Are Lemmy anarchists okay? How does this person have 24 upvotes? In what universe are anarchists NOT doing class analysis, (therefore) don't want to abolish capitalism, and don't want to fight archism?
I suspect this is just because libs absolutely DESPISE comrade @Cowbee@hexbear.net and will upvote anything smart-sounding that supposedly addresses whatever is being discussed?
Also, gotta love the whole "I have this opinion and many anarchists will disagree and that's what anarchism is about". Like, buddy, you haven't read one book or talked to one anarchist IRL, let alone organized in your entire life.
That's fine and well, but these things do not happen in a vacuum. You try to feed people vegetarian meals in a park, and the cops come after you. You host a block party, and city authorities come after you for a permit. You assist precarious people by harboring more than 3 of them (familially unrelated) in your apartment, and your landlord raises your rent or evicts you. You go into business as a self-employed maker, competitors sell their equivalent as a loss-leader to squeeze you out. You post anarchist content on a mainstream social network, and you get shadowbanned. You form a multiethnic federation of cooperatives and municipalities in a power vacuum, and the murderous theocratic faction in the region goes to war with you.
Everywhere you go, you run into deep problems created by inequality, class, racism, patriarchy, imperialism, etc. Every day, you deal with resource constraints in a world of ecological overshoot.
For over 5 years I was part of an anarchist collective that held down a social center, I was easily there more than 20 hours a week. We were having to navigate complex and difficult social situations all the time. If you don't have a clearly understood set of norms and coordination, your collective will fall apart from infighting or people taking advantage of you.
"Creating spaces and communities based on mutual aid and human connection in which people can safely exist as themselves" is something bourgeois people do all the time, there's just a substantial cost barrier to it that excludes the lower classes. These spaces were the best part of my life until I realized the oppositions and structural privilege they were predicated on. And after that it became the anarchist milieu that was the best part of my life, but that is based on constant struggle. Asserting that you can just do all these good-person things without an understanding of struggle screams "baby leftist" to me.
Oh I'm very baby leftist. My country has no leftist orgs, and communism is banned. I have never had a chance to be part of an actually anarchic group, and all I've ever done is read theory. I did manage to hang out with a couple during trips and those were great but right now I'm stuck here.
Best of luck to you!
Slingshot has a list of anarchist-aligned places around the world. There's an anarchist ecosystem of websites and blogs that also will refer to places IRL.
Bookstores and gardens are good places to meet people who are more likely to be aligned. FOSS (and to a lesser extent, maker spaces) is full of comrades too. Any activism for human rights or animal rights is going to already be moving in a very similar direction. It may be the case that you have to try getting a group together with nondescript socialists, or even unaligned people who have the right values but no real interpretation of how the world works, with its dual apparatus of state power and corporate power.
Anarchism is syncretic, almost by definition. There's no perfect curriculum or party, there's just us and our circumstances, and the efforts we make to overcome them and fit conceptual pieces together until the picture becomes clearer.
Thank you! I have been trying, and there does seem to be an uptick in socialist thought, most likely due to the internet and USA collapsing. There's an anarchist bookfair in may that I plan to go to and of course I will keep training my social and anarchist skills here.