i’m feeling bad for any of the poor souls who are getting their hopes up over the election. i did that once, long ago and i have learned my lesson and am now old and bitter. and particularly given the participants in this election i’m genuinely just so checked out. not even my country. but the whole world goes insane each time.
i think the last of the storm passed late last night. we seem to have escaped relatively unscathed considering everything. but unfortunately today is the day i must dig my car out of the mud and go find out if it’s still possible to drive to town.
that sounds horrible. im glad that ur out of there at least luckily the flood defences we build outside the house last time are still in place but i really need to do a whole bunch of repairs on the wall the water got through and i have not been able to get building materials up here yet
no, not everyone has to be involved in every decision. the general idea is that the people affected by the outcome of the decision should be involved in making it. and that a decision should be taken at the lowest level possible. to take an absurd example, no one is going to vote about whether or not i have breakfast because it only affects me. or a more concrete example, there is no referendum or laws passed about whether or not gay marriage is acceptable. there is no state to control marriage, no legitimacy to marriage beyond what we choose to give it. the only people who need to decide that are the people getting married. but thats just a non-decision almost by definition.
so like, lets say there are people who produce food for a community. the people doing the work decide how it is done, perhaps in consultation with the community they are serving to properly understand their needs. but there is no community wide vote on how the farming is done, that is done by the people doing the work.
also, there are differences of opinion about whether decisions need to be consensus-based, or whether or not there should be some sort of voting and threshold for the decision to be make. i think it actually makes sense to use them in different contexts. as an example, we currently have a smol commune and everyone has to be in complete agreement about a new member joining, because especially at our current size, a new person is such a big change to how things work that if one person isn’t okay with it, it would be a massive disruption to the community. but if u have like a large activist org, or perhaps a meeting of federated smaller groups, a majority vote might be more appropriate.
okay i’m done. sorry this was incredibly long. i guess i got in the zone.
anarchists oppose the existence of all states. i would say this is a prerequisite for being an anarchist. but i certainly have solidarity with the people inside states. and of course there are situations in which although i still oppose all the states, given the state of reality i still think it’s good that a state is defending against, or attacking, an imperialist power.
i think one of the issues anarchists tend to have with marxists is the particular way in which they go about solidarity with states. obviously i understand the concept of critical support, and a lot of the way that this kind of discourse is more about not wanting to have to constantly add disclaimers about how you know that the state in question still does bad things, because you’re simply trying to talk about the good thing it’s doing. and i’m sympathetic to that. but i really dislike the way it seems to just turn into team sports where you support any state that opposes the west, and the critical part of critical support just never gets heard. and y’all also have a habit of dismissing any struggle or attempted revolution against authoritarian governments as western interference. which to us is a massive violation of our responsibility to have solidarity with the people, who are the ones who actually matter. it’s not that we aren’t aware of the possibility of western interference, and how it can corrupt a revolution with a communist and/or anarchist character into just fucking capitalism and liberal democracy and i don’t think we’re any happier about that than any of you. but the proper response to western interference in a situation like that is for anarchists (and i would argue, the communists as well) to act autonomously in support of the struggle, attacking the state directly, and also by trying to root out the western interference and participate in the more general organisation in ways that help preserve the leftist character of the revolution.
as for why marxist states get all the flack… well i don’t think this is entirely true. at least in my circles we’re far more critical of capitalist and imperialist states. and the uh, actually politically active anarchists, we tend to attack the state that we’re from, or living in. but yeah, we certainly are critical of marxist states.
in theory, we should have a lot in common. our aim, anarchy, is perhaps not identical to, but at the very least compatible with and similar to the supposed endgame of marxism, stateless communism. but well, we don’t trust you, or anyone else, with power. even before the marxist states of the 20th century, the classical anarchists were concerned that siezing control of the state would simply lead to their priorities being corrupted by that power. and thus though they may have started with good intentions, the state’s primary purpose becomes its own maintenence. it ends up in direct opposition to the original aims of the revolution. i might not think it’s the right approach but i would be fucking delighted if there were a marxist revolution that reached stateless communism in a timely fashion.
and history has proven us right. marxist states have failed, become more concerned with protecting their power. to you, a state with a government which calls itself marxist, and which opposes western imperialism might not seem like a failure - but our priorities are the elimination of the state and all authority. so when we hear that is the goal, but the goal is never reached because the means used to achieve it aren’t consistent with the actual intended result, yeah that’s a failure. not to mention the fact that every time we have tried to cooperate with marxists, particularly MLs, they have betrayed us. i come from a historically anarchist area of spain, that still has a lot of us here. growing up i was introduced to anarchism by some of my school teachers and friends of my parents. and the mistrust of communists among spanish anarchists is incredibly strong over the civil war, and it’s not like i don’t understand why. tho i do have some significant criticisms of spanish anarchism too.
and yeah, it’s not like we’ve ever been allowed to say, create small-scale autonomous anarchist communes within communist states. or you know, stay alive.
i hope that provides some context. i don’t mean to be sectarian or start arguments about who did what in the spanish civil war. i meant to accurately convey what anarchists tend to think and why. but also like, i don’t disagree. i’m actually p comfortable on hexbear and the non-sectarian rules make a big difference. but it’s literally the first place i’ve ever had MLs be even remotely nice to me as an anarchist. i think this community works p well, but in terms of actually organising politically i don’t really see how we can get beyond those differences.
lastly i wanna address the stuff about how to achieve anarchy decisionmaking, and air a massive complaint about the kinds of anarchists u are likely to encounter online, which may actually help u to understand us/relate to us better.
so like i have been active as an anarchist since i was 16, and i’m 29 now. and in that time i’ve had many, many good, serious, anarchist comrades. but though these kinds of people obviously do exist online, its not the typical person you expect to encounter online calling themself an anarchist and it’s something that has frustrated me for years but i kinda came to terms with it. but i was talking to my partner about it recently and realised that it understandably really really upset them and i realised how it must look to people who don’t have my background.
most of the anarchists i meet online are not really anarchists. i don’t mean they’re ancaps (who are about as anarchist is national socialists are socialist), they are people who have heard a bit about it and think it’s a good idea, but have no fucking clue as to any theory, praxis, or what applying anarchist principles really means. and i don’t mean they haven’t read theory in the elitist sense, cuz i do dislike when people act like having read all the classical leftist texts is a necessity when it can be kind of ableist and elitist. but u do need to understand the theory of your professed politics one way or another, even if it’s learning from more experienced members of your group.
i’m sure there are more reasons than the two i’ve come up with, but they’re both definitely a thing. firstly, when some anarchist (and other leftist, tbf) commuities online start to suddenly increase their numbers, it’s usually because some left-leaning liberals heard about it. and i used to agree with the people who made this mistake, i used to think it was a good thing, a way to teach people and bring them in. but i’ve since realised that it dilutes the serious people and serious conversation to such a degree that there it’s not really an anarchist community anymore. it’s just a place where liberals argue about electoralism and repost articles from mainstream media sites.
and secondly, and most tragic to me as a trans person, i’ve found that a lot of the people causing the influx of libs is actually trans people. don’t get me wrong there are many good serious trans anarchists, and certainly the ones who have been active for more than a few years became anarchists before the period of intense visibility and backlash against us really started. but because we face so much discrimination outside of leftist communities, and sometimes in them to a certain degree, it’s seemed like a huge volume of rather lib trans people have flocked towards online anarchist communities as a safe place, without having worked through the lib brain worms. and that also creates a really heavy focus on US electoralism because ppl are scared of like, getting murdered or legislated out of existence if they’re not pushing for this electorally insignificant political group to vote as hard as they can.
if u wanna know proper anarchists, be very thourough when looking online. or go out and find irl groups who actually do things.
achieving anarchy, is not about democracy. some anarchists use the term, but they use it essentially to mean the same kinds of non-hierarchical organisation that those of us who don’t use the term want. the term has just been so corrupted by liberal democracy that i’d rather have nothing to do with it. achieving anarchy essentially requires two processes to happen side-by-side. since there is no possibility of using the existing mechanism of the state to organise after a revolution, the creative and destructive processes have to happen at the same time. we need to build our own methods of surviving, mutual aid networks, distribution and logistics, etc. we need to be able to survive when capitalism abandons us. but anyone who thinks that this is sufficient to do away with the power of the state and capital is sorely mistaken. the state must be destroyed by violent resistance just the same as any other revolutionary theory.
in some cases we can take advantage of the fact that state power is actually decreasing in many rural areas. i’m part of a project that is doing that. and honestly i’m so burned out (not to mention disabled) by years of action, that i’ve been slightly checked out of the protest and direct action side of things. but i do hope to be able to return to that one day. but yeah the place our project is in, is in a rural area of spain that is more or less just abandoned by the state, and their ability to enforce or surveil is very limited. the most we ever see of any state interference is them occasionally dropping water on some trees when there is another wildfire. and that is p nice but us, and the other people living in this region, have gotta be able to deal with the fires on our own, because they can barely manage to do that.
but yeah. violent resistance, revolution, insurrection, is necessary.
gonna add another comment about decisionmaking since i guess i reached a character limit
i might be up for it. i have mod experience on other platforms.
am i doomed to have a panic attack each time it rains heavily now? last time our house flooded and i guess that had a lasting effect on me. i had some anxiety meds n i’m okay and no flooding, just some roof leaks. but i don’t think i’m gonna be able to relax or go back to sleep til its over
thank you <3
yeah it seems like it. and its gonna be sunny for the next couple weeks, as far as the forecast goes. gotta use the time to fix shit up. ty for ur support <3
got power and internet back! the water damage to the electrical system was limited to the plug sockets. can finally chill
thank u! unfortunately there is some damage to the house, but it can be fixed. finally got power and internet back.
thank you, i’m sorry u had to go through that. its awful. my comrade gave me a couple of passive dehumidifiers, and we managed to get the power back on - water damage to the plug sockets caused a switch to flick and we disconnected everything that was bad. so i can run the dehumidifier tomorrow because there will be sun. (our power is literally just solar and some batteries and we can’t run heavy power consuming things at night. ty for ur advice, i will definitely keep it in mind.
i’m completely dead and still in shock i think. we spent the entire day bailing water out of our flooding house. this rain was like an order of magnitude worse than anything i’ve ever seen. the landscape has changed, so much soil eroded. not to mention the new person who is just incredibly toxic.
this shit is fucked. everyone worked together to try and mitigate the damage. i am grateful to everyone.
thank u it was then followed by a 5 hour nap
we got a good night’s sleep! basically the first time we slept in 3 days
ty, i feel a bit better today i think, which is a fucking miracle given neither of us has been able to sleep in 3 days. but i think we will sleep tonight.
damn i’m sorry to hear that. solidarity. i hope u recover fast
maybe shark instance will finally refed with us /s