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.
This is Hell! Radio has been broadcasting and podcasting from Chicago and “manufacturing dissent” since 1996. Between 2014 and 2021, Antidote Zine transcribed over two hundred of their in-depth interviews with scholars, activists, revolutionaries, and journalists on a variety of topics. This is of course only a tiny fraction of the fascinating material they have released, and still release on a regular basis.
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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.
The global police state involves a convergence of global capitalism’s need for social control and its economic need to perpetuate profit-making in the face of stagnation.
Violence to the territory is similar to violence to the body. Intervening in the territory and violence through extractivism is also a way of genocide. Culture cannot exist in the same way when the territory is under threat.
It’s a chronic condition of capitalism that lower-income people in the income distribution of any city are not going to be able to house themselves decently and legally. That’s true if you’re in Nairobi or Lima or New York.
With the increasing concentration of corporate power in the food sector, it’s very difficult to see how it can really shift unless we decide to put pressure on it by abandoning it.
There are people who come into the police department who already hold these views, and there are people who are influenced. Certainly openly racist police officers can have a continuing influence.
“Neither Washington nor Beijing” doesn’t simply signal that both states are equally bad, but it recognizes that imperialism is a world system not limited to the boundaries of nation-states.
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.
Politicians have articulated the absolute expendibility of most humans beings on the planet. That’s creating new forms of solidarity in the streets right now, and all over the world, as people struggle.
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.