Anarchism and Optimism
Anarchism exposes the lie of liberal democratic thinking which says this is the best we can do. The anarchist says no, we can do better if we simply work together and change the systems that we have.
Anarchism exposes the lie of liberal democratic thinking which says this is the best we can do. The anarchist says no, we can do better if we simply work together and change the systems that we have.
A conversation with Indigenous grassroots activists engaging in radical autonomous community care and defense work in the face of the ongoing epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives (MMIWR).
We’re trying to make really big changes to really big institutions and systems that we’ve never existed without (in our memories). We need something that can help us in transition.
If anarchism is a radical overthrowing of the very state that has dictated what is possible for us, then it requires that we think about some seemingly impossible things.
Japanese cooperatist anarchists were often just doing their everyday informal life practices that worked for them through mutual aid, with an ‘anarchist modern’ subjectivity that emphasized symbiosis with surrounding nature.
Disasters like a hurricane or an earthquake are localized. They happen in one place and everyone floods to that place and figures out how to work together. Now with the pandemic, it’s generalized. It’s throughout the city, it’s national, and it’s global.
While all of them face intersecting forms of visible and invisible violence, making border crossing even more dangerous and lethal for women, we know that women on the move are more than what they are reduced to, and that they bear a power and a strength that no border is able to defeat.
People are looking at the structure of this society and asking if it actually makes any sense right now, when we think about the interrelationship that we have with each other, interdependence, dignity, a sense of care for each other, and common good.
Measures being taken to slow the spread of the Coronavirus have restricted access to refugee shelters and camps. But organized refugee women continue to reach out to residents, people who are locked up and lack access to information about the ongoing pandemic.
What happens when people camp together, sleep together, and are not in a rush? Well, they talk about all kinds of things. They establish forms of solidarity through conversation.