Anarchism and Social Ecology

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Anarchism

Anarchism is a social and political theory and practice that works for a free society without domination and hierarchy.

Social Ecology

Social Ecology, developed from green anarchism, is the idea that our ecological problems have their ultimate roots in our social problems. This is because the domination of nature and our ecology by humanity has its ultimate roots in the domination humanity by humans. Therefore, the solutions to our ecological problems are found by addressing our social and ecological problems simultaneously.

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Quotes

Poetry and imagination must be integrated with science and technology, for we have evolved beyond an innocence that can be nourished exclusively by myths and dreams.

~ Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom

People want to treat ‘we’ll figure it out by working to get there’ as some sort of rhetorical evasion instead of being a fundamental expression of trust in the power of conscious collective effort.

~Anonymous, but quoted by Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

~Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.

~Murray Bookchin, "A Politics for the Twenty-First Century"

There can be no separation of the revolutionary process from the revolutionary goal. A society based on self-administration must be achieved by means of self-administration.

~Murray Bookchin, Post Scarcity Anarchism

In modern times humans have become a wolf not only to humans, but to all nature.

~Abdullah Öcalan

The ecological question is fundamentally solved as the system is repressed and a socialist social system develops. That does not mean you cannot do something for the environment right away. On the contrary, it is necessary to combine the fight for the environment with the struggle for a general social revolution...

~Abdullah Öcalan

Social ecology advances a message that calls not only for a society free of hierarchy and hierarchical sensibilities, but for an ethics that places humanity in the natural world as an agent for rendering evolution social and natural fully self-conscious.

~ Murray Bookchin

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/37239269

I fear that if we (anarchists and fellow travelers) cannot explicitly articulate the need for action, within the context of upending daily life as it is currently lived, the horrors that are the existent world will continue along with it. Even when protests become riots, if we find ourselves continuing to inhabit the position of waiting for specialized locations of resistance to make themselves known we will fail to meet the moment at hand, perpetually stuck in a reactive cycle of prairie-dogging into moments of rupture only to fall back in line when the tides subside. If we truly desire the end of this world of death machines, we cannot afford to wait and take action only once ruptures become clear. We must embody the constant state of rupture. But to do that, we need to recognize why we so often wait.

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In USA, both US citizens and immigrants are being caught and sent to detention centers or immigration camps. There the people will be kept and will be deported to another country on a later date. And that person will be deported to another country irrespective of whether he or she originated from there or not. It is even worse than what the USA did during the world war 2 to the japanese americans. During the war the japanese americans were forcefully relocated to internment camps. It is very shameful period of US american history. Probably in 60 or more years later people will read about these events in their history books. They will understand how a deranged president did all these. And the fact that the USA president had support of majority of people. USA needs a revolution today. Just like the american revolutionary war a similar war needs to be fought by the sane people of USA. Otherwise whatever good that has been achieved since July, 4th 1776 will all be lost.

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True libertarianism, a left wing, socialist libertarianism, is a path towards a post-moral, totally human and liberated future. This is because libertarianism rejects the idea that morality should be imposed upon individuals by external forces. Instead, individuals are free to create their own meaning and purpose in life, without being constrained by societal norms or religious dogma. This freedom allows individuals to fully realize their own potential and to live their lives on their own terms. Libertarianism is often misunderstood as a conservative, capitalist philosophy. With this book, I aim to recapture the term from the hands of greedy destroyers of the world, and contribute a little to the ever-growing intellectual tradition on the left.

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To destroy “woman” does not mean that we aim, short of physical destruction, to destroy lesbianism simultaneously with the categories of sex, because lesbianism provides for the moment the only social form in which we can live freely. Lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically. For what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man, a relation that we have previously called servitude, a relation which implies personal and physical obligation as well as economic obligation (“forced residence,” domestic corvée, conjugal duties, unlimited production of children, etc.), a relation which lesbians escape by refusing to become or to stay heterosexual. We are escapees from our class in the same way as the American runaway slaves were when escaping slavery and becoming free. For us this is an absolute necessity; our survival demands that we contribute all our strength to the destruction of the class of women within which men appropriate women. This can be accomplished only by the destruction of heterosexuality as a social system which is based on the oppression of women by men and which produces the doctrine of the difference between the sexes to justify this oppression.

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ABSTRACT Anarchism is a philosophy opposed to hierarchy and authority, and is used as a critical lens to analyze the whole of human society. As with members of all social groupings, anarchists differ from each other in many ways, one of which is their political ideology. At least two visibly distinct ideological variants of anarchism are distinguishable in the US—a red anarchism that emphasizes economic concerns and a green anarchism that focuses upon the environment. American anarchists have long assumed, based upon anecdotal evidence, that there are differences in ideological variant identification between those on the two US coasts. Using survey data, two distinct measures of ideology were formed and respondents were classified into four separate US regions. Although the majority of anarchists do not specify a particular orientation, Northeasterners were associated with red anarchism, while Westerners were associated with green anarchism. These differences may be created and/or reinforced by structural or organizational factors.

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These two sometimes contradictory anti-authoritarian perspectives were hastily translated 50 years after the 17th of November of 1973, the date marking the peak of an insurrection which marked the passage from dictatorship to bourgeois democracy in greece. The first is an article published by an antifascist collective, which discusses, in the trademark style of local autonomists, contemporary — despite the 15 years that have passed since its publication — questions on the meaning and background of the uprising and the position that radicals should have towards its commemoration. The 2007 article ends with a brief chronology of the uprising, a useful segue into the second text, a discussion on the role of “the anarchists”, an informal grouping of anti-authoritarian participants in the workers’ assembly within the Polytechnic occupation. The text is a relatively brief reference within a 1977 article on the development of the greek proletariat in one of many early anti-authoritarian print publications which emerged in the post-dictatorship era, and the originally unnamed author (who has posthumously been identified as X. Konstatinides) identifies himself as one of the participants within this anarchist grouping. Besides a detailed recollection of some seemingly small, but crucial moments within the occupation, there is also value in the inclusion of the reactions of the ‘traditional’ left to the uprising. At the time of writing, there have been large demonstrations and some, fairly limited — for the standards of this particular insurgent holiday — commemorative clashes in Athens, Patras, Thessaloniki and Ioannina. There are still lively debates within the anarchist/anti-authoritarian space on how — and if — uprisings such as the ones marked by the 17th of November of 1973, and the 6th of December of 2008, should be commemorated (see the extended 2022 analysis by anarchist prisoner D. Xatzivasiliadis: https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1621702/; if I have a lot more time on the 17th of November next year, I might tackle it…). Please excuse any translation mistakes!

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Material solidarity means to raise the social cost of Zionism on the home Imperialist front. By reinscribing radical Anti-imperialist history into our theory and practice we can generate a militant strategy in coordination with the movements of the Palestinian national liberation forces on the ground, as they continue to wage war on Zionist colonialism. ‘Bringing the war home’ in essence, calls on us to abolish counterinsurgency from our movements in favour of aligning ideologically and practically with the AlQassam armed fighter and the Fellaheen rock thrower.

Free Palestine!

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The question of our time, then, is not how we should respond to the climate crisis, or the coronavirus crisis, or the current economic crisis. The real question is twofold: firstly, how can we take hold of the revolutionary potential of this moment to attack the root cause of each of these crises – capitalism, and all its oppressive and destructive effects; and secondly, how can we build in its place a system that will truly value and secure the freedom of every individual, community, and society around the world.

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submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net to c/anarchism@slrpnk.net
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Really good analysis of the past few years here

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My love, these experiences together are as seamless as every wave in an ocean. To others this is just a tale of two mercury switch hearts ignited by the spark of a first kiss. I look forward to whatever we may encounter under this black rainbow called life. We'll ride the waves of every hurricane that makes landfall. Until their bullets turn our blood into confetti during a shoot-out, or we simply grow old and sing each other to sleep with a shared death rattle... More riots! Vandalism! Anarchy!

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Rebel Peripheries (bandilangitim.xyz)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by mambabasa@slrpnk.net to c/anarchism@slrpnk.net
 
 

When anarchism (or any other idea for that matter) is brought into new contexts, it necessarily enters into dialogue with the histories and traditions of that new context. When Mao Zedong Thought was all the rage during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos Sr., this new idea was re-contextualized in the context of the history of revolutionary nationalism of the Katipunan, Andres Bonifacio, and the resistance to the American colonial State. Anarchism in the Philippines necessarily indigenizes itself into the Philippine context, something I’ve written about in the past on various libertarian elements in the Philippines.[1] My purpose here isn’t to restate what I’ve already written on previously but to expand the re-contextualization of the potentiality of anarchism in rebel peripheries to a distinctly anti-anarchist project: that of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). As a Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad says “Seek knowledge even in China,” China being the furthest and most remote place in the ancient Arab imagination, urging that we ought to seek knowledge even from the most remote—or in this case, the strangest—of places.

The CPP, its armed wing the New People’s Army (NPA), and its front the National Democratic Front (NDF) have been waging Maoist armed struggle in the Philippines since 1969. In doing so, it has created a number of rebel peripheries in the countryside that exist outside the control of the Philippine State—in the anarchy of the peripheries. However, the longstanding second communist rebellion in the Philippines has to be placed in the historical context of anarchic and rebel peripheries in the archipelago. Once we move past and sublate the experiences of the Maoists for the revolutionary project of anarchism, we can then move on understanding the insurrectionary project of mamundok-in-place.

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What binds these cases is not simply the betrayal of early ideals but the structure of the revolutionary movements themselves: the dominance of military actors, the centralisation of decision-making and the erasure of grassroots democratic input. Liberation became a state project, not a people’s movement. The result was not freedom but domination by a different set of elites.

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What binds these cases is not simply the betrayal of early ideals but the structure of the revolutionary movements themselves: the dominance of military actors, the centralisation of decision-making and the erasure of grassroots democratic input. Liberation became a state project, not a people’s movement. The result was not freedom but domination by a different set of elites.

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In the current evolution of the so-called radical left in the so-called United States, one concerning trend is the growing popularity of Marxist-Leninist organizations, particularly among newly-activated young people. One organization that has been a major beneficiary of such a surge has been the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), which, though around for decades, has become more visible and active on the ground and online in recent years. FRSO’s article on their 2022 congress states that “[r]eflecting the rapid growth of FRSO over the last four years, this was the first congress for most attendees. While some of the participants were veterans of the communist movement with many decades of experience, the overwhelming majority were under 35 years old.” [1] This trend has continued.

FRSO’s program presents their goals and principles in an easily digestible format, divided into six sections. It is a quite basic Marxist-Leninist program and, as such, contains the flaws inherent to this organizational model, making for an uninspiring document outdated in its ideas and of little use. Fundamentally, it is stuck in a fetishized statist framework that conflates socialism with a planned state-capitalist economy, reinforces the colonial foundations on which the so-called United States is built, and spreads false information about its populations. We should criticize this anti-revolutionary program and challenge its growing influence.

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Mutt. – Editorial Looking at the broad counterinsurgent tactics in babylon and across the world – from funding and surveillance to police-friendly A–B marches – Mutt. tells us why it’s important to know your enemy.

Zhachev – They Who Returned to the Rock Zhachev draws connections between ancient Nabataeans, historical Indigenous resistance, and deep knowledge of the land as he proposes a critical decolonial reading of ‘Dune’.

Mar – this poem is dedicated to uncle Mar dedicates, with the incandescent clarity of the midday sun, a poem to uncle – and all the aunties, NGOs, beckies and bootlickers, too.

Sidiq – Pengar / Hangover Sidiq shares a poem in defiance of colonial civilisation. Sidiq is part of two publishing collectives: ___contemplative [Instagram] andtalaspress [Instagram], and his prisoner support group is taking donations: einzine16@gmail.com

Margeret Kimblerly & Roddy Rod – Martinique’s History of Resistance Abridged transcript of a discussion between Margaret Kimberley and Roddy Rod on the situation in Martinique, including its past and present colonial relations with France, internal Martinican politics, and ongoing insurrection.

Simoun Magsalin – The Anarchy of the Peripheries Simoun Magsalin takes us through landscapes of peripheries and asks what anarchisms might be created there. What can we learn from the specificities of failures and successes of anarchist projects? Where do we go from here, wherever we currently are?

Leonardo Torres Llerena – Toward an Indo-American Revolution With generosity and criticality, Leonardo Torres Llerena examines the legacy of José Carlos Mariátegui, an early C20th Peruvian Marxist writer and activist, and why his work is relevant for contemporary anarchist tendencies with regard to Indigenous-led uprisings.

CharlieBanga & Semiyah – Autonomous Submersion CharlieBanga & Semiyah discuss ‘autonomous submersion’, a term they originated to foreground Black autonomy as refusal to submit to enslavement by instead choosing death. ‘May we all be as brave and resilient as the original black autonomists.’

Anon – Our Burning Memory Unflinchingly looking at fear, cowardice victimhood as constituting whiteness, Anon urges us to remember our capacity for wielding power and to consciously recognise our revolutionary fighting spirit.

Patrick Jonathan Derilus – The Immovable Black Lumpenproletariat Looking at Black social formations that resist the State and its white colonial violence, Patrick Jonathan Derilus shares a critical history of Black factions and gangs that foreground abolitionist responses.

Fawaz Murtada – Why Would You Become an Anarchist in Sudan? An anarchist in Sudan explains why anarchism offers clarity in the struggle against multiple failed social systems, and how the anarchist movement in Sudan has contributed to community aid and education during war.

Daniel Adediran – Where is Black Anarchism in the UK? Contextualising the means and ends of anarchism within historical African societies and modern Black radical traditions, Daniel Adediran proposes Espicifismo as a way forward for Black Anarchism in the UK.

Anon – Principles for the coming Yankee invasion / Principios para la invasion gringa que se viene A Mexican anarchist predicts what will happen in the coming year if the Trump government is not stopped.

Decolonize Anarchism – May Day on Fire: Against Empire and Theocracy The Western left will march on May 1st under red banners, chanting slogans of internationalism and workers’ power. But SWANA anarchist project Decolonize Anarchism ask – is there room for Iranian workers in your May Day?

Group Of Informal Affinity – Reject the National Army law A fiery communiqué from insurrectionists resisting the Indonesian state.

Muntjac Collective – Protect Yourself We have two suggestions on how you and your groups can prepare yourselves.

Anon – Alexa, take me to prison! An analysis of how hostile technology is embedded in counterinsurgency, plus tactics and experimental ideas for what anarchists can do to create alternative cultures of operational security.

Haraami – Follow the Fires A diagnosis of how counter-insurgent forms of identity politics leverage scenes and milieus as incubators of insular and fickle social competition and calls upon revolutionaries to focus instead on fidelity to uprisings and practical questions of revolution.

Mutt. – What Color Is The Smoke? (In conversation with Follow The Fires) A embrace and criticism of a recent article on counter-insurgent forms of identity politics, plus reflections and memories of farcical moments in POC anarchist projects of the past and a Black anarchist project in the UK.

Mar – An Introvert’s Guide to the Insurrection Want to do insurgency but are put off by large social gatherings? Don’t worry, Mar is here with a light-hearted DIY guide on how to make revolution happen.

poet of da soil – untitled poet of da soil shares a poem that calls for rebellion in the form of life.

Anon – Selections From Disquietude Laboratory Three poems from an Indonesian language egoist anarchist zine.

Anon – Selections from Kompilasi Puizine A powerful introductory note and three poems pulled from a huge compilation of Indonesian-language anarchist poems, published during the ongoing clashes with the state.

<Read it here>

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The point where people say, well, you know, it's No big deal, it's just their stuff. You gotta remember, this technology is keeping tabs on you, even though somebody else has one of these phones or AI nonsense. If you associate with that person, it takes that and keeps that. You might as well get a shovel and dig your grave if you're not going to mis-behave. The lack of privacy rights in this country is making me see red.

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Apologies if this post doesn’t fit well here, this has a personal element but is ultimately a moral and political discussion.

Personal context:

I’ve lived with no/low income as a disabled person my whole adult life with no end in sight. I try to follow best personal finance practices to try and ensure my survival as I can’t simply look to make more money. As I understand it, the advice I’ve read would be to begin investing (commonly in equity ETFs) once you have saved enough of an emergency fund and are ready to put away assets for the long-term. Due to a unique situation, I might manage to save enough money to begin investing before I go back to living paycheck to paycheck.

Concerns:

A) Is it unethical? On one hand, I’d be investing into truly evil companies. On the other, there’s no ethical survival under captialism and my minuscule investment won’t make or break a megacorps’ ability to do evil shit. Taking a silent stand won’t have an impact and I may just be hurting my own personal finances in the process. In turn, that ironically may make it harder for me to safely save and spend money on things like community organizing.

B) Isn’t it contradictory and unsafe? Investing in equities means I'd be betting on continued “growth” for decades to come. This is the system I’d be working to dismantle and investing in it would be like I’m betting against myself. Considering the impending climate crisis and foreseeable global instability, investing in equities feels like more of a gamble and less of a sound financial decision, but I’m not sure what that means for how I should manage my finances.

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is one of the most common responses I get when I talk to people (usually liberals) about horizontal power structures. It comes down to some version of "Well, that sounds nice, but what about the bad actors?" I think the logic that follows from that fact is backwards. The standard response to this issue is to build vertical power structures. To appoint a ruling class that can supposedly "manage" the bad actors. But this ignores the obvious: vertical power structures are magnets for narcissists. They don’t neutralize those people. They empower them. They give them legitimacy and insulation from consequences. They concentrate power precisely where it’s most dangerous. Horizontal societies have always had ways of handling antisocial behavior. (Highly recommend Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior by Christopher Boehm. He studied hundreds of forager societies, overall done amazing work.) Exile, public shaming, revocable leadership, and distributed decision-making all worked and often worked better than what we do now. Pre-civilized societies didn’t let power-hungry individuals take over. They stopped them. We used to know how to deal with bad actors. The idea of a "power vacuum" only makes sense if you believe power must be held at the top. If you diffuse power horizontally, there is no vacuum to fill. There’s just shared responsibility. That may feel unfamiliar, but it’s not impossible. We’ve done it before. Most of human history was built on it. The real question isn't whether bad actors exist. It's how we choose to deal with them. Do we build systems that make it harder for them to dominate others, or ones that practically roll out the red carpet? I think this opens up a more useful conversation.

What if we started seriously discussing tactics for dealing with domination-seeking behavior?

What mechanisms help us identify and isolate that kind of behavior without reproducing the same old coercive structures?

How do we build systems that are resilient to sabotage without falling into authoritarian logic?

I’d love to hear your guys’ thoughts.

Edit: It seems as though the conversation has diverted in this comment section. That's alright, I'll clarify.

This thread was meant to be about learning how to detect domination-seek behavior and repelling narcissists. This was meant to be a discussion on how anarchism works socially in order to circumvent individuals from sabotaging or otherwise seeking to consolidate power for themselves.

It was not meant as a discussion on if anarchism works. There is plenty of research out on the internet that shows anarchism has the potential to work. Of course, arguing a case for or against anarchism should be allowed, however that drifts away from what I initially wanted to get at in this thread. It's always good to hear some "what ifs", but if it completely misses the main point then it derails the discussion and makes it harder for folks who are engaging with the core idea.

So to reiterate: this isn’t a debate about whether anarchism is valid. It’s a focused conversation about the internal dynamics of anarchist spaces, and how we can build practices and awareness that make those spaces resilient against narcissistic or coercive tendencies.

Thanks to everyone who’s contributed in good faith so far -- let’s keep it on track.

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EDIT: fixed the video url

Murray Bookchin talks about his history in various communist and anarchist movements, discusses trends in anarchism and libertarian socialism (taking positions against anarcho-primitivism and lifestyle anarchism), talks about the working class' need for free time to even begin to engage with politics (as distinct from "statecraft"), predicts the rise of the right in the 21st century, and more.

(The link skips the first 35 minutes of the video, in which he reads a lifestyle anarchist pamphlet being distributed as part of a mini-protest outside his talk and has a very brief interaction with the folks distributing it.)

Invidious link: https://inv.nadeko.net/LFswTGgDG-E?t=2095

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