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!
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.