That didn’t make me into an anarchist, but I read Kevin’s first book, and it dovetailed well both with my experience and the studies I was doing at the time of fair trade. I’m still active in the Green Party, but things are strained, and if they don’t improve substantially, I’ll probably drop electoral activism entirely, and put my efforts into building economic structures that empower the worker at an individual level.

But in fairness to LarryK, I have to say I’ve seen (and probably contributed to) my share of the “herding cats” problem in the factional squabbling between libertarians.

Thanks for the comments, everybody.

I expect a number of people will see Kevin’s title and say to themselves “WTF? Maybe I don’t understand what anarchism is. Let me take a look…”

Then they’ll be hooked (if my experience with Kevin’s writing is typical)!

“ANARCHISM … the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government - harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.” - P.A. Kropotkin

I don’t mean to be an old stick in the mud, but really, this old chestnut involves such a complete misunderstanding of what the overwhelming majority of anarchists in the history of the world (who have tended to assign a lot of importance to freely constituted, participatory assocations) have thought, that it really just fails as humor.

LarryK’s comment reminds me of Per Bylund’s attack on “blueprint anarchists”, which in turn reminds me of Bob Black’s “My Anarchism Problem“.