#anarchist theory

[the-anarchist-civil-servant]

An Anarchist Perspective on The State

The thing to remember about The State is that regardless of the political leanings of whoever is in charge of it, regardless of the moral decency of the individuals who lead it, The State has a logic and a set of material interests all its own which will overtake even the best of intentions.

This is why political parties that lean left in opposition suddenly become right-wing conservatives when in power. This is why supposed anti-imperialists engage in imperialism of their own when they get control of the state. This is why carceral policing and authoritarian policies can come from the left or the right.

The State is not a neutral site of class power which can be seized and later dissolved, as the Marxists would have it, nor it is not an essential arbiter and moderator of social conflict as the liberals believe. In some ways, the conservatives are closer to the truth, in that the state is a means by which force and coercion can be applied to populations. Conservatives consider it necessary because they believe that without a powerful state hierarchy enforcing order from above, society will descend into violent chaos.

Anarchists agree that The State is a site of force, hierarchy, and coercion. We just think all of that is actually bad, and the alternative is not violent chaos. The State is a concentration of authority (in various forms, including capital), and as such, it perpetuates itself as the only legitimate enforcer of that power. In the same sense that corporations are concentrations of capital that perpetuate themselves as the only legitimate owners of that capital. Both operate hierarchically, both elevate an elite group of administrators above the general population, both are fundamentally unequal, and both require outside force to abolish.

Believing that The State can be redeemed as long as the right people are in charge is identical to the neoliberal belief that corporate power can be rendered good as long as the CEOs are diverse enough. Neither idea corrects the fundamental problem with capitalism or The State - the material relations of power which these institutions create, protect, and perpetuate.

Socialism - meaning the workers' control of the means of production - is fundamentally contradicted when there is a State above the workers able to dictate working conditions, production quotas, employment laws etc etc. If the workers do not directly control the means of production, then it is by definition, not Socialism.

Communism - meaning a situation of a classless, stateless, moneyless society where everyone contributes what they can towards the common good - cannot be created via a State either. Many Marxists hold that under a socialist-oriented government, and when the conditions are right, The State will simply wither away to be replaced with Communism. This is woefully naive. Concentrations of power do not self-abolish, not without violence or threats of violence anyway.

More than that, The State trains populations to rely on it. It trains people to believe that The State has a right to the power it wields, that it is the place where decisions should get made. A population conditioned to believe such things is not a population that is in any way ready for Communism. Communism requires a population able to run its own affairs, form its own organisations, and make its own decisions - you can't create an empowered population and simultaneously empower The State.

These are examples of what Anarchists call "The Unity of Ends and Means". Basically, it's the idea that you cannot achieve the ends you want with contradictory means. You cannot build Communism by instituting and legitimising the opposite of Communism, in the same way that you cannot stop violence in adults by hitting kids when they get violent - that just leads to violent adults. No amount of "dialectial materialist" sophistry can square that circle, because this is the material reality of The State.

You can only build Communism by... building Communism: trying to make as much of Communism possible in the here and now via community groups, mutual aid, tenants unions, workers' committees, revolutionary unionism, affinity groups, personally unlearning hierarchy, practicing concensus decision making wherever you can and coordinating with others in building large horizontal networks able to provide goods and services.

Like an object in motion in Newtonian physics, The State will perpetuate itself indefinitely until another force stops it. Just like how capitalism perpetuates itself indefinitely, even in the face of environmental catastrophe and enormous human suffering, until we the people, hopefully, can stop it. If we want to achieve the goal of a stateless, classless, moneyless society without hierarchies and oppression, we have to oppose the forces that work against that goal, and that includes The State.

[love-ardour-anarchism]

Clinically relevant anxiety is the result of a brain that was forced to remain in a state of caution and fear for too long without respite.

We live in a world where we are increasingly aware of the constant danger we are exposed to.

Climate change, COVID, wars, bigotry, terrorism, poverty and human suffering, the once-more rise of far right power are all persistent sources of concern and worry. Capitalist society however tells us that these things are simply without alternative. Capitalism says there is no way but to live like this. Some people tried to be cautious about COVID for a while and then started repressing their worry and stopped being cautious. Some people repressed it all along and pretended COVID never existed. They lost themselves in conspiracy ideologies to escape that dread.

And those of us that are still cautious about COVID are gaslit constantly. The reality is this: the world is dangerous. COVID is a danger to us all. But as long as society (capitalism) claims that there is simply no way to change or remove that danger (this is false, of course) most people see no other way than to repress their own fears and gaslight those that don’t. The reason people lash out at those that are still cautious (like when we wear masks in public) is because it hinders their attempt at repressing this otherwise seemingly inescapable mental torture.

And when we as COVID cautious people struggle with the clinically relevant anxiety that constant caution breeds we are gaslit once more. We are told that our anxiety is clinically relevant and requires treatment and all too often clinical professionals claim that our anxiety stems from irrational worries and caution unnecessary. The truth is that our fears ARE rational. We live in a dangerous world and its NOT a healthy thing to repress it. The natural and healthy thing would be to CHANGE conditions to not be a source of constant worry but as long as capitalism blocks that it appears that the most prevalent coping strategies are either repression or taking constant psychological damage. And when we seek support for that sustained damage its the opposite of helpful that our reality is invalidated and we’re told our fears are clinical. The way we live is unhealthy. The way we live is not natural. The way we live is damaging. But we still need to find ways to manage our anxiety and our existential dread WITHOUT damaging ourselves but also WITHOUT closing our eyes to the horrors of this world entirely. To be aware and awake and STILL find ways to destress and live because it won’t help the world NOR us if we destroy ourselves and burn out. 

[magpiethepunkfairy]

Does anyone have any reading recommendations for anarchist and communist theory stuff that focuses on disablity and disabled people

[guavagyal]

the leftist dream is for people to make fanfics of yourself × reader.

[alpaca-clouds]

The Anarchist History of Homo Sapiens

I already spoke about my favorite book that I read last year: David Graeber's "The Dawn of Everything". A book that very much goes into the topic mentioned above: Human history under the perspective of anarchism.

Now, quite a lot of people will know the theory by Rousseau: Humans lived their wonderful free life, then we discovered agriculture, and then some people decided all the stuff was theirs, and then we ended up in the modern misery. This theory tends to get quoted again and again by scholars, with just one small problem: it was technically just a scenario Rousseau dreamed up. There is no actual evidence for this - which does not mean it is wrong. Just that it is a story not based in research.

And because of this Graeber, who is an anthropologist, decided to look further into this together with a colleague. And what they came up with is quite interesting.

Because here is the thing: the way we learn about early human history in school - not that it is a whole lot - is wrong once more. And technically it does not even need research for this.

Humans have been around for about 200 000 years, which in terms of earth history is not a whole lot. Still, out of this time, humans have only really done agriculture for about 7000 years - or at least this is how the story goes. This was after all, when the first big civilizations showed up on the scene. However, you will notice something: Do you actually think that humans before that did not understand agriculture?

While human brains might have shifted a little bit during this time, in general human intelligence did not change a whole lot. So obviously some humans would have realized that if you put seeds into the ground, you can make plants grow there. And given that some animals were domesticated before that 7000 years, we also definitely knew how to domesticate animals. So, why did we - the species homo sapiens - not do that?

For this Graeber and his colleague go to the one source we have, given that we do not have written sources from pre-history (as the word pre-history implies): indigenous folks who did still rely on hunting and gathering, when a more modern civilization made contact with them. And they actually had a wonderful answer to this: they would not use agriculture, because it was not worth the hassle.

There is theory, that will get discussed to bits: the more civilization developed, the more work did humans have to do. Hunters and gatherers often only "worked" for about 20 hours a week. Early people doing agriculture would do about 30 hours. And today... Well, you and I both know how much people work today.

And a lot of people push back on this, saying it is simply not comparable, given that people back in the day did not really have a concept for "work" and as such work and leisure was not even fully differentiated.

But this does not chance, that we do work a whole lot more these days, than other humans before us had.

And the reason for this is simple: We work, so that the owning class can get richer. We do not just do the work that would be needed to sustain ourselves, but the world that will grow businesses. We work so that "line goes up".

Hunter-Gatherer-Cultures did not do such a thing. While they might at times take a bit more and prepare food so that it could last them the winter, they did not hoard that food just to have it. And while peasants during agriculture societies would have to work more, given they produced the stuff for their kings to hoard, this was still not the kind of overproduction we are bringing in today.

And then there was the other thing. The main reason why people for most of human history actually had one big thing we are lacking today: freedom.

Basically, if you did not get along with the folks in your family or tribe in a hunter-gatherer-soceity, you could simply leave. This was even true in mainly agricultural societies. You did not like the king? Well, if push came to shove, it was fairly easy to leave. Sure, you would have to give up on what you had, but it was usually not that much. Nobody really could stop you, because in the end, there was no way to track you.

If you wanted to just move into another country, you could do that.

And also... For the longest time in human history, whatever rulers or leaders humans had were quite aware that they only could rule as long as the people permitted it. If you did not treat your people well, the people usually had more than enough ability to just throw you out or outright kill you.

So even those hierarchies that existed were fairly shallow.

But we lost all those freedoms over the last few centuries. Especially now, that everything is digitalized and you basically will have a hard time moving across the world without being noticed. Getting in and out of a country? Ha, good luck with that.

And that... Well, that is an issue, isn't it?

Because given that the one thing is what came out of our evolution, and the other thing was brought onto us by a few people... It is easy to say, that this way to live is against our nature.

In our society, we just do not have a lot of freedom. Graeber called this out in several of his books. If you brought an ancient Greek man into our modern world, he would assume everyone here is a slave. Because most people who are not part of the super rich do not really have freedoms. Sure, there is some freedoms that exist in theory, but in praxis? We have freedom of movement... but only as long as we remain in certain countries. We have freedom of choosing our work, but if we do not work, we will simply starve. A lot of countries also did not give people the freedom to roam. And any form of foraging is outlawed in a lot of places or highly regulated. So most freedoms we have are just freedoms in theory - and even those theoretical freedoms can easily be taken from us, as the Trump regime is showing us right now.

Humans are meant to be free. As such, it is no big surprise we are all in all rather unhappy with how we are living, isn't it?

[moonstonetombstone]

[studsandswords]

“Abolishing the ruling class doesn’t mean guillotining everyone who owns a yacht or penthouse, it means making it impossible to systematically wield cohesive power over anyone else ever again- Andrewism

(The case against the guillotine)

[makemeabiggraycloud]

Sharing this perfect little bite from Andrewism on YouTube. We stand, as he says, at a precipice. If you're interested in the concepts Andrew highlights in this video (autonomy, mutuality, and free association), I highly recommend listening to his appearances on the podcast It Could Happen Here, where he discusses them in depth.

Antonio Gramsci said “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” Monsters, yes. But us, too: the people.

[orccock]

rec me leftist theory

who here has leftist theory recs. please my crops are dying

i've already read and enjoyed capitalist realism by mark fisher, and im looking through some reddit threads on this theme, but recs from tumblr would be more than appreciated.

(the one qualifier i'll enforce is that to rec it you have to have read it/have to be in the process of reading it yourself)

[love-ardour-anarchism]

As I am inching towards being 30 years of age I think I found some utmost truth that I will cling to for as long as I will live

I think that hope is like a fungus, its growing in the crevices of everything that I believe in

and I will hold it like Antonio Gramsci said: the only way that we can truly lose as revolutionaries, as progressives, as people who wish nothing more than for a better world is if we give up hope and I won't sugar coat this mess we're in but I will rise each morning and I will do the dishes and I will ask you what we can do today to be less miserable tomorrow

and I will hold it just the way that Terry Pratchett said, and he made Death the one who said it: I'd sieve the world to finest grain and I will show you molecules of mercy, I'll show you atoms of all of the good things I believe in and I will tell you that that kind of hope starts with the little lies that I choose to believe in cause I think he was right if I can make myself believe in what I say each saturday at our game night table then I can rise another day and I can do the laundry and ask you what we'll do today to make sure that our friends will have enough tomorrow; all capitalistic deprivation will be damned as long as we're together

and Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that any human power can be resisted by our human resistance. She wrote that all these systems of oppression that we've been living in won't always stay the same. That they are as unchangeable as was the right of kings to rule. They said that it was godly-given and yet it did not last. And in the spirit of the same I think that I am holding on to hope because to me its all that I can do. Le Guin wrote that resistance often starts in art and I feel called to that. And everytime that someone says that something that I wrote impacted them I know that I have reasons to hold on aplenty. And I won't act like all is bright and like there's plenty lights on the horizon that don't form mushroom clouds; and maybe all the world comes to an end in horror and in agony but I refuse to yield until that day is here. I still believe in better worlds, and I believe there's dishes to be done and friends to call and lovers' lips to kiss; once there is not then maybe I can have a look at apathy.

:SCRR

[the-mechanica]

Margaret Killjoy's most recent newsletter fucks so hard. On Escapism:

When I went and asked authors about the social utility of fiction, I might have been asking the wrong set of questions. On some level, I don’t really care what “value” fiction, or escapism, has. That sort of thinking is based on the idea that the material world is the only world with value.

In The Two Towers (at least the movie, it’s been awhile since I’ve read the books, and I’m going to paraphrase anyway), Aragorn has a dream about his partner Arwen. In the real world, he’s near-dead, but in the dream he’s safe and with his love. He tells Arwen “It’s only a dream.”

“Then it’s a good dream,” she replies.

And if there’s one thing I’ve learned these past few years, it’s that the world of our dreams does not inherently have less value than the waking world. We can enjoy fiction for its own sake. Art ought not be in service of the revolution, that is entirely backwards. The revolution should be in service of art. (Emphasis mine)

[guavagyal]

leftism, communism, socialism & anarchism need a major brand & PR re-haul in the West, mainly America.

too many people think we're white, cringey, and sanctimonious assholes who preach about North Korea & the USSR (you're scaring away the maidens & being weird). they gotta be stylish, funny, and know how to speak to people. that whole litmus test for leftists is played out. you need to be populist, central, & not weird.

[alpaca-clouds]

The Dawn of Everything

I finished reading this very long book, after hearing it being recommended in a podcast a few months back. I thought to myself that it would be kinda nice, given that the topic (the origin of inequality) is interesting me, and the fact that I really like David Graeber. I started reading some of his other stuff earlier in the pandemic. Mainly Bullshit Jobs, a book that I will always highly recomment.

The Dawn of Everything was a very interesting read.

You probably know the story that inspires it: "Humans once lived as hunters and gathers in small bands when they were all very equal. But at some point they invented agriculture, and more and more inequality would rise." This is a thing that is considered to be common knowledge - especially in left wing circles. Meanwhile of course there is a right wing counternarrative that generally goes: "Back when we lived as hunter gatherers we had horrible lives, but ever since we invented agriculture everything got better."

Now, there is of course a big challenge with this: Humans have been around for about 200 000 years. And our actual understanding for history goes back for about 5000 years. The earliest written records we can translate are from Ancient Sumer and were written about 3000 years BC. Everything before that... We know humans were there. We can say something about how humans moved and lived because we find their skulls and tools and art. But the few humans before Sumer who have written anything down, have also used writing systems that we cannot decypher. So all we can say about them is stuff that we can know from the archeology we did.

You might also see where this is going: Doing research for this book, Graeber and Wengrow found, that neither of the "early humans" theories named above, were in any way based in research, but just were two people making up stuff that sounded right to them. So, because of that, they themselves tried to figure this out on the basis of what we do know for certain - both from the archeological record, and from what we know from indigenous groups.

And some of the things they bring up is quite interesting.

They base a lot of their writing on the writing of indigenous people over the last 500 years. Specifically also of how indigenous people compared their own cultures to the culture of colonizers. The book also goes into how early monarchies came to be and why people in some situations might have wanted to have kings.

Another thing the book goes very much into is into sexism, misogyny and also how those ideas often influenced the analysis of archeologists. If there were cultures, where a lot of the archeological finds very much suggest that the rulers were women, for a long while archeologist would go: "But that would be silly. Women cannot rule." One example named in the book is Minoan Greece.

I took quite some interesting things from this book - and I absolutely would recommend it to both my fellow anarchists and my fellow Solarpunks. Because I will once more say: We Solarpunks need to learn more from the past, rather than just hoping that we can solve all our problems.

I will write about some other stuff I learned from this book in the next few days or maybe even weeks, but generally I really enjoyed reading (or rather listening to) it.

While the writing style in this book is at times a bit too wordy, I learned a whole lot from reading this. Heck, while I originally got the audiobook, this is one of the few books I own now as both an audio book and a physical copy.

[magpiethepunkfairy]

Where do you guys recommend buying books if you can't access a book store or the bookstores near you don't have the books you want

[ladyfingerpress]

zlxvii A Well-Balanced Birthday at the Edge of Chaos

[studsandswords]

Really good video even if old

The guillotine is a tool of the state, and of the ruling class, the Jacobins were more comparable to authoritarian government with their use of it, as a top down way of quashing political opponents.

Of course Lenin saw this as a good thing, as he himself ordered the butchering of anarchist and socialists who disagreed with Bolshevism, in essence becoming a counter revolutionary as the USSR and any Leninist regime is

State socialists don’t view the working class as competent. They themselves are just an other layer of bourgeoisie

Leninists are bourgeois, the Jacobins were bourgeois capital punishment is the ultimate tool of the bourgeoisie