#anarchism

[ang-rey]

[joy-haver]

Something I’ve noticed is that leftist movements tend to turn practical, thought out tactics that were part of a larger plan for liberation, and remove them from their context. Then we often use these tactics as symbolic ways to mark our distaste for empire and harken back to older movements. However, these tactics are often already accounted for by the system, and sometimes are actively encouraged as ways to harm our people and defang our processes.

Here is an example;

In the Civil Rights struggle, getting arrested en mass was seen as an important part of the process of freedom. The civil rights leaders realized that the areas they were in did not have large enough jails to confine them all, and that if they filled the jails up, the police simply could not confine everyone else in the movement. Getting arrested in coordinated ways was a noble and helpful sacrifice that kept your brothers and sisters from getting arrested. Due to less strict sentencing at the time, and the ability of the movement to scare the police into releasing people, getting arrested often wasn’t the utterly disabling and free-life ending process it is today. (That’s not to say getting arrested was easy on people; the police brutality of the time was incredibly intense.)

Those who spent time in jail were given almost a reverent status. That had gone through much suffering to keep others from the same fate. Often, their ability to taking confinement completely off the table for the rest of the activists is precisely what allowed for certain other actions to be successful. Paying for legal defense and moderate bail costs was something of a drain on the movements scant, resources but it could often be worth it due to the role arrests played.

However, the state responded to this, and turned it to their benefit. The next fifty years saw a prison boom. Now, economically deprived small towns were made to bid and beg for prisons to be built in there areas; not only to lock people up, but also because working at the prison was presented as one of the only jobs left in rural America. Additionally, thisdrove the labor minded population to be further in conflict with other movements in some areas.

As the capacity of the government to capture and confine increased, the capacity of the movement to fill up the jails and prevent further arrests did not. Now, the system was hungry for more and more bodies for its endless rooms. It further instilled and mechanized the capacity of prisons to force labor, undercutting labor movements. Sentences became longer, parole became stricter, fines and restitutions increased to exorbitant amounts. Those who went in for petty arrests often never came out.

But, the feeling that getting arrested was a noble and venerable goal did not leave the movement. Some transitioned tactics; instead of filling up the jails to allow others to act without recourse, they sought to get arrested in test cases, as they had seen work occasionally before. But this too became more and more difficult, as the legal system realized it did not have to play by its own rules. Slowly but surely, the legal mythology that because it is written and because it is fair, it will be ruled so, began to overtake the minds of activists; even as they failed time and time again to win this way, they still threw countless of their friends into the mouth of the enemy, and condemned them to life in prison.

Even this had become a shadow of itself by the 2000s and 2010s. Arrest became an aesthetic goal instead of a practical one. The most radical in the movements were culturally encouraged to throw their lives away for petty protests that none would see, and would have no material impact on the operations of the system of dominion. The reality that getting kettled at a non violent protest could land you with the same jail time as a political assassination did not dawn upon these activists until long after hey were already in jail, and already disconnected from the movement. Their friends would gather all their meager savings towards bail funds, oftentimes going into debt, or otherwise extracting money from the rest of the marginalized communities supportive of the activism. Those funds would then go to the government in the form of bail, and then right back towards operating the same policing systems that targeted them. In this way, the main economic output of the leftists movement of the time was to fund the very systems of policing that they sought to destroy; and to get themselves and each other locked in cages in the process. Instead of developing practical systems of change, radicals were taught to emulate key aspects of the tactics of prior generations that had specifically been recuperated into the goals of the state.

Those who saw the futility in this were readily pushed towards the defanged and self acknowledged pointless marches of the nonviolent liberal movement, which never had any goal other than to once again emulate the visual aesthetics and personal emotional fulfillment of past movements.

We see this pattern play out all the time. People insisting on the radical importance of a leftist print newspaper in a time when print journalism is dead. A fetishization of industrial unionism in a town where no factory has been for three generations. Arguments over whether to support long defunct governments and long dead leaders for some tactical benefit which will never arise from reality.

It is long past time for us to realize that the process of achieving human liberation does not come from symbolic actions, nor from following the playbook of past movements. We must learn our history, yes, but not to emulate it; instead we must learn it to understand its failures and its successes, and, most importantly, how our movement ancestors interacted with the material conditions of their time to create multifaceted plans that met the needs of their people and made successful guerrilla war upon dominion.

We need to imagine ways of making change that are suited to the times that we are living in, the problems we face, and the opportunities that we have. This utterly necessitates that we get deeply embedded into the places and communities around us, that we listen with open ears to the problems our people are facing, and that we fold those ever more towards opportunities of liberation and care for one another.

[alicearmageddon]

"For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think."

-Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossesed

[fuckyeahanarchistposters]

"Scarcity isn't real.

It's manufactured to make a profit"

Graphic by Krime

[guiltyidealist]

new favorite YouTube comment just dropped

[antsnyourpants]

Please clear something up:

Do you mean "communism"as in "proletarian control of the means of production, abolition of state and currency"?

Or do you mean """""cOmMuNiSm"""" as in "the bullshit fascist continuation of the russian empire and a bunch of military fetishist class traitors"?

[aconstantmonologue]

Burn your own CDs, mend your own clothes, rent all of the books and movies you can carry at the library. Feed the birds, don’t mow your lawn, grow your own food. Love openly and honestly, give yourself patience and time, feel the emotions that you want to feel. Let yourself live in the body you have without being told to change it. Be openly and unequivocally yourself, revolt against your government, challenge preconceived notions of what you should be.

[cookthepenguin]

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.

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

In the earliest 2000s I saw a documentary where a very esteemed ecologist (idk his name, don't remember, I was a kid ya know) said "Money isn't real. The environment is." and I have been excessively annoying about this exact subject (that money is FAKE but our planet is REAL) ever since

[radicalgraff]

"No landlords, no bosses, no police, no snitches"

Stencil spotted in la Parguera, Puerto Rico

[antsnyourpants]

"We should just kill all [Insert bad thing people do] they don't deserve any merxy"

OH,

You mean "we should give the power to the state to kill anyone based on an accusation of [bad thing people do], and everyone will just look the other way when rich people do [bad thing] all casually and briibe their way out of the execution".

[anarch-tism]

I am very excited for my upcoming vacation to El Salvador! (fuck you)

Trump official declaring ‘Anyone who preaches hate for America’ will be deported worried users: ‘They just skip the First Amendment.’

All their bad faith accusations of weaponizing government that were made towards the Biden administration were attempts to justify actual weaponizing of government for authoritarian purposes under Trump.

I am not remotely surprised by this assault on free speech, nor am I surprised that all those knee-jerk jerk right wingers, who cried about alleged silencing of free speech online, are suddenly silent once it’s political convenient for them.

[gayhenrycreel]

leftism would be a lot more efficient if people realized this: the working class and the lower class is not the same thing.

as a child, my family was middle class. dad made $100,000 nzd per year. we moved and bought a new house without renting at any point, simply so we would be in a convenient place closer to dads workplace. dad bought a $10,000 dollar motorbike just because he wanted to. we were well off and if we had better budgeting skills our family could save a million bucks by the time my parents retired.

we lost everything.

middle class people still need unions. they still need to deal with abusive bosses. they can still lose all that financial security just by divorcing the worker of the family or making a bad decision.

now im lower class, as are both my parents.

upper class people dont work. they are ceos, upper millionares, and billionares. people work for them and they dont answer to anyone. there is a huge difference between a very well paid worker (hollywood actors for instance) and a ceo who never has to negotiate his pay with a superior.

dont get it mixed up. an upper middle class person is not the same as the billionare who can buy his way into a goverment or fund a goverment to change the way the law works.

just because someone is well off does not mean you have no shared experiences. they may or may not be out of touch, but you should organize with those who also answer to a boss.

[muffinlevelchicanery]

[rhinndd]

Here is a very good two part primer! The first part is mostly what anarchism is against, and the second part goes over what it's for

Girl, please shut up about politics till you understand that anarchism is not advocating for the absence of government, it's advocating for the absence of the State, these are 2 separate but interlinked institutions, any principaled anarchist could tell you that the goal is not to create another purge film