Hey folks, time for the weekly monthly whenever I can remember check-in. How are we feeling? Read anything good lately? How's the weather?
Been thinking about anarchism as realized in rural areas versus anarchism as realized in urban areas. I've always thought that anarchism is more realistically achievable in the short-term in rural areas - they have a higher degree of independence from authority, and oftentimes there's greater per capita involvement in social structures that could (and sometimes already do) perform most of the work formerly performed by the state.
I'd love to see an anarchist municipality realized, and I'm a shameless :LIB: ertarian municipalism apologist, but I just don't think that it would be as easy to implement the same kind of social structures that exist in rural areas. Is this a bad take? Thoughts?
Edit cause I fucked up the emote oh shit oh fuck
I knew about your first example but not the second one - I assume it's C-Squat ? it looked dope.
I think one of the most important American leftist projects right now should be developing a new language and new iconography to use when talking about leftist ideas like anarchism. People are too propagandized - they aren't suddenly going to decide that Lenin and Mao were based all along and that red is their new favorite color. Developing local symbols and avoiding association with historical movements or figures is a worthwhile strategy.
It's interesting to hear people who aren't anarchists throwing around words like "mutual aid" and "direct action" and using slogans like "acab." It really shows the downstream success of our political movement, even if we're never the majority.
Anarchism and a lot of its vocabulary hasn’t been as tainted by the Red Scare and McCarthyism, compared to other strains of leftism.
As long as you don't use the word "Anarchism."
I grew up in a small town and it could 100% be a commune or whatever. entirely self sufficient and almost everything was locally ran to boot. Literally just tell everyone they don't have to worry about paying their bills anymore and they'd prolly sign right the fuck up
is this a bad take
Probably - at least from a historical point of view. Historically anarchist communities have been established both in rural and urban areas; just depends on the material context.
It's sort of a catch-22 - cities often are more left-leaning for a number of reasons:
- large populations sustain a wider variety of industries and allow for more ubiquitous amenities and technologies, but tend to exploit proletarian members of society
- cities attract groups from other regions and cultures leading to increased familiarity with the unknown/other
- urban cultures are often on the cutting edge of progressive thought and new-wave ideas - think Viennese coffeehouses
However, they're built around hierarchical structures such as often-bureaucratic councils or some administrative structure embedded within the state, and have geographically alienating centres with higher land values and so on.
You have more to compete with in establishing a cohesive anarchistic society, not just the local government or the police, but other liberal and reformist groups that seek to redirect class-solidarity and struggle towards performative, superficial or otherwise dead-end issues and solutions.
It might be true that it's easier to realise an anarchist community in rural areas, but without technology and manpower the rate of growth towards communism will be slow. Likewise, it might be more difficult start in cities, but if the ball is set moving, overall progress can be very significant.Call me a hopeless optimist, but I don't see the value in writing off one approach or another - synthesis ought to be desired when possible (but then I am a synthesis anarchist), i.e. por que no los dos?
Regarding Bookchin's libertarian municipalism - my immediate concern with it is that in essentially all anarcho-communist theory, a starting prerequisite is defeat of capitalism - at least on the small scale in an isolated city for example.
This could manifest in the form of workers expropriating their workplaces en masse, and assemblies being established to acquire and distribute resources in lieu of the market, and to provide essential services in lieu of the state etc.
Libmun. is essentially in reverse: take control of the city's power structures via electoralism, and utilise, effectively, the organs of the state to carry out your socialist whims - hence the reluctance by international anarchists to adopting Bookchin's theories wholesale.
Should you define municipal structures and elections as 'statist' or not?I like the term :LIB: mun, gonna steal that.
Honestly, Bookchin's theories are probably incompatible with pure anarchist theory. From a pragmatic achievability perspective, though, I think they present viable path towards actually achieving lasting social change. Destroying some hierarchy is better than destroying none. Maybe we can have a tiny bit of democratic legislating as a treat.
I've literally been spending my time working and gambling on Cryptocurrencies. As a gangstalking victim, I never even know if I'm going to have a job in 6 months. I sincerely try not to think about it while I'm doing this awful 68 per week gig that I'm working on currently. I can't organize, I can barely think, and I can barely do what I want outside of listen to podcasts. I'm in hell right now. Everything that makes a human, a human, was robbed from me.
Use your privileges to make things better for the rest please. Organize if you have to, just be willing to go to jail for this, because what we're doing isn't working quickly enough
What is gangstalking? Is it just what it sounds like, where a group of people are stalking you? That sounds fucking terrifying
Gangstalking is tough to explain to normal people, but in short it is a government ran program that combines aspects of MKULTRA and COINTELPRO into a hell program meant to test the limits of the human psyche. There's an exponential number of us since 9/11, and I expect that number to increase until a critical mass is formed. I experience all of the aspects of abusive relationships. I experience people mentioning things about my private life that no one else would or should know. I experience the same shitheads following me around. I experience acute pain for no reason. I experience brain fog for no reason. I experience every reference that I have previously used for a job fucking me over all of a sudden.
Gangstalking is legitimately the robbing of the mind. Everything that you take for granted is stolen from you under Gangstalking.
EDIT: Even if you don't believe me, I think this is worth keeping up. The degradation of the mind is worth studying, is it not?
Please seek psychological help, comrade. You are experiencing delusions and it sounds like it's destroying your life
I have several times. The psychs only make it worse. I literally got put in a psych ward for 3 days. One of the nurses in the hospital refused to aknowledge me despite the fact that I had gotten high with him several times. I stopped speaking to him after the fact.
I'm sorry to hear your efforts at getting help haven't been successful
I have met 2 people IRL who said they were being gangstalked (plus a third who had experiences of "electronic harassment"). Both of them are effectively beggars for life, having decided for whatever reason that they don't want to work or that it would be futile.
It's easy to give up when you go through what we do. I cant do anything in my profession anymore because my references collectively ghosted me.
Do you have people in your life whom you still have friendly and "balanced" contact with after 5+ years of knowing them?
Most of my contacts decided to follow me around and harass me in one fell swoop. There were a few that reached out, but they just ended up gaslighting me. I'm sure they'd pretend like nothing happened if I were to shoot them a text right now.
I have met 2 people IRL who said they were being gangstalked (plus a third who had experiences of “electronic harassment”). Both of them are effectively beggars for life, having decided for whatever reason that they don’t want to work or that it would be futile.
I've known a couple people who have identified themselves as "gangstalking victims", and every single one of them also displayed classic signs of delusional paranoia, the kind typically associated with schizophrenia. I'm not going to say that nobody has ever been "gang stalked", since we all know about the CIA/FBI going after people in the US, and the same thing happening in the USSR and East Germany. But if a normal everyday person isn't a powerful person leading a liberation movement or other type of thing that would cause the attention of a dozen or more govt agents, I'm far more willing to believe delusional paranoia, which affects as much as 2% of the population, is a more apt explanation simply by using Occam's Razor. Plus, anyone who is not suffering from delusions and actually being stalked, would take one look at gang-stalking websites, and their frequent discussion of "voice to skull" and "magnetic disruption" and other fantastic language, and do a 180 from the very term itself for the sake of legitimacy. Here's one of the (unfortunately few) academic papers investigating the subject https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7178134/, most people suffering from it fall into the exact same kinds of thought patterns and tropes, and unfortunately the internet has encouraged the spread of it via a sort of "mass-hysteria" as it was once called.
Here's a decent podcast about it: https://upcpodcast.libsyn.com/gang-stalking
I'm currently trying to help someone suffering from it right now, getting them off meth has helped a bit, but I'm fairly certain they are also schizophrenic and unfortunately absolutely refuse to entertain that possiblity or seek treatment for it.
Weather is looking like 20 degrees Farenheit for the next week (at least) in a place where it usually only gets down to 32 degrees. Global climate catastrophe is a fuck.
Spent all day dragging around water buckets, busting out ice, filling poultry shelters with shavings and straw, rearranging dog houses and A-frames to try to block the expected 35 mph winds before the snow starts tonight. Still need to tack up some reclaimed siding onto a chicken shed to blunt the worst of the wind before the sun goes down.
How do you keep your bird fellas warm? The places I've lived where I got to interact with chickens never got cold enough in the winter for chickens to be uncomfortable. Do you like insulate the shelters or something?
Fortunately, all of the birds are fully feathered right now so nothing needs to be insulated/heated.
So all we're looking to do is give them ample places to get out of direct line winds, out of rain/snow, with shavings/straw deep enough on the floor for the ducks/geese to bed down in (the chickens will huddle next to each other on their roosts).
When I first started posting anarchist stuff it was scary, I legit worries about getting dogpiled, but it was weirdly well received, and that was before downvotes were disabled. I think anarchist views are getting a lot more traction now since fewer are dying in infancy
Drizzle chilly today, but my brothers are coming over and we’re gonna have supper and a fire :) reading Wicked, that wicked witch book, and it’s pretty good. Gonna start watching the new Adam Curtis doc
Hey-o. I'm new-ish to anarchism, after having been a ML for a while. I'm currently working through a ton of theory but I wanted to ask how people get involved? What are good organizing options? I've been looking into the IWW, so far.
Sort of the default answer is Food Not Bombs, which you should definitely check out, but honestly the most important thing is getting out there one way or the other. Even if an organization doesn't identify as anarchist or even leftist, if the work the organization is doing helps build community resiliency in a way that doesn't rely on the state, then imo getting involved with them is anarchist praxis. Your local soup kitchen or food pantry is a great way to start (especially now in light of covid).
The IWW and labor organization are another good option, but be aware that you're in serious danger of losing your job if you really go for it. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it - just wanted to flag the dangers of labor organizing.
If there's no great organization in your area, then that's fine too! You can start something yourself. If you have some land, grow food and give it away, and encourage your friends to do the same. If you can knit, crochet, or sew, knit clothes for the unhoused and try to put together a club. If you have a skill or are willing to learn, there's always something to do.
If you're okay with a little anarchist heresy in the form of :LIB: ertarian municipalism, getting involved in local politics on impact issues can make a legitimate difference - but this comes with the caveat that state solutions will never be as resilient as voluntary ones.
Basically, just go out and do something! Helping others is a revolutionary act.
