A community about anarchy. anarchism, social ecology, and communalism for SLRPNK! Solarpunk anarchists unite!
Feel free to ask questions here. We aspire to make this space a safe space. SLRPNK.net's basic rules apply here, but generally don't be a dick and don't be an authoritarian.
Anarchism is a social and political theory and practice that works for a free society without domination and hierarchy.
Social Ecology, developed from green anarchism, is the idea that our ecological problems have their ultimate roots in our social problems. This is because the domination of nature and our ecology by humanity has its ultimate roots in the domination humanity by humans. Therefore, the solutions to our ecological problems are found by addressing our social and ecological problems simultaneously.
Poetry and imagination must be integrated with science and technology, for we have evolved beyond an innocence that can be nourished exclusively by myths and dreams.
~ Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom
People want to treat ‘we’ll figure it out by working to get there’ as some sort of rhetorical evasion instead of being a fundamental expression of trust in the power of conscious collective effort.
~Anonymous, but quoted by Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
~Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.
~Murray Bookchin, "A Politics for the Twenty-First Century"
There can be no separation of the revolutionary process from the revolutionary goal. A society based on self-administration must be achieved by means of self-administration.
~Murray Bookchin, Post Scarcity Anarchism
In modern times humans have become a wolf not only to humans, but to all nature.
The ecological question is fundamentally solved as the system is repressed and a socialist social system develops. That does not mean you cannot do something for the environment right away. On the contrary, it is necessary to combine the fight for the environment with the struggle for a general social revolution...
~Abdullah Öcalan
Social ecology advances a message that calls not only for a society free of hierarchy and hierarchical sensibilities, but for an ethics that places humanity in the natural world as an agent for rendering evolution social and natural fully self-conscious.
~ Murray Bookchin
It appears the US congress has just proposed (edited) a bill that declares "Antifa" a terrorist organization.
This doesn't even make sense as Antifa isn't an organization, but just a shared name for anyone that self-identifies as a person opposed to and willing to fight fascism 🤦♂️
Stay safe out there!
Note: SLRPNK is an EU based service and we are openly Antifa here, and proudly so!
And yet even with that, they were still against authoritarians like we have now. We are objectively worse than slave owners.
They were authoritarian against the indigenous peoples.
They barely allowed anyone to vote! What the fuck are you talking about?
But those that were allowed to vote were expected to know what the fuck was going on. Their position in society came with that expectation, and they had the time to stay up to date on events.
Our system of government is largely based on that fundamental assumption, an educated electorate. In our current system, the idiot with a room temperature IQ and never pays attention to anything political has the same voting power as someone that spends their free time following government and knows exactly what is happening, how their officials have been voting, etc.
An actually educated electorate is something we clearly no longer have, and our system of government is based on that fundamental assumption.
Our system of government was based on the assumption that only white property owning men know how to govern. The truth is, they're as dogshit stupid as the rest of us. The Founding fathers didn't believe in bathing! They day drank because low% beer was safer to drink than water! They thought disease was caused by bad smells instead of not washing your hands!
This country was founded by morons. Stop venerating them like a reactionary.
Well, the data does show that they managed to avoid turning the country into an authoritarian fascist state for over 200 years before we started making changes to that system without considering potential consequences from those changes. We made changes, did no study or mitigation of what might happen as a result of those changes, and here we are.
I'm not saying that everyone shouldn't have the right to vote, far from it, but the way our voting system works with the many changes we've made, it has fallen apart and is easily manipulated. There's a reason no other modern democracy uses our voting and governmental structure, it doesn't work well with things like universal suffrage. It works just fine as it was designed, and could work if we corrected for the things we changed blindly (like changing from first past the post to a ranked choice voting system). But that would inevitably result in removing power from the inevitable two party system we created, and they can't allow that.
Ask the natives that were rounded up into camps how non-authoritarian the US was. The Nazis were inspired by the US.
We're a highly reformed white supremacist settler-colonial project, we've come a long way from our horrible Founders.
You must admit they were anti-monarchist genocidal patriarchal slave owners, which you must also admit is an improvement over monarchist genocidal patriarchal slave owners and pretty woke compared to everything else Europe was doing at the time.
Until the French decided to show people how a revolution is really done.
I can admit they were historically progressive in the same way that capitalism was historical progress from feudalism, but I'm not going to venerate them and act like they wouldn't approve of the modern far right.
If they were alive today they'd be extremely right wing.
Probably, yeah, most of them. That's just how environmental determination works. You can not escape materialism, in all its implications.
But there were, for example, abolitionists among them, it's how we can say that Jefferson and Washington were still slaving pieces of shit as it's clear they were aware of the moral implications and simply chose the path of greatest comfort for themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunmore%27s_Proclamation
Lincoln would employ a similar gambit four score and seven years later, to a more successful end. Confederates would call him a monarchist genocidal patriarchal slave owners in response.
I don't think it's a bad point of order, but I do think it's disingenuous to compare the Emancipation Proclamation from an abolitionist (and Lincoln was, no matter the spin confederates try to put on it) to a ploy by a British governor that most historians agree was a practical maneuver and not related to his beliefs on the topic.
It certainly didn't free all slaves in the Empire, meaning the rebellion was still against another slave state. And Dunmore was himself a slaver, and would after his Proclamation buy more slaves for himself.
I'd probably conflate Dunmore's Proc with the First and Second Confiscation Acts. They both served as tools to undermine rebellious states without upsetting slavers still in their purview. The Emancipation Proclamation, and then the 13th Amendment, were expansions of the policy made afterwards by Congressmen who recognized there couldn't practically be a thin sliver of slave-legal states in between the abolition states and the confederate ones.
The UK abolished slavery in 1803, following a domestic wave of abolitionism that spilled over into the Northern US states. The abolitionist movement didn't end at any one border. Activists recognized abolition as a global struggle, one big reason why the UK failed to align with the Confederate States despite doing a lucrative textile trade on the backs of American plantation captives.
And of course its worth noting how post-abolition colonialism largely exported the brutal practices of slavery outside the view of UK/US consumers. That doesn't change how public disdain for slavery as a practice influenced governors like Dunmore, Kings like George III, and eventually Presidents like Lincoln to employ abolition as a weapon against political enemies.
This wasn't one thing or another. The moral revulsion generated by slavery made slave liberation and instigated slave revolts a popular tool of foreign powers and local dissidents. The politics of abolition were never exclusively a strategic or exclusively moral decision.