#its power seems inescapable but so did the divine right of kings etc etc

[viiridiangreen]

Apparitor stared at the figure with hot distaste. “He believes that the isoamorous—people like you and I—must be consumed by incredible passion. Like addicts. Why else would we persist in our obscene fascinations, when the whole world is against us?”

Baru remembered her fathers flirting on the beach, fearless and beautiful. The whole world had not been against them, no matter what the Empire said.

And that was the beginning of hope: if the world had not always been as the Empire demanded, then it might not always be as the Empire demanded.

- The Monster, Baru Cormorant

[anarchopostings]

Chaos is Freedom✳

"We live in Capitalism, it's power seems inescapable, but so did the Divine Right of Kings" - Ursula K. Le Guin

"Not whether we accomplish Anarchism today, tomorrow, or within ten centuries, but that we walk towards Anarchism today, tomorrow, and always" - Errico Malatesta

"It speaks to the very nature of our domestication that we only choose resistance so long as it feels like something we can win." - Serafinski 'Blessed is the Flame'

What Is Anarchism?

Anarchy is a social political philosophy that believes all hierarchies lead to exploitation and, therefore, must be negated and rejected.

Hierarchy is often defined as a pyramid system, with a group at the top, and everyone else organized under and to the bottom. Those at the top with the most authority, who strip away power from those below them. A hierarchy can mean many different things, and anarchist seek to oppose them all. Examples are social forms of domination such as white supremacy and racism, the patriarchy and misogyny, xenophobia, colonialism, queerphobia, etc. As well as economic systems such as class and capitalism, and the positions within them such as cops, landlords, bosses and politicians. Including but not limited to governments, states, and social political means of authority.

Anarchists seek a world where people freely associate with each other and build connections to help each other and their communities, in a multitude of ways. From workers unions to individual association and gift economies.

Anarchists most commonly advocate for Communism, a stateless, moneyless, classless society, but there are anarchists who believe in anti-capitalist free market styles of trade (called Mutualism).

Commonly, the media portrays anarchy as an ideology of indiscriminate violence and warlording, to propagandize civilization into believing we need to be commanded to be safe. Anarchists believe in communication, in transformative means of justice, in seeking peace when at all possible over violence.

However, this does not mean the Anarchist is passive. To resist domination is self defense, and anarchists believe in the right to defend yourself as needed.

A common phrase is "Anarchy is order, Government is Chaos", which some anarchists embrace while others reject. We are a part of those who reject it. Order is controlled, contained, and caged. Chaos is unbridled, free, and liberating. There is beauty in the Chaos, there is beauty in decentralization, of people organizing communities in their own ways not due to following any sort of Order, but because it is what's best for their community. Anarchy means a diversity of tactics. Anarchy means everyone doing what they can. Anarchy means doing what fits for each situation and community, not one answer fits all without nuance. This is not always ordered, that is to be embraced.

Anarchists believe in landback, anarchists believe in abolishing borders and the means of private and public property. Anarchists believe in the freedom of movement and the respect of nature. Anarchists believe we are not better than nature, humans are not better than the world, but do not get confused and think Anarchim means humans are a negative to the earth. Humans are a part of the earth, just like the plants and every other living being. We are here to live and respect nature, that doesn't mean at the expense of human life like what is advertised in Eco Fascism.

Anarchists are anti-capitalists and anti-fascists, always. Capitalism and Fascism are blood dripped hierarchies, antithetical to Anarchism at its core, and any 'anarchist' claiming to be for Capitalism and / or Fascism is no Anarchist, but an enemy.

If you made it this far, may we suggest going a little further?

Anarchist Reading List

Life Without Law, A Beginners Guide to Anarchism

Anarchy 101, A Beginners Guide to Anarchy

Armed Joy, Insurrectionary Anarchism

Anarchism And Other Essays

Anarchy.Works, Historical Examples of Anarchy

How Anarchy Works, Organizing Anarchy (Video)

Abolish Work? The Meaning Of Anti-Work (Video)

Why States Fail Humanity (Video)

The Tyranny of the Clock, Capitalist Productivness (Video)

The Psychology of Political Cults (Video)

Sticking To It, A Zine About Stickering

7 Myths About The Police

Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution

Blessed Is The Flame, an Intro to Anarcho Nihilism

Where to Read More

Sprout Distro

Crimethinc

[dailyanarchistposts]

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

—Ursula K. Le Guin[93]

Do not be afraid

Do not be cynical

Continue to trust yourself and others

Continue to dream of collective liberation

—scott crow[94]

Perhaps it is more important to be in community, vulnerable and real and whole, than to be right, or to be winning.

—adrienne maree brown[95]

Trust and responsibility as common notions

It is clear that capitalism—administered by left- and right-wing governments—is a disaster for people, non-humans, and the earth. However, cynicism and disillusionment do not necessarily lead to revolt or struggle. Empire’s capacity for decentralized control no longer relies on legitimacy or faith. We do not have to believe capitalism is good for us, or that the state will help and protect us, so long as we remain enmeshed in Empire’s radical monopoly over life, from schooling to law to the built environment that surrounds us.

In this chapter, we suggest that trust and responsibility are emerging in Empire’s cracks. This is not about one way of trusting or a fixed set of responsibilities, but about the proliferation of different forms. A lot of what we get at in this chapter comes from carla’s longstanding involvement in youth and kids’ liberation movements, which fundamentally upend some of the basic assumptions embedded in many forms of organizing. To create intergenerational spaces where kids can thrive means holding space for play and emergence by warding off the twin pitfalls of individualism and conformity. This requires nurturing a baseline of trust, responsibility, and autonomy. We also draw on other movements that we have learned from and been challenged by, including Indigenous resurgence, transformative justice, and anti-violence, all of which emphasize the importance of relationship-based trust and responsibility.

Many of the most militant movements and insurrectionary spaces have emphasized trust as an indispensable part of their capacity to resist Empire and defend their insurgent forms of life. For instance, speaking of autonomous spaces carved out by anarchists in Greece, Tasos Sagris has suggested that “the main organizational form in Greece is friendship. We believe that friendship will be revolutionary. Very close, very good loving friends, that like each other, that spend their lives together, they trust one another. This is a part of the insurrection.”[96] Similarly, Marina Sitrin argues that “groups that are grounded in trust and affect tend to be more militant. This is especially true for the recuperated workplaces in Argentina, and they reflect directly upon this. Knowing one another and working together for years built up a trust that helped when the time came to defend their workplaces physically (with molotovs, slingshots, etc).” Across North America and beyond, many Indigenous peoples are clear that their militancy stems from a responsibility to protect Indigenous land and life, animated by grounded normativities that we explored in the last chapter.

So what does it mean to nurture trust and responsibility? What do these concepts even mean today? Often trust is a catch-all word that suggests there is only one all-or-nothing way to trust, and this is part of the problem. Similarly, responsibility can be turned into a reductive set of stifling norms or duties. We want to walk with these questions: are there different kinds of trust? What makes it possible to trust people up front, without knowing them well? What does a joyful responsibility look and feel like? How can trust and responsibility be conceived and lived in ways that are open and enabling, rather than being imposed as fixed moral duties?

We suggest that these transformative capacities are not based in rigid ideologies or fixed ways of being. Joyful transformation is nurtured through what Spinoza called common notions: shared values and sensibilities that are flexible and based in relationships with human and non-human others. The concept of common notions has been elaborated by Gilles Deleuze and by a current of contemporary radical intellectuals in Spain and Argentina, including Sebastián Touza, whom we interviewed for this book.[97] Touza’s work explains that we might experience joy—a growth in our powers—as a sudden flash, but be unsure what made it possible or how to support more joyful encounters and relations. This is the passive experience of joy. The passage from passivity to activity happens through the formation of common notions: people figuring out together what sustains transformation in their situations, and how to move with it and participate in its unfolding. Common notions can never be a fixed way of doing things or a guarantee that things will go well. They can sound idealistic but in fact they are the opposite: they are pragmatic sensibilities, material conceptions that arise out of embodied, mutually enabling face-to-face relationships. Touza writes,

This is because, in Spinoza’s ethics, to have notions in common, people require more than the sole agreement between the rational ideas that come out of their minds. Common notions are formed in the local and concrete terrain of affects that emerge in the encounter between bodies. A common notion is a bond formed by reciprocal affect. Joy enables a leap beyond the world of sad passions.[98]

Common notions are slippery because like joy itself, they emerge from concrete, unique situations. To share them with others whose situations are composed differently, then, is precarious and fraught. Detached from the circumstances and practices that birthed them, common notions can turn into moral commandments or stagnant habits, rather than ways of relating that remain alive through struggle and care.

As common notions, trust and responsibility are emergent values connected to specific practices, movements, and forms of life. A learned trust—in situations, in others, and in one’s own capacities—is in this sense an unfolding process. To trust in transformation is to undo fear and control. Similarly, the forms of responsibility we are discussing are not enshrined in law and formal agreements, but emerge instead through a sense of feeling invited to participate in the world, care for others and be cared for, support and be supported.

[roundedloaf]

thinking about waitangi day, and this article i read about how nz/maori history is taught as a part of colonialism in the uk and how one of the things the history book pointed out to paint maori as savages was that they had no idea of individual land ownership (i cant be bothered to look up the article cause like fuck that)

and like for context this is sort of true? Maori land was held by the iwi not by individuals as in a british system, and one of the ways land was stolen was by forcing maori outside of their normal system of dealing with the land to make it easier for british colonizers to buy the land without actually having the agreement of all of the people who lived in that land

(okay that is super duper simplifed, theres a bunch of messed up stuff that went on with the maori land courts and making their land unusable, and then the later straight up government stealing of land, but generally maori were forced into a land owning system that didnt fit in with how their land was used, the alternative being their land being stolen, and this system also making it a lot easier for their land to be bought without everyones consent)

and anyway cause im thinking about scifi and specifically murderbot a lot, and specifically giving time to think about the economic system of Preservation. As readers there’s not a lot of specific detail around their economic system but what we do get is that its a barter economy, peoples needs are taken care of, its considered abhorrent to charge people for basic goods services (housing, food, education, internet etc), characters are horrified by the idea of someone owning a planet. It makes sense to me then, to extrapolate that land ownership functions significantly differently there and comes down to more communual agreements than capital

and ive forgotten exactly the point i was trying to get at but its something to do with both how society and shitty history books place ownership at the core of ‘society’ and how even in scifi its odd to see that change. Murderbot diaries centers a lot of its worldbuilding and story around these conceptions of ownership and offers an alternative, but some of these alternatives that have already existed seem to have been pushed aside.

(also for context im a pākehā (translation: white) nzer who is writing this post based off the general knowledge she has so like grains of salt maybe? the gist should be right)

Usula Le Guin once said ‘We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings’

[robertogreco]

The Redirect: Technology after Capitalism

Here are a few thoughts from Public Knowledge’s “The Redirect: Technology after Capitalism” event at SFMOMA with Xiaowei Wang, Andrea Steves, Kim Stanley Robinson, Finn Brunton, and Caitlin Zaloom, which I very much enjoyed. [These notes were shared on Twitter the day after the event, but I am just now piecing them together here with a few corrections.]

That description of late capitalism (finance-driven capitalism, neoliberalism, what have you) keeping us stuck in very short-term thinking reminds me of Stewart Brand’s “pace layering.” We need to zoom in and out. We need to inhabit various orbits.

That notion of the potential of art (in the broadest of terms) as a mechanism for thinking… in a way, it keeps us from doing (making messes, consuming more, etc.) by slowing us down through a process of considering, playing out possibilities and subsequently making less mess, which together with the Fred Jameson quote that came up (“Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”) reminds of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

The, again, Fred Jameson (pretty sure, but I could be remembering wrong) thought that Kim Stanley Robinson shared about the need for everyone to be a technocrat/bureaucrat because commons have always been dependent on keepers/minders/custodians enforcing them, even if not visible.

But how to bring back commons if capitalism keeps up racing along and the capitalist always find a way to root out socialism? I think about a Fred Moten quote I saw earlier today:

I don't think that scale is our friend, it's our enemy. how to get together on small scale with patience, ethical regard for one another... maybe this renewal of our habits of assembly happens on a small scale." —Fred Moten #tinylife

… and the notion of pockets (small!) of resistance (some collected quotes and ideas), with a nod to John Berger for language and for the sense of urgency, which has only expanded since he wrote.

And then back to the struggle to imagine a post-capitalist world, to break free from systems we no longer recognize as human inventions nor anything short of laws of physics, even if they aren’t, we need “the third loop” (Open thread, see above and below.)

Essentially I understand the third loop to be the ability to question a system itself and clearly see it’s contours, while 1st and 2nd loops are working within that dominant system

See also notions of (1) “cultural dark matter” and (2) “transcontextualism” and the “double bind.”

So much more to chew on: Xiaowei Wang’s visit to Alibaba towns and the “rural revitalization” initiatives in China, KSR’s re-terraforming and/or terra-harnessing (my feeble attempts at naming) of California’s Central Valley, using existing geology as “French drains,” and Aldo Leopold’s land ethic (more or less, “What’s good is good for the land.”), and “Capitalism is a fear of the other, a prisoner’s dilemma.” And “You get Theranos because there are not enough places for money to go [in capitalism].” Etc, etc. Brain food.

FIN

Update 1:

Because it relates to many parts of the thread above (especially the imagining of alternatives to our systems and the practice of art), here is some bell hooks, who of course has said:

The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is. It’s to imagine what is possible.

Update 2: From an exchange with Xiaowei Wang, whose prompts are in quotes, the rest of the words mine:

love this Fred Moten quote: so, so true. sometimes I get really excited about being part of a community/organizing + then get heartsick when we start using same vocabularies that capitalism has taught us since birth."whats the most efficient and productive political strategy" etc

yes! with sprinklings of “value” and “worth” and “human capital” and “achievement” not to mention all the hierarchy and war words… “merit” and “deserve” and “dominate” and “lead” and “win” and and

I am curious, especially wrt the "it's easier to imagine end of world than end of capitalism" quote. if capitalism did end, would our brains be able to handle it? i think of many friends who say if they could stop working, they're not sure what they would do instead!

I am curious too. I think we have so much of our identity wrapped up in our work (“What do yo do?” as one of the first questions we ask people new to us) and most of our education points to work, not life and leisure (largely discouraged beyond vacation, “idle hands…”) that even when people retire, many don’t know what to do with themselves. (If I recall correctly, there is some research about retirees and those without hobbies have greater health consequences.) But I think the answer lies in recreation and creativity. If our education emphasized creativity and recreation as part of a balanced life, then it would be easier to imagine days gardening, birding, walking/hiking, sports playing, making of all sorts (art, carpentry, writing, painting, filmmaking, etc.), care and maintenance (of children, homes, machines, etc.).

… reading, chatting, cooking, sewing, cleaning. But so many of those care and maintenance tasks today are paid poorly (when paid at all) and thus seen as something to aspire to remove from our lives (often with an app!, no less).

(Some disclosure.)

PS: Jenny Odell has some good answers to all this notion in How to Do Nothing (the text of a talk, the video of the talk, and the book).

Here’s Jia Tolentino referencing Jenny Odell in “What It Takes to Put Your Phone Away”:

It involves rejecting the sort of progress that centers on isolated striving, and emphasizing, instead, caregiving, maintenance, and the interdependence of things.

[…]

She locates the potential for change in individual acts of refusal, which, she argues, make space for others to follow.

[thefugitivesaint]

It’s with a heavy heart that I share this link about the work of Ursula K. LeGuin given her recent death. She was (and will remain) one of the greats of science fiction and she was (and will remain) one of my favorite authors.  Others have been paying their tributes including, but not limited to, John Scalzi, Margaret Atwood, Tor.com, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, N.K Jemisin, etc.  I’m just going to quote Le Guin from her speech at the National Book Awards because, in many ways, it reflects some of the reason why I appreciated her work as much as I do: “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.” .... “... the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

[omophagias]

a connection i wanted to make in my dissertation and didn’t for various reasons (space, time, lack of sources, marginal-at-best relevancy) was between the efflorescence of various religious-social movements purporting to render their members full and active participants in sacred history, looming socioeconomic change and apprehensions thereof, and the medieval conviction that people had “always” lived in a certain way. the problem is, i’m not sure to what extent people did believe that (and it is not a belief limited to the medieval; cf. ursula le guin, “we live in capitalism. its power seems inescapable. so did the divine right of kings”) and to what extent that belief, among medieval christians, is more a manifestation of a belief in the inherent circularity or repetitiveness of earthly history, of the universe as a machine for endlessly producing and recapitulating the same salvific story. (the metaphor i used with my supervisor was a wheel rolling down a hill, the same surface covering new ground, although it always fell apart whenever we tried to figure out what, in that metaphor, the apocalypse looked like.) i think i’ve gotten away from myself. the connection is something along the lines of, i guess, feeling the first rumbles of destabilizing relations of production and an effort to contextualize that within a society that believed—or acted as though it believed—that its own institutions had been, until that point, as good as eternal, backdating chivalry and kingship and so forth to roman or even pre-roman times (not to mention the Eternal Church…). of course, then i feel like there’s maybe some further link to be drawn between that and the other specter haunting europe, which is the roman empire, and the different appeals and methods of appeal used to imagined-or-real roman precedent, which—obviously—looks different in different places. i think a direction i didn’t take my dissertation, and i could have, or if (god forbid) i decided to do a phd i could have pursued further, would be trying to expand into a discussion of medieval perceptions of history/historicity and imaginations of the future. the question is always “how do we use what we do know to face what we don’t know?” and i want to try to untangle, a bit, how people in the 13th–14th centuries tried to answer that question.

i think what brought this post on was seeing some blogpost on arthurian literature that mentioned its appeals to a sort of transhistoric “chivalry”. which is also its own territory for thinking about, like, the different appeals to rome made in wales versus in france. i remember being really startled, when i read the mabinogion, with how much emphasis was placed on roman antecedent—when you think of “places with massive roman cultural hangovers” wales isn’t really high on the list (“how much of this is retrojected / consciously constructed in opposition to the arrival of [angles / saxons / jutes / danes / normans / etc]” is a question i want to ask but it might be old-fashioned, this specific aspect of post-roman…stuff isn’t my wheelhouse.) anyhow. if i ever seriously contemplate getting a phd i want one of you to shoot me immediately, but if i did i would probably end up calling the dissertation quid faciendus?

[light-bender]

I got you @gluten-free-pussy

K Arsenault - Wrote the Tigers Daughter trilogy, which is one of my all time favorites. High Fantasy at it's best without being 2000 pages long. LGBT love story, Sword Lesbians, (and Bow and Arrow Lesbians) really excellent use of second person narrative, and main characters are POC. Amazing world building lending from several Asian culture without ever getting lost in world building etc. Cant recomend enough.

N.K. Jemisin- Has several trilogies under her belt but my all time favorite would have to be the Broken Earth series. An amazing take on a world which regularly goes through environmental apocalypses. Top to bottom magic system. Main character is a black woman and the world is inspired by African cultures. Had other trilogies as well all of which I would reccomend reading, amazing author.

Katherine Arden - wrote the Winternight trilogy, which is a deft blend of fantasy, fairy tales, and historical realism set in 1300s Russia.

KA Applegate- wrote the Animorph Series. If you started this when you were younger but never finished it, I would reccomend reading it again. The series matures with each book and Applegate has a way of writing very realistic fantasy which doesnt shy away from the loss and struggle of war, etc.

Ursula K Le Guin - The woman herself! Often recognized as one of the first women to be recognized as a female fantasy author, and a very successful one at that. She has written so much, but the Earthsea Series is a classic. She has many books and excellent short stories. I am not kidding when I say I recommend everything she has written. Also, you may have heard this quote, "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." Yea that was her.

Sabaa Tahir - Her book An Ember in the Ashes is next on my list, and it look amazing. This book utilizes a bit of history as well as Arabian mythology and follows a young girl revelling against a tyrannical empire.

Naomi Novik is another popular author I am excited to read soon who is popular for blending fantasy and fairy tale themes.

Tamora Pierce is a fan favorite and a classic fantasy author that has been publishing popular fantasy books since the early 80s.

Octavia Butler is more Sci Fi but I Could Not Resist putting her on this list because she is one of my all time favorite writers. Her writing is so good, so engrossing that it blends fantasy and sci fi and almost makes something new. Blood Child is an excellent if not creepy short story to start with.

I am also going to include a list of women I look forward to reading on the near future: SA Chakraborty, Kristin Cashore, Kat Howard, Robin Hobb, Madeline Miller, and Tome Adeyemi. And honestly so many more I cant think of off the top of my head!!!

fantasy could be the best genre but unfortunately there are too many weird horny men writing it