No. While anarchism in popular media is often represented like that, it’s state and corporate propaganda. We do not seek a society that is lawless, where people can do anything they want from a place of individualism. The ‘O’ around the ‘A’ in the Anarchist symbol means order — It just means order established through agreements made from the bottom-up, not order enforced through violence from the top-down. In not squeezing people into lives they didn’t choose through force and coercion, and giving them agency with others to decide how social and economic life looks, we’d argue that Anarchism is much less a chaotic system than Capitalism.

Marx used Communism and Socialism interchangeably to refer to a directly democratic, stateless and classless society that is established through social revolution. Lenin referred to socialism as the transitionary phase between Capitalism and Communism where workers take state power. Some refer to socialism as progressive social reforms under Capitalism.

Anarchists and Marxists both seek Communism as an ideal society. The methods of reaching said society is the divergence between the two schools of thought – After Capitalism, Anarchists wish to establish federations of communities and workers where all authority is temporary, defined by those under it, recallable by those affected by its misuse and rotates often to avoid accumulating power and control.

Marxists broadly posit a transitionary period between Capitalism and Communism where the vanguard party (an organisation of the most enlightened workers) takes the state and rules it in the ‘interests’ of other workers. Anarchists think this creates class divisions between the ruled and the rulers, where rulers favour their distinct interests to rule and will sell out workers. Anarchists think the state is an authoritarian apparatus that’s incompatible with the eventual goal of an anti-authoritarian, stateless and classless society. If we look at how the Bolshevik experiment set the stage for Stalin, it should be clear that states are not tools of emancipation revolutionaries should utilise.

Anarchists are against reformism, but not reform. It might seem a fickle distinction to make, but the difference between the two is where power is exercised from. Naturally, Anarchists want the world to be better for people, so we are known to aim for social and policy reforms. But as anti-reformists, we don’t give our power to political parties to change society for us, we leverage class power to apply pressure to win the reforms we want, all the while understanding that reform alone can’t undermine the classed and exploitative nature of Capitalist society.

While Anarchism as expressed in the English language does have a European lineage, early anarchists and even Marx, were inspired by anarchic Indigenous societies. Claiming Anarchism as a white political ideology also erases the many lineages of non-white anarchisms that have built upon European Anarchism’s basic ideas and principles, to work for their own contexts. It also erases the historical and contemporary solidarities that exist due to anarchism being a shared ideology.

We don’t lump new members with heaps of work, but you need to be able to contribute work to be part of our org.

We encourage individuals to assess whether you are in a place in life to further the org’s aims and projects. Though we have accessibility considerations for members, we are still a voluntary organisation for Anarchist militants who have some ability, energy and time to build the power of others to fight Capitalism.

Due to bad faith mistranslations of early literature that intended to make our ideas seem vanguardist in practice, Anarchist Communists occasionally recieve baseless criticism that we are like Anarcho-Bolsheviks or Anarcho-Leninists, but the Anarchist Communist program was initially built in conscious opposition to the Authoritarian Communist program.

The only commonality with Leninists that we have is that we are organisationalists. We are not centralists; we make decisions directly democratically in our organisations without a central committee. We also don’t aim to establish a state ruled by a minority of our organisation during a revolutionary period, our aim is a directly democratic uprising of all workers and the oppressed that wouldn’t install Anarchists as top-down leaders. Our aim is not to install enlightened leaders to lead the working class, instead we support the working class developing, controlling and wielding their own power in service of their class interests — we work amongst them as fellow workers and people, not leaders. Our influence isn’t our authority but the merit of our ideas. Our organisation is merely a vehicle for us to coordinate how best to approach our organising work in ways that allows our members to be supported, trained, educated in part so that they do not fall into attempting to lead people instead of building the leadership capabilities of others.

For us, mutual aid is reciprocal. While there is value in survival programs that feed and support people, these programs often maintain a power dynamic of giver and receiver, and lack the structures to shift this power dynamic.

As members of an organisation, we value true mutual aid – healthy and reciprocal relationships of support developing internally amongst our members. However, this org does not exist to fulfill an individual’s social or support needs. We want a loving and caring environment for our members, but we’d like to state upfront that taking on care work isn’t an obligation we force upon our members as an extension of their politics, nor is it a base requirement of an organisation that is focused on revolutionary ends.

If an organisation tries to act like it’s everything the world needs all at once ‘because it is revolutionary’, it will spend its capacity haphazardly and burn out.

Furthermore, we want to organise racialised working class people, many of whom have daily and life-long obligations of care work to people around them. Taking on more in order to be part of our org isn’t an expectation of our members.

That said, the care and support we do offer internally is in service of our revolutionary ends — not individual ends. We offer a mutuality of aid for our members who build this organisation with us, not as a transaction, but because that care and regard is a requirement of revolutionary organisations if they wish to adequately measure their capacity, remain scalable and on task. There is internal support so that members engaging in work with us can remain supported as they go through hard times.