Struggling Against Capitalism: Informal Education, Insurrection and Everyday Life of Russian Anarchists

This paper examines attitudes towards education and explores informal educational structures inside the urban community of anarchists and DIY (Do It Yourself) activists. Informal education is one of the parts of lifelong learning that implicate the process of gaining knowledge and skills while individuals intercourse with their social environment. Many anarchists tend to criticize prevailing educational practices and maintain the concepts of libertarian pedagogy and postmodernist critique of formal education. They suggest that governmental institutions reproduce social inequality and constrain people from getting knowledge in order to create governable and disciplined subjects. My findings show that anarchists realize their own learning needs and carry out appropriate learning activities that are concerned with their values and beliefs. Offering opposition to formal education and suggesting authentic ways of knowledge and skills producing and sharing (distro, workshops, open sources, etc.), anarchists embody them into their daily routine. Their rhetoric, deeds, consumption practices and forms of communications are tightly connected (in dialectical way) with those attainments that are distributed by channels of anarchistic knowledge and skills sharing. 

This paper is based on the case study of young people (age 17-30) who identify themselves as anarchists. The empirical data includes 28 in-depth interviews (from one up to five hours), field diaries (app. 100 pages) and video files (more than 20 hours of shooting). The case study was conducted within the framework of international MYPLACE (Memory, Youth, Political Legacy and Civic Engagement) project.