Hey all, I’m hoping this is the right comm for this kind of post. I’m really interested what brought my fellow lemmings to anarchism (or just radical politics in general). Was is a youtube video? A book? A conversation IRL or on the internet? For me personally it was a friend IRL who introduced me to an local anarchist collective.
Because fuck authority. Governments have always existed to oppress the masses, and and also take away power from people so they don’t govern themselves
I was always into punk music but I got heavily addicted to meth and in desperation made the grave mistake of joining the Marines to hit the reset button on my life. Luckily I fixed electronics so I never had to serve in a war zone or fire a shot in anger but the aircraft I supported ended up doing horrific atrocities when they deployed so my hands are far from clean. When I was in Okinawa I came to the realization on how expendable every person is when it comes to the state. We would poison the ground we lived on because in the end it will be the Japanese equivalent of a Superfund Site and the military could not give less of a shit if we all got cancer along the way. After I got out I found the band Behind Enemy Lines and started reading about the SoA, CIA involvement in the Argentinian Dirty War, and fell down a rabbit hole. I found the book Post Scarcity Anarchism by Muray Bookchin randomly at a bookstore and starting reading a lot more theory. Now I fall on the Bookchinish side of anarcho-communism.
Bevase over aome 100k -150k years plus of humanity being around, it’s the only organisaltional structurethats ever worked ivee the long term. Seems weird to say, you know what, that worked, lets not do that.
Because despite everything conservatives and tankies have said or shown me, I still hadn’t seen any version of government that didn’t absolutely fucking suck. There’s no government in history that hasn’t been guilty of objectively horrifying atrocities, and I just refuse to believe that hierarchy is an intrinsic need of mankind when we do so much better with each other without it.
books
but i was young before internets contaminated every corner of every skull
do people ever anarchise in older ages? Can a 40 year old start thinking that maybe we can be better off living in societies without archs?
Of course you can. Age doesn’t matter. Anyone can get into anti authoritarian ideas at any age
I’m 30-something and I’m just now figuring it out lol
In my younger years I was a “libertarian” before figuring out capitalism was also a huge part of the problem.
Same :3
Check out That Dang Dad on YouTube. Not sure his exact age or ideology, but he was a cop and proud of it until a few years ago and then came to his senses in a big way. He has some great videos discussing that transition.
What books do you recommend
The Conquest of Bread is a great layman explainer where a smart economist introduces to you many examples of how mutual aid and anarchist organization are not only practical but often essential, natural, and superior. It’s examples are outdated (And some of it’s predictions were prophetic!) but it’s points are all preserved to this day.
Bullshit Jobs is a pop economism / sociology book where an anthropologist walks you through the absurdity of our modern economy, specifically our systems of employment and work, to build a case that our system is designed around backward incentives.
God and the State is a fiery call to action by one of if not the most successful anarchist political organizers in history. It is a brief but powerful calling out and condemnation of hierarchy and nation states, written before the author’s falling out with Marx and organized communism (Disclaimer: The author was slightly racist, even for his time).
The Mars Triology is a sprawling three-novel scifi epic about the multigenerational colonization of Mars, featuring a rotating but interrelated ensemble cast who basically act as avatars for the various political tendencies they each represent. The author develops a “future history” of humanity, the complexity of which could go toe-to-toe with Tolkien, developing a wild pallette of libertarian, socialist, future-economist tendencies that fans out over several centuries and really gets the gears of your imagination clanking.
These are all selected as introductions to ideas. I have many more recommends but they’re less “dip your toes in”.
Wow thank you for the list! I will get reading.
i started reading about anarchism at a very early age (14, 15?) after encountering a 2 page description of Nietzsche, Nihilism and Anarchism in an encyclopedia. I wasn’t in uni yet and back then only universities had internet connection, so i had to find books.
From Proudhon to Anarcho-Communists to Stirner to even Anarcho-Capitalists(!) i’ve read all. Add some Dadaism and later Situationists (and after more time their inheritors Tiqqun). I thought I’ve met Bookchin’s ideas late but apparently I’ve met him early through Ursula K. Le Guin (who wrote a wonderful fiction about an anarchist diaspora settling on the moon of a planet).
Not to forget thinkers/philosophers/poets (like Guattari for example, among many others) who wrote the most liberating lines without any anarchist consideration in mind.
I can’t recommend books but a method: Find books that interest you and follow the citations upstream towards other books (or downstream towards their spawns or inheritors).
Now that we have Wikipedia, we’re lucky to click/touch through articles and get books downloaded or delivered to our doors (if we’re lucky to have doors).
Good luck to you.
I found Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, and Bookchin all around my 30th year. We can always change and advance.
I had read about it very early, but really became a convert after reading Ursula LeGuin.
Lol the dispossessed was one of my first intros to the anarchist world, was nice to see a somewhat realistic anarchist community in its early stages, even with its flaws.
Funny how I initially found the plot of the book boring (which I still believe it is), but I guess the point is to focus on the world building and the contrast of the two worlds.
Thanks to the guy who got me the book in a secret santa event cuz I had said that I like dystopian and fantasy books:)
Always Coming Home is also spectacular. Very different kind of book.
Poverty.
I was born this way and always have been this way. But I had to muddle for years through liberalism, then socialism, before identifying anarchism and then even more specifically communalism as being the theory that puts actual words and logic behind the feeling of what I always knew was true. And it wasn’t until my mid-20s that I actually took up that search intentionally because I was so shell shocked throughout my school years.
I gratuated college in 2008 and got my first pepper spray whiffs at Zuccoti Park during Occupy. Chomsky’s Failed States and Zinn’s People’s History of the United States are what got me off liberalism. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy sparked my imagination regarding the radical multitudal possibilities of governance and Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother showed me what one person is capable of. I knew socialism / communism alone weren’t my eventual destination because the history and hierarchy always smelled of what I was escaping from, but it took me a while to find works like Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread and eventually Bookchin’s Post-Scarcity Anarchism where I finally felt like I’d arrived home. I remember reading that last work in a Brooklyn cafe under a skylight when the clouds opened up and it was like nature saying “Yes, this is it. You found it bro.” NYC organizations like MACC and Food Not Bombs, and later on Symbiosis on the west coast, really cemented things for me.
I also credit the literary works of Ivan Illich, Ursula Le Guin, and David Graeber for keeping me hooked.
A lot of reasons, from childhood abuse being justified as “they have the right to do it to a child” to police neglecting issues around me and my family, to just being autistic makes me question things everyone takes at face value.
But the key principle of my ideal world is that as long as everyone involved (small scale to environmental scale) is consenting to the actions being done, you should be able to live a happy life. If they don’t consent, don’t involve them. If everyone involved can’t consent, probably don’t do that.
You shouldn’t have to choose between rent and food. Or healthcare. Or seeing your friends or paying your bills. Or just having a happy life our ape brains enjoy compared to the alienating mundanity of most politics.
Working labor your entire life so you don’t die from hunger in the cold, to retire at 65 and not be able to take any of your material possessions with you to any form of afterlife or lack thereof, seems cruel. Especially when no one was asked to be born into this system, they have to work to survive.
The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.
Star Trek also helped influence me, it made me a better person. I was more jaded and capitalist libertarian in my views as a teenager. Now I’m just a hopeful pessimist.
I don’t pretend to have the answers of every single question or edge case of anarchism, I also don’t pretend it’s best for everyone. But it’s a system that doesn’t reward or enable the power hungry and greedy, when most systems do.
People will gladly tell you the issues of Proudhon, or call out some anarchists wearing the label as an excuse to do whatever they want with no consequences.
I’ve seen people whitewash and idolize and bootlick for other systems of power, people, and philosophies. Sometimes it’s because they think they’ll get a turn of being in that position in life, when they’ll be struck by lightning first.
Maybe I’m just rambling because it’s almost 4:30 am and I’m killing time on my graveyard shift. God I hope somehow this makes some form of sense.
I was into a romanticized version of it as a young punk which led me to read about it and look into it more deeply and it all just made so much sense to me. Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid solidified a lot of what had been in my mind and my confusion about the society I observed.
Punk music, generally. But my first introduction to the word was in a 6th grade social studies class where they discussed different forms of government, and the oversimplified idea given to us at that point was appealing on some level. As I’ve grown it just seems to fit my own ideology and lifestyle more and more.
For disclosures sake: I’m 40 years old now and never read more than a paragraph of any theory related books, but would be interested in trying to learn more
‘Seeing like a state’ is a good one
As is anything by David graeber’
I’ve experienced the harms leadership and hierarchial power can inflict. Lots of societal issues can be successfully explained through an anarchist lens.
Any system created by people must require consent and allow revocation of consent. Without this basic feature there is no freedom.
Inherent rage at corrupt systems.
But I am no longer really an anarchist like I was in ny youth. Too much of a socialist these days. The statism got me.
The statism got me.
Can you tell us more about that.
In short: sewer socialism.
I had spent years street protesting the war in Iraq, and had grown tired of trying to build community and organize in a college town.
So I moved out into a deep rural (and red) part of the country and got a job working in Public Health. This was well before covid and I just started working with grant money to help people retrofit and upgrade their septic systems.
It was a government job and it did more good for more people than I think any damage I did to police or federal property.
And from there I kept working and seeing benefits of public health and infrastructure. There’s a lot to the state and government that I don’t like, but public infrastructure is the valid basis of a state.
College towns are transitory as fuck. Non-student organizing in them is rough.
Your experience does remind me of what graeber says about why conservatives like the military in ‘bullshit jobs’.
Because pretending to be anything else in a system where all power structures have the same incentives to oppress and abuse the lowest rung is giving in to that power structure. You can vote the greatest person into power and they’ll still be ineffective and their term will be over before they can move the needle.
Everywhere I’ve been in life, there has been an asshole above me who made it their mission to make me miserable, either through negligence, malice or apathy.
I want to be a socialist, but I can’t, so anarchist it is.
