What seems to most enrage the delegates to the meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Prague this week is the idea that they even have to discuss the basic benefits of free-market globalization. That discussion was supposed to have stopped in 1989, when the Wall fell and history ended. When the USSR collapsed, that left only one alternative, or so it seemed. All this is why it is so significant that yesterday's head-on attack against the ideology ruling the World Bank and the IMF happened here, in the Czech Republic. This is a country that has lived through both economic orthodoxies, where the Lenin busts have been replaced by Pepsi logos and McDonald's arches.
Anarchism is an ideology that defines itself by being fiercely non-ideological.
It rejects externally imposed rules and argues that we are impoverished, as individuals and as communities, by overwork and overconsumption. Most of us carry a mess of negative biases about anarchists. But the truth is that most are less interested in hurling projectiles than in finding ways to lead simple, autonomous lives. But most aren't capitalists either. They are tapping into something different, and much older.