This concerns theoretical errors. Therefore, appropriately, there will be few friendly remarks. Also, it is consciously ignored that a few anarchists have also noticed what is criticized here. It concerns the usual errors of people who call themselves "anarchists" or "autonomists." [1] Other leftists are often no better – however, about them there are mostly different things to criticize.
Given that anarchism is for the absence of rule, anarchist theory about rule is often amazingly simple. Rule is mostly misunderstood as a purely coercive relationship, i.e. the dictatorship of a minority maintained by means of a force apparatus over the majority. The ruled get off rather easily in this view: how they reproduce rule by their behavior, how they adapt themselves to its conditions, what advantage -- real or alleged, relative or absolute -- that they could have from it is usually not up for discussion. Their unshakeable good opinion of the “people," the "masses," the “working class," the “little people," the "ordinary citizens" becomes particularly amusing when they try to explain fascism – it seems to have come about completely without a population, which “only” took part in it. The subjects emerge exclusively as victims of state coercion. Closing ranks with the little people is a long, bad tradition on the left. The unconditional siding with the victims, who are stylized as better people (even if they strain not to appear as the noble oppressed!), won’t change even if it is clear that most subjects are hardly suppressed revolutionaries. No criticism is made of the point of view of the victims of force and suppression -- it is considered “arrogant," "elitist," and killed with the indication that a critic’s "privileged” point of view is “white male intellectual.”
Anarchists explain the consent of the coerced with rule mostly by media manipulation. This means: the consciousness of the people is lacking because others intentionally tinker with their consciousness. How this could possibly be done is hardly conceivable. The subjects’ own thought processes, which their position in relation to rule produces, is crossed out – they are just victims. And where there are victims, there must also be culprits somewhere.... (Not much better is the point of view that "people forge their chains themselves." As if people choose that themselves! Replacing moral affirmation of the subjects with hostility is not a good alternative.)
Anyone who understands rule as pure suppression soon discovers those who suppress: the rulers. They must be quite clever, preparing abominations at their Thursday night meetings!
Seriously: personalized criticism of rule sticks the rulers with responsibility for the entire shit as a consequence of their conscious action. It is then no more than a kind of conspiracy theory that explains every development of bourgeois society as an expression of somebody’s strategy, nothing more. The fact that the ruling "pigs" are “criminals” justifies individual violence, fantasies à la "in cemeteries we have found new homes for the rich," etc. Structures are so terribly abstract!
The "bad people" have therefore of course a contemptible culture (in contrast to the wild culture of the unspoiled masses, the "authentic" culture of people in third world countries, the friendlier conduct of women with each other -- and other myths, of which there are lots more) and are suspected of undeserved good living: Social envy instead of class struggle! (The people who march around under the label "Marxist" are mostly no better.) Traditional anarchism still had a picture of a rich abundance society in mind. Instead, eco-anarchists envision a rural idyll of village communities -- subsistence instead of cancer. In the here and now, therefore, revolutionary asceticism, tough but pleasant, poor but decent, etc.– however, quite joyful, multicolored and wild!
Anarchism is based on a wrong criticism of capitalism, just like "workers' movement ‘Marxism'": It is not criticized that society is structured by the law of value and competition, but the fact that a "few" prevail over the "many" and therefore it would be better if they disappeared.
Anarchists (and also many Marxists, unfortunately) announce that a person should live only on the fruits of his own labor, and that capitalists and other big shots are "parasites." This is a boring utopia of simple goods production -- it originates in the blessed time when the majority of people still possessed means of production and in order to eat had to live from their own labor – a silly moral criticism. No wonder that they do not attack the mode of production and the form of social wealth but want to abolish interest (Silvio Gesell) and can actually be enthusiastic about small business and agriculture, which is quite popular.
This whole wrong and moralistic excitement is ironically also shared by those who want to live in a different way, avoid work and not take part in the whole shitty work cult (rightfully so) because they have the emancipation of humanity as their goal. This moralism is considerably more inconsistent, even contradictory: because to marry, to toil away, to obey laws is no free life, most autonomen and anarchists hold bourgeois norms to be a morality of rule. Then in place of the morality of rule comes an alternative morality, which is hardly less repressive.
Anarchists want to abolish the state -- but they cannot explain it. If traditional anarchism has understood it either as the rotten idea of domineering obscurants or as a necessary transitional stage for the free development of mankind that is no longer needed, most anarchists today accept the vulgar Marxist opinion that the state is the pure tool of capital. The boring debate about whether capitalism produces the state or the state produces capitalism, whether there was only rule and then wealth or the reverse (as with Robinsonades from the Paleolithic age or in New Guinea today), can only go wrong and then always does. Why the conclusion to this debate should give any explanation about whether the state should be abolished or not is incomprehensible.
Anyone who wants to "free" the "society" (which must really be a class) from the state has not understood the relationship of state to society. Anarchists, moreover, often regard political struggles as a kind of brutal battle of ideas for solutions to the general problems of humankind – and show they do not understand that capitalism creates all the problems for those who live in it, which is precisely why they can’t be solved -- they share this with the many branches of bourgeois and “socialist” politics.
Bourgeois society needs the state as its opposing, apparently independent force apparatus because general competition without a state to limit it would indeed lead to murder and the final abolition of competition. However, the state not only establishes this competition, but it also produces it as a social need. Business takes place only because it does not make itself directly dependent on force -- and the state nevertheless is there so that capitalism can function. The derivative of the state from political economy, mentioned above, says that the state is an instrument that people can also use for good and beautiful things (socialism, etc). On the contrary!
Not only "society," but also "humans" enjoy considerable popularity with anarchists. Just like every state theoretician who has to learn the nature of "humans," anarchists also want to know what "humans" really are. In the theological controversy whether "humans" are good or bad, it seizes the former: Rule is the fall of man from which revolution is the redemption. For the moment, capital and the state mess up human nature, which is equipped with all kinds of human rights which the state -- which grants them! -- constantly violates. With so much oppression of human nature it is also clear that the oppression of this nature, which really consists of voluntary co-operation and solidarity, is quite a bad venture (Kropotkin’s "mutual aid," veganism, animal rights).
The fact that there is no human nature at all, but that humans are only the ensemble of their respective social relations, that the living and thinking of the Paleolithic age is really no explanation for today, that humankind is an empty abstraction, that something does not explain everything, anarchists usually do not know. (No wonder many anarchists refer positively to the anthropological nonsense in Marx’s early writings.) Therefore their enthusiasm for "people without government," who are supposed to prove that society can exist without a state.
The idealization of pre-state (and even pre-capitalist) conditions is a romantic anti-capitalism. An ideal picture emerges of the Middle Ages without plague, famine, aristocratic rule and witch-hunts, just completely comfortable community without visible rule in decentralized units. Highly idealized master societies are defended, "natural" and "authentic" ways of life are extolled against Coca Cola imperialism, the bad individualism in this country is grumbled about, and technical progress and modern control of nature are seen as the work of the devil -- even by those who hold self-determination and free development to be completely desirable.
The concept of anarchism and its relation to political theory must be developed from the relationship of state, public citizen and private subject. The state ensures the competition of all against all, which it forces on people while limiting it. For success in competition, the members of bourgeois society need the state, which impairs their success (taxes) and limits their choice of means (laws), and is both their means and their barrier at the same time. The success of this competition inside the state is a condition for external success in the competition of states, both for the individual enterprises and the state itself. Its success is an essential precondition for the success of the businesses in its country. Political theories think about this conflict -- with the goal of survival in the competition of states. Liberalism represents concern about a too heavy burden on the private subjects by the national laws of competition; conservatism has the reverse fear that too much liberty and too little national sacrifice destroy the society (among other "proven" things, traditional conditions are supposed to not have been subjected to competition: family, religion, etc.). Social democracy is the avowal to protect the conditions of capitalist competition – to which a functioning working class belongs -- from the interests of capital and to protect the victims from its normal operations. Fascism, on the contrary, takes the point of view of the test of the nation in the state competition, and demands the subordination of all private interests under the state, pushing the private subject into the public citizen. Anarchism is exactly the opposite: on behalf of the private subject it fights against the violence that is done and seeks the abolition of the state and the public citizen. Therefore anarchism is originally no different than radicalized liberalism (Godwin, Stirner, Mackay, and, with modifications, Proudhon). Only when anarchism seeped into the workers' movement did it become somewhat communist: Instead of being inside the conflict and radicalizing it, the effort to abolish the whole relationship.
It is not true that anarchists and Marxists have the same goal and only differ about the methods to achieve it. Anarchists and Marxists have different criticisms of capitalism and different conceptions of a future society.
Communists criticize capitalism because the purpose of increasing capital necessarily excludes the workers from social wealth. Surplus value exists because the value created in the production process exceeds the costs of the worker. Since the worker is separated from the means of production by the state’s guarantee of private property, he continues to remain separated from it and must sell his labor in order to survive. The capitalist treats the worker as a cost factor, i.e. pays him as little as possible and uses him as long, intensively and productively as possible to repay the original value and to obtain as much surplus value as possible. This economic relationship is capitalist exploitation. It gives a lot of hardship, physical and mental wear, and pays the worker cheaply in order to reproduce him in his existence as a worker -- if he is lucky enough to work.
In order for the workers to access social wealth, they must abolish private property and develop an economy that produces use values for all instead. In order to achieve this goal, the state and capital must be eliminated. State force, which establishes a certain form of wealth and thus maintains the social conflicts, is then no longer needed.
Anarchists do not criticize capitalism's exploitation, but its suppression, i.e. if they criticize exploitation they consider not the economic conflict that impoverishes people, but only the force relationship. They criticize force, which is certainly present, not for the purpose that it serves, but for the abstract side that others are subordinated by force. First, the adversary is identified -- the ruler; secondly, the fellow combatants -- the victims of force; thirdly, the goal -- freedom from force. Their positive goal is thus negatively determined. Their utopian society is characterized by the absence of authority. The society places itself the infinite task of seeking out and revealing hidden forms of authority.
How does one arrive at such an idea? Reference to anthropological ideology, that humans are free from nature, does not help. The ideology is not the reason for this error, but only justifies it. They do not find in each disaster an injury to one’s own material interest, but only make the accusation that force was at work. The latter seems the obviously greater scandal. However, it is arrived at only if self-determination is thought of as a human right. The injury to this right constitutes the scandal. The appointment to the right to self-determination is now indeed an ironic contradiction because the appointment to a right presupposes a superior force that guarantees it. Anarchists thus appoint themselves to a fictitious force monopoly that grants them the right to self-determination in order to fight against the really existing force monopoly. They shift the relationship in which the state grants rights to its citizens into the individual who relates to himself as a legal relation. Individuals rule exclusively over themselves and grant themselves the right to self-determination. Anarchists thus do not disdain force, but love force in the form of granted rights, and only reject external force as a quasi-interference into their internal affairs.
[1] The criticism of anarchism expressed here is rejected by its defenders mainly with the objection that anarchism is not a uniform movement with a uniform theory and therefore a general criticism of anarchism does not touch its subject at all. "There are as many anarchist theories as there are anarchists... " Anarchists do not notice that this reservation -- that there are as many anarchist theories as there are anarchists -- does not contradict but on the contrary confirms our criticism. Anarchists believe in a sphere of individual rights that exists without state force, which sets each individual in the right against external power. The fact that there are no rights without an overseeing force does not escape them in practice, of course. However, this does not prevent them from calling everywhere for the right to self-determination against any form of subordination or hierarchy. Here also they counter the criticism of their incorrect thinking by saying that one cannot subordinate their individual ways of thinking to a general theoretical system. Anyone who thus tries to describe the common thing or the general idea in the different anarchist theories subordinates under a common rule what each individual anarchist thinks. And subordination is a form of crime, as every anarchist knows. It is then no problem that it "only" concerns incorrect concept formation. If it does not fit anarchists, they make the criticism that subordination takes place, in whatever form. End of story. In this anarchists do not differ at all.