Because everything else is internally contradictory bullshit where you pretend problems dont exist, aren’t problems, are solved by doing them extra hard on purpose, or are fundamental universal constants to worship.

Yeah organizing is hard. Shortcuts just build an Achilles heel with bone-deep chronological or organizational caps on what it can do.

This book and being in proximity with a lot of punk bands. Note this book is just about foreign policy in the last 100 years or so.

https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/901/The-School-of-the-AmericasMilitary-Training-and

It’s on Anna’s Archive.

Inherent rage at corrupt systems.

But I am no longer really an anarchist like I was in ny youth. Too much of a socialist these days. The statism got me.

I knew of anarchism because of cool anarchists that helped me when I was povo.

However I got quite interested in anthropology and after reading a few seminal texts gradually realised how much “human nature” is just cultural and the enormous variety of ways of existing. It also dawned on me how enforced central order tends to crush self regulating (although often not particularly kind or gentle) mechanisms on human societies, resulting in some of the more problematic aspects of society people point to as evidence why anarchy is impractical.

Then I read the bread book

Punk music, generally. But my first introduction to the word was in a 6th grade social studies class where they discussed different forms of government, and the oversimplified idea given to us at that point was appealing on some level. As I’ve grown it just seems to fit my own ideology and lifestyle more and more.

For disclosures sake: I’m 40 years old now and never read more than a paragraph of any theory related books, but would be interested in trying to learn more

A lot of reasons, from childhood abuse being justified as “they have the right to do it to a child” to police neglecting issues around me and my family, to just being autistic makes me question things everyone takes at face value.

But the key principle of my ideal world is that as long as everyone involved (small scale to environmental scale) is consenting to the actions being done, you should be able to live a happy life. If they don’t consent, don’t involve them. If everyone involved can’t consent, probably don’t do that.

You shouldn’t have to choose between rent and food. Or healthcare. Or seeing your friends or paying your bills. Or just having a happy life our ape brains enjoy compared to the alienating mundanity of most politics.

Working labor your entire life so you don’t die from hunger in the cold, to retire at 65 and not be able to take any of your material possessions with you to any form of afterlife or lack thereof, seems cruel. Especially when no one was asked to be born into this system, they have to work to survive.

The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.

Star Trek also helped influence me, it made me a better person. I was more jaded and capitalist libertarian in my views as a teenager. Now I’m just a hopeful pessimist.

I don’t pretend to have the answers of every single question or edge case of anarchism, I also don’t pretend it’s best for everyone. But it’s a system that doesn’t reward or enable the power hungry and greedy, when most systems do.

People will gladly tell you the issues of Proudhon, or call out some anarchists wearing the label as an excuse to do whatever they want with no consequences.

I’ve seen people whitewash and idolize and bootlick for other systems of power, people, and philosophies. Sometimes it’s because they think they’ll get a turn of being in that position in life, when they’ll be struck by lightning first.

Maybe I’m just rambling because it’s almost 4:30 am and I’m killing time on my graveyard shift. God I hope somehow this makes some form of sense.

It’s pretty simple really; we’re all people. We’re all equal. Nobody is greater or lesser than anyone else. And we’ve created a “society” that runs completely antithetical to that idea.

Reading Edward Abbey at a young age didn’t hurt, either.

Any system created by people must require consent and allow revocation of consent. Without this basic feature there is no freedom.

I’m like De Niro’s plumber character in the movie “Brazil”. Is that anarchist? Defying government bureaucracy in order to sneakily fix a citizens toilet, even though all of the approvals and permit forms will take weeks to complete.

My entire life ive been beaten down by power hungry authority, ive seen the forces of capitalism and witnessed the atrocities of imperialism. Ive watched as reaction consumed my community and tore my life apart. Today I dare to dream for a future beyond state and capital, a future truly owned by the workers.

Because despite everything conservatives and tankies have said or shown me, I still hadn’t seen any version of government that didn’t absolutely fucking suck. There’s no government in history that hasn’t been guilty of objectively horrifying atrocities, and I just refuse to believe that hierarchy is an intrinsic need of mankind when we do so much better with each other without it.

Because pretending to be anything else in a system where all power structures have the same incentives to oppress and abuse the lowest rung is giving in to that power structure. You can vote the greatest person into power and they’ll still be ineffective and their term will be over before they can move the needle.

Everywhere I’ve been in life, there has been an asshole above me who made it their mission to make me miserable, either through negligence, malice or apathy.

I want to be a socialist, but I can’t, so anarchist it is.

books

but i was young before internets contaminated every corner of every skull

do people ever anarchise in older ages? Can a 40 year old start thinking that maybe we can be better off living in societies without archs?

I was born this way and always have been this way. But I had to muddle for years through liberalism, then socialism, before identifying anarchism and then even more specifically communalism as being the theory that puts actual words and logic behind the feeling of what I always knew was true. And it wasn’t until my mid-20s that I actually took up that search intentionally because I was so shell shocked throughout my school years.

I gratuated college in 2008 and got my first pepper spray whiffs at Zuccoti Park during Occupy. Chomsky’s Failed States and Zinn’s People’s History of the United States are what got me off liberalism. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy sparked my imagination regarding the radical multitudal possibilities of governance and Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother showed me what one person is capable of. I knew socialism / communism alone weren’t my eventual destination because the history and hierarchy always smelled of what I was escaping from, but it took me a while to find works like Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread and eventually Bookchin’s Post-Scarcity Anarchism where I finally felt like I’d arrived home. I remember reading that last work in a Brooklyn cafe under a skylight when the clouds opened up and it was like nature saying “Yes, this is it. You found it bro.” NYC organizations like MACC and Food Not Bombs, and later on Symbiosis on the west coast, really cemented things for me.

I also credit the literary works of Ivan Illich, Ursula Le Guin, and David Graeber for keeping me hooked.

Poverty.