Anarchism

I was a police officer for nearly ten years and I was a bastard. We all were.

This essay has been kicking around in my head for years now and I’ve never felt confident enough to write it. It’s a time in my life I’m ashamed of. It’s a time that I hurt people and, through inaction, allowed others to be hurt. It’s a time that I acted as a violent agent of capitalism and white supremacy. Under the guise of public safety, I personally ruined people’s lives but in so doing, made the public no safer... so did the family members and close friends of mine who also bore the badge alongside me.

But enough is enough.

The reforms aren’t working. Incrementalism isn’t happening. Unarmed Black, indigenous, and people of color are being killed by cops in the streets and the police are savagely attacking the people protesting these murders.

American policing is a thick blue tumor strangling the life from our communities and if you don’t believe it when the poor and the marginalized say it, if you don’t believe it when you see cops across the country shooting journalists with less-lethal bullets and caustic chemicals, maybe you'll believe it when you hear it straight from the pig’s mouth.

Full text

What is property—and why did Proudhon call it theft?

This video takes a look at some of the history and philosophy of property, from Roman law and slavery to enclosure, colonialism, capitalism, and intellectual property. I unpack Proudhon's claims that "PROPERTY IS THEFT!" and "PROPERTY IS IMPOSSIBLE!", distinguish property from possession, and ask what an anarchist alternative might look like.

Full video

A clip from this livestream: youtube.com/live/Q6c3pXG62K4

It's often said that hierarchy is necessary because humans are selfish and greedy. But is that really the case? Hierarchy creates a system where the worst actors are given the easiest path to power.

Watch here

Johann Sainéa Rubio has been imprisoned in Colombia since 2021, criminalized for participating in the popular uprising of that year. Since the far-right Abelardo de la Espriella government took control of the Colombian state, his situation — which was already very bad — has gotten even worse. The Colombian state is restricting food supplies, inflicting severe hunger and thirst in an attempt to undermine the health of Johann and others imprisoned across the country after fighting for dignity and freedom.

This year, to mark the International Week of Solidarity with Anarchist Prisoners, we are issuing a call to help bring some relief to Johann and his comrades, by chipping in so that they can have dignified access to water and food.

As Johann says in his own words: “Solidarity is love and understanding transformed into action.”

To show your solidarity to Johann and his comrades, please donate any amount via: https://chuffed.org/project/197444-solidarity-with-johann-sainea

Every time a right winger points and laughs at a socialist who was born rich, it should be understood as a desperate attempt to justify their own moral failure to themselves. If you grew up rich and are now a leftist and someone points that out, the proper response is: “Yes I am. Why aren’t you?” I do not believe that there is any plank in the DSA platform that says that nobody is allowed to live in a brownstone that their dad bought. What they say instead is: If your dad has enough money to buy a brownstone, he should be paying higher taxes so that we can build more affordable housing for people who can’t afford brownstones. A rich kid who nods his head and agrees with that assertion and works to raise taxes on himself in the name of social justice is not guilty of hypocrisy at all. He’s exhibiting a commitment to basic fairness. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. Every rich person is morally obligated to do this. It’s the ones who aren’t class traitors that we need to worry about.

Hey y'all! Here we are reading and discussing the Section G.4 of AFAQ this week, which is about why do social anarchists reject individualist anarchism!

Happy reading!

• Section G.4: https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/sectionG.html#secg4

There is also an EPUB version of AFAQ, courtesy of @irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com: here

If you'd like to join, please comment and we'll ping you next post.

Link to last week's read: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/74008481

PS. Feedback request: How did you find last week's reading pace? Fast/Slow/OK/etc.?

After I made this unrelated post, I was informed by @MysticMushroom1776@lemmy.dbzer0.com that lemmy.dbzer0.com was a pro-genAI instance.

It was honestly shocking for me to hear that these two things can coexist and I would like to share the discussion which was correctly moved for being off topic from the above linked post.

I think we owe it to ourselves to discuss topics like this with an open mind.

Here is my statements in reply to MysticMushroom1776, I wasn't able to record their reply before it was removed for being off topic bit I hope they can come here and we can continue the discussion.

Others, please also feel free to discuss with us.

'Wow, I didn't know [that lemmy.dbzer0.com was a pro genAI instance] As an anarchist myself I have to say that is really disappointing.

Anarchist communities [especially in real life] need humans otherwise there is no community. GenAl is a stolen facsimile of a human who can never understand morals or praxis. It can never understand freedom or control. It will however poison our communities (look at what SpaceX/Anthropic is doing in Memphis, TN) make us more predictable (and thus easier to control) and isolate us from other humans within the community which is so important to us.

Even with the most moral genAl you can possibly have, one that is totally FOSS and self hosted on a single gaming GPU, a lot of this is still true.

~~Obviously, this is the wrong place but I have to ask,~~ [prior to moving the discussion to this thread] what makes you think the extreme negatives of genAl (specifically to the anarchist community) can be excused?

... [I do not have a copy of mushroom's reply]

I pirate and seed. I'm also a fan of the megathread And for the most part, I think data is data. However there is a big difference between my pirating a book like the Lord of the Rings (which is credited and I can see the title of) and how Meta scraped Anna's archive and funneled all that data into an approximation of all combined work.

If I pirate the book, the Lord of the Rings to read it. I might enjoy it, I might talk about it to others, quote it, share it with my daughter, I might use the ring of power an an allegory for authoritarian control with a powerful technology, I might even decide to buy my own copies of the book.

What Meta did and then released as open source, won't allow a person the freedom to do any of that. The works were consumed and are used in silence to camouflage as human thought. No credit will ever be contributed. And so no one can even hope to appreciate the original works that was used in training.

The other concerns I have with (local) genAI that I think are deeply important to anarchists specifically.

• Isolation of humanity
• severing of our ties to community
• increasing predictability
• method of control

Photo is genAI made and sourced from the following article:

Why Your AI Is a Terrible Anarchist

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/41776095

Content Notice

discussions of abuse, sexualized violence, and rape.

In their heyday of radicalism in the 1980s, Germany’s Greens were a pacifist, ecological voice. Now the party backs higher military spending not just as a defense strategy but as the linchpin of Germany’s economic revival.

Does anyone have a estimated date or something like that?

This time I am discussing the causes of ecological crisis, using a social ecological analysis, and exploring how simplification damages complex systems.

Watch here

This Week in the Apocalypse, Brooke and Inmn talk about the climate, wildfires, and things that explode.

We’ve been hearing a lot of panicky warnings lately after Democratic primary voters chose socialists and other leftists instead of “moderates” in several major elections. The alarm bells got louder this month after Michigan’s progressive Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed defeated Rep. Haley Stevens – who was, the New York Times reported, “the moderate establishment-backed candidate.”

The soothing “moderate” label routinely goes to candidates like Stevens who’ve supported continual arming of Israel. She “benefited from about $62 million in advertising spending from half a dozen outside groups,” the Times noted. “Over half of that sum came from the super PAC arm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the country’s most influential pro-Israel group.”

What’s so “moderate” about supporting genocide?

Politicians are also routinely dubbed “moderate” when they’re running interference for extreme income inequality and deadly healthcare inequities – helping to block popular policy options like tax hikes on the rich and Medicare for All, which is supported by three-quarters of Democrats.

The Democratic base is fed up with a system that gives inordinate power to the wealthy and to large corporations. In the real world, the so-called “moderates” are aligned with a status quo that continues to inflict widespread suffering and preventable death at home and abroad.

To hear timeworn party strategists like James Carville and Paul Begala tell it, leftwing candidates are duping the Democratic electorate. As this month began, Carville threatened to leave the party. Begala made headlines by declaring, “I don’t like the socialists. I can’t stand them.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/73554758

Camover is a simple game with a simple objective: destroy, disable, and dismantle as many cameras as possible! You play against the surveillance state, an-ever growing enemy that watches all and never sleeps. You play for freedom, for a life without restriction, a city without spy-tech, and a future of possibility!!!

Camover began in 2013 when some anarchists in Berlin decided to take out CCTV cameras ahead of the European Police Congress. They posted their exploits online and encouraged others to play too. Since then, Camover has spread across oceans and continents, with spirited games popping up in Philly, New Jersey, Montreal, and the Bay. Now Camover comes to Portland for Summer 2026!

Ayyy! This marks a year since we started this reading group!! This is wild:)

Hey y'all! Here we are reading and discussing the Section G.3 of AFAQ this week, which is about whether "anarcho"-capitalism a new form of individualist anarchism!

Happy reading!

• Section G.3: https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/sectionG.html#secg3

There is also an EPUB version of AFAQ, courtesy of @irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com: here

If you'd like to join, please comment and we'll ping you next post.

Link to last week's read: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/73642091

PS. Feedback request: How did you find last week's reading pace? Fast/Slow/OK/etc.?

The world is burning. Imperial governments are bombing, destroying, colonising, and genociding entire peoples and countries. Billionaires extend their networks of AI and authoritarian control, all while the planet gets hotter. We are heading straight into dystopia, and every day it is becoming more apparent that society is broken. So, what's the solution? My proposal is a network of new systems, built off the movement of mutual aid and grassroots organising, which build direct democracy, dismantle hierarchies, and prioritise voluntary association, autonomy, and the meeting of human needs and desires. This is commonly called anarchism (or anarcho-communism).