EDIT: fixed the video url

Murray Bookchin talks about his history in various communist and anarchist movements, discusses trends in anarchism and libertarian socialism (taking positions against anarcho-primitivism and lifestyle anarchism), talks about the working class' need for free time to even begin to engage with politics (as distinct from "statecraft"), predicts the rise of the right in the 21st century, and more.

(The link skips the first 35 minutes of the video, in which he reads a lifestyle anarchist pamphlet being distributed as part of a mini-protest outside his talk and has a very brief interaction with the folks distributing it.)

Invidious link: https://inv.nadeko.net/LFswTGgDG-E?t=2095

Thought this was an interesting and well reasoned critque of some aspects of the Dawn of Everything, particularly how Graeber's conclusions could lead one to take a misinformed wrong path toward changing modern society that may give poor results.

The Institute for Social Ecology is in conversation with author Eleanor Finley about her newly published book - Practicing Social Ecology: From Bookchin to Rojava and Beyond! Eleanor is a longtime friend of the ISE and her book is an excellent contribution to social ecology as a living theory and practice. This event includes a talk from the author as well as audience Q&A.

Purchase Eleanor's book from the publisher Pluto Press: https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745346908/practicing-social-ecology/

Author Bio:

Eleanor Finley is a researcher at the University of Massachusetts, an associate of the Institute for Social Ecology (ISE), and an affiliated researcher at George Mason University, Next System Studies. She has published numerous articles on social ecology and related themes, such as Kurdish democratic confederalism, energy and environmental justice, and degrowth, and conducted dozens of workshops, talks, and lectures to diverse audiences in North America and Europe. She lives in Fairfax, Virginia.

Book Description:

How can we harness society's potential to change the trajectory of the climate crisis? So many of us feel helpless in the face of corporate environmental destruction, however, in Practicing Social Ecology Eleanor Finley shows that there is an amazing well of untapped power in our communities, we just need to know how to use it.

Drawing from her experience of working in democratic ecology movements from the revolution in Rojava to Barcelona's municipalist movement and beyond, she shows how to develop assemblies, confederations, study groups, and permaculture projects.

Looking to history, she maps out how social ecologists, such as Murray Bookchin, have led inspirational struggles around climate and energy, agriculture and biotechnology, globalisation and economic inequality. This guide is perfect for anyone curious about how to challenge unending capitalist growth through the democratic power of social ecology.

Members of the Indigenous Waorani village of Kiwaro looked skyward as a helicopter hovered over the rainforest canopy in the center of Ecuador and landed in a nearby clearing. Out stepped government officials, there to inform the community about an impending auction of oil rights on their land.

The Ecuadorian government announced earlier, in November 2011 from the capital city Quito, that it would open up for drilling millions of hectares of Amazon rainforest—including the ancestral territories of Waorani communities like Kiwaro.

Following the meetings, Ecuador’s then minister of non-renewable resources opened the oil auction, later telling the media that oil companies’ investments in Ecuador could be worth $700 million.

The paltry consultation process, and the threat oil operations posed to their lands and culture, galvanized Indigenous groups to fight back. In 2019, sixteen Waorani communities and a provincial ombudsman filed a lawsuit in a local court against multiple federal ministries, alleging that the communities’ rights to free, prior and informed consultation were violated.

The research focused on a model where small, interconnected subgroups operate within larger populations, allowing decisions to emerge through a structured, bottom-up process. This network-based model enables populations to make complex decisions efficiently while still reflecting the will of the broader group.

"Our findings highlight the value of decentralized, structured decision-making," noted Cohen, who is also associate professor of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health. "The way these groups are organized -- and the connections between them -- can fundamentally shape the outcomes."

The world around us is breaking, and not by accident. Climate disasters, poisoned water, corrupt governments, rising inequality, all symptoms of a system built on domination: people over each other, people over nature.

Big promises from corporations and politicians won't save us. They were never meant to.

Real change doesn’t come from the top down. It grows from the bottom up - from our towns, our counties, our communities.

Right now across the U.S., people are already:

• Growing their own food in community gardens.

• Organizing mutual aid when disaster strikes.

• Taking back land through cooperatives and land trusts.

• Defending forests, rivers, and neighborhoods against destruction.

They aren't waiting for permission.

A truly ecological society — one rooted in freedom, care, and balance — doesn't start in Washington, D.C. It starts where you live.

• Local assemblies deciding what happens in your town.

• Community-controlled energy and food systems.

• Neighbors working together to protect land and life.

We can’t fix a broken system by begging it to change. We have to build something better — together, from the ground up.

What will you start reclaiming today?

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/62560258

Hello dear fellow human beings!

Let me clarify a few things.

We are one, all of us, all stardust, right from the belly of an exploding star, right to our shared evolution, history, & current technological & societal progress. All humanity and all life is one and connected, and so are all of our problems.

Poverty, hunger, homelessness, climate change, fascism, war, and even the global epidemic of loneliness & depression aren’t distinct disconnected problems. They are a singular globally connected problem. And it requires a singular globally connected solution.

All of these are problems of a skewed economy, aka wealth inequality. Those who don't have enough face poverty, hunger, homelessness, and a lifetime of financial insecurity. Those who have plenty, want even more, which leads to them dividing the masses by propaganda, eventually leading to fascism & war. Our collective mismanaged consumption is pushing us all towards climate catastrophe. All of these global issues are making us very lonely & depressed, and the overall society prone to crime & violence.

So how can we fix this skewed economy and our collective social issues? And is it even solvable?

Some might find the answer as obvious, some might consider it incorrect or impossible to achieve. Well, let me tell you folks, I've done the math, I've double checked my work, there is one and only one way out - Collectively!

Welcome to Collective Cake, a secular democratic global economic engine powered by all, and created for all. If we are the producers and if we are also the consumers, then we can manage our economy however we collectively want. It’s our Collective Cake, let’s take ownership and enjoy it best we can.

Is it a business? Or is it an cooperative? Is it a think tank? Or is it an economic union? Is it a democratically controlled, sustainability led unified global economy? It is anything & everything we want it to be. We get to collectively decide it!

Is it capitalism? Is it communism? Is it market socialism? All I will say about this is that capitalism is what exists right now, and market socialism is also capitalism, but the better kind. However, I want us all to refrain from using such labels while problem solving. Labels might help identify a sub-group, but it invariably causes division and we pick sides, we blindly love ours, and blindly hate theirs. An emotional response is not a well reasoned response. Lastly, if even one man cannot understand ambiguous or technical jargon, we have all collectively lost.

There's a lot for us talk about. Not a debate to be won, but a problem to be solved. Not using violence, but by strategy and collective action. Before we talk about the what or the how, we must talk more about the why. I have some thoughts that I'll share, but it doesn't matter for we can collectively decide and do anything we want. The matchstick has been lit.

Next week, I'll share my thoughts on our collective ethos or "our water".

Stay tuned!

Love, fakir

PS: enjoy this lovely animation that was released over 50 years ago!

This is the second time, I've denazified a dangerous link to a known fash website

At first I thought it was a mistake, but twice, is a trend. This is the best time to practice anti authoritarian interlacing. It won't occur overnight, so take your time. But be extremely aware they want you dead, and cornered.

I've been part of the online left for a while now, part of slrpnk about 2 months, and if there's one recurring experience that's both exhausting and revealing, it's trying to have good-faith discussions with self-identified Marxist-Leninists, the kind often referred to as "tankies." I use that term here not as a lazy insult nor to dehumanize, but to describe a particular kind of online personality: the ones who dogmatically defend Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and every so-called "existing socialist state" past or present, without room for nuance, critique, or even basic empathy. Not all Marxist-Leninists are like this. But these people, these tankies, show up in every thread, every debate, every conversation about liberation, and somehow it always turns into a predictable mess.

It usually goes like this: I make a statement that critiques authoritarianism or centralized power, and suddenly I'm being accused of parroting CIA talking points, being a liberal in disguise, or not being a "real leftist." One time, I said "Totalitarianism kills" — a simple, arguably uncontroversial point. What followed was a barrage of replies claiming that the term was invented by Nazis, that Hannah Arendt (who apparently popularized it, I looked it up and it turns out she didn't) was an anti-semite, and that even using the word is inherently reactionary. When I clarified that I was speaking broadly about state violence and authoritarian mechanisms, the same people just doubled down, twisting my words, inventing claims I never made, and eventually accusing me of being some kind of crypto-fascist. This wasn’t a one-off, it happens constantly.

If you've spent any time in these spaces, you know what I'm talking about. The conversations never stays on topic. It always loops back to defending state socialism, reciting quotes from Lenin, minimizing atrocities as "bourgeois propaganda" and dragging anarchism as naive or counter-revolutionary. It's like they’re playing from a script.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand why these interactions feel so uniquely frustrating. And over time, I’ve started noticing recurring patterns in the kind of people who show up this way. Again, a disclaimer here: not everyone who defends Marx or Lenin online falls into these patterns. There are thoughtful, sincere, and principled MLs who engage in real, grounded discussions. But then there are these other types:

1. The Theory Maximalist

This person treats political theory like scripture. They’ve read the texts (probably a lot of them) and they approach every conversation like a chance to prove their mastery. Everything becomes about citations, dialectics, and abstract arguments. When faced with real-world contradictions, their default move is to bury it under more theory. They mistake being well-read for being politically mature, and often completely miss the human, relational side of radical politics.

2. The Identity Leftist

For this person, being a leftist isn’t about organizing or material change. It’s an identity. They call themselves a Marxist-Leninist the way someone else might call themselves a punk or a metalhead. Defending state socialism becomes a cultural performance. They’re less interested in the complexity of history than in being on the “correct side” of whatever aesthetic battle they’re fighting. Anarchists, to them, represent softness or chaos, and that’s a threat to the image they’ve built for themselves.

3. The Terminally Online Subculturalist

This one lives in forums, Discords, or other niche Internet circles. Their entire political world is digital. They've likely never been to a union meeting, a mutual aid drive, or a community organizing session. All their knowledge of struggle is mediated through memes and screenshots. They treat ideology like a fandom and conflict like sport. They love the drama, the takedowns, the purity contests. The actual work of liberation? Irrelevant.

4. The Alienated Intellectual

This person is often very smart, often very isolated, and clings to ideology as a way of making sense of the world. They’re drawn to strict political systems because it gives them order and meaning in a chaotic life. And while they might not be malicious, they often struggle to engage with disagreement without feeling personally attacked. For them, criticism of Marxism-Leninism can feel like an existential threat, because it destabilizes the fragile structure they’ve built to cope with life.

These types don’t describe everyone, and they’re not meant to be a diagnosis or a dismissal. They're patterns I’ve noticed. Ways that a political identity can become rigid, defensive, and disconnected from real-world struggle.

And here’s the thing that’s always struck me as particularly ironic: Let's face it, a lot of these people would absolutely hate to be part of real socialist organizing. Because the kind of organizing that builds power, the kind that helps people survive, defend themselves, and grow; it's messy, emotionally challenging, and full of conflict. It requires flexibility, listening, and compromise. It doesn’t work if everyone’s just quoting dead guys and calling each other traitors. Anarchist or not, actual socialist practice is grounded in real life, not in endless internet warfare.

That’s why this whole cycle feels so tragic. Because behind all the posturing, the purity tests, and the ideological gatekeeping, there’s a legit reason these people ended up here. Of all the ideologies in the world, they chose communism. Why? Probably because they hurt. Because they saw the ugliness of capitalism and wanted something better. Because, at some point, they were moved by the idea that we could live without exploitation.

And somewhere along the way, that desire got calcified into a set of talking points. It got buried under defensiveness and online clout games. The pain turned inward, and now they lash out at anyone who doesn’t match their script. That’s not an excuse. But it is something to hold with empathy.

I don’t write this to mock anyone. I write it because I want us to do better, recognize our differences and hopefully come to a fair conclusion. And Idk, I still believe we can. Ape together strong 💖

Lots of good stuff here from a variety of viewpoints

The following is an excerpt from the World Peace Diet by Will Tuttle.

Most of us don’t think of our culture as being a herding culture. Looking around, we see mainly cars, roads, suburbs, cities, and factories, and while there are enormous fields of grain, and cattle grazing in the countryside, we may not realize that almost all of the grain is grown as livestock feed, and that most of the untold billions of birds, mammals, and fish we consume are confined out of sight in enormous concentration camps called factory farms. Though it is not as obvious to us today as it was to our forebears a few thousand years ago, our culture is, like theirs, essentially a herding culture, organized around owning and commodifying animals and eating them.

archived (Wayback Machine)

The World Peace Diet full-length PDF available here (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

BLIND ITEM: “The Watchlist Before the Crackdown”

An unnamed private tech firm—with longstanding contracts in predictive analytics, surveillance, and law enforcement integration—has partnered with a major U.S. federal agency (not officially DHS, but connected) to aggregate protest-related data across university campuses. This includes:

• Social media activity flagged by emotion-tracking AI
• Attendance at student government meetings
• Club affiliations labeled as “culturally radical”
• Usage of encrypted messaging apps on campus networks
• Anonymous feedback submitted to university “safety” portals
• Participation in Zoom-based teach-ins or virtual protest planning sessions

All of this is being collected silently, with university compliance. Some schools are not aware. Others are complicit.

The result?

A tiered watchlist.

• Tier 1: Identified protest leaders—already being targeted via immigration, academic misconduct, or financial aid audits  
• Tier 2: Repeat protest participants—monitored, flagged, and sometimes “randomly” subjected to disciplinary review or mental health assessments  
• Tier 3: “Radical-adjacent” individuals—students who haven’t protested publicly, but who engage with protest content, faculty, or groups  

This program does not show up in public records. It’s buried in private security contracts under language like “campus threat analysis” or “student behavioral tracking.”

What Can Be Done (Off the Record):

• Use public computers sparingly. On-campus networks are being monitored for metadata, not content—just enough to flag patterns.  
• Avoid student portals for organizing. Anonymous tips or incident reporting systems are quietly becoming snitch networks.  
• Print everything and destroy digital drafts. If you’re working on an exposé, flyer, or guide—create it offline, print it, and wipe it.  
• Speak in code when necessary. Resistance is ancient. If they’re using old-school surveillance, you use old-school subversion.  

Start documenting the surveillance itself. Make the watchers the watched. FOIA the firms. FOIA the funding. Begin to expose their shadow work.

~Subject Index: surveillance, predictive policing, digital profiling, student activism, protest suppression, university complicity, private sector firms, emotion-tracking AI, watchlists, encrypted messaging, metadata monitoring, resistance tactics, FOIA, dissent, behavioral tracking, campus surveillance, digital resistance, subversion, civil liberties, academic freedom~

by Colin Denny Donoghue

While it’s true many people are wrapped up in a consumer-corporate lifestyle and think trying to change the world is a naïve or impossible task not worth even trying, many other people are more actively compassionate and are giving a lot of time and effort to try and make this world a better place. Some of those engaged in this productive work, like The School of Living, have a better vision than others on how to achieve the goal of a healthier and more just society; from its founder Ralph Borsodi’s book Flight From the City, along with the later Decentralism by Mildred J. Loomis, to current vegan homesteading projects like Ahimsa Village, I find the ideas and praxis of philosophy toward achieving a sustainable society to be very on-target. Unfortunately many others do not yet see how crucial it is for people to be connected to the Earth in a more direct, natural and free way in order for there to be global social-justice, and in order to restore our environment, health, and sanity.

In “close-but-no-cigar” fashion (i.e. missing the crucial point), modern conservationists, scientists, sociologists and radical activists give key ideas for stopping and reversing the destructive ecological & health crisis we face, namely: we need much more decentralization of power, localization of organic food production, and we need much less environmental destruction, pollution, waste and radiation. As good as these ideas are, the critical problem with them is that their version of decentralization, localization and sustainability only go to a certain limited extent (limited within corporate/statist/monetary systemic restraints), and are alternatives accessible only to a relatively narrow segment of the world population. Here I will argue that the decentralist/localization/sustainability movement absolutely needs to go further, i.e. all the way to the universal individual level, in order for us to achieve the significant positive change the world needs. This “extreme” decentralization, localization and sustainable living would not only be more effective, but is in fact the only way to a globalization of equality and personal/environmental health. And it leads to a clear and specific destination: communities of sovereign zero-waste veganic homesteads. That way of life produces none of the environmental/health/life-destruction that is dominant now, and also fosters human equality, well-being and flourishing; more on why this is the real solution will be explained shortly.

The difference in perspective between what most people are offering as solutions and what’s offered here is fundamentally a difference between inside & outside-the-box thinking; the former is limited within the socioeconomic box (the box that is actually the main source of the problems), looking for within-the-system top-down solutions from State policies and programs (or the International Monetary Fund, etc.), rather than bottom-up solutions from autonomous individuals & the Earth’s ecology. This can also be looked at as a collectivist versus individualist way of thinking, though the former is often mistakenly equated with community, and the latter with a selfish isolationist perspective. In reality, collectivism means forced assimilation into a social-system while individualism has the ethical superiority of valuing individual sovereignty, self-responsibility, and voluntary relations.

archived (Wayback Machine)

To embrace veganism and forgo the consumption and utilization of animal products is not an end, but a beginning; a new start affording the practitioner an opportunity to see everyday realities in a different light.

However, to speak of the suffering of non-human animals and the benefits of a vegan lifestyle is often a disheartening situation to the vegan, for typically the first reaction of her audience is to disagree. Opponents of veganism say that the way vegans view human-animal relationships (i.e. radically) is wrong, and that, looming on the horizon, is a severe cost for such blatant societal insubordination. Ultimately, they prophesize, the error of veganism will become obvious and, eventually, the idea thrown away.

In a strange way, however, veganisms’s critics are correct.

Not until one realizes what makes veganism “unreasonable,” will the individual realize the true reasoning behind what it means to be vegan. Not until one questions what it is that depicts veganism as “wrong,” in the eyes of non-vegans will one gain the ability to adequately address the wrongs driving their refusal to accept humanity’s violent and unwarranted treatment of non-human animals. Not until the principles of veganism are applied to the rubric of injustice as a whole will one understand the need for veganism at all.

They are correct because veganism in isolation defeats the purpose for which it is intended.

And so it goes, for the alienation experienced as an effect of breaking social conventions is often enough to make one “question” her commitment to veganism.

As a philosophy, veganism stands in defiance to ideologies touching the core of Western thought. Opposed to the irrational belief systems which establishment institutions socialize people to “accept,” the principles of veganism challenge individuals to confront the dogma they are issued and to construct new ethics and values based on the premises of compassion and justice.

Confronting the existing belief systems, however, is a frightening concept to a society that has voluntarily conscripted itself to the dominant social paradigms of the state. However, as Brian Dominick so skillfully illustrates in the following essay, it is precisely this confrontation that we must agree to make if we are honest in seeking a true assessment of what social liberation has to offer. In the totality of this process, veganism is but one element in the compound structure of social revolution. It is in this light that Brian’s essay shines its brightest. Animal Liberation and Social Revolution is a compact framework designed to assist us as we embark on the endeavor of recognizing what roles compassion, critical thinking, and rationality (ought to) play in our simultaneous deconstruction and transformation of society. Relentless in his quest to set the proverbial wheels of this transformation in motion, Brian presses us to confront the oppressive ideologies we harbor within ourselves and to uncover their linkages to the injustice that pervades every sphere of our existence.

It is Brian’s belief that each of us has been given the tools to draw these necessary conclusions. It makes no difference if you are an anarchist approaching veganism, a vegan approaching anarchism, or neither of the two. All that is required is the willingness to roll up your sleeves, sharpen those tools and start drawing, in a concerted effort, to challenge humanity’s myopic vision of what constitutes a just society.

—Joseph M. Smith

November, 1995

archived (Wayback Machine)