Did you miss the part where I said vote for Kamala? Twice?

I’m ideologically opposed to party and institutional politics on a foundational level. The fact that people are forced to compromise on their values, the “lesser of two evils” system, the whole “closest to your values” thing is a horrible way to approach politics. It rings true if you don’t think about it too hard but it’s pretty bullshit. At the end of the day, when you are only permitted a political voice at the ballot box, you are forcing yourself into the labels you’ve been given by a group of parasites that do not share your interests…

And yeah, single.issue voters probably have other issues. That doesn’t mean they fit within their chosen party’s platform. There are plenty of pro-lifers who fit better in the democratic camp on other issues but value abortion above the rest. I’m not saying it makes sense or is worthy of respect. It’s simply a thing that is

You people? Please enlighten me, who am I?

Sorry that I’m maintaining some degree of this esoteric concept known as having principles. If extremely mild criticism is enough to upset you then I’m not really interested in anything you’ve got to say. Take it easy

I understand that but they’re still in the party. AOC and Omar are Social Democrats but they still run under the Democrat ticket, for example. On the right we see a mix of right libertarians, fascists, Christian nationalists, white nationalists, esoteric fascistss, and neo-monarchists (I’m sure I’m missing a few), but they’re all running under the Republican ticket because our two party system is broken and incapable of capturing the sheer depth and diversity of political ideologies within the country. The labels of democrat and republican are largely useless on an interpersonal basis and only vaguely useful on a systemic scale.

I’m an anarchist but my voter registration says democrat because I checked that box when I was 18 and never bothered changing it. You’d be “right” to call me a democrat, but only to a superficial and largely unimportant degree. I’m sure there are republicans in a similar situation as well and people who may be closer to democrats but choose to vote Republican due to specific policy issues. Abortion is one that comes to mind. It may be hard to believe but there truly are people out there who only care about abortion and otherwise have no strong political opinions outside of that. They would be a better fit for Republicans than Democrats. Again, the 2 party system is fucked and splitting hairs over people who don’t nearly fit into one of the boxes (which is 99.9% of people) is a pointless distraction

Broadly I agree with you and have said more or less the same thing. But there are people who label themselves republican and fall in line somewhere closer to democrat. The two parties aren’t as far apart as we’d all like to think

Kamala came in with some lip service to progressives at the beginning and has essentially adopted bidens platform with little in the way of changes. She’s doubled down on fracking, distanced herself from the green new deal, and courted the center right (Democrat or Republican) from the DNC forward. It’s not surprising but it’s disheartening to see so many people get fooled by what has been the typical Democrat playbook since the 90s. Biden was bad optics so they traded him out. Vote for her because she isn’t trump, but don’t pretend that she’ll do anything different than follow the party line like her and everybody before her.

If you want to make some real change go ahead and vote for the Democrat. Then stop paying attention to electoral politics. Organize in your community. Agitate for worker unions in your work places and tenant unions in your neighborhood, start a political theory reading group, organize a food drive, free store, tool library, something. Literally anything other than wasting your precious time and energy on following the clown show in DC. None of them care about you. None of them want to help you. None of them are planning to make your life easier.

I;m thinking about thos nectars

“NYPD mass shooting over $2.90” dates it pretty well I’d say. Until cops start more mass shootings over subway fare that is. Story for anyone who’s interested

I took the hit. They’re trying to say that he mixed up “immigrants” and “migrants”. He absolutely did not. You can hear it clear as day

Ehlers Danlos syndrome gang in the house

Informal text communication has increasingly played with punctuation and grammar to indicate tone, emotion, and cadence. This has been happening for decades. Language is a tool that is fluid and malleable. There are only rules insofar as there is broad consensus on how language works at the moment. Stop being a weenie

Ya cum-lord

Feel free to DM me whenever!

I’m always happy to ramble on about anarchism! Thanks engaging me with an open mind. My “extreme” views aren’t always met with a great reaction haha

Your follow up gets into a lot of deep theory from several different areas, but it’s a great question! I’ll do my best to answer it concisely but please know that I won’t be able to answer it perfectly; dozens of books have been written on each aspect of the breakdown I’ll be following this bit up with. If you’re interested in diving deep into these areas, the YouTube channel I linked in my last comment primarily does video essays. His largest project is titled “A Modern Anarchism” and it’s a synthesis work, bringing several strains of anarchism together to form a coherent framework for the present. I think you would find it very interesting. Some other notable creators in the theory and praxis space of anarchism are Andrewism and Zoe Baker. Shout-out to The Anarchist Library as well!

The way I read your question touches on a few areas. Hierarchical realism and self determination, complex systems and decentralization, and the cyclical nature of human history.

On hierarchical realism and self determination:

Like capitalist realism, many anarchists view society at large to be in a state of hierarchical realism - that is- dominant hierarchies are so ingrained into our collective conscience that the majority of people are incapable of imagining a world post-hierarchy. That isn’t a dig, it takes a long time of focused work to deconstruct all of the inherent biases our upbringing imbues us with. As such, any imagining of an anarchist society by people in a hierarchical society will inevitably be tainted by those biases, and will therefore be unable to perfectly depict an anarchist utopia. (Doesn’t mean people haven’t tried, Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed does a fair job that addresses your question to boot). To a degree, your question can never truly be answered. It is very much a question worth asking though.

Hierarchical realism not only taints our imagination towards the future. It taints our imagination for how we might oppose domination in the present. Hierarchy, primarily capitalism and the state in this instance, has stripped us of our self determination, the means and ability to manage our own affairs. From mending clothes to managing society, most of us are incapable of truly controlling our lives and are consequently reliant on the current systems of power for our very existence. Anarchists encourage people to reclaim their self determination because it’s vital to a thriving, citizen managed, society.

I’m sure you’ve noticed a trend in society that points toward a broad delegation of tasks that are vital to modern life. Meal delivery services, hardware that’s increasingly difficult to repair, the hyper-specialization of intellectual labor, broad individual isolation from community, public schooling that is geared to make good workers instead of an educated and capable population, representative democracy. Much of it stems from a systemic pressure to atomize human function and interaction that strips us of our self determination. Anarchists believe that reclaiming ou self determination not only empowers the individual, but creates an empowered society. A society organized without coercion, geared to ensure the individual is capable and supported to manage their life and interests, is one with people who know that allowing individuals to wield systemic power to control the collective is an idea worth rejecting.

On complex systems and decentralization:

Complex systems (as they apply to social structures) in a nutshell: society functions like a living organism. The status quo seeks to exist indefinitely and either resists harmful pressures or co-opts them in order to persist.

You are correct in saying that the power structures that anarchists propose isn’t rigid, it’s not supposed to be! The Anarchist approach to freedom and power is intentionally fluid, in part to allow the individual the maximal amount of freedom and self determination, as well as to entrench a system of collective power that is capable of changing and adapting to the ever changing needs of the community. In contrast, hierarchy is incredibly rigid. It is slow to change and slow to adapt,

A decentralized society is also more resilient in the face of disaster. Think of it in terms of cells, but not too hard lol. It isn’t a great analogy. A decentralized society would be best represented by a cellular culture. If one cell- hell, 90% of cells- die, the culture may still be able to recover and regrow. By nature of its complex organization, cells.dying doesn’t necessarily mean death of the culture. The remaining cells can adapt to the endogenous or exogenous pressures that lead to cell death in the first place and come out stronger than before. In this analogy, hierarchy would be considered a single cell. If the surrounding environment becomes inhospitable to the cell, or the cell develops some horrible mutation in one of its organelles, the cell dies. That’s the end of the cell and something else that is either capable of dealing with the environment or isn’t terminally mutated will take its place.

You recognized this in your comment and I can’t do it justice so I’ll stop there on complex systems but I hope I painted a decent picture. See this video for a much better explanation.

On the cyclical nature of human history:

Hierarchy isnt new, and neither are horizontal societies. Human history is a tapestry of these social forms existing in parallel, with one being more prevelant than the other at times. Most of our written history has occurred in some form of hierarchical society, but the majority of human history points toward a largely horizontal structure. I won’t call these structures anarchic, but they do speak to the horizontal impulses present in the overwhelming majority of humans.

The way I, and many anarchists, see it, people have cooperative and competitive impulses. A horizontal social structure reinforces our cooperative drive, while a hierarchical social structure reinforces our competitive drive. Human history as we currently understand it seems to bear this truth out. The late anthropologist David Graeber has said that human history seems to operate on a roughly 500 year cycle; where different social forms emerge, replace their predecessor, grow in strength and area, and are eventually replaced by other emergent forms. This isn’t necessarily saying hierarchical forms are replaced by horizontal forms. Feudalism was replaced by capitalism after all. It’s simply pointing out that social organizations seem to have an expiration date. Capitalism emerged in the 16th century, it may be well on its way to replacement. Anarchists want to replace it with something as close to anarchy as we can imagine. In 500 years anarchy may go down on the path you described. With people slowly reinventing hierarchical forms that were abolished well beyond living memory. It might also be replaced by something more horizontal and equitable than we can imagine. A post-anarchy, if you will.

I hope that these errant threads were able to answer your question. I wanted to add some more thoughts here to kind of tie them all together but I’m coming up short. This reply wasn’t as direct as my last one, but the resources I’ve peppered throughout my comment may be able to satisfy that if I missed the mark here.

Feel free to ask any more questions you might have too! I’m happy to have a go at them

Edit: just wanted to throw in anarchy in a nutshell is order without authority. That’s what the circle A symbolizes!

There’s a few ways you could take that. I’m reading your comment as a more structural concern over something like disorganized street violence so that’s how I’ll be approaching this. I’m also a social anarchist (pro organization), there are individualist anarchists (broadly anti organization) who may have a different perspective.

Anarchists don’t advocate for only abolishing structural hierarchies. We also labor to build horizontal organizations to serve as opposition and an eventual replacement of these hierarchies. This is called prefiguration, often described as “building the new in the shell of the old”. To oppose mob violence and territorial domination, these structures may take the form of neighborhood councils, community defense forces, or larger federated iterations of these bodies.

The thing that distinguishes these organizations from their hierarchical counterparts (municipal councils and police respectively) is the distribution and flow of power. These bodies are organized in a horizontal fashion; where the power flows from the bottom up. The people living in a given area might convene at regular intervals to coordinate efforts that are relevant to them. For example, a neighborhood council may organize a community defense force, composed of members in the community. The council would determine the scope of responsibilities for the defense force, allocate resources and equipment, and hash out other administrative contingencies.

Positions of “power” within these bodies and organizations would be confined to delegates, who are given explicit tasks to accomplish, are immediately revocable by the community at any time, and who’s position would be dissolved upon completion of their task. In addition, it’s common to have these delegations to be assigned by rotation (think jury duty, in a sense) to community members.

This isn’t everything, of course. But I hope that gave you a rough idea of how these structures would be capable of combatting violence within a community. Bodies like these form a “government” of sorts to manage an area. I didn’t mention it above but its worth pointing out that these organizations are voluntary. Anarchy is all about creating a world without coercion. It’s been demonstrated time and again that people want to be involved in their communities, they want to help shape the world in a meaningful way and these structures simply provide a means for individuals to do their part in the ways they’re capable and willing to do so.

All of these structures could be scaled up as well through federation, where communities coordinate on mutual goals for the betterment of each other. We know these and similar organizational forms are viable because they’ve been done before and are being done to this day. The CNT-FAI, Zapatistas, and Rojava are examples.

The CNT-FAI were a Spanish anarcho-symdicalist organization that controlled much of Spain during the Spanish revolution. They were successfully combatting the fascist forces within Spain until the USSR betrayed them. It’s a long and interesting story that my few sentences are absolutely not doing justice lol.

If you’d like to learn how the Zapatistas and Rojava function, I’ve linked a few videos that go into some detail on their history and social structure. There aren’t many resources like that for the CNT-FAI, unfortunately.

Oh boy do I have some great news for you! That’s what anarchism is all about. Right wing “libertarians” stole the word from anarchists way back when. There’s a deep political and intellectual tradition spanning two centuries exploring and philosophizing what it means to have order without authority and how to construct a society without government. I’d be happy to leave some reading/watching/listening material for you if you’d like to see what real libertarianism is about

They provided a statement. Seeing as you’re alive and commenting, I think it’s safe to assume you aren’t them and, therefore, aren’t able to speak on what was happening in their head leading up to this. So how about we take this person at their word and stop making ignorant ass comments that disrespect someone who showed more bravery and resolve than anybody in this thread ever will? People can do with their lives as they please. You don’t have to agree with it but you also shouldn’t be a dick about it

This isn’t suicide in the sense that the word “suicide” implies. It was a deliberate political statement. Calling it suicide misrepresents and diminishes the intent behind Matt Nelson’s actions

Shouldve renamed him to baguette

Doog