More important than opposition to the current system is the prefiguration of an anarchic one. So much online discourse is about attacking, a lot less is about building. I drew this to remind myself and others that confronting the state is only a part of the puzzle and building new systems without it is also important.
Licence (as always): CC-0, No rights reserved.
An anarchist society isn’t a building. It’s a tree. A living, breathing, perpetually growing organism. You cannot say what a tree will look like before it’s grown. You can only plant a seed and hope for the best. As soon as you start planning and designing parts of this society you start ignoring other peoples contribution, stifling their liberty and self-determination. State socialists are the ones who are designing society according to their own vision and we’ve all seen where that leads.
If you want an actual movement and momentum check what the IWW is doing. They claim to be anarchist/syndicalists but I don’t know how much we are represented in the actual ranks. I’m sadly in a country that doesn’t have a branch.
I am just one. I am limited by my skills and specialties. I cannot really contribute to the discussion of heavy industry or agriculture, unless it’s about using tech and computers to simplify or automate, but even then I would need to listen to the actual people in these industries to even begin designing something that works. I know IT, I know Computers, I know programming. I also think I’m relatively good at recourse management and coming up with solutions that others might not. Those are the areas I know I can contribute. I would love to start a tech-collective but I don’t have the contacts. That’s why I spend most of my time on here, it feels like the only place I can actually contribute. If a person actually has enough anarchists around them to actually do something they obviously should do something more than just spread propaganda, but I don’t.
Which is part of the problem. Anarchy cannot be concrete. It’s chaos compared to centralized power structures, a free society cannot be anything else. The difference between anarchists and statists is that we embrace the chaos and believe something incredible can exist within it, that collectively we can withstand anything bad that chaos throws at us. Any concrete societal structure can only be maintained with control. This control will often result in inequality and exploitation.
Flipping the metaphors doesn’t change anything - except the metaphors. We know how trees work, too.
So whose “contributions” are you waiting for? Tankies? Liberals? Fascists, maybe?
Says who? You?
Pretending that anarchists getting serious about preconfiguration is comparable to tankie’s plans to murder, torture, starve and generally brutalise the working class into accepting their warped ideas of what they cynically call “socialism” isn’t just facetious - it’s downright incoherent. It seems to me that you don’t have much faith in your fellow anarchist’s abilities… apart from peddling empty propaganda, that is.
Well, I sure do know that you don’t know squat about trees… so, I guess you’re right on that count.
I asked you this before, and you didn’t answer. So here it is again… are you starting to see the disconnect?
Again… says who?
No, we don’t. Something tells me you haven’t actually seen much chaos in your lifetime.
No society can survive without control - and that goes double for an anarchist one. An anarchist society will have to be better at controlling things than a statist one - that is the whole point.
I also just found an essay on the anarchist library that deals with a lot of the topics we’ve discussed, perhaps give it a read: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/nishikant-sheorey-society-is-not-a-machine