Recent comments in /f/AnarchistFAQ

ziq OP wrote (edited )

It would be explained in the wiki in about 500 words. E.g.

If not democracy, then what?

Instead of democracy, anarchists advocate for anarchy. This means no person or group gets to rule / dominate / own any other person or group. It means people get to live their lives and make their own choices without having to submit to the will of a majority group or a body of bureaucrats. It means having control over your own life / decisions / actions rather than outsourcing those decisions to a collective. It means cooperating and associating with people you want to spend your time with and dissociating with people when you decide you want to do something else.

Anarchy isn't a blueprint for building a society, it's not a code of laws or a list of prescriptions for all that ails us. Anarchy doesn't pretend to have all the solutions to disparate problems in wildly diverse cultures across the world. All anarchy does is demonstrate to us through volumes and volumes of direct historical and contemporary evidence that building authority, prescriptive ideology, laws, policing, prisons, mass society strangles our individuality, diminishes our capacity for self sufficiency and mutual aid, enables slavery and trafficking, destroys our ecosystems, installs tyrants who commit genocides on us, triggers mass extinction, institutionalizes massive worldwide trauma.

The solution to authority is to reject authority. To reject domination. To reject any group's amassing of power. To tear down all structures of domination and make sure they stay down.

Etc etc i cant write the whole thing on my phone at 1am

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subrosa OP wrote

Reply to comment by ziq in Couple thoughts. by subrosa

An Anarchist FAQ gets linked a ton because it offers those confident answers. If we want to challenge its position, its monopoly, maybe we should gather information first, see what the most common questions are these days and build from there. I dunno, maybe I'll find some time to outline a different structure or something.

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TheNerdyAnarchist wrote

I feel like a lot of this focuses too much on critique rather than providing any kind of actual solution.

e.g. the democracy section - all is well and good in terms of the critique that's there, but all that does is make the reader go "okay...so then what?" - seemingly to a responding chorus of "uhh,...."

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ziq wrote (edited )

I originally wanted to call it Anarchy in the 21st Century or Modern Anarchy and just have it be like 5000 words to introduce people briefly to maybe 50 basic points of anarchy without it being steeped in spite for non workerists and anyone else who doesn't follow the syndie program.

The current faq having a monopoly on introducing anarchy to noobs is doing too much damage to go unchallenged.

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subrosa OP wrote

Reply to comment by subrosa in Couple thoughts. by subrosa

Maybe there needs to be a dozen more FAQs, and maybe it doesn't hurt to have one that reflects the ideas of a few of us on raddle. But I have my doubts about the utility of that, it's like writing manifestos for imaginary parties/movements. "Screenshots" that conserve our current ideas.

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subrosa OP wrote (edited )

Reply to comment by Tequilx_Wolf in Couple thoughts. by subrosa

Not entirely sure how to fix that sentence. I'll try to clarify.

I made a bit of an unmentioned transition, a pivot, from talking about the assumed coherency/consensus of one anarchism (that can produce an FAQ) that "we" (e.g. "we" on raddle, 'us' writing the new FAQ) don't have, to a more general point about not having an "anarchism-in-general". Which shares the same issues, it runs into the same problems. How do we account for the many different approaches and conceptual tools without watering them all down with very 'general' uses and unquestioned appropriateness? Or without contradicting ourselves?

This, I think, calls for conscious and careful synthesis, instead of listing things we associate with anarchy or things we oppose. And instead of assuming we charge our words with the same meaning. That synthesis in turn requires a good amount of mutual understanding, and probably doesn't always result in digestible answers for an FAQ.

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Tequilx_Wolf wrote (edited )

I'll read through this slowly and engage, but for now I'm at

The very idea that there can be "an anarchist FAQ" assumes

and want to disagree, I think the use of "An" rather than "The" implies one possible one of many. Maybe that can be made explicit though.

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ziq OP wrote (edited )

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OdiousOutlaw wrote (edited )

Any particular plans or outlines for what else needs to be done?

Like, Egoism has a section, so is explaining the basics of the non-social anarchist schools of thought on the table?

Is an anti-civ section on back burner?

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ziq wrote (edited )

This was the trigger. Also the author shits on anticivs at every opportunity and pretends green anarchy means Bookchinism, while putting actual forms of green anarchy in scare quotes and attacking them as antisocial and dangerous.

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tuesday wrote

their brand of anarchism as THE mainstream Anarchism

This is a personal pet peeve of mine of anarchists and why I avoid ascribing to any set theory of anarchy. My opinion is my opinion and yours is yours. We can guess and hope but there's no authority on what an anarchist society will look like.

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Gwen_Isilith wrote

No I like your response these are definitely the questions one should ask oneself. I don't mean this as the answer but my own answer to these questions I primarily relate to nihlist anti-morality in that I can only really react to speech as it relates to my self and that I want to challenge the common interpretive lenses one uses on speech aka ideology.

So I don't want to say speech is neutral or anything: if someone says "you want to fight" that could be a friend being playful or someone who actually wants to fight, and one can definitely find malicious intent in other speech. But I don't think one can judge the speech of others in absolutes; this word or phrase is wrong, only in how it relates to oneself.

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kin wrote

Reply to comment by Noir_ in Question from an anonymous redditor by ziq

Usually we are happy to have new users but one thing that happens is the new users not checking the Terms of Service.

Why we have it? Because this site is not darknet place where anything goes and because we have certain discourses (abusive and oppressive ones) we want to keep out. You see this community was born out of a shared political understanding.

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