You are spot on with identifying and denouncing visions exposed by many ideologies and I empathize with your sentiment to resist certain labels because of your goal to address the issues directly rather than participate in less productive armchair politics. The romanticism espoused by certain trans-humanists , groups like the seasteaders , the zeitgeist movement, the venus project , and others all have an unrealistic and utopian ideals which makes them fascinating but anyone with any real experience living in a anarchistic community realizes there is no end utopia to be realized or even desired.
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Despite the caricatures portrayed by socialists and anarcho-communists on the evils of an-caps and our love of corporations and hatred of the poor, in reality we have many of the same goals and motivations as them, just different methods at accomplishing such goals. We would rather allow a psychopath to identify themselves by not contributing rather than using force to mandate egalitarianism. When a community is kept small, social pressures can have a very powerful effect and we have been successful in running some of the most dangerous, heavily armed druglords out of town without the use of violence and by social pressures and solidarity alone in our community with our non-profit DRO.
cool I've had big arguments with communists before turning aggressive and loud calling me bourgeois despite my extremely modest lifestyle striving for my ideals. No matter what you say they are hopelessly dogmatic and unwilling to understand why you can't take power to fix things.
Proudhon said of communism, "whether of the utopian or the Marxist variety, that it destroyed freedom by taking away from the individual control over his means of production" and "Communism is exploitation of the strong by the weak." Mikhail Bakunin stated "I hate Communism because it is the negation of liberty and because for me humanity is unthinkable without liberty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issues_in_anarchism#CommunismTheir ideology is rooted in an older period and is an obsolete dogma for our time.
Why has the oppressed proletariat not come to its senses and joined you in your fight for world liberation? ... [Because] they know that your antiquated styles of protest – your marches, hand held signs, and gatherings – are now powerless to effect real change because they have become such a predictable part of the status quo. They know that your post-Marxist jargon is off-putting because it really is a language of mere academic dispute, not a weapon capable of undermining systems of control…
—"Your Politics Are Boring as Fuck"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-left_anarchyI sympathise heavily with these viewpoints:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-market_anarchism#Left-wing_market_anarchismhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeolibertarianismIn the end, we don't have all the answers, simply ideals to strive towards thinking how we should implement them in the here and the now. Unlike any utopic ideology, what separates us is putting what we say into practice and living our ideals as our activism.
I've lived around the world, and interacted with many activist communities. I'm friends with people across all the spectrum from academics, politicians, businessmen, anarchists of the south, libertarians of the west, ... and sense a common strand of perception on the world separated often by isolating language or political frameworks. What an American believes and emphasises is very much tied to the local culture, context and history, and differs from a Spanish guy. It's important to look past this with understanding about the issues with a recognition that we are one freedom movement.
There are different governance models, different ways of organising, and no one way is objectively better. There are tradeoffs. What we can do is work through markets to provide the things to empower people to self-organise. I fundamentally believe (take it as a dogma or experience
) that free & open markets work best in our favour as we're working against the status quo. It's not simply a matter of what's better but also the inevitability of a changing global landscape that we have to adapt to. I want a world based on merit and empathy (if you're egoist, call it "enlightened self-interest", or leftist call it "mutuality"). I love to support people doing cool things or projects with my own money or have nice people around. My method is about creating the tools or means so we can have 10s of thousands or millions of people working together, supporting each other with a philosophy of "why put your money in the corporations, put your money in your friends". We spend lots of money everyday giving to big corporations, but instead if we could satisfy our needs as free people, we can continue to reinvest in each other. From different perspectives you could call this either socialism or capitalism (depending on your definitions of the word).
Here's an article about the CIC in Catalonia. They are using the legal structure of a cooperative to create their own startup government that provides the basic services that people need to live, but better than that of the governments of the state:
https://cooperativa.cat/en/integral-revolution/They use the legal structure to create their own internal economy and are ~10,000 different organisations with a food network and different services for people. It's a cool vision.
Also our plan is to build our own cities:
https://wiki.unsystem.net/index.php/UnSYSTEM/Opensource_cityA communist town (interesting to understand):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marinaleda,_Spain