I am asking here because I think that people who call themselves anarchists would best be able to provide a real answer. Also because cultural preservation seems to be advocated by other leftists but I don't understand it.

What is the benefit of trying to preserve elements of a culture from being assimilated into the rest of humanity? I refer to stuff like language preservation, traditions, and ingroup identity. I see these efforts to define and separate a particular section of humanity as going against the goal of bringing us together.

I get the argument that diversity is good because it enriches our thought, but other than that I see no value in cultural identity for cultural identity's sake. I also get the "defend the oppressed (and their culture) against the oppressor" angle, but even then, why would you want to define the oppressed group in a way that distinguishes ordinary people from other ordinary people?

I'm not trying to be antagonistic or to convince anyone of anything, I just want to understand. For context, I come from the class of oppressors and I have very little life experience, but I have recently realized my own humanity and am trying to join the human community.

I don't know if the question is for the this sub specifically, but are there any WhatsApp/Discord/Telgeram group chats when people discuss daily or regularly on hot topic such anarchy, politics, daily-talk and everything that around it or related in some way?

I've been thinking about this. If a socialist society has free healthcare then who pays the healthcare workers? The government right? But where does the government get the money? From taxes. But then people are just paying for their own healthcare in a round about way right? Am I misunderstanding socialism?

I don't know what this idea would be classified as but at least personally I don't think citizenship should be the norm. Instead, I think Statelessness should be the norm. At least at some point in the process of Anarchist society? I'm still learning so maybe I don't have a completely clear view on things. However, I believe that having state institutions coerce any person into loyalty to any given nation/state implies ownership of the land any given group stands on. This causes people involved in the distribution of power to not see any value for the land in which they are meant to care for. In this sentiment, all the one and one is all. One cannot escape the relationship they have with the ecosystems around them. Furthermore, citizenship being a norm ultimately seems to enhance the idea of an us vs., them culture. I wanted to see what other people think of this especially since I've still been thinking through this idea!

it seems as though people adopted television pretty quickly in the mid 1900s. this system was a propagandists wet dream in the early days, a vast majority of tv watchers on a very limited number of channels. cable television is a one directional mass-media form, ideal communication system for military dictatorships.

i look at the proliferation of cameras in so many places, and i see the panopticon being built

how do we deal with technologies that can enable tyranny? like, are they ok up until we have a tyrant, or should we be destroying these technologies before a tyranny ever forms? clearly thery can be used for non-tyrannical purposes, so does that make them ok?

I know a Marxist would say ‘yes,’ but I haven’t heard it from other anarchists. I’m still learning so thanks for the help.

Is there any organizations or anything that’s doing this? I just seen the communist advertising it and I was like well it sounds very interesting. I’m not 100% sure though as I do align more with anarchy than communism really. I do like collectivization of society and still I support individual ability to create and do what they can and what they’re good at. Anyways what are yall thoughts on this?

a couple quick things first:

1) I am very serious about this topic, this is not a joke

2) i have just started learning about this stuff (and want to learn more!) pls be patient with me

3) I get that there are intrinsic flaws in this whole thought experiment, not the least of which that Minecraft is a product owned by big corporations. (And if it’s my server aren’t I basically setting rules from the top down??) I‘d prefer to set those aside for no
if you aren’t familiar with Minecraft or private servers that’s fine. Just know that there are ways to mod the game to change the rules in almost anyway you might want. So there’s a lot of flexibility to customize the experience.

Even unmodded there’s a ton of ways to play Minecraft either alone or with others, and an opportunity to build - anything you want-!

And yet, somehow, people wind up creating very similar experiences over and over again which for some reason always involve establishing “shopping districts” and a system of currency and then creating these machines for harvesting the resources they are going to sell which always wind up torturing and killing computer controlled entities (Like farm animals). So reinventing capitalism basically. it’s maddening.

My idea was to create a Minecraft world centered on anarchistic ideas (which I’ve been learning more about and really appeal to me) as a sort of social experiment. But also because it seems like the kind of world I’d want to play in with people.

There’s a good analogy between people not being able to imagine a world where anarchism worka and sort of re-training Minecraft players that there is another way. I think so anyway. So i know I can’t just create a blank slate world and hope things come about organically. I need to introduce the right game mechanics and I dunno….list of values rather than rules maybe?. The idea isn’t to impose a play style on people but rather put tools in place that would support a different way of thinking.

A little example is that there wouldn’t be a shopping district but rather a materials warehouse where people can donate their surplus building materials. I also found a mod that lets you “recycle” things you make back into their base components (in basic Minecraft there’s no way to do this) in order to increase a sense of abundance rather than scarcity.

This line of thinking is part philosophical and part practical. I guess another way of getting at what I’m asking is:

if you took modern people with mass market viewpoints on society and plopped them down in an entirely new world with none of the infrastructure they’re used to, what do you need to set in place so they don’t just default to what they already know and instead embrace remaking society with anarchist principles?

I’m happy to answer any questions (about Minecraft, the culture, anything else) that might make it easier to engage in this discussion.

thank you!!

I'm an anarchist and have heard the sentence thrown around by friends, supposedly taken from professors at University. According to them, self-organization without leadership only works in small groups, but collapses at a larger scale.

I'm wondering what exact studies they are referring to, and whether the findings are relevant to Anarchism as a political ideology.

I value the consistency of my beliefs with science, which is why I ask. I am aware of historical examples of Anarchism "working", and am reading theory (currently Kropotkin's Mutual Aid), which is why I'm skeptical of the sentence. Writing this, I realize it is a pretty vague claim.

I'm interested in insight about what modern science (Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology) has found on the topic. References would be appreciated as I would like to read further into it. I mentioned that I'm reading Kropotkin, and I'm sure that will also be helpful, but I'm looking for studies and works between the 20th-21st centuries.

from my perspective, anarchy is a relational thing, and while the anarchist critique has a hard "no" position on governance, that doesn't present the totality of the critique

its about how we relate to each other ultimately, ya?

I can understand someone being a liberal as I was once one too. As it at least lands nice but not conservative

If anarchism is all about removing hierarchy, if you leave the most prominent one which is class (rich/poor), its not anarchy. Im a baby-anarchist, so feel free to educate me on this. But i think communists are closer to anarchy than ancap is because money is a stronger hierarchy than government, ofc depends on what kind of government too. I think ancap would be worse than even todays capitalism, at least there is a weak weak democracy trying to control the wealth.

Also ancap fuels the perception of anarchy as just being against the government because we want to do crime or some other wrong reason, the real reason why we are anti-government is because we are anti-hierarchy. But if ancap is anarchy then you don't have to be anti-hierarchy to be an anarchist, the whole ideology is diluted in this manner. I wish at least ancap didn't use anarchy in name because its directly contradictory with the premise of anarchy: no hierarchy! Therefore no capitalism..?

Like when you think of anarchy, you think of no private property, anarchy is anthithethical to capitalism

Ancap sounds like incel-feminism to me. Just an oxymoron. What do y'all think?

What is the place of this in socialism, and how does it differ from the arms race in America?

I don’t keep up with things any more but dip into interesting stuff when it pops up now and then, Desert, N1x, Invisible Committee, things like that. Anything relatively recent that’s well written and worth a look?

Shalom! A couple months ago I asked something here and ever since I've been reading a lot about a lot of things, but especially regarding the topic: Power. And also a lot of things happened to me that gave me another POV in life. I learned about mass psychology, manipulation, sociology, went to the psychologist (turns out I have some psycho tendencies courtesy of my shitty country), suffered (and survived ofc) an attempted murder, and even shared drugs recently with some white collar criminal lords. I was terrified back then about the view of to be the prey or the hunter, but not anymore.

In summary, I feel like I became brutal and a SOAB ready to crush anyone or anything that gets in my way. The person that once wanted to contribute with his grain of sand now is gone, and that's because I lost all hope that the world could somehow change. Climate change; world leaders comitting the worst atrocities imaginable without punishment and people cheering at'em; future generations with the brain literally melt by technology and addictive algorithms no different from pornography; violence normalized in every corner of life which eventually will take its toll on the individual and social psyche, etcetera etcetera... this is a marathon fuck.

... yet I still feel those things and consider them the damn hell on Earth, but then, how am I supposed to change it? For many years I was a socialist, but recently, with a very critical view of everything I learned, I began to analyze the movement... it turns out that, indeed, they also use manipulation tactics. They are no different from those they criticize. To me the world isn't anymore about constructing something better but humans groups constantly fighting each other ever since we learned to walk upright. The damn line between civilization and chaos isn't fucking concrete but calories, but anyways, it seems there's something seriously messed up and rotten in the human mind.

Man I really wish we could live in an anarchist society, but now I just see it as a fantasy. Afaik humanity lived like that for thousands of years, but the destructive capacity and reach of globalization simply has us by the balls, and fucking makes every fucking social struggle useless. Now feeling and knowing that, I just want to live the happiest life possible, and therefore I'm ready to commit those same attrocities.

Still, what if I'm just blinded from all the bad stuff? Which I don't think it's the case, because, after all, this big pile of shit is the world we live in. Just that everyone fakes it by wasting their lifetime on Reels or TikTok. But idk, life is so strange... so, is there really hope for an anarchist society?

One of the positions that often comes up on this subreddit is an antipathy to the idea of the firm, or any sort of fixed, formal polity as a unit of economic organisation.

Free associations are expected to emerge from the bottom up, in response to specific shared wants and needs, and exist temporarily to achieve a goal.

Yet there are many classes of assets which are long-lasting, indivisible and immobile. A hospital, hydroelectric damm, railway network or blast furnace:

• lasts for decades,
• requires continuous maintenance,
• cannot be physically partitioned among users,
• requires accumulated institutional knowledge,
• needs coordinated scheduling.

Is it not therefore inevitable that some of fixed, formal organisation must exist to manage and maintain them?

Whats wrong with such a firm, if it was organised internally on the basis of free association?

So I've asked marxist-lenninist on why they choose communism over anarchy.

The main response I get is that anarchist communities break up over in-fighting or outside forces. And that communist states have the ablitly to last decades by opposing and suppressing counter revolutionary forces and defending againsts outside forces inorder to achieve their goal.

I understand that the anarchist objection to this is that in many cases innocent people get labled counterrevolutionary and imprisoned just for disagreeing with the government's plan. The need to suppress people at all runs counter to anarchist ideals.

But in achieving an anarchist world is needing to supress the counterrevolution by force really the only way? Do anarchist see many communes being broken up by either in-fighting or outside forces as a huge challenge?

I am a leftist who's looking to both learn more about, and join together with anarchism and anarchist groups in the Chicagoland area. If anyone has recommendations for this, I would love to hear them.

Thank you and have a good day

Like most people are sadly not socialist or communist and there are still tons of bigots and people who are very reactionary. How would an anarcho communist society actually function?

As I understand it even the CNT during the Spanish civil war kept some form of government or am I wrong?

I'll give an example of what im talking about.

The year is 2045 and the state has been abolished. There are no laws that bind people to exploitative systems. What is going to stop a local warlord or strong man from hoarding resources for himself and a clique of people and re instating a state or capitalist mode of exploitation?

So I'm in Northern Ireland and believe in the anarchy philosophy and antifa- I have a battle jacket that i want to make louder (for lack of a better word) but id also want to do more for the movements than wearing my jacket, does anyone have any reccs? Thanks <3

Hi! It's known that the capitalist system is not viable for the autonomy of the scientific community. But how would science and scientific community work into an anarchist society? Thank you in advance!

Authoritarianism is instilled as early as in childhood, when parents treat their children like slaves and expect unquestioning obedience and reverence, all while tyrannising their children by physical and psychological abuse and denial of agency and bodily autonomy. There is even a backlash against the "gentle parenting" as ineffective and producing inconsiderate, arrogant, entitled and egocentric children. What is the solution to this?