> If the above doesn't make me an anarchist -- that I
> support Social Security being strengthened, folks
> getting fed, minimal guarantees of health care --
> fine, I'm not an anarchist. More's the pity for
> anarchism then. Whatever you call it, though, I think
> it's the right thing to support.
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I've really never met anyone on the left, whether they describe themselves
as anarchists or socialists, who doesn't support the extension of democratic
rights and social measures under capitalism pending the deeper change in
class power and property relations they are seeking, nor anyone who doesn't
hope that a future political system will be less "authoritarian" than
anything which has been seen to date.
What essentially distinguishes anarchism is its refusal to participate in bourgeois democratic electoral politics, to organize political parties, to run in elections and seek office - even if only, as Marxists believe(d), as a platform for disseminating radical ideas and organizing the masses for what they expect will ultimately lead to a decisive, probably armed, confrontation for state power.
Instead, working class anarcho-syndicalists used to promote the concept of the revolutionary general strike as the means of toppling capitalism, and many of today's middle class anarchists seem to believe capitalism will be undermined by a coordinated multiplicity of extra-parliamentary community struggles - without appreicating that these latter inevitably find their way into the political arena in pursuit of their objectives.