The Anarchists, a new six-part documentary series from HBO about a fringe political community in the Mexican resort city of Acapulco, opens with a strange, atmospheric provocation: a book burning on the beach, children tossing law books on the spectacularly orange fire, eagerly shouting: “Fuck the state!” The scene is not about bloodlust so much as frustration and weird, futile rebellion. It’s 2019, several years into the Acapulco anarchist movement, and as the series explores over six detailed hours, the community is falling apart.
That community would be the full-time residents and yearly attendees of Anarchapulco, a conference created by the Canadian entrepreneur, podcaster and cryptocurrency millionaire Jeff Berwick in 2015. Berwick, who made his first fortune in the dotcom boom and moved to Acapulco, began the event as a loosely organized call for people who wished for a stateless existence with the freedom to do as they pleased – party, not pay taxes, homeschool their children. The Anarchists, filmed over six years by Todd Schramke, isn’t about the philosophy of anarchism at large, which is opposed to all hierarchical structures and thus, according to many, inherently anti-capitalist. Anarchapulco, and by extension the series, focuses on a small subset known as anarcho-capitalism, which believes in governance by the free market of unfettered capitalism. Anarcho-capitalists, known as “ancaps”, overlap significantly with libertarianism; they support the privatization of public institutions (courts, roads, police), the mass legalization of drugs and cryptocurrency.
