A book recommendation, maybe, Damndest Radical

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/41887016

I have attempted to read Anarchist books before. I found it difficult to read, boring, laborious, dated, and frankly the entire notion of Anarchist literature felt like it was missing the point of it’s subject matter. I will say that I am also someone who struggles to read a lot or at all, just for a point of comparison.

Then I stumbled into this book. It was a fucking amazing read, I could not put it away. Now it’s a biography, and that to me kind of sucked, as I had thought that biographies were what old people read in their infinite spare time, once they had finished every other book in the universe. That said, the guy’s life could just be fiction book. So does it really matter?

The book admittedly romanticizes a lot of nuance of Ben’s life away. The portrayal of street life, is made out be excited freedom balanced with the hardship of the road. Where that balance definitely feels further towards the freedom end of the spectrum. But it also leans into other challenges Ben faces latter in life, such as being deemed less important to the abortion rights movement by the very women he is fighting for, because he’s male. Unlike fiction and like real life the book doesn’t exactly have a happy ending. In large part because of Reitman’s relationship with Emma Goldman, but also because real life sucks.

What I am really saying is that for someone who always thought of themselves as an Anarchist, this book was the first one that I was truly able to sit down and read to completion without feeling like a lullaby was playing over my head. So I highly recommend it to anyone who read the first paragraph of this, and went – “yeah that’s me”.

For a slightly more broad point, this book is a really good example of actions speaking louder than words. I personally feel that the actions discussed here present a far more compelling argument against the state and capital than any theoretical guide ever could.

Link to download the book as a PDF

Social Ecology

Social Ecology, developed from green anarchism, is the idea that our ecological problems have their ultimate roots in our social problems. This is because the domination of nature and our ecology by humanity has its ultimate roots in the domination humanity by humans. Therefore, the solutions to our ecological problems are found by addressing our social and ecological problems simultaneously.

Quotes

Poetry and imagination must be integrated with science and technology, for we have evolved beyond an innocence that can be nourished exclusively by myths and dreams.

People want to treat ‘we’ll figure it out by working to get there’ as some sort of rhetorical evasion instead of being a fundamental expression of trust in the power of conscious collective effort.

~Anonymous, but quoted by Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.

~Murray Bookchin, “A Politics for the Twenty-First Century”

There can be no separation of the revolutionary process from the revolutionary goal. A society based on self-administration must be achieved by means of self-administration.

In modern times humans have become a wolf not only to humans, but to all nature.

The ecological question is fundamentally solved as the system is repressed and a socialist social system develops. That does not mean you cannot do something for the environment right away. On the contrary, it is necessary to combine the fight for the environment with the struggle for a general social revolution…

~Abdullah Öcalan

Social ecology advances a message that calls not only for a society free of hierarchy and hierarchical sensibilities, but for an ethics that places humanity in the natural world as an agent for rendering evolution social and natural fully self-conscious.

~ Murray Bookchin