While the Democrats have been calling the Teabaggers anarchists, real anarchists are mortified by this comparison. Real anarchists want nothing to do with the corporate hegemonic control the tea party stands for, because real anarchists are opposed to all hierarchy, including the hierarchies created by wealth.
Anarchist believe that power should be distributed evenly among the people, not given to a few at the top who exploit the rest. While anarchists disprove of the US government, they also disprove of corporate control and capitalism. Anarchists support programs that redistribute goods from the wealthy to poor, because an even distribution of goods increases equality, something anarchists value above all else.
Anarchists who believe in equality, autonomy, and social responsibility (such as the anarchists of occupy and globalization protests) are horrified to be compared to crazies in congress who hurt the poor to force increased corporate control.
Many may be surprised, for example, that actual anarchists aren’t necessarily rejoicing over the U.S. government’s latest form of self-annihilation. What they see taking place is a transfer of power from one kind of oppression, by a government that at least pretends to be democratic, to another that has no such pretensions. They point out that the shutdown won’t stop the NSA from spying on us, or police from enforcing laws in discriminatory ways, or migrant workers and nonviolent drug users from being imprisoned at staggering rates. The parts of government that the shutdown strips away are among those that bring us closer to being a truly free, egalitarian society: food assistance to ensure that everyone can eat, health care that more people can afford, and even public parks, where some of our greatest natural treasures are held in common. Meanwhile, ever more power is being handed over to corporations that are responsible only to their wealthiest shareholders.
~Nathan Schneider: The government shutdown — an anarchist dream?
As you can see in the quote above, anarchists are as disgusted with the government shut down as the rest of us. If it was up to real anarchists, the first government programs to be shut down would be the police, the prisons, and the military. Instead the opposite has occurred. The functions of government required to keep capitalism running, protecting the wealthy and oppressing the poor and minorities, continue to function. The functions of government used to help the poor, such as WIC and head start have been shut down.
The tea party stands for increasing inequality under laissez-faire capitalism, the exact opposite of the egalitarian society real anarchists stand for. Real anarchists openly stand for socialism and socialist like systems where the people collectively own the means of production. They do not believe in hierarchy in the work place any more than they believe in government.
True anarchists are openly anti-capitalist, because capitalism is a form of coercion detrimental to the human spirit. To anarchists there is no bigger insult than likening them to pro-corporate religious extremists such as the tea party.