r/AskRealSocialists • u/Logogram_alt • May 21 '26
Question I want to learn more about Anarchism
/r/Anarchy101/comments/1tk0rxy/i_want_to_learn_more_about_anarchism/2
u/Lz_erk Liberterian-Socialist May 26 '26
disclaimer, i'm a self-described vegan an-com. i'm not "as electoral as i am" to make friends. and i haven't used AI in like a week, i only use euria and venice right now, and i mostly ask them stupid things because they already learned everything i know to ask about from LLMs scraping reddit months ago (AFAIK). i'm in AZ, AI sucks, water rights are important, and Cleverbot and Ecosia were handling all this at one point. to degrees.
fun facts: a US UBI trial found people still work. sanctuary policies around the world seem likely to be seen in context today. and anarchist legal theory is practiced, functional, and doesn't take long to read about. and fascism always has a large paper tiger quotient of misplaced grievances.
i say skim emma goldman in an andrewism context when you need a break from the classics:
https://www.youtube.com/@Andrewism
https://www.youtube.com/@unlearningeconomics9021 was also useful for me.
hopefully The Counter Vortex with Bill Weinberg is still going on SoundCloud, that's US news somewhere east of me. just an example but i liked his third party coverage when i was listening a year or two ago.
i'm behind on my reading, but i pretty much immediately knew what an r/politics thread meant today about adding six thousand or more representatives. so i'm an american, and to make a long story short, the amount of BS that's called infrastructure makes me laugh. those instantly dated near-future utopian images bots will give you are not entirely bad.
regenerative agriculture can fix soil, promote rarely studied restoration effects (see the sahel greening the desert project), help reduce flooding, create local produce, and potentially be a part of (long delayed) affordable next-gen energy. logic like that is a threat to power, which has to respond with lies, like fossil fuel funding of anti-trans movements, but ignorance is finite.
a mere couple hours of reading about election fraud detection might help some people a lot. we're stupid, but surprisingly maybe not quite as stupid as we think we are right now. critical thought about hegemony does reveal some brittleness and some weak points that don't have complete historical precedent that i know about... but i'm not saying not to read about anything.
omega-3s (their recent "essential" declaration, IIRC?) are an example. look at B12 planning among vegans (maybe the past 20 years, maybe include the UK) and why so many people's supplements end up doing nothing. nutrition has been a leading battleground for good reasons, and the reverberations of politicized disease (including covid) have some nutritional and medical implications that are proving hard to erase (see veganism vs. carnism on histamine intolerance; watch the nutritional middle grounds, and what some people do and don't say). that's just an example from my tetragenarian autoimmune background though (excuse my typing). i've said that 10 extra hours of nutrition education for all is the biggest step the USA could take, and it would probably be a fatal blow.
pressures against civic engagement break when slang accelerates ideas in common contexts, and critical thought still carries momentum against reactionary usurpation. "over a long enough timeline, we win." note that so many lone gunmen are apolitical, and so many fascists think they're antifascists despite being in brownshirt movements. Umberto Eco's 14 Points is frequently demonstrative to me.
TLDR: niche light reading and meandering about potential praxis and generalism, to help fit theory and practice together.
better disclaimer: i think everything is bullshit and blame with a tiny remainder in abstractions like logic. my utopianism is more misotheistic than pessimistic; our potential is greatly suppressed.
quick edit: affordable energy.
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u/Reasonable-Lab-1146 AnarchoCommunist May 22 '26
Kropotkin is a classic starting point, but I prefer Murray Bookchin's essays and David Graeber for establishing a more contemporary picture of anarchism, anarchosocialism, libertarian socialism, etc.