Hey all, I’m hoping this is the right comm for this kind of post. I’m really interested what brought my fellow lemmings to anarchism (or just radical politics in general). Was is a youtube video? A book? A conversation IRL or on the internet? For me personally it was a friend IRL who introduced me to an local anarchist collective.
Because fuck authority. Governments have always existed to oppress the masses, and and also take away power from people so they don’t govern themselves
I was always into punk music but I got heavily addicted to meth and in desperation made the grave mistake of joining the Marines to hit the reset button on my life. Luckily I fixed electronics so I never had to serve in a war zone or fire a shot in anger but the aircraft I supported ended up doing horrific atrocities when they deployed so my hands are far from clean. When I was in Okinawa I came to the realization on how expendable every person is when it comes to the state. We would poison the ground we lived on because in the end it will be the Japanese equivalent of a Superfund Site and the military could not give less of a shit if we all got cancer along the way. After I got out I found the band Behind Enemy Lines and started reading about the SoA, CIA involvement in the Argentinian Dirty War, and fell down a rabbit hole. I found the book Post Scarcity Anarchism by Muray Bookchin randomly at a bookstore and starting reading a lot more theory. Now I fall on the Bookchinish side of anarcho-communism.
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.
The statism got me.
Can you tell us more about that.
In short: sewer socialism.
I had spent years street protesting the war in Iraq, and had grown tired of trying to build community and organize in a college town.
So I moved out into a deep rural (and red) part of the country and got a job working in Public Health. This was well before covid and I just started working with grant money to help people retrofit and upgrade their septic systems.
It was a government job and it did more good for more people than I think any damage I did to police or federal property.
And from there I kept working and seeing benefits of public health and infrastructure. There’s a lot to the state and government that I don’t like, but public infrastructure is the valid basis of a state.
College towns are transitory as fuck. Non-student organizing in them is rough.
Your experience does remind me of what graeber says about why conservatives like the military in ‘bullshit jobs’.
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.
Edit: Also, growing up in the Rust Belt doesn’t give you a whole lot of faith in states.
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.
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
‘Seeing like a state’ is a good one
As is anything by David graeber’
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
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.
Bevase over aome 100k -150k years plus of humanity being around, it’s the only organisaltional structurethats ever worked ivee the long term. Seems weird to say, you know what, that worked, lets not do that.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Of course you can. Age doesn’t matter. Anyone can get into anti authoritarian ideas at any age
I’m 30-something and I’m just now figuring it out lol
In my younger years I was a “libertarian” before figuring out capitalism was also a huge part of the problem.
Same :3
Check out That Dang Dad on YouTube. Not sure his exact age or ideology, but he was a cop and proud of it until a few years ago and then came to his senses in a big way. He has some great videos discussing that transition.
I found Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, and Bookchin all around my 30th year. We can always change and advance.
What books do you recommend
The Conquest of Bread is a great layman explainer where a smart economist introduces to you many examples of how mutual aid and anarchist organization are not only practical but often essential, natural, and superior. It’s examples are outdated (And some of it’s predictions were prophetic!) but it’s points are all preserved to this day.
Bullshit Jobs is a pop economism / sociology book where an anthropologist walks you through the absurdity of our modern economy, specifically our systems of employment and work, to build a case that our system is designed around backward incentives.
God and the State is a fiery call to action by one of if not the most successful anarchist political organizers in history. It is a brief but powerful calling out and condemnation of hierarchy and nation states, written before the author’s falling out with Marx and organized communism (Disclaimer: The author was slightly racist, even for his time).
The Mars Triology is a sprawling three-novel scifi epic about the multigenerational colonization of Mars, featuring a rotating but interrelated ensemble cast who basically act as avatars for the various political tendencies they each represent. The author develops a “future history” of humanity, the complexity of which could go toe-to-toe with Tolkien, developing a wild pallette of libertarian, socialist, future-economist tendencies that fans out over several centuries and really gets the gears of your imagination clanking.
These are all selected as introductions to ideas. I have many more recommends but they’re less “dip your toes in”.
Wow thank you for the list! I will get reading.
I had read about it very early, but really became a convert after reading Ursula LeGuin.
Lol the dispossessed was one of my first intros to the anarchist world, was nice to see a somewhat realistic anarchist community in its early stages, even with its flaws.
Funny how I initially found the plot of the book boring (which I still believe it is), but I guess the point is to focus on the world building and the contrast of the two worlds.
Thanks to the guy who got me the book in a secret santa event cuz I had said that I like dystopian and fantasy books:)
Always Coming Home is also spectacular. Very different kind of book.
Poverty.
