Anarchism vs Progressivism

The two traditions sit at adjacent corners of the post-state-socialist left and disagree about almost everything important except the diagnosis. Both treat industrial-capitalist dislocation as a real problem requiring serious response. Both have long track records of organizing against concentrated corporate power and state coercion against working people. Both produced sustained intellectual traditions across the twentieth century. The disagreement is foundational: progressivism wants to use the state to fix the problems markets produce. Anarchism rejects the state as itself the largest single contributor to those problems. The argument has been live for 150 years and is unlikely to resolve.

TL;DR

• Anarchism rejects the state as a primary mechanism of coordination. Progressivism wants to use the state actively for reform: anti-trust, welfare expansion, regulatory protection, civil-rights legislation.
• Both traditions share a critique of concentrated corporate power, both treat mutual aid as a serious good, both produced sustained intellectual lineages from the late nineteenth century.
• The contemporary operational overlap (housing, mutual aid, prison reform, labor organizing) is wider than the foundational disagreement suggests, and the post-Occupy generation has been moving between the two traditions without picking sides.

Side-by-side

Where they agree

The agreement is wider than the foundational disagreement suggests. Both traditions take concentrated corporate power seriously as a political problem. Both treat mutual aid and voluntary cooperation as serious goods. Both produced sustained intellectual traditions from the late nineteenth century forward. Both have long track records of organizing for civil-rights expansion, labor protection, and welfare for working people.

The contemporary operational overlap is wide. Tenant organizing, post-disaster mutual aid (Occupy Sandy in 2012, Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, the parallel ecosystems alongside FEMA during COVID-19), the post-2020 abolitionist current, and the broader anti-eviction infrastructure have all run on coalitions that included anarchist organizers and progressive institutional support. The post-Occupy generation in the US, the European squatter and tenant movements, and the solidarity networks across both traditions have produced working campaigns that did not require either side to give up its foundational position.

Both traditions also share a serious concern about declining civic infrastructure. The Putnam-Bowling Alone literature is read across the line, and the mutual-aid tradition inside anarchism and the civic-association tradition inside progressivism touch the same questions about how voluntary cooperation works in contemporary conditions.

Where they diverge

The first divergence is the state. Anarchism treats the state as the largest single contributor to the problems other left traditions try to use the state to solve. The federated assembly, the worker cooperative, the mutual-aid network, and the directly democratic municipality are the working alternatives. Progressivism wants to use the state actively: anti-trust enforcement against concentrated corporate power, welfare-state expansion to address economic insecurity, regulatory protection of workers and consumers, civil-rights legislation to expand citizenship. The disagreement is foundational and shapes almost every specific policy disagreement that follows.

The second divergence is method. Anarchism prefers direct action, voluntary association, mutual aid, and federation. The institutional outputs are usually local: tenant unions, worker cooperatives, neighborhood assemblies, post-disaster solidarity networks. Progressivism prefers legislation, litigation, regulation, and policy implementation through institutional vehicles. The institutional outputs are usually national or international: the Federal Trade Commission, the Affordable Care Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the EU regulatory infrastructure. Both methods have track records. They produce different kinds of change.

The third divergence is scale. Anarchism is honest, in its better moments, that the federated assembly works at neighborhood and city scale and has not yet been demonstrated at continental scale. Robin Hahnel has documented the coordination problem from inside the broader libertarian-socialist family. Progressivism is comfortable at continental scale and treats the modern administrative state as the working answer to coordination problems anarchism would prefer to address through voluntary federation. The Inflation Reduction Act's continental industrial-policy infrastructure is the kind of thing progressivism builds; the contemporary Rojava project, with roughly four million people governed through federated assemblies, is the kind of thing anarchism builds. Both work in their respective contexts.

The fourth divergence runs through the institutional-defensiveness question. The post-2016 progressive coalition has spent considerable political capital defending procedures (judicial independence, peaceful transfer of power, civil-service neutrality) against populist breaches of norm. The defensive posture has been electorally costly. The Klein-Thompson Abundance (2025) critique from inside the progressive tradition argues that the procedural defense has come at the cost of a positive material program. Anarchism is generally skeptical of the procedural defense altogether, treating constitutional procedure as a liberal-democratic tool that anarchism is not invested in. The two traditions disagree about whether the current procedural infrastructure is worth defending.

Who tends to hold each view

Contemporary anarchism survives as both intellectual tradition and active organizing milieu. The Rojava Revolution in northeastern Syria is the largest current project explicitly building on anarchist principles. The Zapatistas in Chiapas have run an autonomous zone since 1994 on adjacent premises. The post-Occupy generation in the US, the squatter movements across Berlin and Barcelona, the Greek Exarcheia neighborhood, and the broader transnational direct-action milieu carry the tradition forward in operating practice. Intellectually, the tradition lives in CrimethInc., AK Press, the broader anarchist-publisher network, and the cluster of academic anthropologists working in this lineage. Living figures include Noam Chomsky, Andrej Grubacic, Cindy Milstein, and Saul Newman.

Progressivism is the working ideology of the post-2010 American Democratic Party's left wing. Its institutional homes include the Sanders and Warren campaigns, the Justice Democrats, the Squad in the House, the Working Families Party, the Center for American Progress, the Roosevelt Institute, and the Economic Policy Institute. In Europe, the tradition lives in the center-left of most major parties (the SPD, Labour, PSOE, the Italian PD) and in the various Green parties' center-left wings. Living figures include Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ezra Klein, and Heather McGhee. The constituency is large, educated, often urban, and concentrated in the policy-foundation-academia ecosystem.

The two traditions overlap in personnel more than the labels suggest. Many contemporary organizers move between anarchist and progressive coalitions on specific campaigns. The Mutual Aid Disaster Relief network, the post-2020 tenant organizing, the abolitionist current, and the post-Occupy generation have produced people who work inside progressive institutional vehicles while holding broadly anarchist principles, and people who work inside anarchist organizing networks while supporting progressive electoral candidates. The boundary is more porous than the foundational disagreement suggests.

What the Votely quiz would say

If your answers cluster around active state intervention to address economic inequality, anti-trust enforcement, welfare-state expansion, and civil-rights legislation, the quiz will read you as broadly progressive. If your answers reject state authority as the primary coordinating mechanism and prefer mutual aid, federated assembly, and direct action, the quiz will move you toward anarchism. The cleanest internal test is the state question: people who treat the state as a tool to be used for reform usually land closer to progressivism. People who treat the state as itself the largest contributor to the problems they want to address usually land closer to anarchism. The two traditions have wide operational overlap and frequently coalition on specific campaigns, but the foundational disagreement is real and unlikely to resolve. If you find yourself moving between the two depending on the issue, that is not confusion. It is the contemporary post-Occupy condition, and most working organizers live inside it.