A quick rant.
The political compass led many people to believe that anarchist tendencies (or anarchist 'schools of thought') are like a list of systems you can choose from. It's probably the main reason why fresh internet-anarchists most commonly identify as anarcho-communists, because it offers a vision for what a hypothetical anarchist society might look like. They went shopping for a new ideology, and then they waste hours defending and debating how these imaginary future anarchists would handle criminals. They waste too much time answering inherently flawed questions and misconceptions, too worried about practicality.
This "anarchism as a system" way of thinking makes individualist approaches inaccessible. It makes post-left critique seem useless. It makes people confuse tactics with critique, historical movements with theory.
I'm starting to think that modern anarcho-communists in particular aren't too interested in anarchy. They often put communism first, the 'anarcho' part is then merely used to distance themselves from authoritarian/statist stuff. To many ancoms, mutualism is some weird economic system that doesn't exclude markets. On the political compass, markets seem much closer to right-wing libertarian ideas, markets seem closer to capitalism, so that must mean mutualism is less anarchistic than anarcho-communism, right?
None of this shit matters. It's silly to think we can design an alternative beforehand, in detail. Some of these ideas can offer a contrast to what is now, they may be helpful for people to realize that it doesn't actually have to be the way it is now. But that's about it. When you hold on to ideas of 'how it should be', you limit yourself to a very narrow set of ideas that have very little to do with today's reality, and that in itself will most likely do more harm than good.
BrowseDuringClass1917 wrote
You can’t map any ideology like that, it’s mega liberalism