After all of those rants y'all have written against anarchism in the RNC thead, I feel as if my honor has been impugned.
You see, I'm an anarchist. An anarcho-syndicalist, to be precise. And I'd like to clear up a few misconceptions...
Let's start with intellectual justification behind anarchism. I believe that the most just society is the one in which freedom is maximized. By "freedom," I mean the term in a general sense, that's to say freedom means more than freedom from the state; it means the freedom to work; it means the freedom not to starve; it means the freedom from disease; it even means the freedom from gravity. Now, we have to find a metric for these freedoms, obviously a subjective judgement. My metric is likely similar to that of other leftists, that's to say that the freedom to eat is far more important than the freedom to have a private jet or the freedom to neutralize gravity.
Now, how do we maximize this generalized freedom? Well, historically there's been a strong coorelation between "libertarianism" (i.e. political freedom) and economic equality. If you look at the most libertarian societies humanity has produced, such as hunter-gatherers, medieval Iceland, parts of the early US, etc., they're invariably egalitarian. The reason for this this is that these two trends are mutually re-inforcing.
If you've got a libertarian society with large wealth disparities, the rich will hijack the state to expand these wealth disparities or the poor will use the state to seek redress. These tendencies often happen simultaneously (if you look at ours, we have both Social Security and Taft-Hartley). Which leaves libertarian capitalism as an inherently unstable concept.
On the other hand, if you have a statist but egalitarian society, the state will use its power to entrench themselves as the economic elite. For example, after the Russian Revolution the Soviet state took over the worker-controlled enterprises that flourished after the Revolution, putting them under the control of the "Red Bureaucracy" in Bakunin's terms. In late 19th century France, when the workers were taking over businesses, the state crushed the movement. If you look at Mexico, the land reform ushered by the Cardenas gov't was reversed by the Aleman gov't. The state's always the enemy of socialism. In the US and Europe, social democracy has been reversed in the past couple decades. And so on and so forth. The basic dilemma is that what the state grants, it has authority to take away.
So what we're after is a free, egalitarian society. So the first question would be, what does this society look like? It'd be socialist. By socialism, I mean the worker ownership and control of the means of production, essentially democracy in the workplace. This would help to ensure wealth disparities being kept to a minimum. Which facillitates the libertarian state, as demonstrated. That's anarchism in a nutshell, libertarian socialism. Not "chaos." Not "disorder." Certainly not committing random acts of violence and destruction at a protest rally. If you're curious about what an anarchist society would look like, check out George Orwell's memoir of his experience in the Spanish Civil war (a situation where anarchism was prevalent in many parts of Spain, particularly Catalonia and Andalusia), "Homage to Catalonia." Other prominent historical examples include Zapatista Mexico, the Makhnovist Ukraine, etc. More recently, there's the factory take-overs in Argentina and the Basque Mondragon system, which are excellent examples of anarchism in action.
The second question is, how do we achieve this society? That's where the "syndicalism" comes in (not necessarily a part of every anarchist's ideology). If you've heard of the IWW, that's what it's about. The idea is that if we have a strong enough labor movement, we can muscle businesses into selling out at a low price to their workers through general strikes, control of pension funds, etc. So trade unions would be the basis for revolution, and the basis for organizing society (in some federative structure).
Now, flame away.