Anarchism

At bedtime, my toddler now knows how to tell me they want me to sing a different song. I am running out of songs so have begun to pull at the church songs that are forever lodged in my brain from my upbringing. I don't like the idea of teaching the messages in these songs. It led me to wonder if there are songs with good social messages that are appropriate for children. It's a stretch but I hope you all can help me out!

(anti-zionist)

Great write-up about Voltairine de Cleyre, and I’ve been kinda obsessed ever since. Chick was a badass. She was self-taught, grew up in poverty in Michigan, and rose all kinds of hell as a public speaker, feminist, and anarchist writer.

She ditched labels and embraced what she called “anarchism without adjectives.” Basically an inclusive, no-bullshit version of anarchism.

The more I read about her, the more I see how much she actually did. She led free speech fights in the early 1900s, risked arrest, and got thrown in jail for standing up for unemployed workers.

A great quote that stuck with me comes from her essay, Anarchism and American Traditions: “Direct action... means that the workingman knows what he needs and how to get it, and does not need any intermediary to secure it for him.”

That line pretty much sums her up. No gatekeepers. No waiting for permission. Just straight-up action rooted in real people’s needs. She deserves to be talked about way more than she is, IMHO.

And me and gf adopted a kitten last night, and we named her "Voltairine de Cleyre" cuz this cat don't take shit from anyone. lol

Sadly, this is all a result of the halo effect of being a Guy Who Raised Money or Guy Who Runs Big Company. We must, as human beings, assume that these people are smart, and that they’d never mislead us, because if we accept that they aren’t smart and that they willingly mislead us, we’d have to accept that the powerful are, well, bad and possibly unremarkable.

Imagine you are a person fighting in an anarchist revolt. You have captured a sizeable chunk of land but the front line has grown too large and you can't progress further. The state that you have been fighting approaches you with an offer: They recognise you as a sovereign (however that would look like) entity but you have to give away most of the land you've captured. They will leave you with the primary city and enough surrounding land to feed everyone.

What would be your position? Would you be willing to make a deal with the state?

There’s a good reason for this, and it’s not (just) that their beliefs were insincere. The whole point of thinking about structures like capitalism, patriarchy, or white supremacy is recognizing structural power beyond the intentions or beliefs of any individual actor. The problem with capitalism isn’t that particular business owners are greedy, it’s that the system of private ownership requires exploitation and poverty. The problem with patriarchy isn’t that all men happen to be evil and all non-men happen to be saints. The problem is the system that secures wealth, power, and safety for one gender at the expense of others.

We should think about state power in the same systematic way. It’s true—some politicians are especially terrible, just like some bosses are particularly noxious and some men are exceptionally patriarchal. But there are structural reasons for all men to take advantage of the privileges of patriarchy, whether we’re personally bigoted or not. Similarly, there are structural forces pressuring leftists in elected office to abandon their positions, entirely independent of their degree of personal ideological commitment

The following is something I wrote earlier. I don't know the validity of it, and I'm not sure I correctly expressed the concepts of "power" and "rights" after translating them from italian.

--

Lately I had in mind the concept of right. Specifically, the idea Stirner had about it.

When I read The Ego and It's Own, that passage stuck with me.

[omitted unrelated stuff, because I started thinking about other things before writing what follows]

I'm thinking how the whole action of Giorgio Rosa [1] was anarchist in it's essence. He created that island just because he could do it: he had the power to do it.

I'm thinking about how many times I did something just because I could, and because I felt like it. I'm sure that more than once me and that-one-friend answered the question "why?" with "because we can". And I'm thinking how "because I can" is one of the fundamental hackers' "ideology" - mostly.

I'm thinking about how "because I can" is one of the most genuine motive that people have to justify their actions.

And, in fact, what I'm saying is somewhat tied to the concept of right. Right now, the first to decide if I have the power to do something is exactly my right to do it. And my rights, at the same time, are decided by people who have power over me! And so I say that the concept of "right" has no meaning, because I won't allow those people to hold power over me.

[1] (but not in its execution) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Rose_Island

Since the early morning of July 2, 2025, the community of Cherán K’eri has been under armed attack by unknown subjects seeking to enter the areas of Rancho del Pino and Cerrito del Aire. In response, our Community Round (autonomous security force established by our system of self-government) has resisted the aggression, activating the barricades to protect the population. At the moment, one person has been reported killed and another injured, both members of the Community Round. This fact fills us with indignation, sadness, and rage.

This attack is not an isolated act. It is part of an escalation of violence that has intensified in the state of Michoacán, where organized crime fights over territory with total impunity, seriously affecting rural and Indigenous communities. In recent weeks, the aggressions have intensified in different regions of the state, including the Purépecha Plateau, where communities like Nahuatzen, Arantepacua, Capácuaro, and Santa Fe de la Laguna have also been the target of threats, armed incursions, and territorial dispossession.

Any time I try to learn about these topics it always references super old books that are written in a complicated English that's beyond my simplistic knowledge.

I'm Gen Z and didnt know the difference between Democrat and Republican until like 4 years ago because I never cared about politics (and pretty personal reasons), this has obviously changed as of recent. As I went through highschool in one of, if not THE most censored history classes in the country (and from a trump supporter teacher too..) I wasn't given the best background knowledge for these topics.

I would like a book that essentially explains the ideas and some of the historical events in a more understandable way that won't lead me to the Wikipedia page for some random person from Russia in the 1900s confused as hell.

Any recommendations would be appreciated.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/32103393

Emma Goldman (1869 - 1940)

Sun Jun 27, 1869

Emma Goldman, born on this day in 1869, was an anarchist writer and activist in the United States whose works, including "My Disillusionment in Russia" and her journal Mother Earth, influenced anarchist movements all over the world.

Attracted to anarchism after the Haymarket affair, Goldman became a renowned writer and lecturer. She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick as an act of "propaganda of the deed".

Frick survived the attempt on his life, and Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed for "inciting to riot" and illegally distributing information about birth control.

After their release from prison, Goldman and Berkman were again arrested and deported to Russia. Initially supportive of the October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power, Goldman changed her opinion in the wake of the Kronstadt rebellion, denouncing the Soviet Union for its repression of political dissent. She left the Soviet Union and, in 1923, published a book about her experiences, "My Disillusionment in Russia".

Goldman was an extremely well-known anarchist in her lifetime, with a reputation as a powerful orator. Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, free love, and homosexuality.

"If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution."

- Emma Goldman

• Date: 1869-06-27
• Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, www.marxists.org.
• Tags: #Labor, #Birthdays, #Anarchism.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

I fear that if we (anarchists and fellow travelers) cannot explicitly articulate the need for action, within the context of upending daily life as it is currently lived, the horrors that are the existent world will continue along with it. Even when protests become riots, if we find ourselves continuing to inhabit the position of waiting for specialized locations of resistance to make themselves known we will fail to meet the moment at hand, perpetually stuck in a reactive cycle of prairie-dogging into moments of rupture only to fall back in line when the tides subside. If we truly desire the end of this world of death machines, we cannot afford to wait and take action only once ruptures become clear. We must embody the constant state of rupture. But to do that, we need to recognize why we so often wait.

As momentum builds under the banner of “No Kings!” liberals and other activists in the U.S. should consider the real question of how we got here and how we can move forward and away from Trump’s authoritarianism altogether. The question isn’t about monarchy versus presidency, but about the myth of representation itself.

Cross-posted from "Inside the scrappy network of volunteers protecting their neighbors from ICE" by @[email protected] in [email protected]

source

Note, I'm neither American, nor heavily in that scene. I'm merely signal boosting what I feel is important information countering lib propaganda.

What could be real uses of AI (llm, or generative) for anarchist organizations ?

Is there any ?

So far I didn't come for any AI use except for some fun with creating images, or text. It just gives junk data most of the time.

But are there some real life uses that showed beneficial ?

This is more so for people requiring enlightenment, not us learned of it’s dammed origin.

Hi!

A bit of background/motivation: Sharing photos of protests can be an important part of the PR of political organizations. However, not everyone feels safe sharing their faces in connection to political organizing. That's why usually, faces are pixellated, or people wear face covering masks (which might be illegal on protests in some juristictions). Pixellated/hidden faces are quite ugly to normies, though, which can reduce the effectiveness of the publication.

So I had this idea: What if instead of pixelating the faces, I run some CV software on the image and all the faces get swapped with the faces of Hedy Lamarr, Diego Luna, or JC Denton. I remember that Snapchat could do live faceswaps with the selfie cam ten years ago, so some desktop software like that shouldn't be too hard to find in 2025, right? /j

Unfortunately, all the stuff I managed to find was some computer science projects in which you train some monster model with one hell of a dataset of each face you want to replace/emplace (which defeats the purpose of anonymizing political activists). Or some obnoxious AI startup which is waaaaay too busy sucking off Elon Musk and/or Sam Altman. I don't want to give my money/data to some doomed AI startup which ends up selling our likenesses to the NSA.

TL;DR: Is there some kind of desktop software which detects faces in an image and swaps them with another face? It's ok if there's only a framework (as long as it's not as bad as all the horrible OpenCV results you find in online tutorials).

Edit: I found something that I can work with

I found this zine interesting and on-topic for Anarchy. These tactics should be in everyone's mind, specially nowadays.

You have several different formats in the link, pdf, doc, etc.

Cross-posted from "For Saturday protests" by @[email protected] in [email protected]