Imagining and Building Better Worlds
You may have wondered why I keep referring to social anarchism rather than just anarchism when I talk about the subject. Social anarchism is in fact what most who understand anarchism are referring to when they talk about "anarchism" without another word in front of or after it. It is an ethical-political traditional which (contrary... Continue Reading →
It's hard to find a single political tradition that doesn't place "freedom", of some form or another, at the top of its list of values - from the far left to the far right. So what is the social anarchist position on freedom? Anarchists are libertarians, a term associated with freedom by its very etymology,... Continue Reading →
Every era of liberatory movements comes with its own terminology, rhetoric, and iconography; largely emerging in response to whatever those movements are busy fighting against and what they want to counterpose to the reigning ideologies and practices of their day. Perhaps the most common term to see in popular left-wing discourse nowadays is social justice.... Continue Reading →
Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism was a controversial book when it came out and is even more controversial now, though for very different reasons. It presented a revised theoretical framework for anarchism which: Painted it as a global, rather than Euro-American tradition Pointed out that syndicalism can be considered an... Continue Reading →
While dwelling on the state of the world during the combination of COP21 – determining the future fate of the human species – and the worsening chaos in southwest Asia (with the Rojava Revolution being the only beacon of light) I was trying to cobble together in my head what some viable solutions to the... Continue Reading →
Pending a fuller elaboration of a social anarchist system of ethics I'm currently developing, I thought I'd share what I consider to be some good guiding principles (virtues) of solarpunk as an approach to the world. The ethical system is going to be a form of consequentialism which incorporates elements of virtue ethics, drawing a... Continue Reading →
Is solarpunk compatible with wanting to live a low-technology kind of life? Terminology can create a lot of confusion. Two people could argue endlessly about the same term, weighing the merits and demerits of it, only to realise that they each were going by two different meanings of the word. Such a thing happened... Continue Reading →
While social anarchists have always used the word autonomy – meaning self-directedness as well as free association – there’s been a certain ambivalence about the word democracy. This can be confusing for newcomers who start reading anarchist literature and see direct democracy being described as anarchistic in one book and lambasted in another. The... Continue Reading →
When Ronald Regan saw the famous TV movie The Day After, which is about people surviving nuclear war on the United States, it was said to have had such a profound impact on him that it lessened somewhat his macho posturing about military action towards the Soviet Union. It's rare that movies can be... Continue Reading →
The aesthetic-cultural philosophy of solarpunk and the politics of social anarchism were practically made for each other. This site attempts to combine them. "The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking" – Murray Bookchin Solarpunk is a new science-fiction and cultural movement dedicated to imagining a... Continue Reading →
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