Anarchy Not Anarchism – by Anarqxista Goldman.
“ANARCHY, I am coming to believe, matters a lot more than ANARCHISM. The latter all too often becomes a dogma or, worse, a party — which is the opposite of ANARCHY. ANARCHY is nothing to do with organisations, dogmas, parties, rules, or any of the far too many anarchist cops that exist in the world today. The danger of any ISM, in fact, is that it becomes dogma or doctrine or a measure of people’s purity or of their activity. These are anti-anarchistic endeavours I do not support and, in fact, condemn. Anarchism is NOT accountability, as some insist, because in a world of free association, which is very anarchist, you simply DISASSOCIATE from those you dislike or despise. [Graeber and Wengrow detail such realities anthropologically and historically, with apparent favour, in The Dawn of Everything, in fact, and refer to the ability to simply “leave town” as a freedom which puts the brakes on societies ever “getting stuck” to begin with.]
There is then no need for cops. You just avoid, or otherwise move away from, those to whom you do not give the privilege of your company or solidarity. There is also then no need for dogma or doctrine since all it would be policing is the freely given association of comrades or associates anyway. If you have the social, political and economic freedom not to “get stuck”, if you can just move away or go elsewhere without further consequence, then lots of things now thought necessary, such as police, punishments, prisons, etc., fall away as a result. We need to think anarchy through a lot more thoroughly than almost anybody actually does, it seems to me. Often this thinking is NOT done exactly because people are too busy conjuring up dogmatic forms of anarchism, new forms of coercion and control, by which to gerrymander the whole. No, my friends. We need a functioning anarchy not dogmatic anarchisms..”
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anarqxista-goldman-anarchy-not-anarchism
