the barriers to entry for a mass of disaggregated, disaﬀected people, yet it also makes the movement’s content and trajectory capricious. The implicit horizontalist assumption that horizontal decision-making mechanisms are suﬃcient to yield egalitarian results stands in sharp contrast with the avowed anarchist commitment to both horizontal practices and anti-oppressive outcomes. This demonstrates that although anarchism is horizontal (in the analytical rather than the historically speciﬁc sense of the term), and horizontalism is anarchistic (meaning it bears many of the traits of anarchism), horizontalism and anarchism are not identical.

Horizontalism

In late 2001, a spontaneous rebellion erupted in Argentina when the government decided to freeze bank accounts to forestall a mounting ﬁnancial crisis precipitated by the IMF-mandated privatization and austerity measures of the 1990s. In under two weeks, popular mobilizationsin a number of diﬀerent groups and movements long before they were associated with the term “horizontalism.” In Unruly Equality: U. S. Anarchism in the 20th Century, Andrew Cornell (2016) demonstrates how the diﬀuse remnants of early twentieth-century anarchism that were increasingly inclined toward paciﬁsm and the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s

provided theories, values, tactics, and organizational forms, which activists in the antiwar, countercultural, and feminist movements took up [over the following decades]; in turn, these mass movements radicalized hundreds of thousands of people, a portion of whom adopted anarchism as their ideological outlook. (245)

The destruction of the American anarchist movement in the middle of the century and the polarization of the Cold War led many American anarchists to experiment with new tactics and strategies. This included