Lifestyle anarchism is a term derived from anarchist author Murray Bookchin's polemical essay " An Unbridgeable Chasm." He used it to criticise anarchists who he believed advocated individualism at the expense of class struggle. The term is currently used by a few anarchists as a description of positions that concentrate on changes to personal behaviour rather than wholesale reorganisation or abolition of class and hierarchical society. Critics of this term see this definition as a form of sectarianism.

In general, those described as lifestyle anarchists deny that they reject social or class struggle, sometimes by rejecting the distinction between individual and class behaviour.

Alternately, "lifestylism" is a term commonly used by those within the anarchist movement to criticize others who, they allege, practice anarchism as a lifestyle or fashion statement. Typically the term is counterposed with 'social anarchism'.

As with any other term which is intended to be pejorative, particularly those which are not also in common use as a self-description, it can be used in a very imprecise way - arguably sometimes just as a term of abuse rather than an actual description of a position.

The term is seldom used as a self-description, and is applied more often to those anarchists who do are less likely to prioritise formal organisation. Thus there are no anarchist organisations which describe themselves as lifestylist.

The term is also seldom or never used by non-anarchists to criticise anarchists. This is despite the fact that Leninists, for example, typically characterise anarchists as "bourgeois individualists", which is very similar to the image evoked by the term 'lifestylist'.

See also

• Social Ecology
• Anarcho-primitivist
• Post-left anarchy
• Situationist

External links

• Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism - An Unbridgeable Chasm full text
• Infoshop.org, Debunking Nonsense in the Anarchist Movement
• Crimethinc

Anarchism