A Brief Overview of The Relationship between Socialism as A Term and Anarchism

If we are occupied on a common ground in which most people define socialism as "maintenance of state ownership of means of production," anarchists seem not to be socialists at first glance. However, if we mean something more inclusive by socialism like "advocating for the removal of private ownership or restriction of it," then the problem becomes a bit more complex.

According to the second definition specified in the first paragraph, some anarchists are socialists, but the rest are not. There is a long historical relation between Orthodox socialists, those who remain outside of Anglo-American political culture, who advocate for a centralized government, and anarchist socialists who advocate for a mutualist way of socialism and a decentralized form of living. Both groups want to severely limit or abolish private property, and therefore both groups fit the second definition of socialism. However, socialists require the state to own the means of production. On the other hand, Anarchists certainly do not want the state to exist in the first place.

Debates that occur while Anarchists are quarreling with traditional socialists are some sort of disagreement about means. (A dispute demonstrated by the fierce conflict between Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin for ascendancy in the European Workers' movement in the 19th century is a decent example of this matter.)

According to this interpretation, socialist anarchists and statist-socialists agree that a communal and egalitarian society is desirable, but accuse each other of proposing ineffective tools to achieve it.

However, this probably makes the conflict, which is more about fundamental values, seem more insignificant than it is: socialist anarchists emphasize the need for autonomy and point out the evil consequences of authoritarianism. In contrast, traditional socialists often express such concerns as "bourgeois" while condescending to the rest of the problems.

When we go back to the Anglo-American political culture, the story is quite different. Hostile anti-socialist anarchism is much more widespread here and dates back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. England was home to many intensely anti-socialist semi-anarchist thinkers of the nineteenth century, such as Auberon Herbert and the early period Herbert Spencer. The United States provided a more fertile ground for individualist anarchism: in the nineteenth century, figures such as Josiah Warren, Lysander Spooner, and Benjamin Tucker came forward with a vision of contract -and private-ownership- based anarchism (Mutualism). In the United States in the twentieth century, the resident thinkers became the primary developers and exporters of anarcho-capitalist theory.

Nevertheless, this geographical separation should not be exaggerated as if it is pretty concrete. The French anarchist Proudhon and the German Max Stirner described modified forms of individuality. Several collectivist anarchists (usually European immigrants) rose to prominence in the United States, and Noam Chomsky with Murray Bookchin, two of the most influential theorists of modern left-wing anarchism, both live in the United States.