Anarchism as Empty Moralism One of the biggest obstacles anarchists encounter is the prevailing notion that anarchism is a failure as a political movement and therefore an unattainable utopian idea. Ironically, anarchists often perpetuate this thinking by failing to project anarchism beyond an empty moralism. Anarchism manifested itself in Seattle as broken windows or a vague call for freedom instead of more serious discussions. These examples are indicative of anarchism as empty moralism as well as the only instances of anarchist activity in Seattle. Anarchism is a sense of injustice in our world, faith in humanity's potential to transcend social structures that produce injustice, and the obligation to do something about it.
Anarchism is also the rejection of all political, social, and economic hierarchy.
It is anti-statist because the state represents a professional bureaucracy removed from the control of the people and anticapitalist because capitalism is an oppressive economic system. These ideas survive despite the lack of a political movement. Most histories of anarchism end abruptly in the late 1930s after the Spanish Civil War. George Woodcock ends his history of anarchism in 1939 because he believes that anarchism never constituted a credible movement afterwards. He either could not have foreseen or didn't take notice of continued low-level anarchist activities in antifascist, feminist, antiwar, antinuclear, and ecology movements, but he still would have viewed these activities as nothing more than scattered and isolated incidents.