Social anarchism needs to take culture (and subculture) seriously.
Social Anarchist Futures
Anarchism used to be bursting with utopian imagination. We need to get that visionary impulse back, and then get it to work creating things.
Why this Anarchist has Stopped Using the Word Communism (an overlong explanation)
In a world of paranoid red-baiting mania, the word communism is more trouble than it's worth.
Why “Social” Anarchism?
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 →
The Dialectic of Freedom and Justice in Liberatory Movements
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 →
A Look Back at Black Flame by Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt
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 →
Solarpunk Anarchist Solutions to Global Problems: A Quick List
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 →
A Few Words on Solarpunk and Primitivism
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 →
Democracy or Autonomy?
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 →
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