Submitted by heckthepolice2 in quotes

This is a short batch of solo songs, prompted by my ongoing reflections on anarchism. I'm still quite young, but most people who get involved with anarchist circles are not still around by the time they're my age (at least in my experience of anarchism in the United States). There are innumerable factors that contribute to this phenomena, but these songs are most generally about the sense of escalating difficulty I experience in determining what the point of anything I do as an anarchist is supposed to be. And I can see how that would be a major factor in people drifting away from anarchism as they grow older.

The revolution is not going to happen, at least not the way people wrote about it in the 1800s. "Building the new world in the shell of the old" demands investing inhuman levels of energy into establishing more-or-less effective models of alternative social values so that they can be stripped for parts by recuperators before being demolished entirely. The charity work anarchists often undertake (Food Not Bombs, bike co-ops, etc) is all nice and friendly stuff, but it is harder and harder for me to convince myself that it is related in any way to the overall project of establishing a world without domination.

Anarchism penetrated my thinking twelve years ago, and no other conception of life has threatened to supplant it since. Yet there is no apparent path from this world to another. I have no solution to this dilema. So these are songs about sticking it out anyway--probably not due to any rationality on my part, but also not just out of stubbornness.

Perhaps what I'm trying to communicate with these songs is that I became an anarchist the way one falls in love, not the way one balances competing arguments in a debate. To be so in love with freedom that everything becomes worth risking for it requires the madness of romance and lust, not the reason of a logician.

Turning away from it all now would be to live a life knowing what passion is, but never permitting myself to experience it. There are many good reasons to believe anarchism is stupid, but I'm not sure anything would be more stupid than living like that.

-Pat the Bunny, November 2013

https://ramshackleglory.bandcamp.com/album/the-volatile-utopian-real-estate-market

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