Personally, I find these to be pretty convincing formulations:
* Anarchism has no real definition, but major strands have in
common the idea that authority is illegitimate by default. The
burden of proof to justify authority is on the person wielding
it. This burden of proof can be met in some cases, the typical
example being using physical force to restrain your child from
running off into the street; the justification's obvious.
* Anarchism is not so much an ideology, but rather about
anti-authoritarian impulses people have.
Not only do these fit many peoples' intuitions, but they're practical guides to evaluating some anarchist's claims about some system they find questionable.
> If anyone disagree with me on principle I would be interested to here
> why. I am not interested in whether or not Mikail Bakunin or Bertrand
> Russell, or anyone else was a saint or not (that was never a claim I
> made to begin with).
Having recently looked a bit at Bakunin's "invisible dictatorship," it seems more as an attempt to have a minimal central authority, a barely justifiable one, one easily dissolved. It was all he was willing to accept:
"After the initial revolutionary victory the political
revolutionaries, those advocates of brazen dictatorship, will try
to squelch the popular passions. They appeal for order, for trust
in, for submission to those who, in the course and in the name of
the Revolution, seized and legalized their own dictatorial powers;
this is how such political revolutionaries reconstitute the
State. We, on the contrary, must awaken and foment all the dynamic
passions of the people. We must bring forth anarchy, and in the
midst of the popular tempest, we must be the invisible pilots
guiding the Revolution, not by any kind of overt power but by the
collective dictatorship of all our allies [members of the
anarchist vanguard organization International Alliance of Social
Democracy], a dictatorship without tricks, without official
titles, without official rights, and therefore all the more
powerful, as it does not carry the trappings of power. This is the
only dictatorship I will accept, but in order to act, it must
first be created, it must be prepared and organized in advance,
for it will not come into being by itself, neither by discussions,
nor by theoretical disputations, nor by mass propaganda
meetings..."
I think this was covered pretty decently at Wikipedia, at least for a non-scholar like me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakunin#Violence.2C_Revolution_and_.22Invisible_dictatorship.22
(There are of course problems with Bakunin, like anti-semitism, but I hear Marx and Engels were racist too. I could be wrong though.)
That said, I've often noticed that anarchists discuss justifiable forms of "dictatorship." Like if you're in a workplace, you should be dictator over whether you can put pictures of your family on your desk. Because that affects you, and the principle of self-management means others don't get input on that decision. So, you decide that by fiat.
Tayssir