Okay, but weapons exist. Any country that declared that it had no government would be taken over in less time than it’s taking me to type this.

Zapatistas seem to doing a good job.

Anarchism isn’t about pretending harm doesn’t exist either. The people that want to do real harm and will cause harm (will in bold because it’s important to distinguish people who want to do harm and people who will do harm) can just as easily get into positions of power in our current system. Most people don’t want chaos, so why should we organize society around the assumption that we need rulers to prevent it? Basic morals are very, very easy for a super majority of a society to get behind.

Bad actors will mess up any polity, to any degree. That’s not a unique fault of anarchism, my friend.

When there is no tangible reward for investment, what motivates people to invest into local or shared projects?

I think education can help us out with that. If we can manage to teach not only our own children but create environments, like schools, where we can teach critical thinking and epistemic hygiene to all people that might actually help combat some of the indoctrination our children face in high-school, college and (bleh) mainstream media. These would have to be highly localized. A big hurdle is sabotage and discrediting perpetrated by the US government. As we all know the government is well known for this kind of stuff.

The point I’m trying to make is if we can teach people to be aware of their relation to the state, it might actually bring people together to take direct action. I know it sounds too hypothetical, but it’s not crazy to believe the current US administration will steep to a new low. The rich want more money, and we know all too well what happens when the majority have nothing and the rich have it all.

It really seems like a daunting task at first, and the amount of work that has to be done may be demoralizing, but as Murray Bookchin said: “If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.” And this becomes ever so clear when you look at what kind of shit the US and EU get away with these days.

Great, can’t wait for them to strongly condemn Isreals actions in about 3 to 4 years.

Not sure if any of this will be helpful to you, but here goes.

First off, I’d recommend checking out The Anarchist Collectives by Sam Dolgoff, Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (a first-hand account, sympathetic but also critical, which I think is important), and Durruti in the Spanish Revolution by Abel Paz. If you can, also look into solid work on the Makhnovist movement in Ukraine. These texts focus on revolutionary anarchist projects and how dual-power systems functioned, mostly in ways that supported anarchist goals.

Despite what some Marxist-Leninists and many others claim, anarchism isn’t about seizing the state and flipping a switch to create instant communism. There’s real work to be done.

My thoughts on this: A big part of that work involves building trade unions, sure, but it’s also about creating a culture rooted in cooperation. In my opinion, anarchist projects only truly thrive when there’s a strong cooperative culture in place first. As individualistic as our society likes to imagine itself, I believe it’s only a matter of time before more people recognize this and begin organizing on a municipal level.

Which brings me to this: to make any of this viable, we need to organize, organize, and organize. We have to come together at the local level if we want to test out a real, modern anarchist experiment. We need a wide range of people, intellectuals, workers, scientists, farmers, philosophers, and especially the poor. The focus should be on identifying what people actually need and figuring out how to meet those needs. This can be done without seizing the state, without violence, and without depending entirely on existing institutions.

I’m a committed anarchist, but that doesn’t mean I can guarantee a fully anarchistic global system in our lifetimes. It doesn’t mean I’m a nihilist either, on the contrary, I’m pretty optimistic about the future. It just means I believe in seeking alternatives and putting in the effort to make them work.

Something like this should be highly localized. As much as I’m in on the practice, I’ve seen way too many videos of consumers rushing into Walmart stacking up everything they can on Black Friday. We need to be able to create a culture where people share a responsibility of not just sharing, but returning.

Great to see Andrewism out here making a solid case though.

What’s with the switcheroo? I thought we loved bombing hospitals and starving children??

Ok, am I annoying or does this seem like another one of those “If you fall for these you kinda deserve it?” There’s not one single company I can think of that asks you to verify your e-mail in a reply. Like come on.

I unsubbed from the “MeanwhileOnGrad” comm because it’s getting so repetitive. We get it, those instances are full of psychos who say psycho shit, so there’s no point in doing anything else other than blocking or better yet defederating. PugJesus in this case is not much different than those hexbear crazies calling everyone they don’t like “liberals”. They just call anyone they don’t like “tankies”

I’m using Blorp for my piefed and lemmy accounts and it’s working pretty well.

There’s no way this guy wrote “Fuck his prostate” with a straight face on his phone

Betrays and slaughters the people of Makhnovshchina

“See! Told you it would fail!”

No war but class war

As an anarchist I find this authoritarian

Buddy this is an internet community not a nation-state 💀💀💀 Please touch some grass

A monarchist abusing his position of power.

Who. Would’ve. Thunk.

Spoiler: He’s gonna fix the “missing” information with MISinformation.

If you don’t mind, I’d love to chime in with my own perspective :)

My path to anarchist ideas was pretty organic. I grew up in a rural area, lots of farmers, my school was just a short walk away, and most of our food was locally grown or raised. It struck me that even if the government had suddenly disappeared, our community probably would have been okay. We already relied so much on each other.

I’m not here to tell you what to believe or what label to adopt. Over the past four years, I’ve done a lot of reading and reflecting myself, and what helped me the most was trying to apply different leftist ideas to the place I knew best, my own hometown. That process helped me figure out what might actually work for the people there and for me, that led to anarchism.

So I’d suggest doing something similar: take the ideas you’ve encountered from socialists, communists, anarchists, or whereever and ask yourself “If we did this and this, could this work?” “If we stopped using money in these areas and these areas, could that work?” Even just exploring things like reducing reliance on money in certain areas can be revealing. (It’s worth noting that many anarchist ideas hinge on an optimistic view of human nature, but that’s a whole other conversation.)

At the end of the day, if you’re trying to identify both an ideal society and a realistic path toward it, I think the key is understanding that socialism, whatever shape it takes, requires a culture built on cooperation. That has to come first.

I’d rather see em under a guillotine

It’s no secret that anarchists are being silenced in China. A lot of it is underground and for good reason. You might have a tough time looking for these circles.

Yup, The Association of German National Jews or Verband nationaldeutscher Juden.