Anarchism

Very good read indeed.

Thanks for sharing! Adding to my reading list

Wanted to share some takeaways I liked from the reading: (Using read it later app Readwise Reader, but there's open source-ish Omnivore which makes a great alternative)

Social transformation never happens through economic or legal changes alone. Those changes are always accompanied by alterations in the more informally transformative spheres of culture and ideology, shaping the nuts and bolts of how people think and act. Anarchists have always acknowledged this.

if there’s one thing anarchists are known for among the general public, it’s having a leg in several artistic, musical, and philosophical subcultures

Kropotkin and Goldman weren’t just exquisite theorists of class struggle and anarchisation, they also wrote entire books on Russian literature and modern theatre respectively.

I’ve noticed a tragic tendency as of late (i.e. the last couple of decades) to view anarchist activity in the cultural and ideological fronts as separate and apart from activity on the political and economic fronts. At worst, I’ve seen some involved in the latter dismiss most of those involved in the former as “apolitical” or as mere “lifestylists”, holding themselves up as exemplars of “real” anarchist action – which, from what I can see, seems to consist of writing articles for newspapers no one reads and occasionally waving a few red-and-black flags around at strikes and protests. If that’s what “real” political activity looks like, it doesn’t do much in terms of accomplishing libertarian political goals.

The bohemians, the hippies, the punks, and the techies have thus far given us lots of nice artworks, though they’ve failed to deliver the dissolution of the state and worker self-management of the economy.

On this issue, and despite the dismissals of much cultural-ideological activity as apolitical, I’d like to propose that both forms of activity are political, but political in different ways. One is infrapolitical (“infra-” meaning underneath), while the other is megapolitical (“mega-” meaning grand or overarching).

By infrapolitics, I mean the forms of cultural and ideological action people engage in which aren’t formally political, but nevertheless form the basis of social-political reality at both the interpersonal and systemic levels of society, as they shape the way we conceive of, relate to, and interact with the social reality. Things like making art, creating counter-cultural scenes, injecting political ideas into various cultural milieus, philosophising, and creating alternative forms of education.

By megapolitics, I mean most of what’s considered “political” in the traditional sense: trying to effect change in the functioning of the social system as a whole, in particular its governance and jurisprudence with regard to the people. Things like municipalism, syndicalism, and activism in the most familiar sense.

Infrapolitics should always be of interest to anarchist activism because it’s in infrapolitical spaces that the seeds of practical (megapolitival) change are sewed within the social imaginary.

labour as a practice is artisan-ised, emulating William Morris’s dream of work being made into play.

Solarpunk is futurist, but it’s a futurism of a rooted and practical kind.

What should make it of interest to anarchists is how similar the underlying values of solarpunk are to those of social anarchism, in particular to the post-scarcity anarchism of Murray Bookchin: decentralism, the blending of the ecological with the technological, the fusion of the functional with the ornamental, local autonomy, participatory decision-making, and unity-in-diversity