10 Facts About Anarchy That You Won't Believe Are True!!

We have all seen the Anarchy symbol that is widely regarded to be the letter “A”  enclosed in a circle of which can be seen as “one of the most common graffiti on the urban landscape”. Some would classify anarchy as something dangerous and even fatal for the foundations of democracy and capitalism those people would also believe in even more outlandish theories. It should be said that Anarchy has many more definitions than most people would think. Karl Marx’s workers revolution is a little more in line with the “traditional” view of anarchism, but even that is false because his ideas was simply to have a more or less peaceful worker’s revolution in which there would be a workers revolution in order to take down the “man”. In fact, one of Karl Marx’s primary influences was Proudhon himself. 

One of Proudhon’s most important books is “What is Property” in which he takes on the the idea of private property. In Proudhon’s mind “Property is Theft”, thus there are inherent problems with Capitalism and Capitalist society. America is a prime example of one of the biggest Capitalist societies in which there is also a multitude of problems that plague it. In America the majority of the economy is based on profit and debt. That is, the economy favors those who would turn a profit rather than the workers who end up working to pay off their various debts whether they be mortgages, loans or credit. Some workers end up becoming “wage slaves” living from paycheck to paycheck just to survive. And that this one of the problems with capitalist society that Proudhon would like to address. 

The idea of Capital in Capitalism only exists with a centralized government. Proudhon wanted to decentralize the government and rather than having this idea of private property being unevenly distributed, everyone would only have enough land as is necessary for each case. In addition, the profit that is generated from the workers belongs to the workers and not the “owners”. This segways into Proudhon’s anarchism being based upon the economic theory of mutualism. The cessation of the practice of private property as it is now would bring nothing but benefits to the world according to Proudhon. I feel that I sympathise with many of Proudhon's ideas in regards to the protection of workers, but not so much with mutualism.