The promotion of anarchism within capitalist media, coupled with the suppression of Marxist thought, is damning evidence against anarchism as viable opposition to capitalist hegemony. In fact, the two happen to be perfectly compatible. Meanwhile, history demonstrates time and again that revolutions require centralized authority to dismantle oppressive systems. Capitalism tolerates anarchism precisely because it poses no systemic threat, while revolutionary movements succeed only by embracing disciplined, organized force.
Capitalist media platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime glorify anarchist individualism with shows like Money Heist and The Umbrella Academy while demonizing Marxist collectivism. The narratives in the media fetishize lone rebels “fighting the system” through symbolic acts such as heists or sabotage that never threaten the core machinery of the system. By contrast, media vilifies Marxist movements as “authoritarian” as seen in The Hunger Games’ critique of collective resistance vs. glorification of individual heroism. Anarchism’s rejection of centralized power also neatly aligns with neoliberalism’s war on institutional solidarity. Capitalist elites amplify anarchism precisely because it atomizes dissent into spectacle, ensuring resistance remains fragmented and impotent. If anarchism actually threatened capital, it would be censored as fiercely as Marxism.
The reality of the situation is that every effective society of meaningful scale, be it capitalist or socialist, relies on centralized power. Capitalist states enforce property rights, monetary policy, and corporate monopolies through institutions like central banks, militaries, police, and courts. Amazon’'s logistics empire, the Federal Reserve’s control over currency, and NATO’s geopolitical dominance all depend on rigid hierarchies. On the other hand, anarchists refuse to acknowledge that dismantling capitalism requires confronting its centralized power structures with equal organizational force.
What anarchists fail to acknowledge is that revolutions are authoritarian by their very nature. To overthrow a ruling class, the oppressed must organize into a cohesive force capable of seizing and wielding power. The Bolsheviks built a vanguard party to crush counterrevolutionaries and nationalize industry in order to dismantle the Tsarist regime. Mao’s Red Army imposed discipline to expel bourgeoisie and landlords. Engels acknowledged this reality saying that a revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets, and cannon.
Rejecting this authority ensures that a movement becomes irrelevant in the long run. The Spanish anarchists of 1936, despite initial successes, were crushed by fascists because they lacked centralized coordination. Modern “autonomous zones” such as CHAZ dissolve quickly, as they cannot defend against state violence or organize production.
Anarchism’s fatal flaw is its lack of a cohesive vision. It splinters into countless factions such as eco-anarchists, insurrectionists, anprims, mutualists, and so on. Each one prioritizes disparate goals of degrowth, anti-work, anti-civ, etc., that are often at odds with one another. Movements like Occupy with their “leaderless” structure are effortlessly dispersed by the state. By contrast, capitalist states execute power with singular purpose of ensuring profit accumulation in the hands of the oligarchs. Marxist movements, too, succeed through unified strategy as articulated by Lenin in What Is to Be Done? where he prioritized a centralized party precisely to avoid anarchist-style disarray. The capitalist ruling class understands perfectly well that it is easier to crush a hundred squabbling collectives than a single disciplined force. Hence why anarchism becomes a sanctioned form of dissent that never coalesces into material threat.
Meanwhile, revolutions demand the use of authority as a tool for the oppressed to defeat capitalism. Serious movements must embrace the discipline capitalists fear most. The kind of discipline that builds states, expropriates billionaires, and silences reactionaries.
Thanks for your post, really good thought-food!
If you reduce “anarchism” to “ultimate individual freedom”, I would say your analysis is correct because capitalism shares this tenet, and one could say that what differentiates anarchism from capitalism is just the rejection of any emergence of centralisation whereas capitalist put no predicates on that.
Another way to say that is:
And what authoritarism has to do with that? I would say it comes to the fact that directive leadership is more efficient than participative leadership when I say “efficient” I mean, it is “fast” to go through problem -> solution -> execution.
On the other hand, participative leadership have overhead, but their outcomes tend to be more sustainable because they are capable of working on complex problems, but even there there is still a notion of control / authority because you must ensure a collective converges to a solution, and then you must have enough authority to enforce its execution.
This is something really easy to understand for me, working on distributed systems: when you pool huge amount of resources over the network, those can work on really large problem space (e.g. genetics, climate, …), but they have a significant overhead:
Capitalism is naturally biased towards directive leadership because of economism short-termism and its sacrosanct performance (i.e. GDP, growth, KPIs, …). Today, it is evident their system is not sustainable, it was already evident socially, but planetary limits are making that even more obvious in the short-term.
So it is evident the world will change (or a massive part of humanity will perish).
Where I am, personally, heading to is the idea that society is a Complex Adaptive System where authority will always emerge in a shape or another (centralised vs. polycentric), hence the idea of removing authority makes no sense, instead, we should acknowledge authority is part of society and it is up to us to shape it in a way that serves us.
An authoritative state with a planned economy would almost always fail at large scale on the long run, even with enough computing power to allocate resources, because the essential problem is that society is a CAS: how to model society and the economy in a correct way that accounts for unknown unknowns?
On the other end, the culture of the free market and idea that, because this is a Complex Adaptive System, we should not try to control it because a sustainable system will emerge is also pure BS; we see today the result of that socially and environmentally: we have put humanity into an existential polycrisis.
So if both “control” and “freedom” are a failure, it leaves us with a single option: “steering”. That is, the authority must not take a single permanent shape, instead it must use resilience thinking to evolve through time to be sustainable.
In my view, centralised authority only makes sense when we are in the top-right region of the quadrant where dimensions are
(emergency; simple problem).Revolution is an example of that, the problem is simple: we need to seize power because reform don’t work; and we likely want to do it as soon as possible. Existential crisis are another example, let’s take war, the threat may be imminent and the problem is simple (economy of war, mass mobilisation, …); but you take climate change, the problem is imminent at the scale of humanity but the problem is complex so do we really want a centralised authority? How to make sure it takes decisions that are actually effective?
Where things get really interesting is how to structure authority in the other regions of the quadrant. And that’s where I am really excited because if you are young as me, you will probably face and live the collapse of neoliberalism, which means, you will also likely be able to contribute to a new model that may span some generations (hopefully it can be sustainable for humanity on the long run).
My stance on that is to accept humanity as a CAS, and realise that the more you scale the “scope” (regions, nations, continent, humanity as a whole, …) the more unpredictable and uncontrollable it is. Like, ask any politician aware of the neoliberalism madness, and he will just be genuinely clueless on how to stop the world wide machine.
Hence, I personally see the goal of any centralised power in place (whether revolutionary or not) to shift towards a polycentric authority during stable / peaceful times.
Of course that implies a first important step that is the establishment of a strong shared ethos that will draw the “boundaries” by which all power centres abide by and take a truly holistic approach (social-ecological system thinking, not just economic). The other key is the empowerment of individuals, once you created those “boundaries” (which one may call the “social contract”), if individuals are given clear boundaries, they can engage in positive deviance where they know the limits but also understand why those limits exist to protect the collective.
Another important part of resilience thinking when it comes to distributed systems, is the ability for members to “monitor” their neighbours and ensure they are well-behaving. This implies “transparency” and I think digital is key there, if information flows freely amongst power centers, it becomes easy for power centers to monitor each other and quickly terminate any misbehaving members.
At the end of the day, I don’t know if my vision can be “classified” into any given ideology, but I personally don’t see authority as something in a finite state. Just like water ends up boiling and turns into vapour when it gets heated but condense back to liquid otherwise, authority will adapt to its environment. When this environment is still (peaceful and stable), I personally argue polycentric governance is the ideal equilibrium for humanity.
Generally agree with the analysis. One thing I’d like to add is that central authority is not inherently at odds with decentralization at local level consider. The human body, we have a central planning authority which is the brain, but it doesn’t micromanage the operation of the body as whole. It doesn’t directly control muscle contractions, the digestive system, etc. It does high level planning that ensures the survival of the organism as a whole and provides a central coordination mechanism to guide collective action. Meanwhile, local concerns are handled by individual organs in a way that makes sense in their local context. In fact, we can view a complex organism as an ecosystem or a collective of different organisms all living in symbiosis with each other.
Interestingly enough, Chinese model follows a very similar principle. This is a great read about the mix of central planning at high level and decentralized decision making at local level that China settled on. For example, Chinese system uses markets as a tool for resource allocation, but where resources should be allocated is decided by the government.
The second thing that’s worth noting is that when power structures emerge organically there aren’t checks in balances in place to ensure these structures are fair. It’s better to consciously create power structures than let them evolve in ad hoc fashion. The Tyranny of Structurelessness is a great read on the subject.