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celebratedrecluse wrote

I've heard some wannabe world-builders say friendship is a weak bond to base a life on, that friends are as unreliable as the anonymous community members they so revere. But those same people will always extol law, order and democracy no matter how many times those houses of straw blow up in their faces. And honestly, is anything more insufferable than utopian communists critiquing someone else’s supposed idealism?

A very good point.

critiques I can make, of the implications of friendship as a building-block/praxis for anarchists, are: that affinity groups are liable to continually split off during times of stress, divide into fractious conflictual groups based on respectability politics/old disagreements, distract anarchists from their other goals of life into petty feuds with bookchin fucks and other fringe groups, and fail to provide a supportive or nurturing structure that can supplant something like a state. Additionally, inequalities between people who are attempting this affinity-based praxis are likely to exacerbate and worsen any underlying problems in the interaction, and re-create hierarchies as people with less means are attached to people with more means, while the whole thing is papered over with "friendship" just like the bookchin fuckers paper over similar problems in "community". so, relabeling the attempt in a brighter label, can still neglect to address the fundamental problems of such a dynamic of anarchists trying to find safe/effective ways to socialize and interact in a lattice, although I still think this is striking closer to the vein than "community".

As bad as being stuck in a toxic community is, continually shaving people off from affinity groups is also a problem when there is no anarchist steel framing to connect the gaps in such a lattice. Many young people have few or no friends at all; especially young men, in many places. While aloneliness is certainly a problem for many people in various parts of their lives, it is paradoxically indivisible from the problem of fundamental loneliness which drives people to such toxic communities in the first place. And such loneliness, affects anarchists more than others, for we are people who often yearn for each other more than archists and apathetics who are content enough to dissolve themselves in asocial, mechanistic "society", employment, media, consumption, whatever other diversions and systematizations that suit their predilections. Anarchists have always been one group of people that wants more than that, and strive to create more than that at great personal and collective risk. This is not irrational, or wronghearted, it is something deeply rooted and inextricable from the problems you identify, it is all part of the same systemization of alienation.

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ziq OP wrote

Credit to /u/Ennui for that observation.. It was so astute I had to shamelessly lift it.

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ziq OP wrote

And also to octox on anarchyplanet's IRC for the 'weak bond' observation and the suggestion for the fangs/claws/docility part.

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