this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2024
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Anarchism and Social Ecology

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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.

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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.

~Abdullah Öcalan

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

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[–] cacheson@piefed.social 20 points 23 hours ago

The electoral system is so focused on the specific immediate task at hand, the election these people were hired to win (and working people to the bone doing it), that there’s never any room to step back and build something long-term. No one is planning for the Democratic party five or ten years from now (at least, not in a way that affects local organizing) because that’s ten or twenty times as long as the average staffer is expected to last. The feeling seems to be that every minute spent planning for something further out than the next election is a minute not spent working on winning the next election.

So, when I get on my anarchist high horse now and talk about how we need to spend our time, energy, and money on something other than electoral politics, it’s not the voting part that upsets me. It’s all this bullshit. Every election, we have to burn out all our most promising organizers in six months because there was no infrastructure for them to build on, and they have to make it all from scratch every time. It’s like we’re working extra hard to pay off our last payday loan, then taking out a new payday loan at the end, ensuring we’ll have to do the same thing over again next time.

I feel like this part bears emphasizing, given the arguments over it that I've seen recently. I'm aggressively neutral on the question of whether or not anarchists should vote. The hour or less per year that an individual anarchist may spend on voting just doesn't matter. Almost all the waste of electoralism is in the time, energy, and money spent on campaigning, and having nothing to show for it afterwards if your candidate loses.

On the other side, if a fellow anarchist doesn't want to vote, fighting with them about it isn't worth the social cohesion cost. Even if you see value in voting as a rearguard action, we're not a big enough bloc for their non-voting to really matter.