A community about anarchy. anarchism, social ecology, and communalism for SLRPNK! Solarpunk anarchists unite!
Feel free to ask questions here. We aspire to make this space a safe space. SLRPNK.net's basic rules apply here, but generally don't be a dick and don't be an authoritarian.
Anarchism is a social and political theory and practice that works for a free society without domination and hierarchy.
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.
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.
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
Written by "ziq" 🙄 I am tempted to discard it outright...
But from a quick skimming of the article it is a long treatise based on semantics and a strawman.
Obviously no-one that says "rules but no rulers" means that in the way ziq interprets it in the article. It is a shorthand for a specific audience that thinks "Anarchy" is about chaos and has otherwise little idea about it. Basically all it says is that a community isn't a free-for-all and actions have consequences 🤷
If anarchists like ziq did not exist, capitalists would need to invent them.
My response to seeing it was written by ziq was pretty similar lol.
I think you're right when you say that the saying "rules without rulers" is usually used to put down the idea that anarchists just want people running around killing each other.
But it's worth noting that anarchists don't really support rules as most people think of them they're more voluntary agreements created through consensus decision making
They don't know who I am, they're just rejecting an author using a pseudonym and not their real name because they're not an anarchist and don't understand security culture.
So you claim someone is using the pseudonym "ziq" since years to post articles on websites run by you to make you look bad? 😅
And btw, hello from a fellow anarchist that also uses a pseudonym and understands security culture quite well 👋
No?
Live in an anarchist community, to see it in practice. I learned a lot from that experience, my main take away is that I don't ever want to live in a community again.
Fair enough, for some people the trade-offs are not worth it.
However, most of today's self-proclaimed anarchist communities struggle a lot with people's deeply ingrained hierachical conditioning, both in the sense that they intuitively fall back on it if challenged and in the sense that some people that are over-represented in such communities through self-selection have deep traumatas and lash out at anything they percieved as threatening their autonomy. Both combined often make a very explosive setting, but this doesn't really invalidate the idea of an anarchist community by itself.
Interesting read if nothing else. The author makes thought-provoking points about how communities that implement rules tend toward governmental structures rather than anarchy. I agree that we (anarchists) should strive to be as clear as possible about the distinction between personal boundaries, voluntary agreements, and enforceable rules. Even if studied anarchists understand the distinction implicitly (and e.g. understand that the "rules" of an anarchist community, online or otherwise, are really voluntary agreements that we make in joining the community), spelling it out explicitly for the new people could be important. Some folks understand things literally.
