Anarchists do not fit into the standard ‘left/right, authoritarian/libertarian’ political compass. They definitionally do not vary along the vertical ‘authoritarian/libertarian’ axis, and do not advocate for the use of governments to push society one way or the other along the horizontal ‘left/right’ axis. Nonetheless, there is a large amount of viewpoint diversity among them, and so something like the standard political compass might be useful for identifying anarchists who have, or would have had, common cause with one another beyond being part of the same broad political ideology.
Hypothesis: There are two major belief axes along which anarchists fall that substantially differentiate one anarchist’s political beliefs from another’s. The horizontal axis spans from collectivist to capitalist and the vertical axis spans from push-button to gradualist.
Traditional Political Compass (left) versus Anarchist Political Compass (right)
Some disclaimers
Anarchists are unified by a simple yet radical belief: there should be no entity with a geographically defined monopoly on violence. Because the criterion for being part of this group is so simple, there is a huge amount of variation in virtually all other belief dimensions among people who call themselves anarchists. While the two dimensions in my compass are, in my opinion, the most substantial and analytically useful, people who survey members of this ideology are bound to notice others that might be important.
For example, some anarchists defend their beliefs on the basis of natural rights and first principles, such as the famous Non-Aggression Principle, while others are more pragmatic, defending their beliefs on the basis that following them produces the best outcomes for humanity. This is an important differentiator for classifying the types of arguments someone tends to use, but is not very useful for identifying people who have common cause with one another.
There is also a comically large number of subgroups that concatenate anarchism and some other ideology. For example:
Anarcho-environmentalism or Green anarchism (the desire to abolish governments in order to save the planet from environmental destruction)
Anarcha-feminism (the conflation of government with patriarchy– and yes, the ‘a’ ending to ‘anarcha’ is intentional)
Christian anarchism (the belief that the Christian god is the only legitimate authority, and therefore no government authority should be recognized)
Jewish anarchism (the same as above but for the Jewish god)
Queer anarchism (anarchy, but gay)
Crypto-anarchism (the belief that government authority can be weakened primarily by adopting cryptocurrencies as the primary medium of economic exchange)
If someone identifies as belonging to one of these groups, that person probably doesn’t believe in anarchy simply as a means to enriching humanity, but only as a means to some other ideological goal. They might play nice temporarily with members of another subgroup and with proper anarchists, but only up until others become a barrier to accomplishing their real goal. Notice that I have not listed anarcho-communism or anarcho-capitalism– two of the most commonly mentioned concatenated forms of anarchy. I will explain why momentarily.
The horizontal axis
Now, on to what I consider the important dimensions. First, I propose that there is a horizontal axis that describes what the person believes will happen when the government pulls back. On the left end of this axis are the collectivists, who believe that humans with no government will adopt or “revert” to communal living, shared ownership of land and capital, and economic egalitarianism. They typically believe that capitalism is an expression of authority not meaningfully different from government coercion, that private property is unnatural, and that socioeconomic inequality is usually, if not always, a result of oppression. On the other end of this axis are the capitalists. They believe that, should the government stop coercing them, humans would mostly engage in voluntary and mutually beneficial exchange on the free market, protect their private property using private means, and seek to enrich themselves and others through individualistic enterprising.
This is obviously very similar to the traditional political compass’s ‘left/right’ axis. However, unless we are dealing with the very bottom of that compass, the left/right axis usually describes what one wants the government to do. E.g., if one wants the government to redistribute wealth to reduce economic inequality, they are further to the left on the traditional political compass. It is only along the absolute bottom of that compass that the left/right distinction refers only to how one wants society to look, or believes it would look if the government did not exist. You could, if it helps, think of my Anarchist Political Compass as laying flat beneath the traditional political compass with its horizontal axis running along the bottom edge of the traditional compass and the vertical axis stretching off into 3D space, orthogonal to the traditional compass.
I left anarcho-communism or anarcho-capitalism off of the list of political subgroups because these two ideologies do not usually describe what secondary thing a person’s anarchistic beliefs are a means to. Instead, they describe how a person thinks society would look if anarchy were achieved. That is, they are names for the dispositions at each end of my horizontal axis, not bastardized offshoots of anarchy proper.
The vertical axis
The vertical axis of my proposed political compass describes the pace at which one believes anarchy should or could come about. At one extreme (that I have arbitrarily placed at the top of the compass), there are ‘push-button’ anarchists. This term, which I have appropriated from Bryan Caplan, refers to people who would, if they could, simply push a button that instantly annihilates their government, believing either that anarchist institutions would automatically arise in its place or that whatever would arise would be closer to anarchy than before. The proverbial button usually means violent revolution, but not necessarily. People on this extreme tend to believe that government is unnatural, that society would quickly adopt peaceful anarchist modes of behavior if only the government would leave them alone, and that there is little to no possibility that slow incremental change can defeat the apparatus of the state.
At the other end of this axis are who I call gradualists. They believe that the road to anarchy is incremental and, ideally, peaceful. They tend to believe that sudden revolutionary change leads to power vacuums that are likely to be filled by new governments, and that the most effective ways to combat the state are either to provide people with private alternatives to government services or to gradually shift the values of society towards peaceful, voluntary cooperation. Another word for this extreme could be ‘reformist’, but since reforms can be sudden or gradual, I find ‘gradualist’ more suitable.
While anyone who is not at the very top of this axis believes the transition to anarchy is gradual to some degree, it still makes sense to me to think of this dimension as a spectrum. The highest quarter of this axis contains all of the revolutionary anarchists, including those who think that the revolution might take some time. It also contains the rare but precious few who believe that peaceful, spontaneous, mass non-compliance with all government dictates is a possibility. The middle two quarters contain all those anarchists who campaign passionately for radical change, but are not willing to commit violence and see there being several intermediate steps between statism and non-statism. The lower quarter contains almost everyone who believes that violent or abrupt change is overwhelmingly likely to lead to more government, not less. It also contains almost everyone who believes that society is probably headed towards anarchy anyway, as private alternatives take more and more market share away from the state in the areas of schooling, policing, law, currency production, etc.
Examples of quadrant members
Collectivist/push-button
Mikhail Bakunin - A 19th century Russian revolutionary and insurrectionist who opposed Marx’s vision of socialism brought about by the state, instead advocating for self-governing communes where humans live freely without ‘overpowering’ each other through ‘political organization’. This state of affairs would be, in his mind, achieved by international revolution by the ‘awakened masses’.
Antifa USA - While some American Antifa members are more classically communist and authoritarian, most at least pay lip service to the aim of abolishing political authority altogether, achieved primarily through terrorism and violent revolution. Nearly all members seem to envision the replacement system being a collection of self-governing communes characterized by shared ownership of land and resources. They tend to view capitalism as inherently oppressive in a way not meaningfully different from corporate fascism.
Collectivist/gradualist
Errico Malatesta (later in life) - An Italian propagandist who had many revolutionary tendencies in his youth, but eventually came to believe that anarchist socialism would be achieved through a gradual unification of labor unions, workers’ parties, and disenfranchised masses into a strong political movement.
Michael Albert - One of the primary developers of ‘participatory economics’, Albert advocates for the replacement of traditional free markets with a system that rewards workers based on their level of effort and sacrifice rather than their skill or productivity. He believes that the traditional libertarian conception of economic freedom amplifies values that lead to negative social outcomes, but that a fully decentralized system can exist which promotes economic equality, sustainability, and diversity. Presumably this would come about mostly through intellectual and cultural change rather than sudden, violent revolution.
Capitalist/push-button
John Galt - This quadrant was difficult to populate with real people, as the vast majority of idealistic and violent revolutionary anarchists and seem to be left-leaning. In fact, I could not find any examples of a prominent capitalistic anarchist who used or advocated violence, though I’m sure some exist. As a result, I have had to resort to using Ayn Rand’s fictional industrialist savant, who decided to pull the world out of the socialist nightmare it had slid into by suddenly removing the vast majority of productive capitalists from society. In his view, ripping individualistic capitalism out of the system would cause it to rapidly collapse, which would teach the world a lesson about where prosperity really comes from and result in a new era of unfettered innovation and voluntary exchange.
Capitalist/gradualist
Murray Rothbard - The coiner of the term 'anarcho-capitalism’ and arguably the movement’s most foundational thinker, Rothbard believed that state monopolies are inherently less efficient than competitive markets, that central banks were a scam, and that government interference in the free market was not only harmful but a violation of natural law. Rothbard did not, to my knowledge, advocate for any violence or revolutionary upheavals, but rather promoted the adoption of free market principles through his writings and academic work.
David Friedman - Probably most known for his authorship of The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism, Milton Friedman’s son does as much as anyone to articulate and promote an incrementalist approach to achieving total privatization. In addition to laying out potential models of private policing, private road ownership, and private court systems, Friedman explicitly opposes violent revolution and makes clear distinctions between government functions that he believes could be privatized ‘today’ and those that he hopes could be privatized ‘some day’.
Centrist
Lysander Spooner - If there is such a thing as a centrist anarchist, I would consider Spooner a prime example. He was simultaneously a critic of what he viewed as capitalistic exploitation and a firm believer in private property. He was opposed to violence in almost any non-defensive context, but encouraged peaceful non-compliance with government dictates— most famously, with the US Constitution.