From Rhyd Wildermuth: " I'm not the sort of person the police or military exist to protect...why let them murder in my name?"

Authoring is an Anarchist practice, because it requires and is an exercise in self-governance.

In order for democracy to work, we have to fight the impulse to surrender our power. We have to take responsibility for our own lives, individually and collectively. That means making a practice of taking back power from those who we have surrendered it to—even when believe they are using it benevolently.

While a genderless society might be the ideal, we don’t live in that society, and until we do, opposing trans rights won’t help us get there. Gender is a social construction, but if we try to eliminate the category of gender outright, then the experience of transgender people living in a cis-normative society is erased.

The original heresy is the belief that the earth is not our home, that our real life is somewhere else—whether in heaven or a future technotopia. We embrace this heresy to make sense of that nagging feeling that something is wrong with the world itself. But the real reason we feel this way is because civilization alienates us from everything that makes us human.

The Rule of Law is not designed to be democratically improved upon, it’s designed to work according to the whims of those already in a position of power, and who have all the interest and resources to retain this power.

Is the arrest of the men who tied another man down to beat him to death what Justice looks like?

People are able to organize very complex distribution and exchange mechanisms in a very short time without the intervention of state institutions. […] People did not engage in a general war for survival, but gathered in smaller groups around small 'pools' of remaining resources.

If the people we fight against had their way, then none of us would be safe for another day. That’s all the reason I need to stand against them.

“(Pre)history, like any story, is empirically non-reducible to a singular causal chain of historical events, including the bogus idea of the agricultural revolution.”

This is the lesson I learned after having my work co-opted by fascists: It’s not enough to articulate a critique of capitalism—as I did in my article about distributism. If we do not also clearly distinguish ourselves from the fascists, then we will end up losing the debate to both.

“I began to see a connection between my anarchist mentality – which, for most of my life, was more of an instinct than a philosophy – and my pagan religion. Specifically, I began to understand a pagan and animist worldview as the spiritual core of a future free society capable of living on this planet without destroying all life here.”

They say the pandemic has popularized walking and the urban concept of the so-called fifteen-minute city – a city where all the necessary things are within a fifteen minute walk.

“If we switch our mental focus and ground our conception of anarchism in the here and now, then what would our anarchism look like?”

“After a year in which the whole world was called to action and solidarity due to environmental urgencies, racial conflicts and one great health crisis, the new chapters of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid could start to be written.”

We had sort of been reliant on the idea that with Graeber out there, there was hope that life today would find a way out of systems of coercive authority.

Today, as the cautionary tale that we have become, it’s not too late to start putting this planet back in our sights, even if it means looking at something uncomfortable and un-rescuable.

It’s easier to think it’s the other, those ‘bad apples’, because we don’t want to come to realization that pretty much every white American is unprepared for what it really means for their Nation to give up being a world power fueled by racial injustice.

Civilized societies are not less violent than non-civilized societies–-though they may appear to be the more privileged citizens. One of the defining characteristics of civilization is the depersonalization of violence.

Though they’re often used synonymously, civilization is not the same thing as culture. Many of the things that are attributed to civilization, such as art and healing, existed before civilization and outside of states. And many of the lauded “improvements” brought by civilization were not really improvements, or else they were improvements which came at a terrible cost.