If you too want to get out of the liberal vs communist showdown and smoke weed on the side come to slrpnk.net where only our memes community has liberals and communists fighting in the comments.
YMMV depending on country. In the US you can find at least a handful of named anarchist organizations in any given state. Many anarchist or libertarian organizations keep it on the DL for a multitude of reasons. You may have better luck finding groups under the monikers of communalist, x or y federation, social ecologist, or just plain ole socialist. Mutual aid networks, food not bombs chapters, and IWW chapters are other spaces a lot of anarchists occupy. Many anarchists still stick to affinity groups and the like as well so, while they may be out there and active, it’s likely you’ll never hear about them. Further muddying the waters there’s also the concept of social insertion where anarchists support local movements and encourage (but don’t attempt to force) the popular movement to develop in a more libertarian fashion. Some big names in the libertarian milieu in the US are the symbiosis network and moneyless society. The black rose anarchist federation is another one I’ve seen around.
That said, it’s still hard to find other anarchists in a lot of areas. I’ve been on the hunt for a while and haven’t had any luck in my area. The closest I have is a food not bombs chapter in my city but they’re all a bunch of zionist soc-dems. 🤷 They do good work but I don’t want to be the only anarchist in the group haha. I’ll be handing out zines and fliers at the pride parade in a few weeks in the hopes of starting a reading group and hopefully an explicitly anarchist org in my city
I may have worded that weird. Just to be clear, food not bombs in general isn’t a social democrat org. The chapter in my town just so happens to be run by them. More often than not, you’ll find at least a handful of anarchists in the mix at a food not bombs group
That would make sense, all things considered. My Houston chapter is constantly butting heads with the police, because the city doesn’t want them distributing food to anyone in town.
Having never done it as part of one such group, I don’t know exactly what goes on, but essentially there’s a large body of literature on leftist political concepts, covering the ideas of why anarchy rather than archy, how to practice it, how to organise etc. I’m definitely the wrong person to explain it, generally socialists (at least here) are the ones doing all the reading, I’m a lot more interested in praxis tbh.
Some classic anarchist writers include Kropotkin, Bakunin and Proudhon, but the communist and socialist literature often applies too.
Pleasently surprised to see Bakunins name dropped! Since there seems to be some misconceptions in this thread about what Anarchy actually is, I thought I’d share one of his quotes that has stuck with me through the years:
Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality
Leftist groups of all stripes have a long history, and with that history comes books, essays, and pamphlets on strategy, analysis, philosophy, and outlook.
They have the exact same goals and stances. They want the west to tear down it’s own institutions and demilitarize. Since Hexbear is failing to gain views these days, a slow shift towards anti-democracy sentiment on instances such as SLRPNK has been seen in it’s stead.
I admit I could just have a skewed perspective since I only ever seem to see the worst examples, like this one.
The problem I see here is that you perceive this as being anti-democracy when it really isn’t. Criticism of western democracy isn’t equivalent to a total rejection of democracy in general. Capitalism renders democracies ineffectual, which is what I perceived this meme to be pointing out.
It points out the contradiction of being in a supposedly free Western Democracy but still being totally at the mercy of others. It isn’t necessarily that Western Democracy is the cause, but that it fails to address these problems.
As opposed to Eastern Democracies which select our perfect godlike leaders who will show us the way to a perfect future (a long painful way), right comrade? /sarcasm
I don’t need to present a perfect alternative for my critique of Western Democracy to be valid. Critique is the means by which we can improve upon what already exists. Some short-term solutions could be to overturn citizens united and end legalized corporate lobbying, introduce voting reforms such as abolishing the electoral college and switching from first past the post to ranked choice or star voting, or expanding direct democratic programs like ballot initiatives. All of these have the effect of minimizing the influence of capital and maximizing the influence of people on the political process.
Longer term solutions involve bottom-up organization of things like mutual aid, unions of various types, decentralized infrastructure, community-run libraries (and not just for books), community gardens, etc. These kinds of dual-power structures always start small but have outsized positive effects on the communities they form in. If they were allowed to grow unhindered they would eventually grow together and easily supercede the top-down power structures that pervade our lives today, which is why they end up being suppressed or co-opted by the same.
A good example of how this occurs is how despite the internet providing a way to collect and distribute all the knowledge on earth for free to everyone on earth (the greatest library in all of human history), powerful corporations - with the help of governments around the world - unnecessarily spend vast amounts of wealth and resources to restrict the free exchange of ideas along socioeconomic lines.
Oh I thought you meant like actual, physical infrastructure, not like one of those terms that software devs stole to refer to a specific type of computer shit.
Sidenote: fuck you, SWEs! You’re an engineer like a Subway sandwich artist is an artist!
That’s not really related to political ideologies, I just hate tech bros.
Decentralized infrastructure can be physical as well, such as microgrids that enable peer-to-peer solar energy sharing.
And sidenote: software engineers are exploited workers like the rest of us, and it’s a respectable profession. The “tech bros” you have to worry about are the wealthy CEOs masquerading as inventors and engineers like Elon Musk.
You might be reading too much into this. Now if you can link to that same user praising Marxist leninism or any of the countries still based on that ideology. Then you have a hypocrisy to critique. But in the absence of that. Those are valid critiques of both Western democracy and Marxist leninist governments. And it’s probably based on their lived experience in a western democracy that they are criticizing it. I’m sure you can find many in China who would have similar criticisms about their own system.
And just to make sure it gets said. Anarchists have no more love for the Chinese Communist Party than you do. So if you think they’re honestly using Anarchist as an attack Vector of the west. They’re going to need all the luck they can get with it.
Those are fair points, but I think it might be better to have a very healthy dose of doubt towards anybody who advocates a teardown of democratic systems of laws. Not the same user in question, but I’ve seen various slrpnk posts defending things from TikTok to Raw Milk.
Are they truly Democratic though. Anarchism is an extreme form of democracy BTW. Not anti democratic. Coming at it from an American perspective, even many of our founding father’s figured by now we’d have majorly overhauled our governing system nearly 10 or more times. They knew their system was flawed. Instead institutional inertia has caused it to become progressively less democratic by many measures. And people turned the founders into infallible deities.
I have less issue with those advocating to rework or abolish institutions. Than those that as a blanket say we can’t question or modify them. Criticism etc should be couched in actually making those institutions more democratic and equitable of course. Not like the economic liberals that like to pretend that they are Libertarians advocating for tax cut and end to regulations that reign in the avarice of Corporations And the wealthy.
When a decision making system is torn down through violent means then for at least a breif moment might makes right, which is absolutely anti-democratic.
Sad that you’re being downvoted for speaking the truth, but the reality is that they’r they’ve got stronghold all over Lemmy’s fediverse, and control the narrative through actions like downvoting your post below 0.
idk if its the exact same goals. idk much about solarpunk aside from the fact that it’s techpunk futurist. Matched with primitive and simple living. theoreticalyl any style of government would work with it, but im guessing anarchy tends to pair with it nicely (i.e. little to no local government, but government on a state/federal level explicitly bound in its capabilities of power.
tankies or hexbear users im not really sure what their goal is, tankies love russia and china, so presumably they want more of that and less of the west, or just less of the west, i’m not really sure. western commies are usually what i call “pseudo commies” they want communism only because our western capitalism sucks and is bad. If they had capitalism but non shit they would like it equally as much.
I wish for once I could just have a civil conversation about my views without people immediately jumping down my throat and accusing me of being a CCP or Russian shill, or a dirty liberal, or a filthy communist. This is what I’m talking about when I say I just end up getting shit on from all sides. Every unsavory label in the book gets stuck to me before I even get a chance to clarify my views.
If we gave equal time to each and every shill, conscious or otherwise, then we would literally never talk about anything else except an infinite debate about whether or not a government office who hired an Operation Paperclip employee 70 years ago is capable of being a force of good.
We just don’t have time for bullshit from people like you, keep searching.
I might enjoy this, but I’d have a requirement: Every participant join via webcam, not text posting.
Yes, that gives away much of your identity and makes you vulnerable. That’s the shared price we’d all pay to have a little bit of trust in each other. It would make it much harder for one person to be a bot posting from multiple accounts.
He doesn’t even know if he’s on the spectrum because, at least as far as we know, he hasn’t been evaluated. He just decided he has autism because he thinks it lets him get away with doing atrocious shit. As if autism made you an asshole.
Funny thing about that, I once did some investigation on the page he reposted it from, and they seem to be very against self-diagnosis, and put a great emphasis on the suffering of autistic people.
That's an option here in Japan, though most don't use it. I'm pretty sure some people sell that style in the US as well. I use one that has a hole but no cardboard insert.
That’s Florin, it used to be divided by two countries, Florin and Guilder, but there was this horrible kidnapping incident which led to a revolution which merged the two.
William Goldman wrote the definitive book on the topic.
Solid TP rolls are quite common in Asia. Not sure if this is still true, but a lot of public toilets don’t provide toilet paper for fear of people stealing them. You have to bring your own TP, at which point including the cardboard insert takes up too much space to carry around.
This is common in US motels and some hotels. It’s supposed to say that one should put their towel on the floor, rather than the rack, to have it replaced.
That’s called coreless TP and you can get it in the US too, mostly from institutional suppliers. You can also try Asian markets like Ranch 99 if you are near one.
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