As Donald Trump and Elon Musk subordinate the United States government to their pursuit of totalitarian power, their opponents remain in a defensive posture, accusing them of lawlessness. But neither courts nor laws will halt the descent into autocracy. Massive numbers of people will have to take it upon themselves to organize concrete acts of resistance, to take direct action on a horizontal and participatory basis—in other words, to become anarchists.

Tyranny Is the Opposite of Anarchism

On February 8, the editorial board of the New York Times wrote that Elon Musk

“is on a mission to rampage through the government’s confidential payment systems with an anarchist’s glee.”

If you know any real-life anarchists, you know how absurd this is. Given access to the government’s payment systems, no anarchist would begin by cutting off resources to starving children or medical research. An anarchist would begin by cutting off funding to the police and the other instruments of state violence—precisely the institutions that Donald Trump and Elon Musk will expand at any cost.

Anyone who tells you anarchism is about abolishing the social safety net for the sake of unbridled profit is lying to you outright. There are other words for that—for example, neoliberalism.