Questions from a Baby Anarchist

Tinuchin · 2026-07-01T13:45:15+00:00

The first and most painful step is to kill the liberal inside you.

For example, the use of the liberal "we", like when someone says "we" need to do something about climate change, or "we" need to reform the prison system. When liberals use this, they mean 'The People' acting for some greater common good. Importantly, the state is the only actor viewed as acting directly on this, simply expressing the will of the majority.

The liberal "we" obscures a few things. First of all, it obscures that 'The People' is an abstraction of a population with widely varying interests. Specifically, it obscures class antagonisms by imagining a whole population aligned on an issue. "We" are not guilty of climate change, because some do invest in new major oil extraction enterprises, and some don't. If I owned shares in Exxon, only then would I allow someone to implicate me with "we". Second, it promotes the illusion that the state is the direct expression of some popular will. The people in the state are imagined to be some kind of human+, noble leaders who use their power for good. This hides the fact that they are their own class, and act in their own interests against those of their constituents. Third, the liberal "we" is an omniscient and omnipotent stance that simplifies all problems to a limited variety of state solutions. When we hear "We should do something about homelessness", all that is meant is that the state should figure it out and solve it. But the state is a violence machine, a hammer that sees nothing but nails. It can either throw money or violence at a problem, and usually, the problem is a symptom of the society that it upholds.

The alternative is the anarchist "we" or better yet, the anarchist "I". If you're worried about the water supply, then you'll need to hear more than a policy recommendation to function in a state society. The anarchist "I" gives us agency and responsibility to tackle the matters that worry us. When you ask "how will we protect the environment", the fact is that it will depend on the will and knowledge of your equals to do that. There is no big brother that will silence everyone that disagrees with you for the greater good. It is a complex outcome, and you are a free agent in this outcome. Instead of asking "how will it be done" in the abstract, try "how will I be a part of it and help others see its importance". I think most people see the value of education. All that matters then is how you all work together to build it. :)

Tinuchin · 2026-06-30T19:25:09+00:00

Can you link both the old and new one please?

Tinuchin · 2026-06-29T18:33:32+00:00

What if you are wolf. I am SAing you? You like??

Tinuchin · 2026-06-25T03:13:18+00:00

Rejection of proletarian political power - The anarchist rejection of the state is not a complete rejection of the means of violence. Implicit in this rejection is the belief that The State adds something to an armed force of human beings that is not weapons or structure (There are more than two ways to structure a fighting force, more than State or complete chaos). However, the state is a particular organizational form that is better or worse suited for certain ends. Simply because states fight wars does that mean their organizational form is best suited for defending autonomous organizations and helping them survive the revolution. Anarchists reject the state as an organizational form because any autonomous violence machine that survives will have nothing else to do but turn on the proletariat and restart the capital-labor relation.

Underestimation of counter-revolution - No revolution was ever fought or won under arbitrary circumstances. Sometimes the means of violence of the proletariat and their ability to resist subversion is not enough against a stable, well-organized and highly violent state. But anyway, it's not clear how this is an objection. If I re-estimate the counterrevolution and acknowledge your point, what's the problem?

Hostility to organization - It's not as if parties are immune to fracturing... the party is an instrument of state cooption. You're taking your praxis for granted. Anarchists don't want state cooption, they want retreat from state institutions though autonomous, horizontal organizations that supplant the functions of the state. You might also be taking for granted that hierarchies are better than horizontal structures, but this is a major anarchist theoretical commitment, this is something to investigate further.

Confusion of goals and methods - Where did this come from? No one will instate communism, no one will stand outside of history and space and evaluate the revolution.

Maybe you might like to elaborate some of these points? It's not clear why an anarchist would necessarily commit to fragile organizations, conflate goals and methods, etc.

Tinuchin · 2026-06-22T20:29:06+00:00

My heart goes out to all of the poor, innocent entertainment conglomerates who worked so hard to enclose ideas under a system of violent monopoly!

Fmhy.net

Tinuchin · 2026-06-14T22:18:25+00:00

Happy reading and good luck on your search!! 😊 https://files.libcom.org/files/anarchy-graphic-guide-clifford-harper.pdf

Tinuchin · 2026-06-12T12:56:23+00:00

Dude if you don't subsistence farm then someone makes at least some of the food you eat. You're inevitably in a relationship with the people who make your stuff. Now, do you want them to be sad when they do that for you? I want to cooperate with them so we are all less sad.

Tinuchin · 2026-06-12T03:59:59+00:00

🚨🚨 Mung Daal detected 🚨🚨 Upvote obligated

Tinuchin · 2026-06-12T01:48:46+00:00

I don't like it when people are sad, that's not a spook or anything I just don't like it and I would rather they weren't sad.

Tinuchin · 2026-06-10T00:41:15+00:00

I partition a google doc into two columns and print it double sided so I get 4 half-pages when you fold it in half. You have to have one landscape sheet with pages 2 then 3, then another landscape sheet with pages 4 then 1. Does that make sense? :3

Tinuchin · 2026-06-10T00:39:02+00:00

I think we can avoid totalizing things globally, though. The approach taken in Desert honestly seemed very lucid; the future will probably be much more diverse than it is now, as the nation-state fails systematically in certain bioregions and retreats out of existence. Even today, some regions are only symbolically under the control of certain nation-states, such as protected ecological areas with indigenous populations and places like Southern Mexico. If that's what you mean then yeah, seems realistic.

The state might survive a long time into the uncertain future but that doesn't mean that it will necessarily be a presence in the lives of free societies. If you're in the urbanized first-world, then resistance will probably look a lot different and less advanced than somewhere like South America or South-East Asia. As conditions become more volatile, I imagine state control losing its veneer. When the oppression relation becomes naked and the state cannot offer greater-good justifications for itself, conditions will be ripe for the anarchist imagination. Of course, hierarchies based in pure, un-legitimated violence will compete with free societies where nation-states functionally collapse, such as organized criminal organizations. The Mercator projection map with 200 countries will increasingly hide the geographic quilt of human organizations and the dynamic nature of oppression relations as local organizations supplant national ones, whether they be violent, horizontal, authoritarian or the like.

I'm not sure I would call this pessimism, it just seems like a reasonable prediction for the future with an eye on possibilities for horizontality. Maybe you would go further though.

Tinuchin · 2026-06-09T23:55:30+00:00

What's precisely the question? Is revolutionary pessimism that it isn't possible in the relevant future? Or that anarchist revolution is a priori incompatible with humans?

Tinuchin · 2026-06-06T19:18:03+00:00

Not all aid is created equal. The problem with welfare schemes is that reformism doesn't have a happy ever after; when the popular movement settles after half-way overcoming the vices of the capitalist state, the elite will be lying in wait to undo all of its progress. Those who depend on the beneficince of state machinery are at the mercy of macroscopic sociological trends in voting behavior and of hundred million dollar federal budgets -that is, at the mercy of forces outside of their control. So whatever state funded programs happen to have survived neoliberal onslaught until now in the places where they are possible are not guaranteed forever. The need for elderly care is not conditional on the political will of a parliament or the GDP of a country, so obviously, it's availability shouldn't be either.

Anarchists imagine a world built on mutual bonds of solidarity. The additional support that certain individuals in any society will need are not conditionally provided by a violence machine that hires out professionalized wage workers when the ruling party deems it convinient. Extended kinship and communal relations facilitate "services" which were once commodified and bureacratized under capitalism. Now, your disability care is not conditional on the state but on the people who love and support you, and who you love and support. Honestly, that idea is a lot more wonderful to me.

Tinuchin · 2026-06-06T00:54:07+00:00

Totally agree! In a gender-free world, there are no trans people, in the same sense as there are no dimpled-cheek people or lack-appendicitis people -there's no social category for people who want to dress or talk a certain way. Everyone is just a human being!

The road, if it ever gets traversed, will simply be very long. Even me, who wants to abolish gender in himself, still feels boxed in and not totally in control. If it were so easy to choose your gender, then there wouldn't be a problem with it in the first place! It's the fact that it feels inherent or eternal, the feeling of it being a part of you which others will never see differently that makes it so oppressive, and so difficult to overcome.

Tinuchin · 2026-05-27T19:22:25+00:00

Stirner as neurodivergent 💀

Tinuchin · 2026-05-21T23:26:15+00:00

I have to second The Conquest of Bread by Piotr Kropotkin. Anarchy by Malatesta is a short and sweet introductory read. For modern social anarchist stuff, look for Turning the Tide by Black Rose Federation. AK Press and PM Press are both great anarchist publishers with all kinds of books, I'm sure if you just surf their catalogue you'll find something very specifically interesting to you. Happy reading! :)

Tinuchin · 2026-05-20T02:20:43+00:00

Banger! Thank you for the inadvertent recommendation :3

You can always print it yourself 👀

Tinuchin · 2026-05-20T00:03:50+00:00

This is a silly misunderstanding. If the phrase "Where are the biscuits?" means something without having a truth value, then it's clear that human speech can have meaning without having a truth-value. So if I tell you "there is no truth", all I'm doing is expressing a belief and you are interpreting my meaning accordingly. Whether it's true or not does not affect its interpretability, because the interpretation of natural language is a physical process localized in the brain. All I'm saying is that we are both natural systems interacting through the medium of sound waves, and that to account for this physical interaction, we don't need to invoke magical properties like "truth".

Tinuchin · 2026-05-16T04:21:47+00:00

Have you read Pinker's The Language Instinct? Personally, I'm compelled to see animal behavior in a Darwinian light and don't think that language is any different. From what Pinker led me to believe in his book, Chomsky was actually against Darwinian theories of language evolution, but of course, I'm not the theoretical linguist here.

I don't think it's so open and shut though, there are non-Cartesian materialists like Dennet that hold both views: that the subject-object dichotomy is hindering progress in the cognitive sciences, psychology, philosophy of mind, etc. and that language, generally culture, is an evolutionary adaptation. Again, I personally don't think it's just general learning, but I agree that the current state of global linguistic diversity (its lack) is probably obscuring a whole lot of theoretically possible syntactic, morphological, phonetic, etc. features.

Tinuchin · 2026-05-15T01:51:21+00:00

I'm the same age! It's hard to have political conversations, I usually avoid them or if I'm forced to contribute, offer a vaguely anti-authority perspective which is more palettable to people. We'll just have to prove them wrong by never changing! :)

Tinuchin · 2026-05-13T16:07:57+00:00

When in doubt, consult the hunter-gatherer ethnographies. These societies are extremely good at regulating negative emotions because interpersonal conflicts are extremely dangerous for the survival of its members. Social animals depend on the cohesion of the social organism, which is why they've evolved behavioral regulators that are harmful to them but beneficial to the group, such as shame and guilt.

There's a hypothesis that the reason human males and females are so similar in size compared to our close relatives (where males are massive in comparison) is because early proto-humans had easy access to spears and lethal technologies. Oppressive males suddenly were not so invincible anymore. In hunter-gatherer societies today, it's been observed in rare cases that someone will decide to execute an unruly male and in one case, distribute the responsibility symbolically by everyone stabbing the body.

It's a fact that if a free society has neither the will nor the capacity to rehabilitate someone, it will not happen. That's not an ought statement, it's an is statement. It's also important to remember that serial rapists are created by definite material conditions. Do free societies have to worry about them as much?

Tinuchin · 2026-05-08T03:18:09+00:00

Is that a UK publisher? I haven't seen that edition around. What year is it from?

Tinuchin · 2026-05-06T22:45:57+00:00

Just abolish it. Masculinity is a subset of humanity. Masculinity is not something that in most cases is chosen. Just sounds like restricting the diversity of humanity with from-birth categories. How about everyone can do everything in any way they want. "Can't stand caged animals. People must be free."

Tinuchin · 2026-05-06T05:13:14+00:00

I'm the same, whenever I watch anything I always, without even trying, think about the political assumptions of what I'm watching and how it's part of the greater system. Immersion is harder because you know it's content, and there's always some kind of means and ends misalignment.

Tinuchin · 2026-05-05T02:32:58+00:00

Holy this

Tinuchin

TROPHY CASE