What Bonobos Taught Me About Anarchism (Anarchism for Civilians series)

Lesson 2: Anarchism isn’t about hyper-individualism. Anarchism is about community and cooperation.

When people think of anarchists, they often have in mind a loner, a rebel, somebody who rejects all social norms. This is because we wrongly associate the absence of hierarchy with the absence of social order. Though there are some individualist forms of anarchism, many are actually communalist. Communalist forms of anarchism recognize that no person is an island, that we exist a priori (“always already”) in society, that our identities are formed in relation to one another. 

This runs counter to the hyper-individualist philosophy that informs much of American politics today, which assumes that individuals exist prior to our relationships and that human relations are inherently adversarial. This belief be traced to the philosopher John Locke, who theorized that individual human beings exist “naturally” outside of society in a state of war of all against all. Eventually, he imagined, individuals enter into a “social contract” in which they agree to respect the individual rights of others in exchange for the same respect of their own rights. This view of social relations is atomistic and adversarial. …

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