Anarchism

This book and being in proximity with a lot of punk bands. Note this book is just about foreign policy in the last 100 years or so.

https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/901/The-School-of-the-AmericasMilitary-Training-and

It's on Anna's Archive.

Edit: Also, growing up in the Rust Belt doesn't give you a whole lot of faith in states.

Inherent rage at corrupt systems.

But I am no longer really an anarchist like I was in ny youth. Too much of a socialist these days. The statism got me.

Because everything else is internally contradictory bullshit where you pretend problems dont exist, aren't problems, are solved by doing them extra hard on purpose, or are fundamental universal constants to worship.

Yeah organizing is hard. Shortcuts just build an Achilles heel with bone-deep chronological or organizational caps on what it can do.

I knew of anarchism because of cool anarchists that helped me when I was povo.

However I got quite interested in anthropology and after reading a few seminal texts gradually realised how much "human nature" is just cultural and the enormous variety of ways of existing. It also dawned on me how enforced central order tends to crush self regulating (although often not particularly kind or gentle) mechanisms on human societies, resulting in some of the more problematic aspects of society people point to as evidence why anarchy is impractical.

Then I read the bread book

Punk music, generally. But my first introduction to the word was in a 6th grade social studies class where they discussed different forms of government, and the oversimplified idea given to us at that point was appealing on some level. As I've grown it just seems to fit my own ideology and lifestyle more and more.

For disclosures sake: I'm 40 years old now and never read more than a paragraph of any theory related books, but would be interested in trying to learn more

A lot of reasons, from childhood abuse being justified as "they have the right to do it to a child" to police neglecting issues around me and my family, to just being autistic makes me question things everyone takes at face value.

But the key principle of my ideal world is that as long as everyone involved (small scale to environmental scale) is consenting to the actions being done, you should be able to live a happy life. If they don't consent, don't involve them. If everyone involved can't consent, probably don't do that.

You shouldn't have to choose between rent and food. Or healthcare. Or seeing your friends or paying your bills. Or just having a happy life our ape brains enjoy compared to the alienating mundanity of most politics.

Working labor your entire life so you don't die from hunger in the cold, to retire at 65 and not be able to take any of your material possessions with you to any form of afterlife or lack thereof, seems cruel. Especially when no one was asked to be born into this system, they have to work to survive.

The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.

Star Trek also helped influence me, it made me a better person. I was more jaded and capitalist libertarian in my views as a teenager. Now I'm just a hopeful pessimist.

I don't pretend to have the answers of every single question or edge case of anarchism, I also don't pretend it's best for everyone. But it's a system that doesn't reward or enable the power hungry and greedy, when most systems do.

People will gladly tell you the issues of Proudhon, or call out some anarchists wearing the label as an excuse to do whatever they want with no consequences.

I've seen people whitewash and idolize and bootlick for other systems of power, people, and philosophies. Sometimes it's because they think they'll get a turn of being in that position in life, when they'll be struck by lightning first.

Maybe I'm just rambling because it's almost 4:30 am and I'm killing time on my graveyard shift. God I hope somehow this makes some form of sense.

It's pretty simple really; we're all people. We're all equal. Nobody is greater or lesser than anyone else. And we've created a "society" that runs completely antithetical to that idea.

Reading Edward Abbey at a young age didn't hurt, either.

Any system created by people must require consent and allow revocation of consent. Without this basic feature there is no freedom.

My entire life ive been beaten down by power hungry authority, ive seen the forces of capitalism and witnessed the atrocities of imperialism. Ive watched as reaction consumed my community and tore my life apart. Today I dare to dream for a future beyond state and capital, a future truly owned by the workers.

Because pretending to be anything else in a system where all power structures have the same incentives to oppress and abuse the lowest rung is giving in to that power structure. You can vote the greatest person into power and they'll still be ineffective and their term will be over before they can move the needle.

Everywhere I've been in life, there has been an asshole above me who made it their mission to make me miserable, either through negligence, malice or apathy.

I want to be a socialist, but I can't, so anarchist it is.

Because despite everything conservatives and tankies have said or shown me, I still hadn’t seen any version of government that didn’t absolutely fucking suck. There’s no government in history that hasn’t been guilty of objectively horrifying atrocities, and I just refuse to believe that hierarchy is an intrinsic need of mankind when we do so much better with each other without it.

Prison.

Poverty.

Abuse was what started it, then as we grew we saw just how shit 'authority' was more and more, how bad power was and we wanted nothing to do with it, either over others or others having it over us.

As we've gone on we could see all these systems of control, oppression and such serve no one really and are just so boring. Things could be so much better, the planet could be beautiful, healing or never have gotten harmed, and all life could be in balance.

Edit: We also saw the amount of fear those in 'power' have and thought how sad it is, they could get rid of that fear so easily if they worked to improve the conditions for everybody, but they don't want to for some strange reason.

We suppose the main event that finally crystallised it for us was when a supervisor at a job told us just how they saw us, the hierarchy that existed and how they use that as a way to oppress us and others, and to try to protect themselves. We quit a little time after that and have been working on being anarchists ever since, we've done well, we think.

books

but i was young before internets contaminated every corner of every skull

do people ever anarchise in older ages? Can a 40 year old start thinking that maybe we can be better off living in societies without archs?

I had read about it very early, but really became a convert after reading Ursula LeGuin.

I was born this way and always have been this way. But I had to muddle for years through liberalism, then socialism, before identifying anarchism and then even more specifically communalism as being the theory that puts actual words and logic behind the feeling of what I always knew was true. And it wasn't until my mid-20s that I actually took up that search intentionally because I was so shell shocked throughout my school years.

I gratuated college in 2008 and got my first pepper spray whiffs at Zuccoti Park during Occupy. Chomsky's Failed States and Zinn's People's History of the United States are what got me off liberalism. Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy sparked my imagination regarding the radical multitudal possibilities of governance and Cory Doctorow's Little Brother showed me what one person is capable of. I knew socialism / communism alone weren't my eventual destination because the history and hierarchy always smelled of what I was escaping from, but it took me a while to find works like Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread and eventually Bookchin's Post-Scarcity Anarchism where I finally felt like I'd arrived home. I remember reading that last work in a Brooklyn cafe under a skylight when the clouds opened up and it was like nature saying "Yes, this is it. You found it bro." NYC organizations like MACC and Food Not Bombs, and later on Symbiosis on the west coast, really cemented things for me.

I also credit the literary works of Ivan Illich, Ursula Le Guin, and David Graeber for keeping me hooked.

I'm like De Niro's plumber character in the movie "Brazil". Is that anarchist? Defying government bureaucracy in order to sneakily fix a citizens toilet, even though all of the approvals and permit forms will take weeks to complete.

I've experienced the harms leadership and hierarchial power can inflict. Lots of societal issues can be successfully explained through an anarchist lens.

I was into a romanticized version of it as a young punk which led me to read about it and look into it more deeply and it all just made so much sense to me. Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid solidified a lot of what had been in my mind and my confusion about the society I observed.

DIY and self-sufficiency. Once you do things for real, not play a wasting game of capitalist hypercomputer, you only could be an anarchist. Then you can go ahead and learn the theory, etc.

I'm not an anarchist yet but I am willing to learn.

The Bread Book did a lot of heavy lifting for me. I think I've always been an anarchist at heart, but Kropotkin convinced me of the viability of the actual theory as I was learning more about leftism in general.

When I was still a religious believer I first learned about the recurring christian anarchist movements and groups throughout the religion's history, and I had a lot of respect and admiration for the people who were able and willing to critic an unjust authoritarian hierarchy imposed on them and take seriously the call for mutual aid instead of expecting someone else to do the hard work. I deconverted from the childhood religious indoctrination, but kept the virtues of participating in mutual aid efforts and rejecting unearned authority and imposed by force hierarchy I learned from the anarchists.

Tl;Dr books, curiosity about how to ethically organize groups of people

For me it was a combination of the BLM protests in 2020, finding real life examples of anarchism through HOI4 with the Spanish Civil War, watching "Living in Utopia", and reading At the Cafe by Errico Malatesta.

Prior to that though I started off as a very uneducated 14 year old self identifying as Trotskyist. And I really just became a communist because I cared a lot about fairness, and I didn't think a system where there is an owning class and a working class was fair. And because originally my only knowledge of communism was a freshman understanding of the Russian Revolution, between Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. I picked Trotsky cause I liked his emphasis on international revolution, and at the time I thought he was the most democratic. Then slowly I became more libertarian socialist as I learned about other Marxist ideologies like Council Communism and Luxemburgism.

The BLM protests really pushed me to the conclusion of abolishing the police, and that laid the foundation for everything else that came after to build off of for me becoming an anarchist

I never thought of myself as an anarchist, I still don't I guess, but after reading about the topic, I realize the term fit me perfectly.

But, what made me the way I am, are lots of books and growing up in an environment where I was taught to think and analyse.

I always had anarchistic thoughts but these just looked like unrelated thoughts. I think it started with feeling not comfortable anymore with my religion and because I hated school ( they told me what to learn and I hate the person who invented homework). In my twenties I somehow stumbeled upon the word anarchism and never found the exit of that rabbithole anymore (luckily)

Because the institutions that had the will and power to create the hierarchies that rule society got that power by stepping on heads and fucking over anyone who got in their way. It's why things only work in favor of a tiny number of people, and exposing that truth to the largest number of people possible seems like one of the only ways to rectify the issue.

I grew up a strong environmentalist and then years ago a friend gave me some stuff by Zerzan, Bookchin, and later Stirner to chew on. Haven’t looked back since. (This was also after reading Kaczynski as a bit of a joke.)

Even if I don’t wholly agree with any of them—or anybody else I’ve read—I can’t look around and see any system of power being exercised over others as good. Some systems are less bad than others and I continue to vote/participate in bourgeois democracy as a harm reduction strategy, but in the long term…