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Nope, don’t have the link and I’m not going to spend the enrgy to find it, either… I don’t bother with online anarchists - I sure as hell hope the offline kind is less cringy.
And no, it had nothing to do with mutual aid groups… he was exhorting people to knock on doors and “organise” - you know, that thing breadtube lipflappers are always talking about but never actually show themselves doing.
I expect this kind of shit from tankies - they are, by design, it seems - “lead from the back” types. But when anarchists do it it simply demonstrates how hopelessly disconnected they are from the working class they supposedly want to “liberate.”
I’d seen him suggest knocking on your neighbors doors to get to know them so you can build community and organize ICE watch groups. Without more context it’s hard to see those suggestions as negative.
“organise” - you know, that thing breadtube lipflappers are always talking about but never actually show themselves doing.
I take it you’re unfamiliar with his involvement in Cooperation Tulsa? He’s been organizing and getting involved with that group and making videos on it for quite a few years now, which is involved in a lot of really solid community organizing.
I take it you’re unfamiliar with his involvement in Cooperation Tulsa?
Okay, I’ll eat your humble pie. I’m wrong about that.
This is better. If anarchists wants to be taken seriously by the working class, they’re going to have to do more doing and a lot less talking - in fact, I’ll advise them to tone down on the talking until they can actually figure out how to actually talk to the working class again. They did know how to do this, once.
can build community and organize ICE watch groups.
The members of the working class that is willing and, more importantly, capable of doing that is already doing so, and they did not need Youtube leftists cajoling them into doing so.
The left has never earned the right to lecture the working class on what to do, and it never will - but the working class has always proven willing to be influenced by those elements of the left that is willing to lead by example.
It’s not about money… it’s about what it is that you’re offering.
It’s easy to join, or get people to join, something that already exists. But if there is nothing to start off with, there might be damn good reasons why there isn’t. And you need to think twice before telling people to “bootstrap” it into existence.
If anarchists wants to be taken seriously by the working class, they’re going to have to do more doing and a lot less talking
That suggests that Anarchists are not working class, and are somehow talking ‘down’ to working class, but they very much are the working class figuring out how to solve their own problems.
It’s not about money… it’s about what it is that you’re offering.
What are you talking about? What do you think makes someone working class or not? If they work for someone else for a wage to live, they are working class.
Did you literally just forget how this conversation started in the first place?
but they very much are the working class figuring out how to solve their own problems.
So all the anarchists I see distancing themselves from the working class by referring to the working class as “normies” is merely a figment of my imagination? If you are, that would be nice… but then you’d have to explain to me why the only anarchists you find in my country are edgy white liberal kids at elite universities.
What are you talking about?
What did you think the working class really cares about? Explain to me how we keep the electricity on, the water flowing through the pipes, the food shelves stocked (community gardens doesn’t even qualify as a start) and the pharmacies in a working condition. Show me the nuts and bolts from which a plan can be built.
It’s a fantastic historical event we can learn from and build upon, and that book should hopefully answer how we’ll keep the pipes flowing and the pharmacies running.
As for things average people can do to contribute toward building that sort of future, it’s obviously not something that can be done overnight. It’ll involve building alternative, decentralized power structures that can, over time, slowly make us less reliant on the state and its powers. Basically, building something new within the shell of the old.
Many people can only contribute a little of their time and energy in-between commitments from their job to keep them and their families alive, but with enough joining in, alternatives can be built. Starting small (short guide toward the bottom of that post) is what most of us can do, and I think Anark’s Cooperation Tulsa project is a good example of that in action. After being the seed to get it started, he has seen steady growth and more involvement, even grants/funding from his local county/town government after seeing the work he has done.
Building up radical unions (like the IWW), teaching others how to start tenet unions, starting worker owned cooperatives, converting or building cooperatively owned housing, etc, are all a bit harder to start, and often more risky, but they are very impactful building blocks that serve to give us working class folk breathing room financially, giving us more time into building these alternative systems.
the food shelves stocked (community gardens doesn’t even qualify as a start)
I wouldn’t dismiss them. According to studies, smaller scale urban gardening and community gardens are actually capable of up to ten times higher yields compared to industrial farming. You can read more on that in the comments of this post here.
And I agree, ultimately we’ll need to have independent food production. That may take ques from how Cuba does urban gardening, and could be combined with quite promising Edenicity apartment complexes with rooftop growing areas combined with converted parking lots (some solid number crunching on the real-world viability of that in the video), which should allow for cities to be mostly food independent, as well as making it viable to produce their own textiles locally.
If you want to see a potential end-point for all this, The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin offers a very grounded and in depth look into how an Anarchist society could function as a target we can aim toward and be hopeful about, which itself is very important.
A for effort - and I’m not being sarcastic. I need you to understand that before I start pointing out all the problems with this approach of yours.
1936 Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War
Sounds absolutely grand. But how did it fail?
When I ask anarchists this, the answer I inevitably get boils down to something along the lines of, “the anarchists were stabbed in the back by tankies and liberals.”
That’s not an answer - that’s a cop-out.
Firstly, the tankie/lib alliance did not stab the anarchists in the back. They stabbed the anarchists in the chest - in fact, the anarchists saw the knife coming from a mile away and was still incapable of preventing it. It’s very easy to blame the liberals and the tankies… it’s much harder to analyse why anarchism seems so uniquely incapable of resisting (never mind taking the fight to) the political machinations of liberalism. I’d go even further and argue that anarchism’s apparent inadequacy in the face of liberal realpolitik is even more evident today than it was in 1936.
This is not a praxis problem - it’s a theory problem. Or rather, a lack of theory problem.
Secondly, studying the successes of anarchist Catalonia (or Makhnovist Ukraine, or the Paris Commune, or whatever failed libertarian socialist project you might want to mention) is a dead-end as far as theory goes. Political theory that is built on past successes are next to useless… theory that is built on a sober (and granular) appreciation of failure is not.
The socialist experiments in Rojava and Chiappas proves this - both owe their existence to tankies who went back to the drawing board, critically reviewed the very Marxist-Leninist fuckups they had committed, and dumped Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy overboard (the fact that tankies dislike talking about these two projects proves as much). Should anarchists, perhaps, do the same? The “lame-duck” status of anarchism since the end of WW2 suggests… yes.
There is, by now, slightly more than an eighty-year gap between anarchist Catalonia and the present time - that’s an eighty-year period where anarchists have failed to make any real headway against the post-war liberal consensus. This is not something that is going to be fixed by wishfully hoping that enough people will be “joining in.” What stopped people from “joining in” during the sixties? The seventies? The eighties?
My answer to that would be… the same thing that’s stopping them from “joining in” now - and that is, the lack of a proper theoretical framework that allows not just anarchists but also the working class to easily problematise the liberal consensus. The lack of this framework is on display literally in the very first source you posted - any self-described “libertarian socialist” that frames the concept of democracy as some kind of “problem” that requires solving will (justifiably) raise a lot of red flags with the working class. It seems that “killing the liberal inside your own head” is something that a lot of anarchists preach… but do not necessarily practice.
Nope, don’t have the link and I’m not going to spend the enrgy to find it, either… I don’t bother with online anarchists - I sure as hell hope the offline kind is less cringy.
And no, it had nothing to do with mutual aid groups… he was exhorting people to knock on doors and “organise” - you know, that thing breadtube lipflappers are always talking about but never actually show themselves doing.
I expect this kind of shit from tankies - they are, by design, it seems - “lead from the back” types. But when anarchists do it it simply demonstrates how hopelessly disconnected they are from the working class they supposedly want to “liberate.”
I’d seen him suggest knocking on your neighbors doors to get to know them so you can build community and organize ICE watch groups. Without more context it’s hard to see those suggestions as negative.
I take it you’re unfamiliar with his involvement in Cooperation Tulsa? He’s been organizing and getting involved with that group and making videos on it for quite a few years now, which is involved in a lot of really solid community organizing.
Okay, I’ll eat your humble pie. I’m wrong about that.
This is better. If anarchists wants to be taken seriously by the working class, they’re going to have to do more doing and a lot less talking - in fact, I’ll advise them to tone down on the talking until they can actually figure out how to actually talk to the working class again. They did know how to do this, once.
The members of the working class that is willing and, more importantly, capable of doing that is already doing so, and they did not need Youtube leftists cajoling them into doing so.
The left has never earned the right to lecture the working class on what to do, and it never will - but the working class has always proven willing to be influenced by those elements of the left that is willing to lead by example.
Anark has mentioned multiple times that he’s barely able to afford rent. Most Anarchists are working class, it is very rare that they are well off.
It’s not about money… it’s about what it is that you’re offering.
It’s easy to join, or get people to join, something that already exists. But if there is nothing to start off with, there might be damn good reasons why there isn’t. And you need to think twice before telling people to “bootstrap” it into existence.
I responded to this:
That suggests that Anarchists are not working class, and are somehow talking ‘down’ to working class, but they very much are the working class figuring out how to solve their own problems.
What are you talking about? What do you think makes someone working class or not? If they work for someone else for a wage to live, they are working class.
Did you literally just forget how this conversation started in the first place?
So all the anarchists I see distancing themselves from the working class by referring to the working class as “normies” is merely a figment of my imagination? If you are, that would be nice… but then you’d have to explain to me why the only anarchists you find in my country are edgy white liberal kids at elite universities.
What did you think the working class really cares about? Explain to me how we keep the electricity on, the water flowing through the pipes, the food shelves stocked (community gardens doesn’t even qualify as a start) and the pharmacies in a working condition. Show me the nuts and bolts from which a plan can be built.
I’ll give it my best shot.
1936 Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War organized an Anarchist society with over 3 million participants, and they documented much of how exactly they ran it, right down to how they kept the electric trams for public transport going (there is a fantastic book embedded at the bottom of that article, Collectives in the Spanish Revolution by Gaston Leval, which offers more details on other aspects of how they operated that society).
It’s a fantastic historical event we can learn from and build upon, and that book should hopefully answer how we’ll keep the pipes flowing and the pharmacies running.
As for things average people can do to contribute toward building that sort of future, it’s obviously not something that can be done overnight. It’ll involve building alternative, decentralized power structures that can, over time, slowly make us less reliant on the state and its powers. Basically, building something new within the shell of the old.
Many people can only contribute a little of their time and energy in-between commitments from their job to keep them and their families alive, but with enough joining in, alternatives can be built. Starting small (short guide toward the bottom of that post) is what most of us can do, and I think Anark’s Cooperation Tulsa project is a good example of that in action. After being the seed to get it started, he has seen steady growth and more involvement, even grants/funding from his local county/town government after seeing the work he has done.
Building up radical unions (like the IWW), teaching others how to start tenet unions, starting worker owned cooperatives, converting or building cooperatively owned housing, etc, are all a bit harder to start, and often more risky, but they are very impactful building blocks that serve to give us working class folk breathing room financially, giving us more time into building these alternative systems.
I wouldn’t dismiss them. According to studies, smaller scale urban gardening and community gardens are actually capable of up to ten times higher yields compared to industrial farming. You can read more on that in the comments of this post here.
And I agree, ultimately we’ll need to have independent food production. That may take ques from how Cuba does urban gardening, and could be combined with quite promising Edenicity apartment complexes with rooftop growing areas combined with converted parking lots (some solid number crunching on the real-world viability of that in the video), which should allow for cities to be mostly food independent, as well as making it viable to produce their own textiles locally.
If you want to see a potential end-point for all this, The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin offers a very grounded and in depth look into how an Anarchist society could function as a target we can aim toward and be hopeful about, which itself is very important.
A for effort - and I’m not being sarcastic. I need you to understand that before I start pointing out all the problems with this approach of yours.
Sounds absolutely grand. But how did it fail?
When I ask anarchists this, the answer I inevitably get boils down to something along the lines of, “the anarchists were stabbed in the back by tankies and liberals.”
That’s not an answer - that’s a cop-out.
Firstly, the tankie/lib alliance did not stab the anarchists in the back. They stabbed the anarchists in the chest - in fact, the anarchists saw the knife coming from a mile away and was still incapable of preventing it. It’s very easy to blame the liberals and the tankies… it’s much harder to analyse why anarchism seems so uniquely incapable of resisting (never mind taking the fight to) the political machinations of liberalism. I’d go even further and argue that anarchism’s apparent inadequacy in the face of liberal realpolitik is even more evident today than it was in 1936.
This is not a praxis problem - it’s a theory problem. Or rather, a lack of theory problem.
Secondly, studying the successes of anarchist Catalonia (or Makhnovist Ukraine, or the Paris Commune, or whatever failed libertarian socialist project you might want to mention) is a dead-end as far as theory goes. Political theory that is built on past successes are next to useless… theory that is built on a sober (and granular) appreciation of failure is not.
The socialist experiments in Rojava and Chiappas proves this - both owe their existence to tankies who went back to the drawing board, critically reviewed the very Marxist-Leninist fuckups they had committed, and dumped Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy overboard (the fact that tankies dislike talking about these two projects proves as much). Should anarchists, perhaps, do the same? The “lame-duck” status of anarchism since the end of WW2 suggests… yes.
There is, by now, slightly more than an eighty-year gap between anarchist Catalonia and the present time - that’s an eighty-year period where anarchists have failed to make any real headway against the post-war liberal consensus. This is not something that is going to be fixed by wishfully hoping that enough people will be “joining in.” What stopped people from “joining in” during the sixties? The seventies? The eighties?
My answer to that would be… the same thing that’s stopping them from “joining in” now - and that is, the lack of a proper theoretical framework that allows not just anarchists but also the working class to easily problematise the liberal consensus. The lack of this framework is on display literally in the very first source you posted - any self-described “libertarian socialist” that frames the concept of democracy as some kind of “problem” that requires solving will (justifiably) raise a lot of red flags with the working class. It seems that “killing the liberal inside your own head” is something that a lot of anarchists preach… but do not necessarily practice.