#practical anarchy
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geek-22 · 5 months ago
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I cannot for the life of me find the OG post, if anyone knows what these accounts are called now I will cry (positive)
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dailyanarchistposts · 8 months ago
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Direct action, simply put, means cutting out the middleman: solving problems yourself rather than petitioning the authorities or relying on external institutions. Any action that sidesteps regulations and representation to accomplish goals directly is direct action—it includes everything from blockading airports to helping refugees escape to safety and organizing programs to liberate your community from reliance on capitalism. Here we present a step-by-step guide to organizing and carrying out direct action, from the first planning stages to the debrief at the end, including legal support, media strategy, and proper security.
There are countless scenarios in which you might want to employ direct action. Perhaps representatives of despicable multinational corporations are invading your town to hold a meeting, and you want to do more than simply hold a sign; perhaps they’ve been there a long time, operating franchises that exploit workers and ravage the environment, and you want to hinder their misdeeds; perhaps you want to organize a festive, community-oriented event such as a street party. Direct action can plant a public garden in an abandoned lot or defend it by paralyzing bulldozers; it can occupy empty buildings to house the homeless or shut down government offices. Whether you’re acting in secret with a trusted friend or in a mass action with thousands of people, the basic elements are the same.
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love-ardour-anarchism · 6 months ago
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urban anarchist type autism is i know all the plants on my home street i recognize all common graffiti tags and i have favourites
i can tell you 16 places off the top of my head that the tag "333" in this one specific archaic style is found
i notice new tags, i see you unheard souls
i watch the tiny sapling, canadian maple, it has spent months trying to force its way through sidewalk concrete and i'd try and rehome it if its roots weren't caught there underneath
i have the city council queer representation person on e-mail speed dial, i carry 12 types of pen to cover up hateful graffiti and i carry industrial cleaner and a scraper to get rid of bigoted stickers and nazi propaganda
and in an envelope that i was given by my lover/friend i carry uncountable amounts of stickers
the cops stop me for random "check ins" when they see me remove graffiti and i'm white and i'm aware of what that privilege means, despite the tattoos on my fingers and all the things inside my bag i have never been arrested
and i have brought you food when you were sick, i took the city bus with tea and vegan ginger soup to help you rest and cure
and i have fixed a bench myself with my own hands and tighter screws when it came clear that between the city council and the store in front of which it stands nobody owned it and therefore noone cares that senior citizens could injure themselves sitting on a broken bench
and on another street the senior citizen residence, they know me cause i've asked for their maintenance ladder to remove some fascist shit high up on a streetlight right outside their building
i count the seasons based on what the bramble hedges do
and every full moon new i silently rejoice, O Máni, that the wolves have not yet caught you
:SCRR
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cookthepenguin · 11 months ago
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IF YOU ARE HUNGRY, I WILL OFFER FOOD.
IF YOU ARE THIRSTY, I WILL OFFER WATER.
IF YOU ARE COLD, I WILL OFFER WARMTH.
IF YOU ARE IN NEED, ASK AND I WILL GIVE.
IF YOU ARE IN TROUBLE, ASK AND I WILL HELP.
I DO NOT DO THESE THINGS WITH THE HOPE OF BEING REWARDED.
I DO NOT DO THESE THINGS OUT OF FEAR OF PUNISHMENT.
I DO THESE THINGS BECAUSE I KNOW THEM TO BE RIGHT.
I SET MY OWN STANDARDS AND I ALONE ENFORCE THEM.
I AM AN ANARCHIST.
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porcelanitaa · 1 year ago
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friendly reminder: Everyday is a good day to punch nazis <3
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rotteneldritchhorror · 4 months ago
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youtube
Here to drop this video I just found on all of you before I’ve even finished watching it because it’s damn good and gives actual examples of how to engage in small acts of praxis on the daily or weekly
The comments are also incredibly helpful and definitely worth a read through!
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magickloop · 4 months ago
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Sociocultural Stalemate
How can we expect to continue to advance as a society when technology is valued over humanity, the heightening of consciousness prioritized and funded far below the pursuit of ever nearer, ever more conspicuously and minutely inadequate approximations of its base functionality?
The powers that be stigmatize what presents them no direct fiscal benefit, disenfranchising divergent and creative academia, homogenizing the voices amplified to the masses, lest those masses recognize authority no longer warrants the respect it demands.
We are awake. We are aware. We reject the notion that consciousness can be effectively explored in its absence. We are scattered, but we are capable of and moving toward organization.
The future requires both ideological autonomy and practical unity, both intellectual ingenuity and collaborative problem solving, both vulnerability and fortitude, both empathy and honesty. It cannot wait.
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ghostlyfroggy-is-drawing · 5 months ago
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As the world tries to keep us silent, it is more important now than ever to be loud. Speak up for yourself and others when you see the injustice.
I have been inspired by more classic activism posters recently, especially those from punk movements.
This is my way of incorporating punk into my art. (I as a person am punk and in the subculture, so I guess my art is already punk…)
Remember, Knowledge is our greatest weapon.
Educate yourself.
Total Time: 1 Hour 48 Minutes
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love-ardour-anarchism · 2 months ago
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sorry y'all (not sorry) I just heard about the "unemployed friend" meme and I gotta say, yeah, I'm the unemployed friend.
i'm on an actually surprisingly livable disability pension (yippie, till they slash it) so when I'm not busy doing ALL the shit I need to keep my fairly low standard of living up by jumping through all sorts of hoops, polishing psych ward and doctors office doorknobs and begging the government to let me live another year I'm THAT unemployed friend
things I've done within the last year or so that are a bit random but cool:
clean up a bunch of fashy graffiti and stickers just as I walk around town on my silly little mental health walks
ask a local retirement home for a ladder to get rid of some particularly nasty stickers WAY up high (prolly shouldn't tell them I'm a LITTLE mobility impaired and def shouldn't be doing those kinds of impromptu acrobatics)
repair a bench in front of a grocery store that senior citizens sit on a lot that became a safety hazard because it was broken and the store claimed it was "the city's" and the city claimed it was "the store's"... i just went there with a powered drill and some screws and fixed that shit
helped a neighbor do some laundry just cause, also learned that the washer/dryer situation in the building is shit so I offered my personal washer/dryer for use
removed some fash graffiti that was on the back of the door of a government office only for the gov workers there to proclaim me the savior of the broken or some shit which made for a very funny conversation as I stood there with my "acab antifascist" punk patches
first email then call a local government branch incessantly to tell them about ALL the ways their website is fucking broken and inaccessible, then got to talking with them about the specifics which they said they'd relay to their IT department which then proceeded to email me back to let me know their website's fucking broken links are "client side" (sure lol)
paid for some guy's bus fare and had an argument with the bus driver who wouldn't let me use my "my support worker rides for free with me" bus pass cause that random old man who doesn't speak good German "isn't my support worker" when the bus driver was about to call the cops on me for "fraud" I just smacked down my pay card and was like "okay I'll pay for him then", the old man then blessed me and said I'm going to heaven and my "husband... or wife" is very lucky to have me
almost got mugged but when I joked with the 4 guys surrounding me while talking to me aggressively they suddenly eased up and were like "you're cool, actually" to which I responded with "haha cool I thought I was gonna get mugged" to which they replied "you were" so I just smiled politely and walked away in a leisurly pace
given a guy some rolling tobacco, papers and no cigarette filters because he doesn't like the taste and been given a VERY expensive chocolate in return because I refused his loose change in return for the loose handful of tobacco and 1 rolling paper, I offered him the whole open bag of tobacco and he said no he doesn't smoke
removed ANOTHER shitty graffiti (there's too many of those, geez) and got asked by a guy if I'm "from city council" (imagine me, wearing combat boots, a punk vest and covered in tattoos) which I responded to by saying I deny any such allegations. man who asked thought that was very funny and asked if I take tips, I said I don't, he was disappointed and left.
So yeah, I do a little mischief and a little community service when I can
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dailyanarchistposts · 8 months ago
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Turbulent times are upon us. Already, blockades, demonstrations, riots, and clashes are occuring regularly. It’s past time to be organizing for the upheavals that are on the way.
But getting organized doesn’t mean joining a pre-existing institution and taking orders. It shouldn’t mean forfeiting your agency and intelligence to become a cog in a machine. From an anarchist perspective, organizational structure should maximize both freedom and voluntary coordination at every level of scale, from the smallest group up to society as a whole.
You and your friends already constitute an affinity group, the essential building block of this model. An affinity group is a circle of friends who understand themselves as an autonomous political force. The idea is that people who already know and trust each other should work together to respond immediately, intelligently, and flexibly to emerging situations.
This leaderless format has proven effective for guerrilla activities of all kinds, as well as what the RAND Corporation calls “swarming” tactics in which many unpredictable autonomous groups overwhelm a centralized adversary. You should go to every demonstration in an affinity group, with a shared sense of your goals and capabilities. If you are in an affinity group that has experience taking action together, you will be much better prepared to deal with emergencies and make the most of unexpected opportunities.
This guide is adapted from an earlier version that appeared in our Recipes for Disaster: An Anarchist Cookbook.
Affinity Groups are Powerful
Relative to their small size, affinity groups can achieve a disproportionately powerful impact. In contrast to traditional top-down structures, they are free to adapt to any situation, they need not pass their decisions through a complicated process of ratification, and all the participants can act and react instantly without waiting for orders—yet with a clear idea of what to expect from one another. The mutual admiration and inspiration on which they are founded make them very difficult to demoralize. In stark contrast to capitalist, fascist, and socialist structures, they function without any need of hierarchy or coercion. Participating in an affinity group can be fulfilling and fun as well as effective.
Most important of all, affinity groups are motivated by shared desire and loyalty, rather than profit, duty, or any other compensation or abstraction. Small wonder whole squads of riot police have been held at bay by affinity groups armed with only the tear gas canisters shot at them.
The Affinity Group is a Flexible Model
Some affinity groups are formal and immersive: the participants live together, sharing everything in common. But an affinity group need not be a permanent arrangement. It can serve as a structure of convenience, assembled from the pool of interested and trusted people for the duration of a given project.
A particular team can act together over and over as an affinity group, but the members can also break up into smaller affinity groups, participate in other affinity groups, or act outside the affinity group structure. Freedom to associate and organize as each person sees fit is a fundamental anarchist principle; this promotes redundancy, so no one person or group is essential to the functioning of the whole, and different groups can reconfigure as needed.
Pick the Scale That’s Right for You
An affinity group can range from two to perhaps as many as fifteen individuals, depending on your goals. However, no group should be so numerous that an informal conversation about pressing matters is impossible. You can always split up into two or more groups if need be. In actions that require driving, the easiest system is often to have one affinity group to each vehicle.
Get to Know Each Other Intimately
Learn each other’s strengths and vulnerabilities and backgrounds, so you know what you can count on each other for. Discuss your analyses of each situation you are entering and what is worth accomplishing in it—identify where they match, where they are complentary, and where they differ, so you’ll be ready to make split-second decisions.
One way to develop political intimacy is to read and discuss texts together, but nothing beats on-the-ground experience. Start out slow so you don’t overextend. Once you’ve established a common language and healthy internal dynamics, you’re ready to identify the objectives you want to accomplish, prepare a plan, and go into action.
Decide Your Appropriate Level of Security
Affinity groups are resistant to infiltration because all members share history and intimacy with each other, and no one outside the group need be informed of their plans or activities.
Once assembled, an affinity group should establish a shared set of security practices and stick to them. In some cases, you can afford to be public and transparent about your activities. in other cases, whatever goes on within the group should never be spoken of outside it, even after all its activities are long completed. In some cases, no one except the participants in the group should know that it exists at all. You and your comrades can discuss and prepare for actions without acknowledging to outsiders that you constitute an affinity group. Remember, it is easier to pass from a high security protocol to a low one than vice versa.
Make Decisions Together
Affinity groups generally operate on via consensus decision-making: decisions are made collectively according to the needs and desires of every individual involved. Democratic voting, in which the majority get their way and the minority must hold their tongues, is anathema to affinity groups—for if a group is to function smoothly and hold together under stress, every individual involved must be satisfied. Before any action, the members of a group should establish together what their personal and collective goals are, what risks they are comfortable taking, and what their expectations of each other are. These matters determined, they can formulate a plan.
Since action situations are always unpredictable and plans rarely come off as anticipated, it may help to employ a dual approach to preparing. On the one hand, you can make plans for different scenarios: If A happens, we’ll inform each other by X means and switch to plan B; if X means of communication is impossible, we’ll reconvene at site Z at Q o’clock. On the other hand, you can put structures in place that will be useful even if what happens is unlike any of the scenarios you imagined. This could mean preparing resources (such as banners, medical supplies, or offensive equipment), dividing up internal roles (for example, scouting, communications, medic, media liaison), establishing communication systems (such as burner phones or coded phrases that can be shouted out to convey information securely), preparing general strategies (for keeping sight of one another in confusing environments, for example), charting emergency escape routes, or readying legal support in case anyone is arrested.
After an action, a shrewd affinity group will meet (if necessary, in a secure location without any electronics) to discuss what went well, what could have gone better, and what comes next.
Tact and Tactics
An affinity group answers to itself alone—this is one of its strengths. Affinity groups are not burdened by the procedural protocol of other organizations, the difficulties of reaching agreement with strangers, or the limitations of answering to a body not immediately involved in the action.
At the same time, just as the members of an affinity group strive for consensus with each other, each affinity group should strive for a similarly considerate relationship with other individuals and groups—or at least to complement others’ approaches, even if others do not recognize the value of this contribution. Ideally, most people should be glad of your affinity group’s participation or intervention in a situation, rather than resenting or fearing you. They should come to recognize the value of the affinity group model, and so to employ it themselves, after seeing it succeed and benefiting from that success.
Organize With Other Affinity Groups
An affinity group can work together with other affinity groups in what is sometimes called a cluster. The cluster formation enables a larger number of individuals to act with the same advantages a single affinity group has. If speed or security is called for, representatives of each group can meet ahead of time, rather than the entirety of all groups; if coordination is of the essence, the groups or representatives can arrange methods for communicating through the heat of the action. Over years of collaborating together, different affinity groups can come to know each other as well as they know themselves, becoming accordingly more comfortable and capable together.
When several clusters of affinity groups need to coordinate especially massive actions—before a big demonstration, for example—they can hold a spokescouncil meeting at which different affinity groups and clusters can inform one another (to whatever extent is wise) of their intentions. Spokescouncils rarely produce seamless unanimity, but they can apprise the participants of the various desires and perspectives that are at play. The independence and spontaneity that decentralization provides are usually our greatest advantages in combat with a better equipped adversary.
Bottomlining
For affinity groups and larger structures based on consensus and cooperation to function, it is essential that everyone involved be able to rely on each other to come through on commitments. When a plan is agreed upon, each individual in a group and each group in a cluster should choose one or more critical aspects of the preparation and execution of the plan and offer to bottomline them. Bottomlining the supplying of a resource or the completion of a project means guaranteeing that it will be accomplished somehow, no matter what. If you’re operating the legal hotline for your group during a demonstration, you owe it to them to make sure someone can handle it even if you get sick; if your group promises to provide the banners for an action, make sure they’re ready, even if that means staying up all night the night before because the rest of your affinity group couldn’t show up. Over time, you’ll learn how to handle crises and who you can count on in them—just as others will learn how much they can count on you.
Go Into Action
Stop wondering what’s going to happen, or why nothing’s happening. Get together with your friends and start deciding what will happen. Don’t go through life in passive spectator mode, waiting to be told what to do. Get in the habit of discussing what you want to see happen—and making those ideas reality.
Without a structure that encourages ideas to flow into action, without comrades with whom to brainstorm and barnstorm and build up momentum, you are likely to be paralyzed, cut off from much of your own potential; with them, your potential can be multiplied by ten, or ten thousand. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world,” Margaret Mead wrote: “it’s the only thing that ever has.” She was referring, whether she knew it or not, to affinity groups. If every individual in every action against the state and status quo participated as part of a tight-knit, dedicated affinity group, the revolution would be accomplished in a few short years.
An affinity group could be a sewing circle or a bicycle maintenance collective; it could come together for the purpose of providing a meal at an occupation or forcing a multinational corporation out of business through a carefully orchestrated program of sabotage. Affinity groups have planted and defended community gardens, built and occupied and burned down buildings, organized neighborhood childcare programs and wildcat strikes; individual affinity groups routinely initiate revolutions in the visual arts and popular music. Your favorite band was an affinity group. An affinity group invented the airplane. Another one maintains this website.
Let five people meet who are resolved to the lightning of action rather than the agony of survival—from that moment, despair ends and tactics begin.
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dailyanarchistposts · 3 months ago
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What is wrong with the concept of rights?
Do rights always and everywhere flow from the state? Don’t some rights (ideally) protect one from the state? Human rights as opposed to legal rights say? Isn’t it OK to have some basic standards for our treatment of one another and can’t that be totally independent of the concept of the state? And, finally, can’t new rights take political/social space away from the state and capital? For example wouldn’t the concept of housing as a basic human right take some space away from the idea that property rights should be primary and form the foundation of the social order? Can the concept of desire replace the concept of rights? What are the implications of this? If it doesn’t replace this concept what are some of the consequences of eliminating a discourse of rights? How does one talk about the importance of people’s access to basic resources or the importance of eliminating torture (for example) outside of this discourse.
ank
Rights always come from the state. The idea that rights should be written into law was developed when people were so pissed about getting stepped on and ruled over by sovereign powers that the governments had to do something. So they made a tremendous shift into a system of politics called liberalism (not the same as liberalism as in liberal vs. conservative or liberal vs. maoist) in which the law recognizes the rights of citizens. These laws serve to not only convince citizens that they aren’t going to be stepped on as hard but also to ensure that people will appeal for recognition of their rights to the state or for a change in the rights written in law, rather than revolt when they have grievances. It is a remarkably successful system, in which revolt now tends to happen only when the system is clearly fucking people over and clearly not going to change itself. Even then, revolt can be settled by implementing some larger systematic change or having a revolutionary government take over.
Anarchists do not want protection from the state. Or, to put it another way, a truly anarchist life guarantees that one will not be promised protection by the state, and instead punished by it. The state offers protection to (certain normal, decent, law-abiding, good, productive, etc) citizens in exchange for their preservation, reproduction, and reformation of the status quo.
An alternative understanding would be that rights are first and foremost inherent to our being human, and only secondly is this ‘real’ human essence recognized by the state. I would reject this because no one can point to the existence of these essential rights except in the writings of law (whether international or national). There isn’t an inherent human essence, or if there is it would be a highly paradoxical, enigmatic “thing”. To appeal (to the state) for the establishment of greater rights does not “take away space” from the state. It would seem that only revolt can actually wrench spaces from state control, but even then, state-forms manage to creep in through the back door (the implementation of self-management among the insurgents).
As for alternative discourse, I don’t see the need for one. For anyone to actually achieve the essence of what you are talking about—to live free of the domination of state and capital in their lives—they would have to live fighting against domination and not appeal to it to recognize the importance of their needs or how cruel torture is. In other words, they would have to become a non-subject. And only subjects can have rights.
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dailyanarchistposts · 11 months ago
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The way most people talk about climate change we are led to believe we all have an equal part in creating the capitalist nightmare we live in, but that’s a lie. The unsustainable and extractive nature of capitalism grew directly from the ideological and material foundations of European colonization. We cannot hold the entire human species responsible for that. It’s victim blaming.
The vast majority of waste is produced by the same people and institutions who hold power. Fighting for our planet, the health of our land, our food, our homes, our communities, is where the fight against capitalism and white supremacy collide. Any fight for environmental justice must also be a fight for racial justice because BI&POC are the ones who disproportionately bear the weight of climate change.
White Settler Colonialism Is Destroying the Planet, Not Poor BI&POC
Don’t believe the Malthusian and eco-fascist myth that there are too many people on the planet to care for. This is a lie peddled by capitalists, eugenicists, and people who advocate for genocide. We know that every landbase has its limit for how much life it can support (indigenous peoples have been saying this for hundreds of years), but “overpopulation” rhetoric is overwhelmingly used as a means to enforce colonial hierarchies where wealthy white people can maintain lives of access and privilege while poor BI&POC barely survive.
Instead of telling poor BI&POC to have less children or to stop wanting better lives, we should build a movement to fight climate change which centers racial justice, abolishes capitalism, and forces wealthy, predominately white populations to stop hoarding resources.
Here are some Earth Day facts for tomorrow so you don’t fall for the lies:
Just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions. (Source: the Guardian)
Black communities are exposed to 56% more pollution than is caused by their consumption. For Latinx communities, it is 63%. (Source: American Journal of Public Health)
97% of waste produced in the United States is corporate waste. 80% of businesses are owned & operated by white people. (Source: “The Story of Stuff” & US News)
Indigenous peoples make up less than 5% of the planet’s human population, yet they are protecting 80% of its biodiversity. (Source: National Geographic)
The world’s richest 10% produce half of carbon emissions while the poorest half contribute only 10%. (Source: Oxfam)
The world’s wealthiest 16% use 80% of the planet’s natural resources. (Source: CNN)
We are not all equally “responsible.” White settler colonialism and capitalism are destroying the planet, not poor BI&POC.
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dailyanarchistposts · 21 days ago
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“The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there… Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.” — José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia
“I want a world where friendship is appreciated as a form of romance… I want a world where our worth isn’t linked to our desireability, our security to our monogamy, our family to our biology.” — Alok Vaid-Menon
Our Manifesto
Romance is inherently queerphobic
The organisation of queerness around the celebration and pursuit of romantic desires and pleasures reinforces queer oppression
Queer liberation must abolish romance as its long-term goal
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dailyanarchistposts · 9 months ago
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From September 20 to 27, tens of thousands will take to the streets to denounce the causes of climate change and call on governments to address what may be the most drastic crisis facing humanity in the 21st century. These mass actions will showcase the growing anger of a new generation that has known nothing but crisis, war, and the threat of environmental collapse. We have prepared the following text as a flier encouraging climate activists to consider how to interrupt the causes of climate change via direct action rather than petitioning the state to solve the problem for us. Please print these out and distribute them at climate protests and everywhere else you can.
Finally, people are filling the streets to call on governments to address the climate crisis, the most serious threat facing humanity in the 21st century. This is long overdue. But what good will it do to petition the same sector of society that created this problem? Time and again, we have learned that the state does not exist to serve our needs but to protect those who are profiting on the causes of this crisis.
The most effective way to pressure politicians and executives to address the climate crisis is to show that whatever they fail to do, we will do ourselves. This means moving beyond symbolic displays of “non-violence” to build the capacity to shut down the fossil fuel economy ourselves. No amount of media attention or progressive rhetoric can substitute for this. If we fail to build this capacity, we can be sure that the timeline for the transition to less destructive technologies will be set by those who profit on the fossil fuel economy.
Several examples from recent social movements show that we have the power to shut down the economy ourselves.
In 2011–2012, the Occupy Movement demonstrated that tens of thousands of people could make decisions without top-down organization, meeting their needs collectively and carrying out massive demonstrations. On one day of action, participants shut down ports up and down the West Coast, confirming that coordinated blockades can disrupt the global supply chain of energy and commodities.
In 2016, people converged to fight the Dakota Access Pipeline, a corporate project threatening Native land and water. Tens of thousands established a network of camps to block construction, demonstrating a new way to live and fight together. The Obama administration canceled the pipeline, causing many occupiers to go home, but the Trump administration reinstated it—confirming that we must never count on the government to do anything for us.
In France, occupiers blocked the construction of a new airport at la ZAD, the “Zone to Defend.” Farmers teamed up with anarchists and environmentalists, establishing an autonomous village that provided infrastructure for the struggle. After years of struggle, the French government gave up and canceled the airport.
We have seen train blockades in a variety of struggles. In Olympia, Washington, anarchists blocked trains carrying fracking proppants in 2016 and in 2017, forcing the company to stop transporting the commodity. In Harlan County, Kentucky, coal miners have blocked a coal-carrying train after the Black Jewel company refused to pay wages they owed to workers. It only takes a few dozen people to shut down a key node in the supply chains of the global fossil fuel economy. Imagine what we could do on a bigger scale!
Governments serve to protect the economy from those it exploits. The state exists to evict, to police, to wage war, to oppress, and above all to defend the property of the wealthy few. The perils of climate change have been known for years, but governments have done little in response, focusing instead on fighting wars for oil, militarizing their borders to keep out climate refugees, and attacking the social movements that could bring about the sort of systemic change that is our only hope of survival.
The capitalist economy is literally killing us. Let’s begin the process of shutting it down.
Another end of the world is possible!
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dailyanarchistposts · 8 months ago
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possible reading list (in no order)
Anarchy Alive! – Uri Gordon An examination of contested issues between and among anarchists. The questions of Violence, Power, Technology, and Nationalism are each given their own chapters.
Anarchy Works – Peter Gelderloos A cross-cultural examination of how anarchist principles have worked, whether the practitioners called themselves anarchists or not.
Recipes for Disaster – CrimethInc. Big and small, legal and il-, 62 recipes that run the gamut from dumspter-diving to banner drops, open relationships to locking down streets, monkeywrenching to coalition building.
Anarchy after Leftism – Bob Black Black’s response to Murray Bookchin’s Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism. Black accuses Bookchin of being a closeted authoritarian, city-statist and Marxist with a penchant for high tech and the Athenian polis. Black defends what he calls heterodox or post-leftist anarchism, a kind of anti-work, individualist, and moderately primitivist form of anarchism.
The Anarchist Tension – Alfredo M. Bonanno One of the most influential (along with Armed Joy and At Daggers Drawn) of the insurrectionary writings. Challenges anarchists to resist dogma and easy answers.
anything written by Fredy Perlman (Against (His)Story, Against Leviathan would be a good start) To be healthy and sane we need to be grounded in a more direct relationship with nature and with other people in comprehensible, face-to-face communities. Leviathanic civilization destroys these basic relationships — hence the pathology of the modern era. This book covers all this. It’s deep, it’s allegorical, it’s like nothing you’ve ever read before.
bolo’bolo – p.m. A sketch of how a future anarchist society could work, the only utopia with enough diversity to deserve the name anarchist.
Society of the Spectacle – Guy Debord One of the main texts of the Situationists, explaining (in aphorisms) the concept of the Spectacle as the defining impetus of western culture, one that is, through consumption, continually searching for meaning.
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dailyanarchistposts · 4 months ago
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“Without Civilization People Would Starve, Epidemic Diseases Would Break Out and there Would be no Medicine to Heal”
Then ask yourself why the Hadza, for example, survive until today. Hunger didn’t exist in such lifeways, but to a rather high degree in the civilized world. Naturally you can reply that eight billion people can’t be fed by hunting and gathering and you would probably be right, even if food forests appeared overnight where there were once shopping centers, commercial districts, insutrial complexes, and streets. Precisely for that reason, even I don’t advocate for a return to pure gathering and hunting. Perhaps a means of agriculture will be found that is sustainable enough to provide for all people without continuing the colossal ecocide. Monocultures are definitely out. Here also, Indigenous cultures deliver us teachable lessons.
Regarding diseases, it is once again the opposite. Civilization first made possible the serious outbreak of epidemics. We are currently treading into an Era of Pandemics. I certainly don’t have a crystal ball, but I can’t imagine any scenario in a decivilized world where something like the current Corona Pandemic could kill millions of people, let alone that such a pandemic could even exist when you have destroyed its very basis for existence. The past should prove me right: epidemics first broke out regularly with the arrival of civilization. There were of course earlier infectious diseases, I certainly don’t want to lie. But never to the extent reached in the civilized world.
With that we finally arrive at the topic of healing and medicine and start off with a Fun Fact: an essential part of modern western medicine is based on the botanical knowledge of Indigenous peoples, which people appropriated in the course of colonialism and later synthesized. Indigenous cultures often utilized methods which modern science only barely understands, if at all. In fact, Indigenous groups as well as uncivilized/precivilized people have at their disposal not only a deep knowledge of nature, but also discoveries which have been lost to city-dwellers.
The majority of modern medicine doesn’t even heal but only relieves the symptoms. Take for instance medicines for the Diseases of Civilization like thyroid disease or diabetes, which as a rule must be taken for a lifetime in order to “manage” the illness. In decivilization, the cure itself stands in focus. Healing of the fissures which have grown inside the individual, between people, and between humans and nature. The fissures made by civilization, by power. Our modern medical progress is also anything but innocent – stop romanticizing it. Colonialism, imperialism, and horrific medical experiments largely on the African continent (as well as in the animal world) were always a part of this so-called progress. They remain to this day. My ancestors were tortured and killed so that today a pill can manage your illness brought about by the modern way of life.
Ask yourself: do I want to stand for the continued existence of this world, in which my children will be plagued by the same (and new) ills as me? Or do I want to take this destructive world and destroy it and renew it so that future generations can be spared from these ills? In the end, the best medicine is not fighting symptoms. In so doing, new symptoms often emerge and you end up taking Pill B against Pill A. Instead, you fight the underlying causes wherever possible. Here, at least, civilization is honest when it admits that it has created the worst illnesses and itself speaks of “Diseases of Civilization.”
We have and will all be mutilated in one way or another. Our psyche is damaged and we are destroyed physically by illness and disease. As Diseases of Civilization and other infectious diseases withdraw from life, the need for complex medicine will steadily decrease. A world which places healing at the center would energetically strive to heal ills. For the few modern medicines which could possibly be brought into a decivilized world, people will find non-civilized and anti-colonial ways to produce them. Today’s science also won’t suddenly disappear into thin air. (This also shouldn’t be taken to mean that you should suddenly throw out all your pills just because they have a colonial history behind them. We must recognize that the ills and destruction of our bodies brought on by civilization will not be undone overnight. It means to fight so that future generations will be spared these ills and destruction by tackling the root causes. Some will be corrected quicker than others – a change in lifestyle and diet, the abolition of work, letting wild the surviving specks of the Earth, all can have a quick and not insignificant impact. On the other hand, some threats will continue to harm us for a long time. The poisons which have accumulated into the soils, for instance, will remain with us for decades and centuries.)
With this piece I hope to have offered a glance at a perspective on restoring our lost anarchy, and to have shown that it is modern society which is backwards-looking, not primitive lifeways. Alongside eurocentrism, modern-centrism is revealed to be a grave problem. Our society endlessly describes the possibilities offered by modern technology and entirely ignores what it simultaneously takes from us. It is of critical importance that we examine with sober and objective eyes what we have won with the coming of civilization, but most of all what we have lost.
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