#anarchy 101

Dtiys from @anarchy101comic @redmaycare !!!

I really love anarchy 101 and syndicate's dynamic in it, it helps me stay in this fandom a little bit longer 💔

sure thing! (and obviously, trigger warning for ableist language to follow)

I know many may feel I take a pretty radical stance, but i've studied enough linguistics to know how powerful the words we use can be, even when we don't intend it in that way. so I use the ableist language tag for when people are not being ableist but are using language which reinforces ableism. this can get a bit tricky as the people who are the subjects of ableist terms may often identify with or reclaim those terms, like calling someone a cripple is ableist, but many people self-identify as cripples, like the cripple punk movement.

I think they generally fall in three categories:

intelligence: stupid, idiot, moron, etc. intelligence and iq are not real, they're eugenicist myths and insulting people's intelligence only feeds these myths and serves the ruling class. build solidarity by seeing everyone as your equal. there is no moral value to having received a better or worse education than someone else. also many of these terms come directly from eugenics, such as their classifications of types or degrees of autism.

diagnoses: psycho, dumb, schizo, bipolar etc. these are real health conditions and i shouldn't have to explain why using them as insults is deeply offensive.

saneism: insane, crazy, mad, etc. the sane/insane dichotomy, if it was ever helpful, which I doubt, has been outdated for generations. there is no medical diagnosis of 'insane', there are hundreds of mental health conditions and an infinite number of combinations which we are barely beginning to understand. but none of them have or convey a moral value. using them as insults only stigmatizes those of us who have them, to the benefit of the ruling class and detriment of solidarity.

i would typically describe myself as a socialist, but i’ve been reading basic anarchist theory and am wondering, for you, what made you convinced of anarchy as your primary political ideology?

It's not selt defense, it's self preservation. Self defense is non-state affiliated people defending themselves. It's guerilla forces & international volunteers.

You're cheering on an oppressive regime attacking another oppressive regime. You're a campist.

not stupid at all! it's a great question that I’ve been excited to answer :D

So anarchism is often portrayed as young white boys with liberty spikes throwing Molotov cocktails at cars and wrecking shit. being “2 edgy 4 u” and wanting total chaos and disorder to rival the wastelands of Mad Max, which isn't true at all. 

Anarchism is simply the belief that arbitrary power structures should be abolished. 

An example of an arbitrary power structure (imma hop right into this) would be the American Police. US police have the ability to wave a gun in civilians’ faces, wrongfully arrest, brutalize and kill average citizens without consequences as we have seen over and over again. there is no need for any person to have this much power over another. it serves no purpose other than to uphold oppression and send people to private prisons in order to make certain old capitalists very very rich. it's at its core arbitrary which means its easy to corrupt. however, a non-arbitrary power structure would be the fire department. they are paid volunteers who go through rigorous training in order to prevent fires and protect citizens and have the power to tell you what to do and how to do it or physically wrangle you in order to get you safe and out of a burning building. Which at its core is a meaningful and important power imbalance to save your ass from dying of smoke inhalation.

these are two extremes so let's take it down to a smaller level. You're at work, you’re job is at the service desk where you resolve order problems and you’re paid abt $9.00 an hour. however, about 30 steps up the ladder in corporate a CEO is making $200k a year. If I were to film both of your day’s and line them up minute by minute next to each other chances are that you as a service desk person would be multitasking more, doing a wider range of tasks and certainly dealing with more stress from it because of the daunting emotional labor of putting on a smile while angry old rich people yell at you for things out of your control. both of you would be working, both of you have been trained for the position you are in and are doing something productive. so why is it that the CEO is paid more than you? hierarchy. arbitrary positions of power that allow a person to say their work is more important or harder than someone else’s. this is why people say that janitorial work should be paid slave wages, despite the fact that if sanitation workers vanished the human race would die out of disease. 

On the opposite end of the spectrum, a classroom is a necessary hierarchy. An English teacher’s know what's going on, they know their topic and how to write an essay and how to teach you to write an essay and can take up a whole hour just running their mouth, when in a normal social exchange that would be pretentious and rude. 

these can be extended culturally for certain. racism, sexism, and homophobia are the result of arbitrary social class structures that bar people from success in order to be used as step ladders for privileged groups to go higher. 

NOW, that I went on my tangent and finished. Anarchists are people that think arbitrary power is garbage and should be done away with. not that there should be a gap in necessary services like with law enforcement. but that these services should be devoid of pecking orders both internal and external. a violent and corrupt police force could be replaced with a rigorously trained group of paid volunteers who only have critically necessary power over other citizens such as firefighters do. 

anarchists come in all shapes and sizes. we usually don't look punk or metal or anything that the media has tried to paint us as, although some of us certainly do! I look like I popped out of cabbage patch in the 70′s and the other anarchists I know look like your average tired college student. 

there's also different branches of anarchism. you’re talking to an anarchist-communist or anarcho-communist for short, which heavily paints my views on how I answered this question. there’s also anarcho-capitalists (yuck), anarcho-primitivists, anarcho-feminists and much much more and they’d answer this question a little differently than me. 

But, when someone comes to you and is like, “Look, I’m unconvinced by anarchism, but I’m not hostile. In fact, I would actually like to be converted because the world’s going to shit and I want to believe that we can overcome all this, that a just society is possible,” you gotta be ready to come correct, and I was not. Part of it is that I’m of the school of thought that views anarchy as a process, a vector, a way of approaching human relationships and not a stage of history we might sometime achieve or draw blueprints for. I’m much more comfortable talking about direct action, mutual aid, relationships of trust, autonomous action, freedom of association, etc as tools for organizing an egalitarian society whose emergent organizational forms are probably difficult to predict from where we sit right now than I am going on about, “Well the workers at one site of production will be a syndicate and they’ll send delegates to the steering committee for that industry, and that body will send recallable delegates to the regional all-industry associations, meanwhile neighborhood assemblies will meet fortnightly with members of the association taking it in turn to act as a sort of executive officer...” blah blah blah. Exacerbating things is this friend is an economist so they are pretty well versed in the problems of collective action, use of common and public goods, and all that.

anyways, tl;dr: what defines anarchism and how does it work?

thanks in advance! have a cookie 🍪

"Anarchism asserts the possibility of an organization without discipline, fear, or punishment, and without the pressure of poverty: a new social organism which will make an end to the terrible struggle for the means of existence,—the savage struggle which undermines the finest qualities in man, and ever widens the social abyss. In short, Anarchism strives towards a social organization which will establish well-being for all."