We argue that diversity of theory, organisational form, tactics, and strategy is something that anarchists have to accept about our movement for it to succeed as a movement, and we can not impose ideological or strategic unity on our comrades. It is not a question of if we accept this diversity, but rather a question of how we react to it? Should we embrace it and build networks of communication and cooperation across our pluralistic movement, or should we treat disunity as an unfortunate cost of bottom-up structures that we must overcome?

We take the side of building networks of communication and cooperation across the anarchist movement that mutually embrace our inherent diversity. Such an approach plays to the strengths of anarchism instead of working against them, allows us to better exploit weaknesses in the hierarchical structures we oppose, and ultimately is the approach that will allows us to develop a shared strategy that actually works, if such a thing is possible.

The first advantage of embracing the diversity within anarchism is that it will allow us to reach far more people. There is often a tendency to treat outreach and recruitment as a zero-sum game, with different forms of anarchism competing for the same small pool of radicals who we might come into contact with. This may be true in terms of our existing base of activists, but that is the attitude of a movement that has accepted stagnation, death, given up on the prospect of significant growth, and turned inwards on itself.

If, instead of focusing our discussions on each other, we turn our focus outwards to people who are not already anarchists, then this logic changes. People are diverse, with their own interests, preferences, and experiences. Someone who is not interested in anarchist organising in one sector, or around one issue, may be drawn in by some other anarchist project. Someone who dislikes one kind of propaganda may still be receptive to a different set of arguments for anarchism. In this context, the diversity of anarchism does not put us in a situation in which we are competing with each other to build our specific projects and organisations, but covering each others’ blind-spots, and building a movement that draws from the broadest possible pool of support.

This broadness is important not just for making anarchism relevant to as many people as possible, but also to deny space to our ideological opponents. This is especially important in this time of rising fascism; anywhere we are not organising and building solidarity across society is a space that we risk giving up to fascist opportunists. We need to be in the community, in the workplace, in subcultural spaces, building our movements and organisation around as many issues as we can, working to influence culture from as many angles as possible, and such a diversity of organising space is going to both demand and reinforce a diversity of anarchisms.

The second advantage of diversity is that it allows us to operate in ways that are harder for the centralised institutions of state and capital to counter. Centralisation grants state and capital access to monstrous resources to deploy against their opponents. Radical movements that attempt to mirror this rigid, homogenised, and centralised structure are often defeated, because state and capital are better at playing that game, and can throw more resources at the problem until it is crushed by sheer brute force. Anarchists should not make this mistake.

Instead, an anarchist movement of diverse anarchisms can exploit the ways in which centralised hierarchies are weak and ineffective. A diversity of anarchisms allows us to quickly find out what works against state and capital in any given circumstance; a diverse bottom-up movement is capable to testing many more different theories at once, compared to a top-down hierarchy that can only try a limited number of approaches. A thousand activists all trying different approaches to fighting state and capital are always going to find weaknesses faster than 999 activists waiting on one theoretician to come up with the answer through abstract thought. This is a way to offset the resource advantage state and capital have, by being able to use the resources we do have in a way that is more responsive to reality.

Diverse bottom-up movements also have an advantage over top-down hierarchies in their speed of adaptation. State and capital adapt to better suppress social movements, but they do so slowly; information must be gathered, filtered, and made understandable to each level of the hierarchy as it travels up towards the top where decisions are made, and then orders must flow back down the hierarchy. Bottom-up activists can use their own initiative and adapt to changing circumstances on the fly. This adaptive advantage grants a diverse bottom-up movement another way to offset the resource advantages of state and capital, by adapting faster than they can counter, ensuring those vast resources are going to fight whatever we were doing yesterday, not what we are doing today.

The third advantage of a movement of diverse anarchisms is that it can better tailor itself to local conditions and specific circumstances than any top-down hierarchy that is always going to have to apply a more one-size-fits-all approach to organising society. We don’t seek to spread a single anarchist monopoly across the land like a fast-food franchise but to connect localities that are unique and relevant to their communtiies, to whom they belong and reflect. Someone embedded in their community or workplace is always going to better understand what is happening on the ground, compared to a top-down administrator. A diverse anarchist movement can organise and resist in ways that are themselves diverse, shifting, and exploit specific local weaknesses in state and capital with scalpel-like precision, while state and capital can only respond slowly with a generalised defence, that cannot cover all of its vulnerabilities at once.

Lastly, if there is a single collection of ideas, organisation forms, and tactics that are correct for the vast majority of anarchists, we are more likely to discover this within a broad and diverse movement, than in one that is smaller and more homogenous. The greater the breadth of our collective experience, the more experiments in resistance we can look to, and the more angles of critique we can expose our ideas to, the more capable we will be to be able to sort the good from the bad.

But these advantages can only be leveraged if we commit to active communication and cooperation between different strands of anarchist thought and action. We can not learn from each other if we do not talk to each other in good faith. We can not cover each others’ weaknesses if we treat those weaknesses as irrelevant. We can not support each other, if we do not accept that we need different ideas and tactics for different situations and different sections of society. We can not build an anarchist movement that has maximum social impact, if we dismiss all ideas that are not relevant to our particular projects and concerns. We need to accept diversity and build trust in our movement before we can use it as a weapon against state,capital and the dominant culture.

Anarchism is a diverse movement with a long history. There are many routes into anarchism; socialists and greens who reject the state, liberals who apply their liberalism consistently, local traditions of dissent and resistance, experiencing abuse of authority by bosses and politicians, cultural critique, reading anarchist theory, and the countless other ways we all ended up where we are right now. These different origins all leave a mark on our ideas and our practices, and we all have our own preferences and ideological hang-ups. Every anarchist carries a slightly different anarchism within them, which also implies a slightly different communism, or a collectivism, or a mutualism, or perhaps a rejection of any of the old economic ideas in favour of something entirely new.

This feeds into a diversity of organisational forms, tactics, and broad strategies. Syndicalists who anchor their efforts in the workplace. Insurrectionaries who prefer direct attack against state and capital. Municipalists who are building a new world in the shell of the old in their neighbourhoods. Countercultural anarchists who attempt to live as free as they can in the here and now. Philosophical anarchists who do cultural and education work for a better world in the far future. And even within each branch of anarchism there are important differences between their members.

This diversity is an inherent part of anarchism. Anarchism has always respected the ability of each individual to organise with their peers based on their own experiences, conditions, capabilities, and desires, and so has always accepted that different people will have different ideas, build different organisations, and follow different strategies. Anarchism has always held that organising both along and across these lines of difference will result in a society that better serves its members, rather than a homogeneous society built on trying to suppress diversity and impose a one-size-fits-all solution.

As an example of this, someone may need to adopt an anarchism that puts an emphasis on dropping out of society because society is so hostile to them that staying within it is excruciating. That position makes it far harder for them to do the kind of organising that requires being well-connected to mainstream society, like workplace or community organising. Attempting to apply a strict syndicalist or municipalist approach to anarchism would only result in frustration for them, and likely not be effective regardless of the merit of syndicalism or municipalism. But perhaps they are well placed to maintain countercultural spaces, launch acts of insurrection, or reach for new horizons of anarchism in the spaces not yet controlled by the dominant culture.

On the flip side to this, someone who is well-embedded in their community, local traditions of organising or resistance is unlikely to be able to easily remove themselves from that position even if they tried. They have networks of solidarity that they rely on, and people who rely on them. Building on those traditions and attempting to push them in a more radical direction is probably the optimal thing for them to do. But the very social links that open some avenues for radical action also may close some avenues for insurrection or countercultural activity, regardless of the merits of those approaches.

In the above examples it is clear that each anarchist should take very different approaches to organising and tactics based on their particular context and strengths. By embracing a diversity of tactics we can better serve anarchism as a whole by doing different things as and where we can. Anarchists have different inclinations, exist in different spaces, and will have built up different skills and networks, all of which would be squandered if they decided to swap places with others because they felt that this was the only ideologically correct course of action according to a certain theory.

This kind of diversity is also never going to go away. Even if one anarchist theory or strategy becomes the most prominent, there will always be other approaches active alongside it. If this diversity is inherent, then all we can do is choose what to do with it. Ideally, we would turn our diversity into a strength, with different traditions mutually supporting each other as best they can towards building a united revolutionary movement.

Yet there is still a reflexive ideological absolutism in current and historical anarchist discourse and organising. We tend to treat our particular strain or experience of anarchism as superior to others, and treat what others are doing as simply wrong. We sometimes end up discussing the pros and cons of different kinds of anarchism in the abstract, instead of the needs and capabilities of actual anarchists and our communities. When we dismiss other anarchist traditions like this, we often end up also dismissing potential avenues of communication and cooperation, and damn anarchism to be a “movement” of isolated projects that live and die on their own or end up in spirals of infighting and ideological nitpicking with others.

This kind of attitude contradicts the pluralistic spirit of anarchism and contains the seeds of a new authoritarianism and, considering how easily authority has re-asserted itself in past movements for liberation, we must do all that we can to guard against it. Whatever else we might be, we must be good anarchists first, and we would much rather have a movement in which someone’s preferred approach was a minority but they could still trust everyone involved to be truly committed to the core ideals of anarchism, and work through disagreements with mutual respect for a diversity of tactics and a shared solidarity.

That said, this is not a call for everyone to drop their theoretical, organisational, and strategic commitments and adopt an anarchism that is a loosely-defined mush. Having specific commitments and principles in our anarchism is important, whilst remembering that not every theoretical, organisational, or strategic idea is necessarily equally valid. Some people are still doing things that are wrong for them, or wrong for anarchism as a whole. Neither is this a call for everyone to give up on deeper strategy and do whatever is easiest for them. It is laudable when people think beyond their immediate context and develop themselves as activists to fill roles they believe the movement needs.

This is a call to accept that anarchism will always be diverse, and that diversity isn’t necessarily rooted in some anarchists doing anarchism wrong, but in real differences in where individual anarchists are, what they need, and what they can do. This is a call to start organising a real revolutionary movement for all of us that can incorporate this diversity instead of ignoring it, or pretending we can build a movement on the basis of a single fixed “correct” idea of anarchist organisation or strategy. Many anarchists are going to choose, or be forced, to fight where they stand, and everyone starts standing in a different place. We need to work out how best to support each other on that basis and fight to win.