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A popular insurrection, by its very nature, is instinctive, chaotic, and destructive, and always entails great personal sacrifice... The masses are always ready to sacrifice themselves; and this is what turns them into a brutal and savage horde, capable of performing heroic and apparently impossible exploits Mikhail Bakunin, in God and the State. Anarchism is the idea that an individuals freedom should only be constrained by the freedom of others, that there should be no government. Thus anarchism is in constant opposition to capitalism and authoritarian socialism. Its aim is liberation of humanity. Anarchism has taken many forms, to really define it in its complexity you have to look at the historical process of the anarchist movement especially focusing on France.
Unlike most of the rest of the left anarchists do not want to remain static, scholarly re-interpreting the works of the early prophets and arguing over the number of angels a pinhead. Anarchism directly supports the revolution which was the case with the French commune. The founders of both Anarchism and Marxism followed Young Hegelians in the mid XIX century. Both Mikhail Bakunin and Frederick Engels were present at the December 1841 lecture by Friedrich Schelling denouncing Hegel, representing two of the plethora of radical currents that sprung out of that conjuncture. Also Max Stirner, a founder of libertarian individualism, one of the targets of Marx's The Holy Family, Proudhon, the founder of theoretical anarchism in France and Bakunin's teacher greatly contributed to the diversity of anarchism. Speaking about acts of 1871, Id like to note that the French workers in Paris seized power after Paris and France capitulated to the Prussian troops.
This was the first time in history that the working class had seized state power. The ideas of Proudhon and Blanqui were the most widespread theories of revolution known to the Paris workers, but the International Workingmen's Association actively participated through its Parisian section. The Commune was eventually overthrown by a reactionary army raised in the countryside and workers were slaughtered. Still one has to remember that the Paris Commune was the testing ground for revolutionary theory in the world, and in the light of its experiences Marx revised his theory of the State, concluding that the working class had to smash the state machine, rather than hoping to take it over or leaving it intact. Speaking about relationship of anarchism and socialism I would want to mention the fact that the history of workers' attempts to take power with their own organisations, or where a workers' movement has come into fundamental conflict with the state over who has power, is critical for the education of socialists, who built up their theory on anarchism. These are the lived experiences from which we can learn about the potential of spontaneous mass movements, the strengths and weaknesses in the analysis and response of organised socialists and labour movement leaders.
This is how one can develop a working understanding of the relationship between the mass movement, the conscious active minority who sees the possibility of workers power, and the ruling class and its state which are the enemies of the working class and a free and equal society. Socialism unlike anarchism denotes an utopia where the view that the state is responsible for effecting an even or more equitable distribution of wealth and for taking control of all or some of the means of production and distribution of resources in an economy. It is seen as a successor to capitalism, as both an economy and an ideology. Anarchism on the other hand opposes formal government, authority and state power.
In Marxist socialism, the power must be passed to the peasant and the proletariat from bourgeoisie. Karl Marx specifically focused on control of the means of production, which he saw as passing from monarchs under feudalism, to bourgeois professionals and an upper-middle-class facilitating capitalists under capitalism, and then to the workers themselves, whose contributions he saw as under-valued. Extreme forms of socialism and modified anarchism are commonly called communism, though philosophers (particularly Marxist philosophers) reserve that to mean the final, stateless, market-less, moneyless, and wage-less stage in the supposed progression of a socialist society operating according to the principle of universal free access to goods and services and volunteer labor. The anarchy in general and in France in particular, is not the absence of order, rules, and organized structure -- the proper name of which is chaos or anomie, as some might call it.
On the contrary, the anarchy sought by French anarchists is the absence of hierarchy, power and authority, which the anarchists consider as immoral, oppressive, detrimental, and sources of violence, disorder and misery. Anarchists claim that human relations should be based only upon voluntary associations, which relates anarchism to communism and socialism directly, and by the same token opposes capitalism. In conclusion I would like to say that, anarchists around the world and in particular in France support either individual or collectivist anarchism that makes its related to capitalism and communism / socialism correspondingly. The individual anarchism states that though individualist anarchists may have personal ideas about how things would work in an anarchist society with personal responsibility for the actions. Their anarchist stance is thus above the debate of economic regime. In France this idea was greatly supported and promoted by Henry David Thoreau.
On the other hand the collectivist anarchism is also known as Libertarian Socialism focus on social responsibility and support violent action by revolutionary organizations to achieve liberation from the authority of the State. Some also believe in using violence to "free" unwilling individuals, although this stance is not accepted by the majority...
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