Dear media, I am an anarchist. I assure you, the Capitol …

If you ever see an "anarchist coup", it won’t involve people storming government buildings and trying to take over

It will involve people ignoring those buildings and coming together in their neighbourhoods and workplaces, then deciding to run them autonomously and cooperatively

Liberals and conservatives alike throw around the word "anarchists" to mean "people who cause a fuss in public", regardless of their actual politics.

If you’re at all interested, there’s more to social anarchist political philosophy than causing a fuss in public.

Social anarchism is about trying to push society in a direction that is more

• free
• egalitarian
• cooperative

It sees the central antagonism within society as the conflict between

1. Sociality: the voluntary cooperation of free equals
2. Hierarchy in its various forms

Social anarchists propose replacing the various forms of social hierarchy that restrict both freedom and equality – statism, patriarchy, white supremacy, queerphobia, ruling classes – with various forms of horizontal organisation through free associations.

In other words, anarchists want to take all the useful forms of activity that currently go on in this existing society – e.g. making a growing things, providing services – and find ways to do them through egalitarian cooperation.

It’s not actually that crazy.

It’s not that crazy because there already exist (or have existed) many real-life examples of egalitarian cooperation which function in ways similar to what anarchists recommend.

A free online book, Anarchy Works by Peter Gelderloos, is chock full of such examples.

Most anarchists don’t believe we can achieve such a world overnight.

I have no faith in the notion that it can be achieved through some kind of ruptural event like the Storming of the Winter Palace.

Instead, we try to do what we can to eliminate hierarchy in the here and now.

You can find anarchists working within every progressive social movement to fight racism, sexism, queerphobia, and ecological degradation.

Anarchists have also been historically involved in every fight for civil liberties and used to be joined at the hip to the labour movement

If all you pay attention to is street fighting and window breaking, you’re roughly equivalent to the British newspapers in the 1770s who cried "Those violent brutes! Look at all that tea!"

Sometimes you have to scream to be heard.

But you need to hear the words, not the noise.

So once again media,

No, the rightwing authoritarians who stormed Capital Hill ARE NOT ANARCHISTS.

"Anarchist" does not mean "anyone who makes a fuss in public".