Talk:List of anarchist communities

Standard for Inclusion

This article lists a wide variety of things as 'anarchist communities', including ephemeral Communist republics and protest movements. For inclusion on this list, shouldn't there be a requirement that an organization be both anarchist and a society? Flameoguy (talk) 22:52, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

This lack of a clear inclusion criteria is why I gave up on editing this list years ago. I honestly don't think it can ever be good, as this list is a magnet for people that want to throw everything but the kitchen sink in here, often without any reliable sources. That someone has just added Liberland and Democratic Kampuchea isn't an aberration, it's indicative of how poorly conceived this list is.

I could recommend we TNT this list, but I know that would likely not be a popular solution. What we can do is go through the sources and verify whether these societies were described as "anarchist", removing the ones that aren't. There's also some questionable sources like anarchist pamphlets and magazines that should probably be removed/improved. -- Grnrchst (talk) 09:05, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

How is this list differentiated from the List of stateless societies? czar 10:16, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

Presumably, this list would cover communities created by or controlled by political anarchists, while the other list would cover any society without a state. The 'mass societies' section on the article could probably be removed in its entirety, with any verifiable entries transferred to the list of stateless societies article. Something like Revolutionary Catalonia is dubiously an 'anarchist community' in the first place.

Flameoguy (talk) 00:09, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

From what I can see, anarchist communities are communities acting according to anarchist principles regardless of whether they have fully established their ideals (i.e. abolished the state) whereas stateless societies don't have a state and may not explicitly act according to anarchist principles. I feel this probably addresses @Flameoguy's concern that Revolutionary Catalonia and some other communities weren't anarchist. While they weren't entirely stateless, they acted according to anarchist principles, considered themselves to be anarchist, and are considered by many to be anarchist. Aethyrial (talk) 00:47, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

@Czar; @Flameoguy; @Aethyrial: I think a good way to help establish clearer inclusion criteria in the list would be to add quotes to the citations and maybe to require quotes moving forward. This would help ease verification of what it is an editor thinks a source says that qualifies it as an "anarchist community", which could encourage more of a discussion cycle for additions. I'm normally not very keen on in-citation quotes, but I think it might be a good route for this article. -- Grnrchst (talk) 16:28, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

A good example I just came across: When verifying the sources for Patagonia Rebelde, I saw that they they described the events as a suppressed strike or uprising, rather than a specific "community" or "society". Do we let any mass strike or uprising onto the list? Or do we require there be some kind of clear social unit that formed from it? -- Grnrchst (talk) 17:10, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

add quotes to the citations ... ease verification Agreed—good idea! czar 03:40, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

I'm of the firm belief that strikes an uprisings do not constitute communities, and that the ephemeral governments created by anarchists or socialists are not "mass societies" in the sense implied by this article.

Flameoguy (talk) 17:17, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

@Czar and Flameoguy: As time goes on, this list continues to expand and contract seemingly at random. With still no obvious standard for inclusion, the additions and removals from the list often appear to come from people's personal ideas about what constitutes an "anarchist community", rather than any concrete basis in reliable sources. I'm starting to wonder if we should just cut our losses and discuss deletion of this listicle. I understand this probably won't be a popular proposal, as this pulls a daily average of 380 page views, but my worries that this list isn't salvageable from endemic issues of synth get bigger each passing month. --Grnrchst (talk) 09:00, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

As an aside, the Category:Anarchist communities category will continue to have the same scope issue as this list. The part I'm missing is, if "anarchist community" is an ambiguous term that can be further refined, what is the potential refinement? We have Category:Anarchist organizations (groups) and Stateless societies so what is this list meant to cover that isn't in the others? Should this list be "anarchist intentional communities" (in which the a residential group either declared or is commonly described as anarchist), or does it not need to be a list at all since categories are sufficient? Either way we'll have to address the category alongside the list. czar 13:47, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

I agree that the category would need discussion as well. For reference, I just searched up the term "anarchist community" on Google Scholar,[1] and found that the term itself is completely ambiguous in terms of scope. Some works refer to it in the same way as describing any other demographic in a certain area, like "the anarchist community of Philadelphia/Chicago"; others refer to it in terms of utopian or intentional communities; others refer to it as a synonym for "anarchist movement". In contrast, "anarchist society" appears to not only be more commonly used but also to have a narrower scope, with almost all sources using it to describe a future social order.[2]

I think the "intentional communities" section would better be merged into the larger "list of intentional communities", which I think has a more narrowly defined scope than "anarchist communities" does here. I also don't think "anarchist intentional communities" is a notable enough concept to warrant its own article.[3] As for the other sections, I'm not yet sure what we could hypothetically use to even describe and group together these "mass societies" that we have listed. The cited sources don't help. I also don't know what to do with the "community projects" section, as its scope is even more loosely defined than the "mass societies" one, and with far less sources to boot. --Grnrchst (talk) 17:05, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

I have been a fan of this page for years because it captures examples of communities that have successfully implemented systems that reflect left-anarchist principles. That is really how I have interpreted the term "list of anarchist mass societies" (or "communities") in its broadest sense, and the semantic container through which I have filtered the validity of any new contributions (not mine, but those of others). The more subtle differentiations of political vs. cultural/indigenous, intentional vs. organic/spontaneous, mass society vs. community, etc. are of course important distinctions -- I get that -- but it was easy for me to get my head around the bigger, albeit much looser semantic container.

Reading through the talk section (requested move, etc.) I do sense some sentiments of what I would describe as "nitpicking" -- or a concern with subtle minutia that tends to miss the forest for the trees, and is understandably incompatible with an inclusion definition that is perceived as "too loose" or "too broad." One example is asserting that Rojava's municipalist socialism isn't really "anarchist." Yes, of course, subsidiarity is not anarchism in-and-of itself (otherwise we could describe Switzerland semi-direct democracy as "anarchist," which is clearly isn't), but if there is no national government at all, or the municipalism operates completely independently of the State within which it exists, it is most certainly "anarchist" in nature and execution, and is perceived as such by the State. Ignoring this distinction is akin to labeling Rojava "communist," as was done by the previous U.S. administration in its encouragement of Turkey's incursion -- it may be ideologically convenient shorthand, but it lacks real accuracy or efficacy. This is a difficult and nuanced point to argue...but again if we look at the historical context and operational reality of this particular implementation of municipalist socialism in Syria, it is most certainly "a successfully implemented system that reflects left-anarchist principles" -- and I would maintain this is true even though Murray Bookchin was disillusioned with the anarchist movement and didn't want to be associated with it.

In the bigger picture, as anarchism is extremely difficult to shoehorn into a strictly confined semantic container, I wonder if increasing the confinement of an input funnel for it on this page is somewhat...futile. There is also a paucity of deep knowledge around anarchism in general. The term is widely misunderstood in common parlance (in the U.S. at least), as is the term "libertarian." Can that widespread lack of informed usage be remedied by restricting what is allowed in the bucket of "anarchist communities?" I honestly do not believe it can.

So those are my thoughts. I would love to see the original, much longer list restored (especially the one that was chronological, as I felt it was pretty breathtaking)...but I do recognize that some differentiation would be helpful. To that end I would propose creating a column in the table that helps folks identify differences. That column, which could be called "Source of Anarchist Praxis," might contain labels that speak to the desired divisions, labels like "[Specific/Named] Political Ideology," "Indigenous Cultural Values," "Spontaneous Planned Community," "Religious Planned Community," and so on. In fact, I have a vague memory of something like that existing at one time in the past.

I hope this was helpful. HollenEstelrim (talk) 17:10, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

Welcome to the discussion @HollenEstelrim and thanks for your thoughts. I'm going to have to disagree with you that the looseness of the definition of "anarchist community" is an asset here, as again, I think this looseness gives way to endless back-and-forth arguments based on conflicting personal definitions. You might think that something constitutes an anarchist community, but another person might not. Whose opinion do we trust? With such content disputes, we tend to focus on what reliable sources say on the matter. Now the source that was cited for the AANES was a blog post, so its reliability is already questionable, but the source itself also questions whether the label of "anarchist" applies to the AANES and even whether such a label matters.

That the term "anarchism" is misunderstood by the American public isn't what concerns me, not only because I'm not American, but because we can help rectify such misunderstandings by improving our prose articles with helpful information from good sources. There are already many such Wikipedians diligently contributing to this effort, including my colleagues and I over at WikiProject Anarchism. Believe me when I say I understand the pull of this list, as it was one of the first articles I started editing when I first signed up. But I just don't think it serves to improve people's understanding of anarchism any more, it's too vaguely-conceived to do that. At this point, I think it's mostly a battleground for people to plant their flags in different movements and claim them under (or reject them from) a certain label, usually just based on personal preference and without any regard for backing their claims up with sources.

Now I would love to be proven wrong on this. If you want to see this list keep on keeping on, I would highly encourage you to contribute to it and cite reliable sources so that others can verify whether it has a place in the list. But right now, I'm still unconvinced that this list has a good reason to continue existing. --Grnrchst (talk) 20:12, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

Points and suggestions well taken, @Grnrchst. Here is a possible "reliable source" that could be used in this context -- and indeed suggests a possible differentiation and labeling scheme per my previous post: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anarchism/ Note some of the relevant categories listed there: Political Anarchism; Religious Anarchism; Black, Indigenous, and Decolonizing Anarchism, etc.

There is also some interesting discussion in that article that begins to explore different real-world applications of anarchism, such as this section: "Separatist communities have to consider: the degree to which they give up on anarchist direct action against dominant political forces, the extent to which they have to accommodate themselves to political reality, and the risk that customary hierarchies will be reinstated within the commune."

Could this be a viable starting point for trust, perhaps?

Lastly, I'm wondering if "Enclaves with Anarchist Principles" (or something like that) would be a useful container. Still broad, but with either verifiable or aspirational conditions that can be supported with meaningful citations. HollenEstelrim (talk) 22:02, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

While a good introductory encyclopedic text on anarchism, I don't think this source is too helpful for this specific listicle. There's only one section (which you quoted from) that is about anarchist communes/utopian communities, but it doesn't really go into depth on any specific examples and mostly fixates on the theory. This might be useful to cite in a section about challenges that anarchist communities might face, but for a list? I'm not so sure.

As for your alternate container suggestion, do you know of any sources that use such terminology? Personally the only time I've seen the term "enclave" used in the context of anarchism was in the book Temporary Autonomous Zone. --Grnrchst (talk) 22:20, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

@Grnrchst Thanks for the quick response and apologies for my tardy reply. To your points...

"Enclave" has been used in anarchist literature as a placeholder for planned, religious, or culturally spontaneous anarchist communities for many years. For example, in addition to Hakim Bey's The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1985), it was used by Murray Bookchin in The Communist Manifesto: Insights and Problems (1998); in Peter Marshall's description of anarchist "expanding enclaves of freedom" in Demanding the Impossible (2010); in more obscure works like Erica Lagalisse's Occult Features of Anarchism (2019); and others I could dig up with additional time. Some form of usage also appears in a ~23,000 academic works on anarchism when searching on multiple phrases like "anarchist enclaves" in Google Scholar. For me it's become a convenient shorthand for anarchist experiments around the globe -- albeit medium-scale ones (i.e. generally larger than a "community" but smaller than a "society"). That said, the term may not be flexible enough to encompass all communities and societies listed on this page. So that is something to think about.

As to the defining of a "list," it seems like theoretical categories (or ideological categories?) of anarchism may be the only route of organization here, simply because such vastly different terminology has been used over time to differentiate real-world instances. The discussion/disagreement around Rojava is a prime example of this. To someone familiar with the reality-on-the-ground and it's regional context, I think Rojava being an "implementation of left-anarchist principles" is fairly obvious. To someone who is invested in a more rigid ideological purity (i.e. the sort of contributor who insists that "authentic capitalism" or "authentic communism" don't exist anywhere in the world), there is simply no way out of this conundrum. But, if we can relax that impulse, I do think there are some qualified wins. HollenEstelrim (talk) 16:48, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

Using quotation marks to search for the exact phrase "anarchist enclave", there are are 40 results in GS. "Anarchist community" is far more common and yet it refers to just as vague a collection, i.e., there is no special reason for why these are grouped together apart from all being groups that identify as anarchist.

The Rojava definitional issue isn't as complicated either since, on Wikipedia, we care about what reliable, secondary sources do most often, so if it's commonly referenced as an anarchist experiment, we call it that and if not, we don't. czar 12:48, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

@Gioggo: As you've been contributing to cutting down on entries, I was wondering if you had anything to add to this discussion. Do you think we can establish solid inclusion criteria and what would such a criteria be? --Grnrchst (talk) 12:06, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Split proposal

Would it be sufficient to split the three sections of this community list into the existing articles: List of stateless societies, List of intentional communities, and List of self-managed social centers? That would cover the full scope of each and each list could potentially be formatted as a table with a column for its community ideology ("anarchist", "anti-capitalist", etc.) The caveat would be that there would no longer be a list of "anarchist communities" but I think we arrived at that grouping being vague and not the subject of commentary in secondary sources. More often sources discuss anarchist societies, anarchist infoshops, anarchist communes (intentional communities) and not some catch-all. If this works, then we'd split appropriately and redirect this title to a place where all three lists are linked, perhaps Anarchism § See also? czar 19:56, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

I certainly agree with splitting the intentional communities and community projects sections into the existing articles. But I think there's a problem with merging the "mass societies" list into the list of stateless societies, because while they're often unambiguously anarchist in orientation, they may not be described as "stateless". For example, I don't know of any reliable sources that describe the Makhnovshchina as a "stateless society"; it arguably wasn't one, even if Makhno may have been attempting to create one. Other cases are similar: e.g. the Southern Fujian Protectorate may have been a haven for anarchist activity, but it was also basically a military dictatorship. Where the latter two sections could be merged without issue, I think merging the "mass societies" section into the list of stateless societies trades one problem for another. --Grnrchst (talk) 09:56, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Is there some common grouping that holds the Makhnovshchina and Southern Fujian Protectorate in common? Do you recommend leaving "anarchist mass societies" as the subject of this standalone list? I haven't personally seen an academic grouping that addresses "anarchist mass societies". There are "anarchist communes" but since commune could refer to revolutionary government (Paris Commune) or intentional community (commune), it brings us back to the original issue. Even if we defined it as revolutionary government commune as inclusion criteria, I would expect to be forever pruning editors looking to expand the definition to intentional communities. Perhaps a better solution than keeping it as "mass societies"—a term not widely used. czar 12:59, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

You're right that "anarchist mass societies" isn't really a thing, but if I knew of a better combination of words I wouldn't be mulling over deletion. In my experience, the Makhnovshchina is most commonly described as a mass movement, not a "community", "society", "enclave", or whatever. Makhno only ever used the terms "free society", "anarchist society" or "libertarian society" when talking about what he aspired to create, not what he actually created. The Makhnovists did create some libertarian agricultural communes, mostly in 1917, but these were only a part of what the movement became; I wouldn't describe the Makhnovshchina as a "commune".

I'm reading about South Fujian now and it's certainly interesting, but I am very sceptical of appending the "anarchist" adjective to it. Anarchists had significant freedom of association and press there, and Chen Jiongming had anarchist sympathies, but it was at its core a military government during a period of warlordism. I haven't seen the terms "commune", "community", "society" or "enclave" applied to it, nor have I seen it described in concretely anarchist terms.

As for others, the quoted source for the KPAM says it's "not an anarchist organization", but rather defined it as an "autonomous, self-governing, co-operative organization." Should we count self-defined organizations? And I know many anarchists love to imagine that "Revolutionary Catalonia" was a coherent utopian anarchist polity, but it really wasn't; anarcho-syndicalism was certainly influential and powerful, but there was still a government and it wasn't meaningfully very autonomous from the Republic from November 1936 onwards. Naissar was a Soviet republic that just happened to have an anarchist at the centre. The Baja Rebellion briefly captured a couple cities, but I know of no genuine experiments in alternative economics of organising that happened there in those few months. Funnily enough, the Strandzha Commune is the easiest of these to pin down in easy terms, but it consisted of only a few towns in the mountains and existed for about a month.

This could go on... at the end of the day, I just don't think there is a grand unifying premise that contains all of these entries and don't think listing them together is helpful to understanding any of them. If we want a simple term for it, we are going to inevitably use a term that isn't commonly used across each of the different examples, one that risks reducing complicated, diverse and interesting movements down to a label that may not even be applicable to them. If we want a more complicated and broad-based scope, what would the criteria even be? "List of communities, societies, communes, enclaves, movements, polities, governments, organizations, events or enterprises that may or may not have been anarchist, involved anarchists in some form or can be interpreted as tangentially-related-enough to anarchism for it to be included based on vibes"? I just don't think this listicle has a potential solution that can satisfy everyone. Either we set a strict and concrete criteria, and it becomes small enough that there's no point in it being a list; or we have a broad criteria, and it quickly grows to the point of meaninglessness. --Grnrchst (talk) 23:34, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Once the two other sections are split out and we're left with the mass societies section, I think it's reasonable to redirect this list to Anarchism § See also where those two split section list targets should be added as well. czar 01:18, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

@Czar: Should I just go ahead and merge the intentional communities section into the intentional communities list? --Grnrchst (talk) 14:40, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

I think that's the best option, yes czar 17:42, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

"List of libertarian socialist communities" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect List of libertarian socialist communities has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2023 October 9 § List of libertarian socialist communities until a consensus is reached. Utopes _{(talk / cont)} 21:30, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

Merger proposal: "community projects" section

The community projects section has been an issue for this list for a while. Not only is it almost entirely unsourced, but it's unclear how exactly the section fits under the branch of "anarchist communities", as the entries are largely self-managed social centers. Now I recently noticed that we already have a List of self-managed social centers, which is much better-defined and better-sourced, thanks to the tireless work of @Mujinga. Looking through our "community projects" list here, I see that many of the entries are in fact already in the list of self-managed social centers. So right now, this section serves as little more than an inferior duplicate of a much better list. As such, I propose we merge any entries in the "community projects" list that aren't already there into the list of social-managed social centers and delete the section. --Grnrchst (talk) 17:24, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

I don't see this as a merger per se because the list article already exists. Any entries that belong in that list should be added, and if we remove all of those entries from the present section, what "community projects" would be left over (i.e., not eligible for merge)? czar 19:50, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

This page has certainly been updated since I last saw it. I agree with Grnrchst that an unreferenced list for "community projects" isn't great and I can imagine there will be a fair bit of overlap with List of self-managed social centers, but not all the social centres are anarchist by any means - for example Conne Island is/was antideutsch, Leoncavallo defines itself as "Leoncavallo Self-Managed Public Space" and is more autonomist than anarchist, Syndikalistiskt Forum didn't seem anarchist, more communist when I was there etc etc So I think we'd have to do it on a case by case basis, and also some of the ones here eg Jura Books seem more like a small anarchist infoshop/bookshop projects than a full-blown social centre with multiple activities going on. But at the same time I don't see what a bookshop necessarily has to do with communities such as Naissaar#Soviet_Republic_of_Naissaar; Coffee Strong looks cool but not even particularly anarchist, so the section has gone a bit out of control. In sum, merge and delete in the good way :) Mujinga (talk) 11:05, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

I had another look, I'd say the only entries in the list that seem relevant to this page are Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, Slab City, California and Dial House, Essex Mujinga (talk) 20:01, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

@Grnrchst, to close out this section, looks like you should feel free to do what you proposed czar 02:19, 6 February 2024 (UTC)

@Czar; @Mujinga: I have merged all the remaining entries, with the exception of the CHOP, Slab City and Dial House. --Grnrchst (talk) 13:57, 15 February 2024 (UTC)