Why I Am an Anarchist

March 3, 2023 7:44 AM

"Why I Am an Anarchist" is a short comic It explains some of the basic concepts of anarchism and why the author is drawn to it as a philosophy.

As I have gotten older, I have seen the political beliefs I was taught by my parents (basically bland liberalism) fail to bear fruit. I've seen the rise of corporatism and fascism and have ached for something to be done about it, while at the same time coming to the upsetting realization that the checks and balances I believed in as a youth have been coopted by those same dark forces. No-one is coming to save us. The author's journey depicted in this work in many ways echoes my own evolution of political belief, so I thought it might be edifying for folks to see what one version of anarchist thought looks like.

posted by signsofrain (19 comments total)

So great. Thank you. This does exactly what it says. It’s a great primer and I’m already book marking and doing library searches. Before the last three years I would probably have identified as left of left but still having some (perhaps nostalgic) regard for liberalism and even modernism taken as terms of a per se platonism. Can of worms I know, but here’s an even bigger one. I must love contradiction because now I might qualify myself as somewhere between a communalist and a communitarian. For me considering the self/ individual with regards to community and freedom for all is the biggest struggle besides the realities of a misplaced and naive assumption of universal benevolence or even a universal neutral subjectivity on the part of most people in the (W)est who identify as leftist, socialist and anarchist. Seeing this all laid out in terms of the personal and lived without a massive reliance on terms of art is beyond inspiring as well as refreshing.
posted by Conrad-Casserole at 9:11 AM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

I am very interested in reading this. Unfortunately it does not render on my phone very well.
posted by slogger at 9:41 AM on March 3, 2023

> Unfortunately it does not render on my phone very well.
Same here, but on a very capable desktop computer.
Anyone know of an alternate link?
posted by a complicated history at 9:51 AM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

@slogger tap on the image to open a full screen version.
posted by andreinla at 10:01 AM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

For whatever reason in mobile (Android, Opera) the image fades to black towards the bottom. But in my mobile browser menu I can choose "desktop mode" which does the trick.
posted by St. Oops at 10:16 AM on March 3, 2023

A fine personal testimony! I was hoping for an accessible, evangelistic tract for the uninitiated which this maybe isn't, but I am happy for the author and the journey they have made, and appreciate the exposure.
posted by St. Oops at 10:23 AM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

The pages are very very slow to load, I gave up waiting after a couple of pages.
I saved one page and it has 1.8 MB of javascript to display a 100 Kb jpeg. Nice going WIX, someone needs to post this to somewhere like imgur to make it readable.
posted by Lanark at 10:34 AM on March 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

Nice post, signsofrain.
posted by doctornemo at 10:44 AM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

As the author states: "No one is coming to save us"... except us.
The "revolution" is not coming unless we bring it.
Anarchism is a toolkit. Anarchists are building the social structures right now that we will need to navigate the future. Of course, we're also building a bunch of bullshit that won't last; either to confuse the kopps, freak out the straights, make high people giggle, or by sheer accident or misguided cussedness.
We shoplift at the marketplace of ideas even as we restock.
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 10:44 AM on March 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yes, thanks, signsofrain.

To help people who are having difficulty with the Wix site, I uploaded a copy here: Why I Am An Anarchist : jules leslie webb : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
posted by scruss at 11:00 AM on March 3, 2023 [9 favorites]

The reading list:

Lorenzo Kom'Boa Ervin - Why I Am an Anarchist (2017)
Louise Michel - Why I Am an Anarchist (1896)
Voltairine de Cleyre - Why I Am an Anarchist (1897)

Peter Kropotkin - Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899)
Dark Star Collective - Quiet Rumors: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader (2002)
Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism (2009)
Howard Zinn - A People's History of the United States (1980 (link is to a later edition))
Ursula Le Guin - The Dispossessed (1974)
Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness - Life Without Law (2013)
Scott Branson - Practical Anarchism (2022, couldn't find a .pdf)
posted by box at 11:16 AM on March 3, 2023 [9 favorites]

“What is to be Done?”—Anark Abridged, 24 February 2023
posted by ob1quixote at 5:34 PM on March 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

What is meant by "monological propaganda" as opposed to art by anarchists? The only sense of "monological" I can find is relating to monologues, and I don't understand ascribing that to all non-anarchist art.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 1:19 AM on March 4, 2023

So 'monological' speech is speech that doesn't engage in a dialog with its audience. I think what the author is saying is that while they acknowledge this work as one of propaganda, it seeks to enter into a dialogue with its audience, hence the links to all the additional reading and it's nature not so much as an argument for anarchism as a way of life but more as a personal story. The author wants us to identify with their feelings first, and from there do further reading and investigation ourselves. They are positioning their work as 'dialogic' is my understanding.
posted by signsofrain at 1:43 PM on March 4, 2023

(I found I could tap to zoom a single page, then zoom and scroll with two fingers. You drag and scroll from page to page.)

Content-wise, this was a balm. So often, I'm prone to rhetoric (even this comment seems to me to follow a tradition at MeFi for rhetorical additions to the thread), where the fine webcomic said what it was and why.

I'm adopting the David Graeber quote that anarchists don't protest but instead they act and dare authorities to stop them.
posted by k3ninho at 3:08 PM on March 4, 2023

This is cool, thanks for sharing it!

Much of what I've been thinking about recently is how we get from here to there, and I have found myself in agreement with Platformism or the especifista tradition, in short, if I capture it correctly, anarchist revolution won't just happen spontaneously. Instead, we anarchists should share a specific platform, or set of ideas and strategies, and should participate in popular movements, not to take them over, but to bring our ideas into the shared struggle with others, and should federate with each other across geographic space toward these shared ends of liberty and socialism.

I have less clarity about the world we are building. I'm just as much a victim as anyone else of the near impossibility of visualizing a post-capitalist, post-authoritarian world. But I know I want to build a world where we can successfully make and distribute HIV meds to all who need them, run high speed trains from one city to the next, protect shared resources such as watersheds and forests, build buildings safe enough to withstand earthquakes and coordinate our communities enough to practice and drill for such disasters, and also allow for free travel across geography, free expression, free association. I want a world that nurtures weird differences and expansively diverse cultural practices, but also have systems of account and responsibility for when people do harm. It all seems really hard to imagine from where we sit now, but so would most everything about today from the vantage of anyone 100 years ago.
posted by latkes at 4:41 PM on March 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Um. This is quite appealing: "...anarchism doesn't restrict its critiques to solely oppressive institutions, but to hierarchy and oppression itself, and their respective logics and moralities".

Are any of the linked books in box's comment above a 101 of anarchism?
posted by harriet vane at 6:07 AM on March 6, 2023

I haven’t read all of them, so possibly. But if not, here’s a short-ish introductory resource: Cindy Milstein - Anarchism and its Aspirations (2010)
posted by eviemath at 8:54 AM on March 6, 2023

Thankyou!
posted by harriet vane at 6:56 AM on March 10, 2023