Reply #36: not really

[tama]

both are anti-capitalists, but the difference in organization is cruxial. Socialists - both revolutionary marxists and reformist social-democrats - have centralist organizations with elected leaders and participate in party politics, anarchist self-organize without institutional leaders and are decentralized.

Generally and also in my personal experience cooperation between centrally organized socialist and other progressive groups is very difficult because of rivalry and power hunger of the institutionally led organisations with leaders having big egos - dogmatic trotskyist groups being the classic example of factional infighting. On the other hand anarchic leaderless and decentralized self-organization is more inclusive and allows also centralized organisations come together and participate and cooperate with less rivalry between groups. This is the experience from Zapatistas and other anarchic movements in Mexico and rest of Latin America, from Arab Spring and M15 indignados from Spain and elsewhere - now first time on large scale in US.

Not to forget that there are also some very dogmatic and ideological anarchists with fetish of physical violence and who don't want to participate in nonviolent anarchic movement where the right to act violently (in self defence) is "democratically oppressed". I have no dogmatic attitude against violence, but in this situation I'm strongly for strictly Gandhian tactics.