Anarchism and Social Ecology
!anarchism@slrpnk.net
A community about anarchy. anarchism, social ecology, and communalism for SLRPNK! Solarpunk anarchists unite!
Feel free to ask questions here. We aspire to make this space a safe space. SLRPNK.net's basic rules apply here, but generally don't be a dick and don't be an authoritarian.
Anarchism
Anarchism is a social and political theory and practice that works for a free society without domination and hierarchy.
Social Ecology
Social Ecology, developed from green anarchism, is the idea that our ecological problems have their ultimate roots in our social problems. This is because the domination of nature and our ecology by humanity has its ultimate roots in the domination humanity by humans. Therefore, the solutions to our ecological problems are found by addressing our social and ecological problems simultaneously.
Libraries
Audiobooks
- General audiobooks
- LibriVox Public domain book collection where you can find audiobooks from old communist, socialist, and anarchist authors.
- Anarchist audiobooks
- Socialist Audiobooks
- Social Ecology Audiobooks
Quotes
Poetry and imagination must be integrated with science and technology, for we have evolved beyond an innocence that can be nourished exclusively by myths and dreams.
~ Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom
People want to treat ‘we’ll figure it out by working to get there’ as some sort of rhetorical evasion instead of being a fundamental expression of trust in the power of conscious collective effort.
~Anonymous, but quoted by Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
~Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.
~Murray Bookchin, "A Politics for the Twenty-First Century"
There can be no separation of the revolutionary process from the revolutionary goal. A society based on self-administration must be achieved by means of self-administration.
~Murray Bookchin, Post Scarcity Anarchism
In modern times humans have become a wolf not only to humans, but to all nature.
The ecological question is fundamentally solved as the system is repressed and a socialist social system develops. That does not mean you cannot do something for the environment right away. On the contrary, it is necessary to combine the fight for the environment with the struggle for a general social revolution...
~Abdullah Öcalan
Social ecology advances a message that calls not only for a society free of hierarchy and hierarchical sensibilities, but for an ethics that places humanity in the natural world as an agent for rendering evolution social and natural fully self-conscious.
~ Murray Bookchin
Network
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They were asking specifically about communalism, not communism.
Well caught. It started of as an autocorrect error and then I lost sight.
Anarchy rejects formal structures "all power corrupts".
Communalism accepts some formal structures "we need power to create something democratic .. ". I don't think communalism scales very well. It becomes someone's communism as the numbers increase.
There are some communalism set-up in the west of England, I think it's more of an off grid thing, but they're long lived. Maybe they're collapsed now.
Perhaps you're referring to theory I haven't read, but does anarchism really reject structure itself? Certainly hierarchical structures are rejected, but organisation requires structure, even if it's a flat one.
I haven't know anarchy any other way, so I'm a little confused about the distinction. Granted, there are many flavours of anarchy and I don't know them well, but I thought they all accepted structure itself while rejecting the hierarchical.
Like you say, there's lot of schools of thought around this. I think most everyone acknowledges that you have to have some level of organization in order for society to function. The question is, at what scale?
Some would say anarchy can exist alongside a state. Anarchy is how a community meets its needs when the state doesn't, filling in the gaps between the broader pillars. The idea is that anarchy can "grow past" the state by outperforming larger institutions that don't benefit from the same entrenchment in local community. I see this as a useful perspective to approach mutual aid from, for instance.
Others view the state and larger systems as an inherent threat to communities' ability to organize themselves. As authoritarians seek greater power, they seek to undermine communities' self-determination so power can be consolidated under the state. This is where historical tension between anarchists and state communists has arisen. People in this camp aren't rejecting organization altogether, but view larger systems as having inherently corrupting incentives.
I tend toward the former personally, but know a lot of folks of the latter variety and see a lot of value in it too. I think it'll always be a balancing act between local, community-driven structure and broader, country-scale structure.
What definition are you referring to?
We are talking about Anarchy/Anarchism as a political theory, and what you say is plainly wrong in that context
Sure, they is also a propagandized layman's understanding of "anarchy" = chaos, but this is not what we are talking about in this community.
I understood it as
rejection of hierarchical authority and coercive order.
I was not referring to chaos but the rejection of defined order because it is coercive.