Convicted and hanged as an anarchist scapegoat for the Haymarket Square riot, his wife went on to be one of the founders of the "Wobblies," the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Big Bill Haywood, a anarcho-communist and head of the IWW made it clear to every worker when he said, "Every dollar the boss gets that he didn't earn, is a dollar you earned and didn't get."
The IWW was made up of anarchists, socialists and communists, labor and civil rights organizers who believed in "one big union." They rejected unions set up based on types of employment (trade unions) because their lack of unity with other unions allowed them to be exploited against one another. Regardless of what you might have been told, anarchists, socialists and communists share a belief that man has evolved to live on a bottom up democratic basis. The movement was ultimately destroyed by their arrest, deportation and destruction of their organization by the liberal interventionist Democrat, Woodrow Wilson for opposing World War I and what was promoted as a growing communist threat, the first "Red Scare."
The short and dirty explanation of Anarchism
The difference between anarchists and other "Reds" is how they get there; socialists and communists believe that the workers should take control of the means of production (wealth creation) and run it for themselves under the direction of the state, which Marx believed would eventually "wither away" leaving a society run by the workers themselves. Unfortunately Lenin and Stalin had other ideas and what developed was the communist central state; in effect the government became business under control of elite party members.
That is the very topic that caused the split between Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin, the leading Anarchist theorist of his time. He predicted the bourgeoisie (the managing elite) would be replaced by a new bourgeoisie made up of party members who would be invested in the continuation of the state and their privilege; which of course is exactly what happened in Russia.
Probably the only thing worse than the economy being run by the state (the state directing the application of capital, Lenin/Stalinism) is government being run by corporatism (capital directing government actions, the definition of fascism). Usually thought of as polar opposites in the political spectrum, they are actually twin sisters with different names, the merger of the state and the corporate interests are the same, it's just a matter of management models. The same could be said of the religious state which adds an additional set of superstitions to be considered in the application of the corrupting amoral logic of capital, and raw power of the state.
Anarchists believe that men should not rule or be ruled but form voluntary cooperative relationships to accomplish what they cannot do for themselves, bottom up democracy. Membership in any collective is voluntary and fluid. The three corruptions of power as far as Anarchists are concerned are the power of the state, the power of the church, and the power of capital. They refuse to recognize the authority of all three.
They believe that all formal structures that get power tend to promote the concentration of additional power and the inevitable abuse of it against the individual. Free thought and free will are considered paramount by Anarchists and they consider political processes diversions from direct participation in the processes themselves, whether they be self government or the economics they must live by.
Anarchists and "Direct Action"
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