Of course there’s no easy answers, but your post reminded me of the following:
Hannah Arendt’s essay ‘On Violence’. Power stems from people collectively working towards change, strength etc. is violence. Anarchism requires a collective desire which is anti-coercion and anti-violence. Arendt was partly inspired by Rosa Luxemburg’s views on spontaneous revolution.
Graeber’s ‘Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology’ and le Guin’s fictional novel ‘The Dispossessed’ give some insight into what is required for maintaining anarchist ways of organizing. In brief: you leave, divorce yourself from oppressive systems and start over elsewhere.
Which is of course difficult if not impossible on a planet which has been near entirely colonized. Somewhat more philosophical, anarchism requires the dissolution of notions of property. Agamben writes on monastic forms of life, which seem rather anarchist to me, in ‘The Highest Poverty’. Graeber and Wengrow mention the ‘sacredness’ of objects in ‘The Dawn of Everything’, which is a terribly deep anthropological and philosophical rabbit hole, but there’s some interesting connections between sacred objects and possession.
All books mentioned are worth the read of course, imo.
Of course there’s no easy answers, but your post reminded me of the following:
Hannah Arendt’s essay ‘On Violence’. Power stems from people collectively working towards change, strength etc. is violence. Anarchism requires a collective desire which is anti-coercion and anti-violence. Arendt was partly inspired by Rosa Luxemburg’s views on spontaneous revolution.
Graeber’s ‘Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology’ and le Guin’s fictional novel ‘The Dispossessed’ give some insight into what is required for maintaining anarchist ways of organizing. In brief: you leave, divorce yourself from oppressive systems and start over elsewhere.
Which is of course difficult if not impossible on a planet which has been near entirely colonized. Somewhat more philosophical, anarchism requires the dissolution of notions of property. Agamben writes on monastic forms of life, which seem rather anarchist to me, in ‘The Highest Poverty’. Graeber and Wengrow mention the ‘sacredness’ of objects in ‘The Dawn of Everything’, which is a terribly deep anthropological and philosophical rabbit hole, but there’s some interesting connections between sacred objects and possession.
All books mentioned are worth the read of course, imo.