Anarchism

Politics & News
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Starting a thread so nobody gets mad if I make them the OP. Also for all the likes

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And so the Free Town Project began. The libertarians expected to be greeted as liberators, but from the first town meeting, they faced the inconvenient reality that many of Grafton’s presumably freedom-loving citizens saw them as outsiders first, and compatriots second—if at all. Tensions flared further when a little Googling revealed what “freedom” entailed for some of the new colonists. One of the original masterminds of the plan, a certain Larry Pendarvis, had written of his intention to create a space honoring the freedom to “traffic organs, the right to hold duels, and the God-given, underappreciated right to organize so-called bum fights.” He had also bemoaned the persecution of the “victimless crime” that is “consensual cannibalism.” (“Logic is a strange thing,” observes Hongoltz-Hetling.)

And so the Free Towners spent years pursuing an aggressive program of governmental takeover and delegitimation, their appetite for litigation matched only by their enthusiasm for cutting public services. They slashed the town’s already tiny yearly budget of $1 million by 30 percent, obliged the town to fight legal test case after test case, and staged absurd, standoffish encounters with the sheriff to rack up YouTube hits. Grafton was a poor town to begin with, but with tax revenue dropping even as its population expanded, things got steadily worse. Potholes multiplied, domestic disputes proliferated, violent crime spiked, and town workers started going without heat. “Despite several promising efforts,” Hongoltz-Hetling dryly notes, “a robust Randian private sector failed to emerge to replace public services.” Instead, Grafton, “a haven for miserable people,” became a town gone “feral.” Enter the bears, stage right.

What was the deal with Grafton’s bears? Hongoltz-Hetling investigates the question at length, probing numerous hypotheses for why the creatures have become so uncharacteristically aggressive, indifferent, intelligent, and unafraid. Is it the lack of zoning, the resulting incursion into bear habitats, and the reluctance of Graftonites to pay for, let alone mandate, bear-proof garbage bins? Might the bears be deranged somehow, perhaps even disinhibited and emboldened by toxoplasmosis infections, picked up from eating trash and pet waste from said unsecured bins? There can be no definitive answer to these questions, but one thing is clear: The libertarian social experiment underway in Grafton was uniquely incapable of dealing with the problem. “Free Towners were finding that the situations that had been so easy to problem-solve in the abstract medium of message boards were difficult to resolve in person.”>

Grappling with what to do about the bears, the Graftonites also wrestled with the arguments of certain libertarians who questioned whether they should do anything at all—especially since several of the town residents had taken to feeding the bears, more or less just because they could. One woman, who prudently chose to remain anonymous save for the sobriquet “Doughnut Lady,” revealed to Hongoltz-Hetling that she had taken to welcoming bears on her property for regular feasts of grain topped with sugared doughnuts. If those same bears showed up on someone else’s lawn expecting similar treatment, that wasn’t her problem. The bears, for their part, were left to navigate the mixed messages sent by humans who alternately threw firecrackers and pastries at them. Such are the paradoxes of Freedom. Some people just “don’t get the responsibility side of being libertarians,” Rosalie Babiarz tells Hongoltz-Hetling, which is certainly one way of framing the problem.

Libertopia! Bears!

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The difference between left and right libertarianism (“libertarian” originally came from anarchists in Europe Joseph DĂ©jacque - Wikipedia).

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I bet you could have a small community like the anarchist commune in Denmark - call the guiding philosophy anarchism, left-libertarianism, small c communism, whatever you want - and end up with a very similar working result. People just figuring out the rules as they go along - trying to give each other as much freedom as possible while still having some kind of order, basic services, and not step on each other’s toes.

Libertopians otoh - who just don’t like to pay taxes or obey rules but still magically want all the good stuff - are a fantasy that only works on message boards and tends to attract horrible, selfish people. So of course they’re never going to work out.

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Hey now, thats not fair. They also attract pedophiles that are sick and tired of people telling them to stop molesting children.

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Some great quotes in there

Sound familiar?

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If you want to live somewhere where your nearest neighbor is a mile away you can be a egoistic libertarian, but if you want to live in a town/community and have it work as a town/community then you need to either be part of making it a community or just submit to leadership.

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Yeah for sure. Small communes seem like the best solution to maximize human happiness - if you can make them work.

Of course to some degree you’re still piggy-backing on mass top-down civilization - assuming you want modern medicine, iphones, etc. and you kind of need to either be in the protective bubble of a country or have no resources worth stealing.

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All those words and not even one Simpsons “bear tax” joke/reference. Disappointing.

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That’s because the bear tax episode made the opposite point.

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That whole story reads word for word like a South Park episode.

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For some reason you keep pimping this “small community” crap. How about cutting that shit out. Since you have no idea what you are talking about, and have even less interest in educating yourself
 why do you feel this continuing need to spew gibberish you just plain make up?

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Christiania is a bullshit place. Weed and a ban on running. Whoopee.

It’s as anarchist as I am rich.

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I think there’s a lot to the small community (Dunbar’s Number) and the best organization is affiliations/coalitions/confederations of independent small groups - even in large cities. Murray Bookchin, the writer most inflential on the Rojava Revolution, didn’t necessarily think organization would stem from quite so small groups, but sometimes, and what he called municipalism.

And Rojava is maybe 1/3rd collectivized and the Spanish Anarchist Revolution was pretty fucked up within year by the communists.

Moreover, the democratic spirit of the militias made them breeding-grounds for revolutionary ideas. The Communists were well aware of this, and inveighed ceaselessly and bitterly against the P.O.U.M. and Anarchist principle of equal pay for all ranks. A general ‘bourgeoisification’, a deliberate destruction of the equalitarian spirit of the first few months of the revolution, was taking place. All happened so swiftly that people making successive visits to Spain at intervals of a few months have declared that they seemed scarcely to be visiting the same country; what had seemed on the surface and for a brief instant to be a workers’ State was changing before one’s eyes into an ordinary bourgeois republic with the normal division into rich and poor. By the autumn of 1937 the ‘Socialist’ Negrín was declaring in public speeches that ‘we respect private property’, and members of the Cortes who at the beginning of the war had had to fly the country because of their suspected Fascist sympathies were returning to Spain.

But besides all this there was the startling change in the social atmosphere — a thing difficult to conceive unless you have actually experienced it. When I first reached Barcelona I had thought it a town where class distinctions and great differences of wealth hardly existed. Certainly that was what it looked like. ‘Smart’ clothes were an abnormality, nobody cringed or took tips, waiters and flower-women and bootblacks looked you in the eye and called you ‘comrade’. I had not grasped that this was mainly a mixture of hope and camouflage. The working class believed in a revolution that had been begun but never consolidated, and the bourgeoisie were scared and temporarily disguising themselves as workers. In the first months of revolution there must have been many thousands of people who deliberately put on overalls and shouted revolutionary slogans as a way of saving their skins. Now things were returning to normal. The smart restaurants and hotels were full of rich people wolfing expensive meals, while for the working-class population food-prices had jumped enormously without any corresponding rise in wages. Apart from the expensiveness of everything, there were recurrent shortages of this and that, which, of course, always hit the poor rather than the rich.

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And onto regions, as in revolutionary Spain and Rojava. In Spain, the plan was to ‘hive off’ autonomous departments from large business enterprises to get the numbers down in each group
 a plan stillborn as the fascists won the civil war.

The takeaway point here, without wandering off into the weeds of horizonal theory, is this


  • There is such theory, and practice, and history, and contemporary activism that could be discussed here on UnStuck. And it has absolutely nothing to do with the “racist anarchists”, or the ACers, or folks who “just want to destroy and burn it all down”, or Anarchy brand sun-glasses, or burning man, or small communes being all kumbaya, or pedophiles because ZOMG the shitty old Anarchy Magazine.
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The guy who only speaks in gibberish is accusing another poster of speaking in gibberish

Checks out

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Pretty easy to parse Sabos posts maybe you’re just dumber than you think

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Yea that’s totally not gibberish

:clown_face:

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More libertarians vs. bears reading.

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Go bears!

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