When we pay attention to the amount of injustice in the world, we find ourselves wanting to do something about it. And we don’t want to do just anything. We want to participate in what can most strategically stop those injustices. We need to organize together to confront what is killing us and the planet.
If you go looking for others involved in this resistance work, you might stumble across some organizations that seem to have all the answers. They say they know exactly how to bring capitalism to its knees. And they’re often recruiting new members like you to take part in the Revolution.
But when organizations offer easy answers and tell you all you need to do is step in line with their orders, it should raise some red flags.
Before we get swept away by their revolutionary aesthetics, one-size-fits-all plans, and lefty lingo, we should talk about authoritarian and vanguard communist groups. They often search for young, enthusiastic people who haven’t been warned about them yet or don’t know the warning signs. All the major ones we know of have long histories of abuse. As anarchists, we understand that their embrace of authoritarianism is exactly what makes them so susceptible to being abusive.
This zine outlines red flags to look out for, provides some history of the most well-known authoritarian communist groups’ harmful behavior, and offers a few alternatives to joining them.
We believe that the most strategic way to fight systems of oppression is by fighting collectively. We don’t need to recreate the very power dynamics we’re struggling against to win. But we do need you in the fight.
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