mcc
Imagine I want to read a book and understand "anarcho-syndicalism", but I'm lazy, so I only want to read one book*. What book or essay should I read
* I will go up to two or three if it's something like "read this book to understand anarcho-syndicalism and this second book to understand the problems with anarcho-syndicalism" or "read this book to understand what anarcho-syndicalism meant in 1930 and this second book to understand what it would plausibly mean in the year 2030"
clarity flowers
@mcc I find that anarchist thought really struggles to make its way into print in what you might call a "conway's law corollary"
mcc
Awhile back I tried reading this Emma Goldman book called "Anarchism: What It Really Stands For" but I got very little sense of what anarchism stands for just a lot of "Anarchism will be great, don't worry about it, it'll be cool". Then she spent a lot of time doing journalistic exposes of sex trafficking in upstate New York in the 1890s? That last part sounded actually really important but wasn't very directly relevant to my life
clarity flowers
@kboyd tbh I don't think this is the biggest factor. there is ample amount of revolutionary Marxist and Maoist literature out there with extremely rigorous intellectual thought behind it that. and while they are definitely suppressed by the institutions, the writing still happens! In anarchism, however, the knowledge buildings happens organically – off-handed posts online, conversations in the women's restrooms, organizers learning from each other while collaborating, etc etc etc
Kevin Boyd (he/him) 🇨🇦
@clarity @mcc feels like it might also intersect with "it is difficult to convince someone of a thing when their salary depends on them not understanding it" and "No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them"...
clarity flowers
@kboyd pretty much, yeah
Kevin Boyd (he/him) 🇨🇦
@clarity Ah, I see. And conway's law enters the picture because that jumble is possibly a natural outflow of the jumbled nature of anarchism itself?
James Cat
@clarity @kboyd I did shifts in the anarchist bookstore in London, there are theoretical 'anarchist' texts but it's a wide range of ideas such as mutual aid, community organisation, cultural democracy etc it's a much broader term than Marxist or Socialist so single definitions are not something you get in one text other than 'decentralised power'
clarity flowers
@zz_james @kboyd yeah I think people routinely confuse anarchism for being a model of governance or economics a la communism capitalism, etc, when it's much closer to being a widely applicable lens of critique, like marxism or historical materialism, that can be put in many different contexts
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