Expanding the concept, idpol (both right wing and left wing versions) are the outer face of the current divide and (continue to)conquer strategy, but "democracy" and electoral politics are the inner head of the beast. Elections massively divert energy from creating reality into lobbying individuals corrupted by the system itself to hopef…
Expanding the concept, idpol (both right wing and left wing versions) are the outer face of the current divide and (continue to)conquer strategy, but "democracy" and electoral politics are the inner head of the beast. Elections massively divert energy from creating reality into lobbying individuals corrupted by the system itself to hopefully pass some scrap in an omnibus bill for the constituency as close enough. It can never solve "our" problems as long as our= people who can't afford to buy politicians.
Seems that most of our formulation of problems is itself problematic. The first aspect being that govt is assumed to be the appropriate entity to effect a solution.
Given that violence has already been initiated (anywhere from 10,000 to 4.5 billion years ago) it looks like you're going to have to deal with and through the government, the monopoly of legitimated original violence. And in that case, finding an alternative to democracy that isn't a cure worse than the disease does seem to be a problem. I concede that you may be able to withdraw from the world and live in the woods, but having made some passes at such solutions I can tell you they're not easy. (I don't want to discourage any of you anarcho-communards, though. Sometimes there is no acceptable alternative.)
Precisely my point - when all 'problems' require a coercive solution, you may have an issue with how you define the problem. There are other forms of human organization based on cooperation rather than the one form based on [legitimate] coercion. The problem for the anarcho types is either an entire absence of coercion (doesn't seem to fit our species) or competing systems of coercion (doesn't sound very promising).
I think anarchos would have to start from existing relations (groups, entities, institutions) and work up. Hence the importance of the scaling problem. Not a lot of coercion contemplated, except immediate material self-defense as a last resort. Certainly a lot of stuff to get rid of even before getting to utopia, like the war habit of certain states.
I remember telling someone some years ago that anarchism might have to be 'profoundly reactionary.' I was joking, but later some writers came along
with Primitivism (for example, John Zerzan). There is a certain ambiguity or irony in the vision of hunter-gatherers stumbling about the forest primeval with highly advanced technological whizbangs.
My approach to anarchism has been to observe the things 'we' don't like (or say 'we' don't like) and suggest ways in which they might be removed or reduced, so it's been a process of negations. Until people actually do things, though, "nothing fundamental will change."
Expanding the concept, idpol (both right wing and left wing versions) are the outer face of the current divide and (continue to)conquer strategy, but "democracy" and electoral politics are the inner head of the beast. Elections massively divert energy from creating reality into lobbying individuals corrupted by the system itself to hopefully pass some scrap in an omnibus bill for the constituency as close enough. It can never solve "our" problems as long as our= people who can't afford to buy politicians.
'"our" problems'?
Seems that most of our formulation of problems is itself problematic. The first aspect being that govt is assumed to be the appropriate entity to effect a solution.
Given that violence has already been initiated (anywhere from 10,000 to 4.5 billion years ago) it looks like you're going to have to deal with and through the government, the monopoly of legitimated original violence. And in that case, finding an alternative to democracy that isn't a cure worse than the disease does seem to be a problem. I concede that you may be able to withdraw from the world and live in the woods, but having made some passes at such solutions I can tell you they're not easy. (I don't want to discourage any of you anarcho-communards, though. Sometimes there is no acceptable alternative.)
Precisely my point - when all 'problems' require a coercive solution, you may have an issue with how you define the problem. There are other forms of human organization based on cooperation rather than the one form based on [legitimate] coercion. The problem for the anarcho types is either an entire absence of coercion (doesn't seem to fit our species) or competing systems of coercion (doesn't sound very promising).
I think anarchos would have to start from existing relations (groups, entities, institutions) and work up. Hence the importance of the scaling problem. Not a lot of coercion contemplated, except immediate material self-defense as a last resort. Certainly a lot of stuff to get rid of even before getting to utopia, like the war habit of certain states.
I remember telling someone some years ago that anarchism might have to be 'profoundly reactionary.' I was joking, but later some writers came along
with Primitivism (for example, John Zerzan). There is a certain ambiguity or irony in the vision of hunter-gatherers stumbling about the forest primeval with highly advanced technological whizbangs.
My approach to anarchism has been to observe the things 'we' don't like (or say 'we' don't like) and suggest ways in which they might be removed or reduced, so it's been a process of negations. Until people actually do things, though, "nothing fundamental will change."