Yea, I mean I can imagine even if your anti-consumption, if there aren't affordable smaller businesses to support or dependable mutual aid services that can provide food for enough people it's gonna be tough to give up groceries from the monopolized supermarkets. Not saying Americans shouldn't boycott, but we need to be aware that as long as there's capitalism, we're always gonna be choosing between compromised options.
Honestly, for me it’s Sarah Hrty. She’s done some really good research on alloparenting. She’s been basically saying that it’s literally in our genes to help eachother out. Because survival isn’t just self-preservation, it’s survival of the pack, or community for us naked apes.
Start Local, Think Big: Ecology and Freedom Begin in Our Communities
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 tog
A question in this article that I feel is important. "Has social ecology been eclipsed in ecological anarchism? Should it be revived?"
Partially, yes and absolutely yes. In my honest opinion, it's a great shame that some other anarchistic eco-currents (like anarcho-primitivism, rewilding, and now solarpunk-ish movements) have sometimes pushed Bookchin aside, finding social ecology too rationalist. Its insight, that we need communal, decentralized, directly democratic solutions to ecological collapse, is more relevant than ever. Maybe today it needs to be expanded. Maybe we make it more pluralistic, more attuned to Indigenous knowledges, more experimental. But its core spirit absolutely deserves revival.
This is very insightful. I'm really interested, are there any books or otherwise sources that helped you draw this conclusion? It makes a whole lot of sense, I guess I was kind of ignoring that possibility.
Yea, I skimmed through the comments. Yikes. Really just proves my point that they take these criticisms like a shot to the chest.
An honest discussion about Tankies, from an Anarchists Perspective
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 left
Lost me at Bezos.
Alls I’m saying folks, I’m not done until I’m six feet deep in the ground.
Yes thank you. Quick google search says your right. My bad.
It drives me crazy that there are people who think us humans are inherently lazy. It's silly to think money is the ONLY thing that incentivizes us to work. We build shit because we want to. Did the native Americans build Tipis and expect to get payed? No! They built another Tipi because they fucking needed another Tipi. Imagine the type of shit we could build in the future if capital wasn't a thing and budget wouldn't be a barrier.
If you go to any old town in Europe there are a lot of roads with practically no cars. You can just walk along this wide road through the town fit for dozens of people. The problem is not that there aren't enough pedestrian sidewalks, the problem is everything in modern infrastructure is being made for cars, and roads are seen as both meant for pedestrians AND cars.