The crypto community has a decidedly libertarian bent among those who are politically inclined. It's only natural that we would find that in a group of people interested in using and spreading the use of an alternative form of currency which is decentralized and not government sanctioned.

As an autonomist Marxist or anarchist, I find that a lot of the people who consider themselves libertarians hold right wing or conservative views. This is something that I will be dedicating future blog posts to, as I tease out some of the differences between typical libertarian views and my own, as well as areas of overlap and some suggestions of how to reconcile the two moving forward.

For now, I wanted to highlight a passage that I read earlier that sums up anarchism pretty well. It comes from David Graeber's book, "The Democracy Project."

What then is anarchism?

Actually the term means simply "without rulers." Just as in the case of democracy, there are two different ways one could tell the history of anarchism. On the one hand, we could look at the history of the word "anarchism," which was coined by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1840 and was adopted by a political movement in late-nineteenth-century Europe, becoming especially strongly established in Russia, Italy, and Spain, before spreading across the rest of the world; on the other hand, we could see it as a much broader political sensibility.

The easiest way to explain anarchism in either sense is to say that it is a political movement that aims to bring about a genuinely free society--and that defines a "free society" as one where humans only enter those kinds of relations with one another that would not have to be enforced by the constant threat of violence. History has shown that vast inequalities of wealth, institutions like slavery, debt peonage, or wage labor, can only exist if backed up by armies, prisons, and police. Even deeper structural inequalities like racism and sexism are ultimately based on the (more subtle and insidious) threat of force. Anarchists thus envision a world based on equality and solidarity, in which human beings would be free to associate with one another to pursue an endless variety of visions, projects, and conceptions of what they find valuable in life. When people ask me what sorts of organization could exist in an anarchist society, I always answer: any form of organization one can imagine, and probably many we presently can't, with only one proviso--they would be limited to ones that could exist without anyone having the ability, at any point, to call on armed men to show up and say "I don't care what you have to say about this; shut up and do what you're told."