Social anarchism, also known as left-wing anarchism or socialist anarchism, is the branch of anarchism that sees liberty and social equality as interrelated.
It advocates for a social revolution to remove oppressive forms of hierarchy, such as capitalism and the state. In their place, social anarchists encourage social collaboration through mutual aid and envision non-hierarchical forms of social organization, such as voluntary associations.
Identified with the socialist tradition of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, social anarchism is often contrasted with individualist anarchism, due to the latter's criticism of socialism.
Political principles
Social anarchism is opposed to all forms of social and political power, hierarchy and oppression, including (but not limited to) the State and capitalism. Social anarchism therefore sees liberty as interconnected with social equality, and considers the maximization of one to be necessary for the maximization of the other. Social anarchism therefore employs a utilitarian ethics, concerning itself with the well-being of all, as it considers each person's happiness to be equal to those of others. As such, social anarchism seeks to guarantee equal rights to freedom and material security for all persons.
Social anarchism envisions the overthrow of capitalism and the state in a social revolution, which would establish a federal society of voluntary associations and local communities, based on a network of mutual aid.
The key principles that form the core of social anarchism include anti-capitalism, anti-statism and prefigurative politics.
Anti-capitalism
As an anti-capitalist ideology, social anarchism is opposed to the dominant expressions of capitalism, including the expansion of transnational corporations through globalization. It comprises one of the main forms of socialism, alongside utopian socialism, democratic socialism and authoritarian socialism. Social anarchism rejects private property, particularly private ownership of the means of production, as the principal source of social inequality. As such, social anarchists typically oppose propertarianism, as they consider it to exacerbate social and economic inequality, suppress individual agency and require the maintenance of hierarchical institutions.
Social anarchists argue that the abolition of private property would lead to the development of new social mores, encouraging mutual respect for individual freedom and the satisfaction of individual needs. Social anarchism therefore advocates the breaking up of monopolies and the institution of common ownership over the means of production. Instead of capitalist markets, with their profit motives and wage systems, social anarchism desires to organise production through a collective system of worker cooperatives, agricultural communes and labour syndicates.
While social anarchism has rejected the statism of Orthodox Marxism, it has also drawn from Marxist critiques of capitalism, particularly Marx's theory of alienation. Social anarchists have also been reluctant to adopt the Marxist centring of the proletariat as revolutionary agents, instead identifying the revolutionary potential of the socially excluded segments of society.
Anti-statism
As an anti-statist ideology, social anarchism opposes the concentration of power in the form of a State. To social anarchists, the state is a type of coercive hierarchy designed to enforce private property and to limit individual self-development. Social anarchists reject both centralised and limited forms of government, instead upholding social collaboration as a means to achieve a spontaneous order, without any social contract supplanting social relations. Social anarchists believe that the abolition of the state will lead to greater "freedom, flourishing and fairness".
In the place of a state structure, social anarchists desire anarchy, which can be defined as a society without government. Social anarchists oppose the use of a state structure to achieve their goals of a stateless and classless society, as they consider statism to be an inherently corrupting influence. They thus have criticised the Marxist conception of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", which they consider to be elitist, and have rejected the possibility of a "withering away of the state".
However, some social anarchists such as Noam Chomsky sometimes hold state hierarchy to be preferable to economic hierarchy, and thus lend their support to welfare state programs like universal health care that can improve people's material conditions.