Anarchism

I'm guessing that when you hear "socialism", like most people you think of state socialism. USSR, China, etc, as well as the various political parties trying to implement socialist policies through the electoral process. The socialist movement has always had a significant anarchist faction as well. Basically, things went like this:

• State socialists: Right, we're going to do state socialism
• Anarchists: That's going to go very badly, let's do anarchism instead
• State socialists proceed to do state socialism, and it goes very badly
• Anarchists: Okay, now that we all have the benefit of historical hindsight, let's do anarchism now?
• State socialists: No, we're going to do state socialism again
• Anarchists: Oh for fuck's sake

First of all, do you know the difference between Socialism, Marxism, Anarchism and Communism? If not, you can start by checking out this quick run-down (disclaimer: this video is made by a Marxist).

Now, what OOP is saying is that we know from historical evidence that state socialism (like Marxism) always ends badly, one way or the other, but we also know that anarchism and libertarian socialism do work, so we need to push for that without falling in the pitfall of believing that 'this time state socialism might work'.