anarchism

30 Oct 2021 02:15 - 23 Mar 2024 10:53
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    • Anarchism is the idea that human societies can dispense with the coercive institutions of the state, and manage themselves via other means that do not impose constraints on individual freedom. It is the ultimate repudiation of imposed authority.
    • It's a beautifully naive ideal. Nobody knows how to run an advanced industrial society without vast and powerful institutions. One anarchist answer (the anarcho-primitivist) is that we should give up on that and live as indigenous people do. This does not appeal to me.
    • But in-between the extremes of the hyperstate and the tribal nomad is a vast space of possible institutions that are less centralized, less alienating, and more supportive of genuine human agency than what we have now.
    • Anarchy and Computation

      • Computational technology emerged from the state and is largely a tool of the state; but there have always been efforts to bend it towards more liberatory ends.
    • The Dispossessed, Le Guin. This belongs on my list of major influence s; it's rich portrayal an anarchist society in all of its contradictions and problems really made the ideal alive for me, for a time.
    • In ancient times I used to flame on anarchy-list, which quickly devolved to a constant and tedious battle between left-anarchists and right-libertarians or "ancaps" as they are known today.
    • William Gillis

      • This dude is maybe the most vocal and interesting left-anarchist active on the net. Like any good leftist he spends a lot of energy in factional fights but it's an interesting window for me.
      • Ultimately you can either value freedom or some random dead static thing. Some specific state of affairs rather than motion and agency. To identify with freedom, to truly live, to embrace possibility, is to reject and overcome all walls, including those between one another.
      • By declaring ourselves for the abolition of rulership itself we have created a space for striving; the furthest particulars will always be unsettled. Anarchism does not represent a final state of affairs, but a direction, a vector pointing beyond all possible compromises.
    • Random

      • "Resistance to authority," said Mike Travers, who was there with his 5- year-old son, Sam. He came, he said, to check out the state of anarchist theory. "I thought of myself as an anarchist 20 years ago," said Travers, 47. "Anarchism is great as an attitude. I lost faith that you could run the world according to anarchists' principles." He sighed: "It's hard being an anarchist parent," he said, "because as a parent, you have to be the authority figure." A couple of hours later on his way out, Travers showed off what he had picked up: a book about the Critical Mass bike protests, a history of the Industrial Workers of the World and a George W. Bush coloring book for Sam -- the future of anarchism, Travers said proudly.