More important than opposition to the current system is the prefiguration of an anarchic one. So much online discourse is about attacking, a lot less is about building. I drew this to remind myself and others that confronting the state is only a part of the puzzle and building new systems without it is also important.

Licence (as always): CC-0, No rights reserved.

  • masquenox@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    Since I took food as an example I’ll use that because we all need food

    True, but food is also the easiest one. Food sovereignty is not the only kind of sovereignty an anarchist society would require in order to be viable. There is also energy sovereignty, mineral resource sovereignty, technological sovereignity and more - and I rarely see anarchists engaging with those… perhaps because they are not as easily dealt with as food sovereignty.

    Instead of massive monoculture farms

    Monoculture farming has more to do with colonialism than profiteering - the latter is merely the method preferred by imperialist and sub-imperialist states to ensure the accrued power and privilege resulting from it stays with those land-owning elites who support the status quo. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with monoculture - certain things will simply be better cultivated that way, even in a decolonised society. Democratised food systems would be nice, though.

    supply chains thousands of miles long

    This is unavoidable if you intend on having any kind of industrialised society. You can’t expect an anarchist farming community to also build and design it’s own agricultural machinery - and that doesn’t even take into account the raw materials needed for production.

    food would be grown close to where people live

    This would make trade inevitable. Not all crops can be grown everywhere - and that means people will inevitably start trading for the things that aren’t locally available to them. That is, unless you violently prevent them from doing so - but doing that also means your revolution has already failed.

    Let’s be clear - this…

    through networks of community gardens, small-scale permaculture farms, and cooperative distribution.

    …does not food sovereignty make. When it comes to food production, an anarchist society is going to need far, far more sophisticated and better-supported food production infrastructure than what you are imagining.

    The tools and materials needed, (yes, even some that are industrially produced) could be made in worker-run, federated workshops

    I have no interest in a society where the height of technology is only the machinery necessary to produce a spade. In order to be viable, an anarchist society won’t just need workshops - it will require factories and large-scale industrial complexes, supported by well-established (and extremely large) scientific and technological institutions. Only a relatively small amount of all of this can happen in a localised matter - even in a fully-democratised and socialised society (which is what an anarchist society would have to be).

    I know, I did a shit job of explaining it

    You did a shit job of explaining it because you don’t understand it well enough - just like Einstein famously said. I would go further than that - I’d also say you also don’t understand the world in which this proposed economic system would function well enough.

    You know, there was this absolute doomer - Mark Fisher - who opined that imagining the end of the world was easier than imagining the end of capitalism. I disagree - imagining the end of capitalism is not so hard… as long as you stop obsessing over replacing capitalism and begin understanding that a post-capitalist society will, instead, be built on top of a capitalist society. Ie, a historical process that actually has precedent.