Anarchy just means no rules, right? Well, the truth is a little more complicated than that, as ISRF Fellows Alex Prichard and Ruth Kinna explain.

Prichard, professor of international political theory at the University of Exeter, and Kinna, professor of political theory at Loughborough University, research the challenges – and opportunities – of organising around ideas of anarchism.

This is the subject of their forthcoming book about the constitution of anarchy – a form of politics which rejects any final or fixed point of authority.

Their work examines 19th-century anarchist thought, revisiting the work of thinkers who critiqued the birth of the nation state in the 1850s to show how anarchism speaks to contemporary political and international theory. 

In Constitutionalising Anarchy: an Anarchist Constitutional Politics for the 21st Century, they consider how these ideas play out in practice by looking at three modern grass roots movements, including the Occupy movement of the 2010s, which saw tens of thousands take to the streets in protest against economic inequality.

While, they argue, tensions can sometimes arise from failing to fully think through what it means to organise around a concept of anarchy, they’ve articulated a set of practices which can be adopted and adapted by groups to change the dynamics of power for the better. 

Anarchists, you might be surprised to hear, constitutionalise routinely. They develop declarations and constitutional documents, formal and informal rules, multiple and overlapping institutions, and complex decision-making procedures to challenge power inside and outside the groups they form. 

The following wide-ranging conversation addresses a range of topics including whether, at a time when the possibility of meaningful change through conventional democratic politics is arguably limited, anarchist constitutionalising could address issues such as those presented by the climate crisis.

Adam Smith: There are many forces within politics today which feel almost superficially anarchist, I’m thinking here of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. To what extent is your project about reclaiming anarchism? 

Ruth Kinna: I would start by distinguishing transgressive anti-establishment politics from anarchist politics. 

I think anarchist politics is fundamentally different from someone like Trump or Musk in the sense that you're trying to dismantle power structures, not just shift them to your own interests. I don't see Trump or Musk as anything to do with anarchism or even libertarianism. 

They're just regular politicians with a particular strap line. What we're doing is changing the basis on which we think about politics. We're not thinking about institutional politics, we're thinking about a politics which empowers people outside those institutions.

Alex Prichard: Javier Milei, the Argentinian president, presents himself as anarchist, but when you look carefully, he's actually completely within the establishment. He just uses affectations of disruption and disorder to divide opinion and generate a constituency because he needs people to vote for him. 

That's what these techniques do. They're not there to challenge the existing structures of power; they're there to entrench them. It's disappointing people see it in any other way. 

What we're trying to do is recover a conception of anarchism that is authentic in a way most people just won't recognise because we're trying to recover anarchism as a constitutional politics.

RK: It seems to me that the way power is currently being entrenched through people like Trump is actually a last-ditch attempt to save a kind of a status politics that's collapsing wherever we look. It's not sustainable, it's not stable. 

As far as I can see, the post-war order is actually disintegrating. And what's coming in its place is a new, internally-focused, old-fashioned kind of statism that’s all at sea. You just have to look at the responses to the fall of Assad in Syria to understand that. All people see is a threat: the hope is having a new leader who's not going to be a tyrant. 

AP: A sizeable percentage of the world's population live in areas where states just don't rule, there's no monopoly of violence or centralised provision of public goods, they’re effectively living in anarchy. This isn’t just in so-called failed states, but everywhere else too. 

Ask somebody in West Baltimore or living in some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the UK: what does the state do for you? Plenty of them will say: ‘nothing, that's why I vote Reform UK.’ The state isn’t there for far too many people. Despite globalisation, the world's never been more anarchic. 

What Ruth described is an attempt to somehow tame this anarchy by appealing to “strong leaders”, which is retrenching to neo-fascism. That's how we should be describing the right.

What French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon called “industrial feudalism” is still with us: an attempt to rule and to cajole worker populations to produce surplus capital. 

The reason everyone's now interested in Syria is because all the regional powers want to figure out how to control the population through this incumbent jihadist movement. 

AS: What you’re both talking about sounds quite different to the images of anarchy we’re offered in popular culture.

AP: We started this project in 2016, the year of Brexit. In 2016, what you were seeing was the death throes of the post-Cold War, cosmopolitan era. What everyone was saying was if we can't have a regional European power, and a world state's impossible, what's the alternative? And what we're seeing is this retrenchment, a return to the statism of the Cold War.

But there’s an alternative in historical anarchist and socialist movements. In Occupy and in the popular reconstitutional moments like in Iceland and Chile. Brexit too is arguably a major constitutional crisis that was essentially trying to determine who rules whom and where. These sorts of debates are central to what it means to be politically active today. 

The anarchist approach to constitutional politics has been completely sidelined. And here, sidelined is a euphemism for anarchists getting shot by Marxists, Fascists and liberals over the last 150 years. It's a marginal position, but I think it's really valuable because it demands that people justify statist politics rather than simply acquiesce. 

At the moment, statist politics is just the norm and people can't think outside of that. When they do, they stumble over conceptual issues because they can't abandon statism because that takes them straight into “bad” anarchy.

The problem is you've not really theorised what a “good” anarchy is. If you read a little bit of anarchism you might get a better sense of what that option is and have a more critical approach to some of your taken for granted assumptions about political order. 

RK: The way to think about an alternative is not to think in terms of a mirror image; anarchy as the opposite of the state. Anarchist ideas of constitutional politics push decentralising forces further than anyone else - beyond ‘devolution’. But we see these decentralising forces at work all over the place and they open opportunities to ask a question: how can we organise in anarchy?

Instead of starting with the idea that politics must revolve around state sovereignty, we start with the idea of individual sovereignty and combine it with collective or societal multiplicity. The question we ask is: how did the 19th-century anarchists, who absolutely nailed the destructive power of the state and capitalism, think about association without both?

If you look at the UK, there’s been quite a change in my lifetime in the way power is devolving to the nations, which never used to be the case. These are positive forces because they set up different kinds of legal frameworks within which grassroots movements can do different things. 

This enables us to think about transforming statism without thinking in terms of this cataclysmic moment where we're all going to be marching from capitalism to socialism or from the state into a new anarchic order. That's just not going to happen. 

What we're thinking about are processes of decision making and ways in which relatively small changes at the legislative level can actually empower people to do really exciting things at the grassroots. 

AS: Is there a concern that more power at a grassroots level means more conflict? Without the state to adjudicate between competing interests.

AP: At the end of the Cold War, Robert Kaplan wrote this piece called The Coming Anarchy. He said, if you want to know what's going to come next, you need to look at Africa or Yugoslavia. 

His argument was that nation states collapsed there because they didn’t have these two blocks – the US and the USSR – sustaining them, propping them up, just as we're now seeing in Syria. So you're going to see Balkanisation with the collapse of these political orders and it's going to be anarchy. This worried a lot of people. 

On the back of that, you see all sorts of post-conflict or liberal state building, anything to build up political capacity in a way that will push anarchy back. But all of it has failed. There aren't any obviously glowing success stories. 

Before the First World War, Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin made a different argument in a piece also called The Coming Anarchy. He said there's anarchy coming and we all need to be happy about this. 

He thought we were looking at the maturation of European politics: people were increasingly autonomous, self-directing, communal, able to manage their social relations in ways that didn't necessitate autocratic states, the monarchy, or Napoleon. He thought perhaps the Caesarist-Bonapartist model of politics was over and that was a good thing. 

RK: Kropotkin describes the coming anarchy as a potential. There are global trends towards decentralisation and the possibility of ending global commodity exchange. If you think about globalisation, Kropotkin’s argument is that you need to promote decentralising and federalist trends against capitalism and state socialism.

AP: His letters to Lenin kind of really drive home these points because the failure of the Russian Revolution concretised precisely this argument. 

AS: You mentioned Occupy, could you say a bit more about its relevance to your thinking? 

RK: We’ve looked at Occupy Oakland which was an incredibly successful camp. It mobilised local activists and organised a general strike with the support of between 20,000 and 30,000 people, closing down a major port. 

Yet it illustrates the problems of trying to democratise a movement rather than think in terms of its anarchist dynamics and the benefits of a constitutional commitment to anarchy. 

Oakland has a long history of Black activism and radical community organising, much of which came together in Occupy. But in the process of coming together, they constitutionalised as a singular people, a 99% which actually smothered the differences between them. 

In the end, the centre could not hold. 

What comes next? The task is to reconfigure the relationships and work out how to navigate differences, to come together to support each other in solidarity, when you’re not quite signed up to each other's aims and objectives. 

Occupy ended up trying to constitute in the same way as the state, which is to say, we are a people and we can have a uniform structure or aims or principles that we're all going to sign up to, and a general assembly that is “sovereign”. 

That's going to have strategic and tactical implications for what we do and how we do it and who's going to decide on the moral rightness of what we do and how we do it. 

AP: The movement to decolonise Oakland brought this contradiction out in stark relief. They said, look, there's something really wrong about the way we're characterising ourselves as an “occupation” when we are essentially on occupied, unceded North American indigenous territories. So they brought a petition to the general assembly to decolonise Oakland. 

But because Oakland was obsessed with democratic rules over all other constitutional mechanisms, they hadn't really considered how they might address these other issues. The original founding documents of the movement certainly didn't make it clear how rules could be written or changed.

The name change was put to a vote, which needed to get a supermajority. It fell short of this. The fetishisation of democracy as the only mechanism for radical change meant they failed to pass the motion to decolonise, the camp split and an opportunity was lost. 

This was hugely symbolic, but I think it tells us something about how important it is to think really clearly about the wider constitutional politics like the rules and declarative statements – “we are the 99%” – and how different institutions balance one another, for example the general assembly and the caucuses. 

It’s not just about decision making procedures, it’s important to always have the problem of power in mind. 

AS: I understand what you’re saying in theory but how can these ideas be scaled up to a national or international level?

AP: The problem with modern politics is this attempt to scale good ideas. Actually, good ideas only work within the scale in which they were intended. If you scale up in the way Aneurin Bevan tried to with miner’s insurance policies, creating the NHS, you start finding problems of bureaucracy, inefficiencies and so on. Anarchists argue that linking up and federating is better than scaling up and centralising.

If you're going to try and achieve the sort of anarchistic principles we're advocating, things like mutual aid, horizontality, the absence of a final point of authority, the best place to do that is in your home, your workplace and on the streets. That's what the anarchists have always done. 

Andrej Grubačić has this wonderful piece where he says he's pro-Balkanisation. He's a Yugoslav and he says the collapse of the federation was actually the beginning of a new and positive Balkanisation because it finally gave people freedom.

This caused a civil war, but the civil war was a function of the failure of centralisation, not because everyone was bloodthirsty and wanted to kill their neighbours, though I'm sure there were people who did do that. The order that had been imposed was artificial and it had essentially frozen animosities. 

Balkanisation is not necessarily the problem. It's the fixing of those social relations in a way that relies on centralisation, hierarchy and overwhelming force. As soon as Tito died the whole society fell apart. That's hardly a recipe for stability, justice, order, or a future. 

RK: The Tito example is a classic. It's just like Syria. Not only did Assad try and impose an order on a very diverse population, but he did so by advantaging one group over the rest. It’s not surprising there was bloodletting at the end of it. 

AP: People are only really free if they can leave as well as stay and build purposeful and intentional communities. But secession is anathema to contemporary theories of federalism, whether that's Canada, the United States, Spain, the UK. This essentially turns the federation into a prison, because people can't leave. 

Anarchists argue that unless you guarantee the right to secession and work hard to keep people in, by convincing them rationally and materially that it's in their best interests to do so rather than through force, it's not a federation at all, it's a state. If it's a state, you might as well forget about justice and order because really it privileges the historic power of the stronger. 

That was the problem with the Yugoslav federation. And that is why Balkanisation and exit are, for Grubačić at least, such potent metaphors. 

AS: We’ve talked about “strong leaders” – as a society it feels as though we’re currently obsessed with ideas of leadership.

RK: The strong leader is a myth. Actually, it's not leaders that get anything done. We see that particularly in moments of crisis. Who's in charge during the floods? It's not the prime minister. But these are potent myths. 

In anarchism, there's no objection to people taking initiative. The objection is to people who take initiative being empowered permanently. Groups have their own dynamics and different people have different skills and talents. 

The idea of association is to enable people to express those skills and talents in ways that don't divide them permanently through their functional roles. So you're not trying to recreate a hierarchy. 

What you're trying to do is to tap into everybody's strengths and support everybody at moments of weakness. That is what decentralised or anarchist constitutions do. 

Leadership can direct, but cannot meet goals by the leader’s actions alone. 

In the UK, it’s claimed we all got the vaccines early because Boris Johnson was such a brilliant leader. But you wouldn't have had those vaccines being developed in the first place if you hadn't had informal contacts between scientists who had been working on this stuff for years. 

If you hadn't had countless papers written in order to elaborate the science, in order to develop the kit that produces this stuff. That's where the genius lies, in the collective actions that enable people to develop their skills because they want to help other people. 

Government comes in at the last moment and says, we'll throw a load of money at this then claim the credit. That's not governance. Governance is the prior relationships that make all of these things work. 

AP: The standard Republican argument in the 19th century was that the European kings and queens were effectively mob rule, the upper classes essentially running amok with nothing to constrain them. 

Anarchists helped develop this argument. American sociologist Charles Tilly characterised state building as racketeering: the state offering itself as the only source of order and justice in the face of problems that only it creates. That's a classic account of a mafia essentially becoming the state. This is a historic norm. 

The idea that states could absolve themselves of their monarchic history and of these structural dynamics was a ruse central to their legitimacy claims. Anarchists always said this isn't possible. In the 19th century, they made these claims against the emerging liberal order and the rise of Marxist revolutionaries.

Since then, Western powers have tried and failed to build states in post-conflict zones, they’ve tried to impose liberal market economies where they didn't previously exist. We know what happens next: it gets worse, just take Afghanistan or Iraq for example. 

We've built systems that enable the worst of us to succeed. Not only succeed, but take positions of power like Donald Trump and others, even when they're convicted criminals. 

If we're trying to encourage the best of us, we have to accept that some people might not be as bad as Donald Trump and then find ways and means of building social orders that encourage those sorts of behaviours instead.

AS: So where do rules fit in around all of this and how do anarchists relate to them?

AP: The notion that anarchists don't develop rules is just nonsense. I mean, anarchists are obsessed with rules. 

Anarchist groups are ruled by all sorts of unspoken but very obvious norms and rules, like how you dress (in black please!), how to relate to one another respectfully, and so on. 

Rules are absolutely central to the constitutionalising process. In other words, you can devise rules that stipulate there should be no final or fixed point of authority. 

When you go to any anarchist group there are rules for who talks, how they talk, when they talk, and whether or not they are dominating other people's talking. It's tiring, but it's functional and it’s valuable. For one thing, it helps ensure that you are flattening social hierarchies.

One of my favorite books is David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules. It's got a really great little anecdote in there which is taken from child psychology. One of the things that Graeber liked about kids’ play is that they spend about 50% of their time devising the rules of the game and about 50% of the time actually playing.

Developing rules is part of play and play can't happen without a discussion about rules; so rule-making is play. It was striking for me because it helped me crystallise precisely the problem we’re thinking about.

The vast majority of what we do as active citizens is questioning, rewriting, retelling or rejustifying rules. There is no end to this and it could be more playful than it currently is. Graeber's point is that this is utopian because we can never find the right rules, but we're always struggling to find the ones that work, and we should never give up.

For example, when you look at the recent floods in Valencia, the rules around how communities should respond in the absence of the state weren't invented ab initio. They were regenerated by the social context, instincts of the people that were involved, history of communal self-organisation, and lessons from other catastrophes. This was not the first time Valencia had been flooded.

Within days, it was pretty clear that the state wasn't coming in quickly enough. It didn't know what to do, it couldn't get organised. But people knew that if you didn't get in there and start cleaning, disease could become a real issue. 

Thousands of people crossed the bridges from different parts of Valencia and helped with the cleanup in the flooded areas. This was effectively breaking the law, like in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. But they were taking in clean water, they were helping to move mud out of the way.

The contestation of rules comes when they're imposed, and they're clearly ill-suited for the context in which they are imposed. When the levee broke in New Orleans, the immediate protection of local businesses and getting everybody out of the Lower Ninth Ward was an act of social cleansing, the protection of private property over the lives of peoples. 

When unarmed Black men were crossing over bridges to go back to their communities, they were shot because they were thought to be looters. The rules were not being developed by the people who were going to be affected by them. That imposition of rule through sovereign violence is precisely the problem. 

A free society only ever functions as a consequence of people's play with rules, not with their blind obedience of them. In fact, when people blindly obey laws, that's when the bad stuff happens. 

AS: So if we’re looking ahead to the next decade, what might the coming anarchy look like? 

RK: The hope for me comes in the ongoing global discussions about ecology and climate change. There are grassroots movements who are seriously thinking about patterns of consumption and production that are anti-capitalist and ecological. 

There are connections being made that focus the mind on the unsustainable extractive processes which sustain obscene hierarchies of wealth across the world. This is an opening for thinking about a constitutional politics based on anarchism. 

AP: I think the reason we're seeing right-wing retrenchment at the moment is because they understand the transformative forces inherent in climate change. 

We're seeing a shoring up of the power of capital in the face of inevitable social change. These structural forces, this material transformation and the mode of social production is a consequence of climate adaptation. 

What's going to be really interesting is whether Donald Trump and people like Milei and others can actually deliver to their constituency in the face of climate change and climate change adaptation. 

The instruments the state has to wield are really crude and clumsy. Mass migration is going to happen because of climate change. We know what they're planning to do – they're going to deport people, build bigger barriers – that's going to backfire and it's going to alienate huge constituencies. 

RK: They're already fighting, we're already at war. 

AP: We’re already at war over these things across the world. The question is, how do we resolve this? Now’s not the time to start picking up guns because it's just going to get worse. We're going to have to find some way of doing it. It's not as though the alternative ideas aren't out there either.