The anarchist as permanent outsider.
When I say I am an anarchist, I simply mean that, to the extent that I have the power, I refuse to let anyone or anything dominate me. This is not a complicated statement, but it is a radical one, and its implications extend further than most who call themselves anarchists seem willing to follow.
Let me be precise about what this refusal entails.
It means I refuse to accept the power of any authority over me—not the state, not the church, not the boss, not the movement, not the collective, not the ideology. It means I refuse to choose between potential rulers and rules, because doing so would express a willingness to give up my power to create my life. It means I refuse to temporarily hand my power over to any institution to act for me, which is why I won’t turn to cops or courts to deal with any problem or conflict in my life. To the extent of my power, I avoid dealing with these institutions altogether.
But here is where the refusal must go further than many are prepared to follow: it also means I refuse to let anarchism itself become a power over me. I refuse to let the movement, the scene, the ideology, the tradition, the approved positions become authorities demanding my submission. The moment anarchism becomes a doctrine I must obey rather than a tool I choose to use, it has become just another form of domination—perhaps more insidious than the state because it wears the mask of liberation.
This is why I speak of the anarchist as outlaw rather than the anarchist as believer, adherent, or member. The outlaw stands outside the law—all law, including the unwritten laws of radical respectability. The outlaw creates her life according to her own powers and desires, not according to what is permitted by any authority, whether that authority wears a badge or a circle-A.
When I say I am an outlaw, I don’t mean that I am some great, heroic bandit. Such a claim would make my friends laugh. I mean simply that, to the extent of my power, I live alegally—that is, without regard for the law. I don’t let the law determine my choices and my actions. Rather I use all my powers—my skills, my tools, my wits, my relationships—to create my life on my own terms without getting caught.
The distinction between alegality and illegality is crucial, and most people—including most anarchists—miss it entirely.
Illegality is a relationship with the law. The person who acts illegally is still orienting their life around legal categories. They know what the law forbids and choose to do that forbidden thing. Their action is defined by its relationship to prohibition. In a sense, the illegal actor is still captured by the law even as they violate it—the law remains the frame of reference, the measure against which action is judged.
Alegality is something different. The alegal actor does not orient their life around legal categories at all. The law exists, certainly—it is a social fact with material consequences, cops who will beat you and cages they will throw you in. But it does not determine the structure of decision-making. The alegal actor asks: what do I want? What serves my purposes? What can I get away with? The law enters into these calculations only as an obstacle to be avoided, not as a framework to be obeyed or violated.
This is a subtle but decisive distinction. The illegal actor is, in a sense, still a subject of the law—a disobedient subject, but a subject nonetheless. The alegal actor has stepped outside the relationship entirely. She is not disobedient because she does not recognize the authority that would command obedience. She is simply living her life, and the law is one of many obstacles in the environment that must be navigated.
Consider the difference in practice. The person who thinks in terms of illegality tends to develop a morality of transgression. Breaking the law becomes a value in itself, something that proves one’s radicalism. This leads to posturing, to performing criminality for an audience, to treating illegal action as a badge of identity rather than a practical matter. It also leads to unnecessary risk, because the point becomes the violation rather than the goal the violation might serve.
The person who thinks in terms of alegality has no such investment. Breaking a law is neither good nor bad in itself—it is simply something that may or may not serve one’s purposes. The question is never “is this illegal?” but always “what are the consequences, and can I handle them?” This is a cooler, more calculating stance, but also a more honest one. It does not romanticize crime or criminalize the law. It simply proceeds according to its own logic.
I speak of alegality and not illegalism, not because I am opposed to illegalism, but because I want to be precise. Language matters, and the slippage of terms obscures important distinctions.
Originally, the term “illegalism” had a specific meaning within anarchist circles. An illegalist was an anarchist who chose to use illegal means as the way to make their living rather than begging or taking a job. So illegalism referred specifically to robbery, burglary, theft, counterfeiting, and similar activities—not to propaganda of the deed, not to political assassination, not to such things as the refusal of military service or taxes. The original debates over illegalism were therefore not about whether anarchists should take illegal actions—it was assumed that all anarchists did—but about whether individual reappropriation was a legitimate tactic.
This distinction is worth recovering because it clarifies what is actually at stake.
The question of whether to break laws is, for any genuine anarchist, not a question at all. Of course we break laws. The entire legal structure exists to protect property and power against those who would live freely. To accept the legitimacy of law is to accept the legitimacy of the domination it enforces. Any anarchist worthy of the name will inevitably find themselves in conflict with legal prohibitions—not because they seek transgression for its own sake, but because living freely in an unfree world requires ignoring the rules designed to maintain unfreedom.
The question of illegalism, in its original sense, is different. It asks: should one make a living through theft and similar activities rather than through work or begging? This is a practical question with practical considerations. What are the risks? What are the rewards? What does it do to one’s relationships, one’s psychology, one’s capacity for other activities? The answers will vary depending on circumstances, abilities, and preferences. For an egoist, there is no principled reason to reject illegalism—the only question is whether it serves one’s interests in the specific situation.
But this is very different from the contemporary tendency to treat “illegalism” as a revolutionary strategy or an identity. The original illegalists were not posing. They were making practical calculations about how to survive and pursue their projects without submitting to wage labor. When illegalism becomes an ideology or an identity, it loses this practical character and becomes just another form of radical posturing—another way of performing rebellion rather than living it.
A person could look upon these refusals—not voting, not turning to the cops, not using the courts, not working for wages if one can avoid it—as a set of principles, an ethic, that one chooses to live by. And indeed, this is how many anarchists understand their practice: as adherence to principles that distinguish them from the masses who have not yet seen the light.
But I refuse to let these refusals become principles in that sense, because I want them to remain my refusals, chosen by me in each moment according to my assessment of the situation. The moment they become principles that I must follow, they have become powers over me—spooks, as Stirner would say, fixed ideas that demand my submission.
This is perhaps the most difficult aspect of the position I am describing, and the one that most anarchists find hardest to accept. We are taught to value consistency, to see principled behavior as the mark of integrity. The person who violates their own stated principles is seen as a hypocrite, someone whose word cannot be trusted. And there is something to this—the person who simply says whatever is convenient in the moment, with no regard for consistency, is indeed untrustworthy.
But there is a difference between using principles as tools and serving principles as masters.
When I say I refuse to turn to cops or courts, I am not stating a rule that binds me in advance. I am describing a practice that I have found serves my interests and my project of living freely. In the vast majority of situations, turning to the institutions of domination to solve my problems would be foolish—it would strengthen those institutions, put me in their debt, and model submission for others. So I don’t do it. But this is a choice I make freshly in each situation, based on my assessment of the circumstances, not a commandment handed down from on high that I must obey regardless of consequences.
Could I imagine a situation where I might choose differently? Yes—though the situations I can imagine are extreme and unlikely. The point is not to construct elaborate hypotheticals but to recognize the difference between choosing a practice because it serves one’s purposes and submitting to a rule because one has accepted it as an authority. The first is freedom; the second is just another form of slavery, even if the slave has chosen the master.
This is why I am suspicious of anarchists who speak in terms of duty, obligation, and moral requirement. These concepts belong to the world of domination. They are the tools by which submission is justified and enforced. An anarchist who talks about what we “must” do or “cannot” do has not yet escaped the logic of authority—they have simply replaced one set of masters with another.
Behind all of this is a commitment to what I have elsewhere called projectual life—the understanding that life is something we create through our choices and actions rather than something that happens to us.
The logic of submission begins with the premise that life is given, that circumstances determine our possibilities, that the best we can do is make the best of what we’re dealt. This logic pervades not just mainstream society but also much of what passes for radical politics. We are told that conditions are not yet ripe for revolution, that we must wait for the right moment, that we must build the movement, that we must be realistic about what is possible. All of this assumes that we are fundamentally reactive—that our role is to respond to conditions rather than create them.
The projectual life rejects this premise. It insists that we are the creators of our existence, that our choices matter, that our actions shape the world even when they fail to achieve their stated goals. It refuses to wait for permission from history, from the masses, from the vanguard, from anyone. It acts now, according to its own desires and assessments, because now is the only time any of us have.
This does not mean ignoring circumstances or pretending that will alone can overcome all obstacles. That would be childish. Circumstances are real, power is real, consequences are real. The projectual life does not deny any of this. What it denies is the claim that circumstances determine our choices rather than simply informing them. What it insists upon is our responsibility—not moral duty, but the simple fact of being the ones who respond—for the lives we create through our actions and inactions.
The anarchist as outlaw is someone who has taken up this projectual stance. She does not wait for the revolution to live freely. She does not defer her desires to some future state when conditions will permit their satisfaction. She acts now, using whatever means are available, creating her life on her own terms to the extent of her power. When laws stand in her way, she ignores or evades them. When institutions threaten her, she navigates around them. She refuses to accept the premise that she must submit now in order to be free later, because she knows that later never comes—there is only now, and if she is not free now, she is not free at all.
The phrase I keep returning to is “to the extent of my power.” This is not a qualification that weakens the position. It is the key to understanding it.
Rights are fictions. The idea that we possess inherent rights that ought to be respected regardless of our power to enforce them is a mystification—a way of making submission seem rational by promising that the authorities will protect what belongs to us. But rights without power are nothing. The right to free speech means nothing when the cops are beating you. The right to property means nothing when someone with more power takes what you have. The right to life means nothing when the state decides you need to die.
Power is real. It is the capacity to do something, to affect the world, to make things happen. Power can be physical strength, weapons, money, numbers, skill, knowledge, social connections, cunning, position. It can be individual or collective. It can be developed, organized, wielded in various ways. But whatever form it takes, power is what actually determines outcomes in the world. Rights are what we tell ourselves to feel better about our powerlessness.
This is why I speak of refusing domination “to the extent of my power” rather than claiming a right to be free. I have no right to be free. No one has such a right. What I have is whatever power I can develop and deploy in the service of my freedom. Sometimes that power is sufficient to resist domination; sometimes it is not. The honest position acknowledges this limitation rather than hiding behind mystifications about inherent rights that exist independent of the power to enforce them.
This understanding also clarifies the nature of anarchist practice. We are not petitioning for our rights. We are not asking authorities to respect what belongs to us. We are developing and deploying power in conflict with the structures of domination. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, but we are not under the illusion that justice is on our side and will eventually prevail. Justice is a spook. What matters is power—and power is something we can actually do something about.
There is a phrase in my description of alegality that deserves more attention: “without getting caught.”
Some might see this as cowardice—a retreat from open confrontation with domination into sneaking and hiding. And indeed, there is a strain of anarchist thought that valorizes the martyr, the one who stands openly against the state and accepts the consequences. This strain has produced heroic figures whose courage I do not question. But I do question whether martyrdom is the only or even the best model for anarchist practice.
The point of living freely is to live freely, not to demonstrate one’s willingness to suffer for freedom. If I can create my life on my own terms without getting caught—if I can evade the consequences of my refusals while still making those refusals effective—then I have accomplished more than the martyr who makes a grand gesture and spends the next twenty years in prison.
This is not an argument against taking risks. Risk is unavoidable for anyone living alegally. But there is a difference between necessary risks taken in pursuit of one’s projects and unnecessary risks taken to prove something—to oneself, to others, to history. The first is wisdom; the second is vanity.
The outlaw who survives to act again is more dangerous to the system than the one who is captured and made an example. The system wants us to confront it openly, to declare ourselves, to provide targets that can be neutralized. It is less able to deal with those who refuse this confrontation—who act quietly, who disappear back into anonymity, who cannot be easily identified and processed.
This does not mean we should never act openly. There are situations where open action serves our purposes better than clandestine action. There are times when the statement made by open defiance is worth the costs it incurs. But these decisions should be made strategically, according to assessments of what will actually advance our projects, not according to a fetishization of openness as inherently superior to secrecy.
The outlaw lives in the shadows not because she fears the light but because the shadows are where she can move most freely. She emerges into visibility when it serves her purposes and retreats when it does not. She is not ashamed of this flexibility. She understands that survival is not cowardice—it is the prerequisite for continued action.
One might object that the position I am describing is atomistic—that it reduces the individual to an isolated unit pursuing their own interests without regard for others. This objection misunderstands the nature of power and of life.
My power is not something I possess in isolation. It is constituted in large part by my relationships—by the people I trust, the networks I am part of, the collaborations I engage in. The autonomous individual is not a solitary individual. She is someone who has refused to let her relationships become bonds of submission—but she has not refused relationships as such.
The distinction is crucial. There is a vast difference between relationships based on affinity—on genuine commonality of project and desire—and relationships based on duty, obligation, or submission. The first enhance my power; the second diminish it. The first are freely chosen and can be freely dissolved; the second bind me to others regardless of whether the relationship serves my interests.
Among outlaws, relationships take particular forms. Trust is earned through demonstrated reliability, not granted based on shared ideology or membership in the same organization. Collaboration emerges from convergent projects, not from formal agreement or organizational discipline. Solidarity is practical—it consists of actual assistance in concrete situations, not declarations of abstract support.
These relationships are not weaker than the bonds of duty and obligation. They are stronger, because they rest on genuine alignment rather than external compulsion. When I trust someone because they have demonstrated themselves trustworthy, that trust has a foundation. When I am required to trust someone because we belong to the same organization, the trust is hollow—it is not trust at all but merely the performance of trust.
The anarchist as outlaw is not isolated. She is embedded in networks of affinity that enhance her power and extend her reach. But these networks are not organizations in the conventional sense. They are fluid, informal, based on personal knowledge and demonstrated reliability. They form and dissolve according to the needs and interests of the participants, not according to formal procedures and institutional requirements.
What I am describing is not a political program. It is not a strategy for achieving anarchism in the future. It is a way of living now—of creating one’s life on one’s own terms in the immediate present rather than deferring freedom to some anticipated future state.
Politics, in the conventional sense, is about managing collectivities—about making decisions that bind groups of people, about exercising power over others for ostensibly good ends. Even anarchist politics, when it becomes politics proper, involves this logic: the attempt to organize movements, to develop positions that others should adopt, to influence the course of events through collective action coordinated around shared goals.
I am not opposed to collective action. I am not opposed to coordination around shared goals. But I am suspicious of the political framing that makes these things central—that measures the worth of our actions by their political effectiveness, by their contribution to some larger project of social transformation.
The outlaw does not need to justify her life by its political significance. Her refusals do not require validation by their contribution to the revolution. She lives as she does because it is how she chooses to live—because submission is intolerable to her, because domination disgusts her, because freedom is something she wants now and not in some hypothetical future.
This is liberating precisely because it removes the burden of political justification. The political anarchist is always measuring, always calculating: does this action advance the cause? Does this tactic build the movement? Is this the correct line? The outlaw has no such concerns. She acts according to her own assessment of her situation and her interests. If her actions happen to contribute to some larger transformation, so be it. If they do not, she has still lived as she wished to live.
This may seem irresponsible from the perspective of political seriousness. But political seriousness has accomplished remarkably little in the way of actual liberation. The movements, the organizations, the strategies, the theories—all of this apparatus of political anarchism has failed to produce the free society it promises. Perhaps this is because the approach is wrong. Perhaps we should not be trying to produce a free society at all. Perhaps we should simply be living as freely as we can, here and now, and letting whatever comes of that emerge without trying to control it.
I want to live my life on my own terms immediately, here and now, not put it off to a future that is always a fiction.
This is the core of everything I have been saying. The future does not exist. It is an idea, a projection, a story we tell ourselves about what will happen. What exists is the present moment—this moment, in which choices are made and actions are taken. If I am not free now, I am not free at all. The promise of future freedom is precisely how domination maintains itself. Submit now, and you will be rewarded later. Work hard, and you will prosper. Be patient, and the revolution will come. These are the lies that keep us in chains.
Every time I give my power over to another—every time I defer to authority, every time I accept the premise that I must submit now for some future benefit—I lose my life here and now. Which is to say: I lose my life. Because life is not something that happens later. It is happening now, and if I am not living it on my own terms, I am not living it at all.
The anarchist as outlaw understands this. She does not defer her freedom. She does not wait for conditions to be right. She does not sacrifice the present for the future. She acts now, according to her own powers and desires, creating her life in the immediate present rather than postponing it indefinitely.
This does not mean she ignores consequences or fails to plan. Planning is part of present action—it is something one does now, in the present moment, to shape the conditions of future action. But the purpose of planning is not to sacrifice the present for the future. It is to extend the power of present action, to make the present more effective, to create possibilities that would not exist without forethought.
The crucial difference is between planning as a tool of present action and planning as a substitute for it. The political anarchist who plans endlessly for the revolution that never comes has made planning a substitute for living. The outlaw who plans her next move is using planning as a tool to enhance her present freedom. The first is trapped in the future; the second is alive in the now.
I have been asked whether this position constitutes an ethic, and I am ambivalent about the question. Ethics, as usually understood, involves rules or principles that one ought to follow—obligations that exist prior to and independent of one’s choices. In this sense, what I am describing is not an ethic. There are no rules I acknowledge as binding, no obligations I accept as given.
But there is another sense of ethics—ethics as the practice of living deliberately, of making choices consciously and taking responsibility for them. In this sense, what I am describing is intensely ethical. It demands constant attention to one’s choices, constant assessment of one’s actions, constant refusal to sleepwalk through life accepting whatever comes.
The outlaw does not follow rules, but she is not arbitrary. She acts according to her assessments, her interests, her desires—and these are not random. They have been shaped by her experiences, her reflections, her projects. They constitute a coherent orientation toward the world, even if that orientation cannot be reduced to a set of principles.
Call this an ethic if you like, or don’t—the label matters less than the practice. What matters is that one lives deliberately, that one refuses submission, that one creates one’s life rather than merely suffering it. The anarchist as outlaw does this. She may not be able to articulate a theory of ethics that justifies her practice. She doesn’t need to. The practice is its own justification, because it is the practice of actually living rather than waiting to live.
There is a phrase that I have used elsewhere and that I want to return to now: “an outlaw worthy of her transgressions.”
To be an outlaw is not simply to break laws. Anyone can break laws—through carelessness, through desperation, through moral weakness. The outlaw worthy of her transgressions is something more. She is someone who has made a conscious choice to live outside the law, who has taken responsibility for that choice, who has developed the capacities and relationships necessary to sustain that life.
She is not a victim of circumstance but a creator of her situation. She is not pushed into crime by poverty or addiction but chooses alegality as a mode of life. She is not ashamed of her refusals but owns them proudly. She does not apologize for her existence but affirms it.
This does not mean she is perfect or invulnerable. She makes mistakes, faces setbacks, sometimes fails. But she does not let failure become an excuse for submission. She learns, adapts, continues. She maintains her stance toward the world even when the world pushes back.
To be an outlaw worthy of one’s transgressions is to live with integrity—not the integrity of following principles, but the integrity of creating one’s life according to one’s own powers and desires. It is to be the author of one’s existence rather than a character in someone else’s story. It is to refuse domination not as a political position but as a personal reality.
The anarchist as outlaw is not waiting for the revolution. She is living the only revolution that matters: the transformation of her own life from a site of submission into a site of creation. Whether this spreads, whether it becomes the basis for broader transformation, she cannot know and does not need to know. What she knows is that she will not spend her brief time on this planet submitting to powers she did not choose and does not accept.
The law exists. The cops exist. The courts exist. The prisons exist. All of these are real, and all of them threaten her. But they do not determine her. She moves through the world according to her own logic, avoiding what she can avoid, confronting what she must confront, creating what she chooses to create. She is an outlaw—not a rebel, not a revolutionary, not a believer in any cause—just someone who has decided that she will live on her own terms, whatever the cost.
This is what it means to be an anarchist. Not to hold the right positions, not to belong to the right organizations, not to deploy the right analysis. Just this: to refuse domination and to create one’s own life. Everything else is commentary.
October 2013 / Expanded January 2026 by Wolfie Landstreicher Simulacrum
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Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.