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Anarchism and Social Ecology
!anarchism@slrpnk.net
A community about anarchy. anarchism, social ecology, and communalism for SLRPNK! Solarpunk anarchists unite!
Feel free to ask questions here. We aspire to make this space a safe space. SLRPNK.net's basic rules apply here, but generally don't be a dick and don't be an authoritarian.
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.
Libraries
Audiobooks
- General audiobooks
- LibriVox Public domain book collection where you can find audiobooks from old communist, socialist, and anarchist authors.
- Anarchist audiobooks
- Socialist Audiobooks
- Social Ecology Audiobooks
Quotes
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.
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
I mean the highest standard of living in human history and arguably a system whose current problems are mostly fixable, but moreover, "your shit's not working right so clearly [thing] is better" isn't an argument. Humans have this bizarre cognitive bias of "this thing isn't working, so clearly my idea is the future". See: the far-right.
> highest standards of living in human history
> checks inside
> highest suicide rates in human history, extreme loneliness, people aren't having children because they feel there is no point bringing them into this world
Definitely nothing to do with massive advances in science, medicine, and socialist thinking in the 19th and 20th centuries... No, it must be the hierarchies!
Forget that science is fundamentally based upon peer review and rational authority, which is a rejection of traditional hierarchy. That definitely has nothing to do with it.
Standard of living is just a made up metric that only increases because it exludes so many things from it. When I read about it on Wikipedia it becomes clear to me that its a capitalist inventiom or atleast serves really well as capitalist propaganda.
Things that somehow dont get included but definitely reduce my "standard of living":
Okay, if you want to be exceedingly pedantic and call me on using "standard of living" in place of its hypernym "quality of life", then by all means. I'm glad your 15-second glance at Wikipedia has enlightened you that one of the main concepts in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which measures things like access to social services, food, clothing, etc.) is filthy capitalist propaganda; I meant quality of life.
Edit: If I had to add to the list, it'd be animal agriculture destroying the environment and torturing and murdering billions of sentient, emotional creatures across the world (let alone commercial fishing) for superfluous human enjoyment. Something you statistically take part in for no good reason, although I'm proud of you if you don't.
for how many? and at whose expense?
If you think anarchy is some kind of substantial deterrent to an underclass when we're talking about the same people with functionally the same underlying morality that create and enforce them in democratic systems, I have a bridge you can barter for. More equal e.g. economic systems can thrive under democracy; democracy is not the problem.
Difficult to quantify given it's difficult if not impossible to decouple life-changing advances in quality of living from the nations and systems that facilitated them. For how many, though, compared to before? For near-basically everyone. Life is still unbelievably shit in major swaths of the world, and yet human life overall is still improving in most areas, still has obvious room for betterment, and is still markedly better than before. There's still plenty of Return to Eros shit we need to fix and C-suites to jail, but we obviously can fix it under democracy. We of course have minimal data for actual anarchy, which leaves a convenient argument from ignorance for anarchists to cling onto.
I guess what I was getting at earlier, come to think of it, is a subtype of the argument from ignorance. "Well we've just never tried it, which is why it's way better than this thing that's tested and has problems."