as Thomas Paine said), the state will always exist.

As an anarchist I do not seek utopia, but to reject a system that is every bit as criminal as what it claims to oppose. I seek to oppose hierarchy, power over others and oppression. To claim that we must accept oppression on one level to avoid oppression on another level is inaccurate.

What kind of "dealing" takes place between states? The least onerous form of trade between states - the baseline - is a continuous barter, between their political classes, of wealth stolen from their productive classes.

From there, it only gets worse, up to all-out war that makes any conceivable stateless "war of all against all" look like a friendly game of flag football: Massive armies (cajoled or even conscripted from among the productive class, of course - if you're looking for the political class, consult your directory of "undisclosed locations") arrayed against each other, brandishing terrible weapons that only acolytes of the state could manage the psychosis necessary to imagine, or work up the hubris to invest the massive amounts of unearned wealth required to develop.

The practice of anarchism fills society with empowered individuals, diffusing power throughout society so that no authority can take it over. Interactions of free individuals – the everyday pursuit of needs and desires combined with the recognition that mutual respect for freedom is the best way to realize needs and desires – build counter-power. Organizations of social cooperation that are established for the mutual benefit of participants, not for the power of some at the expense of others, help keep power dispersed in a fashion that safeguards individual liberty. Institutions of authority can be subverted or seized for the purpose of dispersing power.

To have this complex movement – which, at heart, is about total redistribution of power – reduced to little more than a jibe at someone who throws something at a policeman is a travesty. The more political parties merge into one seamless entity, the more we are told that there is no more money, that there is no alternative, the more we need to be reminded that there is. The paradox for anarchist groups is always how to take power without becoming an anti-democratic and hierarchical operation.

It follows, Berkman argued, that “we are so steeped in the spirit of violence that we never stop to ask whether violence is right or wrong. We only ask if it is legal, whether the law permits it. You don’t question the right of the government to kill, to confiscate and imprison. If a private person should be guilty of the things the government is doing all the time, you’d brand him a murderer, thief, and scoundrel.”

We anarchists don’t believe other people are our property. We don’t believe we have the authority to tell other people what to eat, drink, smoke, or whom to have sex with. We’re not their bosses. We don’t own them. And we have no right to act through government to do things we have no legitimate authority to do as individuals. In other words, we anarchists actually believe the things the authors of your civics texts claimed to believe.

So why the pretense? Why go through this ruse of “public” and “private?” Well that’s it. That’s the state. The state IS the ruse. The state … is a social fiction. It is the myth of legitimacy. This myth is the thin black line that separates “the government” and its “private sector” attachments from any other Mafia. The fact that people believe that “the government” is legitimately allowed to kill and steal, and that when it does so, it represents something good and just, is what has allowed it to dominate the earth. And despite the secondary myth that the government exists to fight crime, it is the very existence of the government that allows the lesser Mafias to thrive.