"Oh no they're feeding people we don't like on land they don't pay our protection racket for, and they self-organized to do it without using coercive hierarchies! Quick, get 'em!"
The general public almost resoundingly believes Anarchy is when you smash a Gap's windows at the strip mall.
Anarchism is when you throw bombs at cops and the more bombs you throw the more anarchism it is.
Seriously. 90% of Americans don't know that Anarchism is even a political philosophy, they just think of it as an adjective used to describe rioters
Just keep that in mind whenever you see articles talking about 'anarchists and looters' or whatever
I heard the phrase "total anarchy" being used to describe a windstorm that blew through our city last month. I was so flabbergasted as to why anyone would use a word like that to describe the weather, but then I remembered "anarchy" has become synonymous with pandemonium and chaos, and less associated with political theory.
Anarchism is just normal human interaction, free of all the bullshit that markets and currency brought about. Everyone does anarchism any time they do something for another person without some kind of transaction or coercion.
Free of all the bullshit the state brought out, too.
And I don't really think anarchism is quite normal interaction. Hierarchies have formed over and over again; whatever our natural inclinations are have not guarded against it. Preventing the formation of hierarchies has to be a new societal norm to maintain an anarchist society.
Anarchism isn't against all hierarchies, only unjust hierarchies.
Oh no I've been out pedanted!
My post still works if you say unjust hierarchies everywhere I said hierarchies though.
Fear my abilities to "umm ackually"! Hahaha!
Also you're right, sorry 👉 👈
Umm, Akshually you're an owl and owls can't talk BACK TO YOUR BURROW!
Hierarchies tend to be much more malleable outside of state contexts. Think about the seasonal cultures that are sometimes heirarchal and sometimes egalitarian. Think about the "chiefs" who are cast out if they don't provide enough yams to their subjects.
Preventing the formation of hierarchies has to be a new societal norm to maintain an anarchist society.
Agreed! Thing is, most non state societies had these. Anthropologists call them "leveling mechanisms."
There were a couple of societies up until like the 90s where if someone was trying to bully you or order you around you could just pick up your 50-60ish pounds of tools and posessions, give that person the finger, and walk a day or two to go live with your cousins or neighbors or whatever. The environment had enough food, and population density was low enough, that no one could easily monopolize and control resources. Afaik that mostly changed as neighboring farmers and pastoralists moved in to the region, but it's something that existed in some places within many of our lifetimes.
You can see some echoes of it in places like the GDR; The whole meme about women having better sex bc they could just leave shitty relationships due to the GDR's housing, jobs, and childcare policies. Shitty men couldn't control women when the women could just pack up and go somewhere else with relatively little difficulty.
The violence of the state clearly makes these sorts of hierarchies rigid. Indeed, that's what a state is.
Right. And I really end up wondering: can a state maintain the heirarchy of proletariat over vanquished bourgeoisie without the office of state becoming its own fixed heirarchy?
Afaik one of the critical drivers of most hierarchies is the ability to control access to important resources. It's really easy to control access to a mine, factory, or farm. But it's very hard to control access to wild or semi-wild fruit trees, or goats, or the sea. For that exact reason a lot of states undertook operations like exterminating the Bison/Tatanka, draining swamps that people relied on for forage and hunting, banning numerous kinds of hunting and foraging tools, or just clear cutting forests. If people can just wander around eating what they find and sleeping where they please you can't make them pay taxes, so one of the first things a state has to do is enclose the commons, slaughter the wild game, post soldiers at the wells, and otherwise create scarcity.
We've got a lot of potential existing and emerging technologies that could make it much harder to centralize control of some kinds of resources and products, so there's definitely some room for movement there. If you can use a lathe to build a lathe then build some motors and stick a cheap computer on and eventually you've bootstrapped your way to 3d-printers and 3-axis mills you're less dependent on big, expensive, easy to control factories. That's not enough by itself, but that removes some ways that capitalists and states can control a population.
Like I'm not saying it's everything by any means, but one potential road to a stateless society is creating a world where people can just pick up and leave if someone tries to bully them. Chasing nomads and semi-nomads around has historically been very resource intensive and undesirable and those are often some of the last populations to be forcibly integrated in to states. It's why one of my "If I ruled the world" dreams is converting the whole planet in to a vast permaculture gardne where you can find stuff to eat anywhere in any season.
Oh shoot yeah, that was my "crank socialist megaproject" from that recent thread.
The way you're talking, you would really like As We Have Always Done by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. She hits a lot of the same points as you, builds on Fanon and draws on her own experiences practicing indigenous life ways in so-called Canada.
Something I haven't really resolved in myself. I have a tendency, but revolutionary energy is so far from where I live atm and it's more important to bring people on side and help people with their struggles to build community.
I read a book called War in the Tribal Zone. It defined Tribes as a structured, hierarchical society that forms when an Imperial society intrudes in to the territory of low-complexity, non-hierarchical societies. Not "primitive" societies, but societies that never developed hierarchies because they never needed them. And the theory the book was putting forward is that when a low-complexity society tries to defend itself from an Imperialist state they tend to form Tribal societies as a kind of immune reaction - Either they develop more structured political and military organization to better fight against the invader's highly organized troops and logistics, or the invaders find compradors and give those collaborators the guns and material they need to take control of the society.
Regardless of exactly why and how it happens, the result is a more hierarchical society with more coercive political and military organs. There are other ways to try to exist, but mostly they don't work and the societies that try them are either wiped out or forced to submit something else.
The part I thought was interesting is that it positioned the nation-state of the Imperialist states as a technology in and of itself. A technology that allowed for large, highly effective militaries and the efficient production and movement of goods and materiel. A nation state might send in a hundred soldiers and a low-complexity society could wipe them out, but if that happened then the next year the nation state would send a thousand soldiers, and using their territories they'd violently recruit more and more soldiers and send them out to die until the society they were trying to control was either destroyed or enslaved.
And the premise was that basically once one society invents the nation-state, or it's various highly organized hierarchical predecessors, it forced everyone it came in contact with to adopt the technology. All the attempts to build a competing organizational technology were ultimately defeated, resulting in a world where almost all military and economic power is held by nation states. It's, idk, like introducing a chunk of crystal in to a supersaturated solution. The crystal catalyst forces everything else to crystalize in response, turning the entire solution from an un-structured material to a structured crystal.
And then my take-away is that if we every want to have something other than nation-states we have to build a nation-state killing organizational technology. That might mean chewing up nation-states from the inside using parallel power, it might mean building a new kind of non-state organization that can fight nation states on equal footing, and it might mean something else entirely. Regardless, I don't think we're there yet, but with all the possibilities of rapidly emerging technologies and the chaos of the 21st century I think the ground is better laid than it has been in most of the last few centuries.
a nation-state killing organizational technology
erratic flows
sporadic mossification
digesting the crystal through rhizomatic overgrowth
communalized adaptive planning of economy and ecology
decentralized meshnets offering tools and processes for democratic decision-making, collective mobilization and strategic maneuvering
perpetuating itself everywhere at once, slowly, inevitably
revolutionary mycelium
metabolizing capitalism
scaffolding infrastructure to build a million utopias
For a bunch of people who don't have Archons folks sure are upset by AnArchism.
here's the link to the actual comic instead of imgur. https://existentialcomics.com/comic/247
OP is a lib
idk, i don't know who anyone is, and frankly i don't want to know
Frequently liberals who've tasted leftism will declare themselves anarchists (since anarchism is more palatable to libs than ML) and then lib up the place with bad takes, bad ideas, and argumentative attitudes with actual leftists
Also because many of them don't actually know what Anarchism is. I don't think Anarchism is any more palatable to them, I just think it has a different set of misconceptions around Anarchism and anti-communist propaganda is much more heavily promoted. I guess there are anti-revolutionary anarchists, but I have a hard time considering them "real" Anarchists, and the revolutionaries are pretty clear that Anarchism won't be established without exactly the kind of conflict Libs love to scream about.
A lot of libs aren't on board with critical Anarchist positions like ending private property or getting along with your neighbors or ditching the USA's bullshit faux-Democracy.
On the plus side, these "anarchists" never manage to do much to damage anarchist orgs because their idea of praxis is making angry tweets about niche internet celebrities.
It's like judging MLs because of some always online Lysenkoist.
because people's first exposure to anarchists is usually on twitter these days
That's why people are so up in arms against them. "Be kind and cooperate with your neighbors and your standard of living will improve drastically" is about the most dangerous thing a wage worker under Capitalism could possibly believe so during the 19th and early 20th century it was subjected to an intense propaganda campaign by the capitalists right up until the 30s or 40s, after which the Cold War took over.
Twitter anarchists mostly. RL Anarchists are cool and good. We still have substantial disagreements, of course, but it's one that progresses both our ideologies.
Twitter Anarchists
Twitter MaoistsRuining the reputations of otherwise good ideologies.
I have honest to god run in to "Anarchists" on twitter who think fighting a revolution against Capitalism to establish Anarchism would be bad because it's authoritarian or something. I don't even have a joke it was one of the weirdest exchanges I've had on Twitter and I've been on there since a year or two after it started.
I think those people are just feds and wreckers.
Worst case scenario they're people who just want to enjoy the aesthetic of an ideology but balk at taking even small steps towards it.
I think a lot of it is that they've decided that Anarchism begins and ends with some kind of "I'm going to go live in the woods in a shack with my dog" American individualism by way of frontier brainworms. I don't think a lot of them really understand or care about Mutual Aid, they just wanted a name to assign to their desire to not have any community responsibilities and live "off the grid" in what is essentially a 21st century settler-colonial fantasy, the idea that you can escape all the hardships of modern capitalism without actually confronting it.
BUt again, I've only encountered them on twitter, they're extremely weird and hard to make sense of, and there aren't very many of them. I've never seen one in the wild, all my free range anarchist comrades were very "let's feed people, help the homeless, and yell at the cops" people.
RL
People always say this but in my experience real life leftists are even more ludicrous than online ones
There's a lot of dumb shit even in RL, but generally I find the established anarchist orgs to be less silly than the Communist ones. The trick is getting to 18 months without tearing yourself apart or becoming a sex pest cult.
I think states began to hate anarchists when they they were doing that whole "propaganda of the deed" thing in the early 20th century and killing kings and presidents and stuff. too bad they stopped
Afaik in the US at least the labor wars and especially the crack downs and illegal deportations during WWI and through the 20s did a lot of harm to the Anarchist movement. And after the New Deal white labor basically sold out everyone else and signed on with the Feds and that was pretty much the end of things.
iirc even other Anarchists realized the Propaganda of the Deed guys in France weren't having a good effect pretty early on.
Shooting random kings was really funny though.
Well, yes, but even before:
When there were the Levellers there were also the True Levellers (Diggers) which were like "lets just create communes that are awesome, then people won't want to work for the feudal lord. The latter were then killed and tortured to death cause they didn't have self defense squads.
They were proto-vegan and somewhat feminist though. They also had health insurance... yeah they were much better than the US.
Diggers
The Diggers' beliefs were informed by Winstanley's writings which envisioned an ecological interrelationship between humans and nature, acknowledging the inherent connections between people and their surroundings; Winstanley declared that "true freedom lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the earth".[6] With this the Diggers sought to establish a communistic utopia.[7]
was true back then also:The Iver Diggers recorded that nine of the Wellingborough Diggers were arrested and imprisoned in Northampton jail and although no charges could be proved against them the justice refused to release them.
If it is your first time looking the Levellers and True Levellers/Diggers up, the Ranters (sic!) might be interesting to, example:
"I can if it be my will, kiss and hug ladies, and love my neighbour's wife as myself, without sin."[2] — Abiezer Coppe, A Fiery Flying Roll (1649). "Kings, Princes, Lords, great ones, must bow to the poorest Peasants."[2] — Abiezer Coppe, A Fiery Flying Roll (1649).Let me revise that, states began to hate anarchists in the current way as soon as (a) states and anarchists existed in the current way (b) anarchists seemed to be a legitimate threat to states. Nowadays they're not, I think, but the bomb-tossing past of anarchism is a great pretext so they're never gonna give it up.
Diggers were cool
lets just create communes that are awesome, then people won't want to work for the feudal lord.
well it was in opposition to enclosure but same thing really
also they didn't have self defence squads because they were under the impression that Oliver Cromwell would support them unfortunately Cromwell was unwilling to restart the civil war over the matter
They're gonna make vegan chili, give it out, and not even charge for it.
Like animals.
Well yes. But we also like dead cops.
"Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or a knife, and lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot the owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy, and let it be a war of extermination."
It just occurred to me this is precisely against the rules of c/memes for being an unedited webcomic. I'm glad we are generally pretty chill about rules like that here
Im curious if it isnt allowed to post unedited webcomics (why?) in this comm. Where would one post them ?
Anarchism is not considered the most dangerous by the state at the moment, if you look at funding and internal organization of the relevant state departments. Perhaps by insane conservatives, libertarians, and people who’s brains are too poisoned by the haze of suburbia. The state’s intelligence and anti-terrorism focus is more on Islamists and the far-right terrorism, if you look at funding, because they rational ones in charge are aware that the left doesn’t really do terrorism in the west any more.
They ofc jail, murder and infiltrate groups of leftists, but the brass are actually aware that we are not the main violent threat at the moment.
In terms of long term politics liberals and conservatives often cannot distinguish communists or anarchists within their broad ‘socialism’ spectrum. However, the state does not think we have much of a chance I reckon, and they think this least about anarchists. In a sense they are right, because anarchism does not sound realistic or sensible to your average working class individual.
they rational ones in charge are aware that the left doesn’t really do terrorism in the west any more.
Not just this, but they also had a ~50 year (70 if you count the first red scare) head start to perfect methods to keep any kind of mass leftist movement relatively powerless and disorganized, not to mention unmotivated to engage in direct action.
With islamism and religious extremism it's a different story, because they had to learn how to counter this new flavor of terrorism, and it doesn't help that they had propped it up before, so they were wise to the usual tricks.
anarchism is closely tied to adventurist violence, look at that movie about destroying pipelines
