It’s about working towards how we should be living. That’s living in a community where people have an attachment and connection to the village, town or city neighbourhood they live in and the people they live alongside.
Narrowing down the parameters of discussion
I’m far from the only person feeling that the parameters of what can and cannot be discussed and debated these days have been narrowed down over the last few decades. A tendency that for a variety of reasons, has accelerated over the last decade.
A way forward?
It feels that the environment movement is in grave danger of allowing itself to be used and abused in the name of imposing the ‘great reset’. A ‘reset’ that will subject the vast majority of the population to a very limited life while the elites who presume to rule over us continue to swan around flaunting their wealth.
So, what was that all about?
The long established currents of anti-monarchism raging from the anarchists to the decidedly middle of the road Republic have a choice to make. Do they accept or reject the tens of thousands of potential allies that have emerged from the anti-lockdown protests?
Why do I do this to myself?
Why has the frustration and pain of being an activist got worse? I’ll try to explain. I used to be very tribal. Once I’d found a political home, I’d defend it and my comrades vigorously. Any nagging doubts I had were packed away in a box and hidden in a dark cupboard. That was until the point when it started to become clear that what I thought was a ‘for ever’ political home was changing and going off in a direction I couldn’t travel in.
Beyond the label…
I’ve written this piece because there are a few things about who supposedly ‘owns’ the movement and what anarchism actually is that I want to try and clarify. In part, it was written in response to some of the ongoing sniping that’s going on between various factions in the movement. If this sniping is all people see of anarchism, then it may well not have much of a future.
The masks have slipped right off the faces of the ‘be kind’ brigade
All of this came from activists who exhort others to ‘be kind’. A courtesy they’re unwilling to extend to anyone raising questions and concerns about their beliefs. Anyone questioning them is told that the issue is ‘not up for debate’. Anyone questioning them is subject to abuse, threats and as we have increasingly seen, actual violence.
What next? Dystopia?
We’ve tended to write about dystopia as something to fear in the future. That was a mistake, a massive one to be honest. Why is that? You only have to look at the state of the world as it currently is to realise that to all intents and purposes, we’re living in a dystopia right now.
The abuse of a term
As the word ‘fascism’ been used in such a scattergun way, when actual fascism really emerges, too many people won’t recognise what’s actually going on until it’s too late.
Honesty vs tribalism
Looking back over the last six years, the issues I’ve had with now former comrades stem from me wanting to find out the truth of a situation as best I can and to then formulate what I felt was an honest opinion. What I found was that some of the opinions I formed were at variance with what could best be described as the prevailing orthodoxy. I don’t use the term orthodoxy lightly but, on a range of issues where I has differences with comrades, it transpired that there was very little room for an open and honest debate.
Complexity, collapse and radical change
As society becomes ever more complex, as well as becoming harder to develop any overview of how it functions, it’s also becoming more vulnerable to disruption and eventually collapse.
It’s been an interesting year…
As for how events and trends will pan out next year, we’ve given up making predictions. That’s simply because making predictions as we enter a massive and complex clusterf**k is a mug’s game.
Attachment, connection and a search for meaning
Among the various currents of protest against the way the Covid situation was leveraged to accelerate the 4IR, there are those of us doing what we can to join the dots and understand what’s being done to us and why. In the process of doing that, a fair few of us have moved beyond the political labels we once had and we once, sometimes proudly, wore.
Trying to understand the situation we’re in…
It’s only when you start to pull all of the disparate threads of the ongoing clusterf**k together that it becomes frighteningly obvious we’re heading towards some kind of system failure, possibly even a collapse. What this piece is attempting to do (quite possibly in vain) is to try and analyse why we are where we are and then establish what, if anything, we can do to save ourselves.
Where the f**k do we go from here?
That’s it, we’re done with what passes for an anarchist ‘movement’ in this country. While we still adhere to what we regard as anarchist principles, it needs to be known that we want nothing to do with this ‘movement’.
Thoughts on not falling for blatant wind ups
This is where the real resistance is going to happen. Not outside of a party conference but in thousands of neighbourhoods across the country. It will happen with actions that will frustrate the authorities, make us more ungovernable and ultimately, start to bring power down to the level of the neighbourhood.
Double standards?
When we see double standards and blatant hypocrisy in play in what passes for an anarchist movement here in the UK, we really have no option but to call it out.
What next?
The illusion of stability that Queen Elizabeth II somehow managed to convey during her reign will be seen as just that – an illusion. One that will disappear as the harsh reality of a society in the first stages of collapse impacts upon everyone’s lives. When people’s illusions get shattered, there’s no way of telling how they’re going to react.