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A lot of anarchism is predicated on individualism, which is increasingly being challenged by non cartesian shifts in academic and popular thinking.
How do you think anarchists should navigate this shift?
I come across it the most in primmie spaces. Not Zerzan, ofcs, since the man thinks the ego is a form of oppression (what a fucking weirdo), but from folks like Landstreicher and Perlman. Perlman took the liberal idea that in primeval times we were all individuals without kin and went “this is good , actually.” Landstriecher just kind of… ran with Stirner to the exclusion of almost everything else. The only anti-civ egoist I’ve seen with a response to it is Alejandro De Acosta who argued that you can read the Unique as referring to a collectivity and The Unique and Its Property still makes sense.
But like, it doesn’t seem limited to the anti-civ individualists. I often see Crimethinc. putting out individualist article claiming that democracy is suppression of the individual or that freedom is individual freedom from constraint which seems at odds with recent thinking about partial and partable selves, multitudes as selves, and the fact of interdependence down to the sub molecular level.
the political compass is a 2d graph, but is actually just fake science that doesn’t correspond to people’s politics.
Descartes thought about individuals as having hard borders and a discernable essence. This is the assumption that most anarchists have made through history.
Recently, it’s become popular to think about biomes of cells and microbes “holobiomes” rather than species. This is one attack on cartesian individualism.
In anthro, people have noticed that some people think about humans as having multiple distinct selves that come out in different social settings. This is called a “partible person.” this is another attack on cartesian individualism.
Another observation of anthro is that some people think of individuals as having one self, but that self can be combined with another self, especially during sex. This is the “permeable person”
This makes centering a politics around the freedom of an individual fairly problematic. Not impossible, just problematic.
You get what I’m saying?
So I am going to come out and say I have no answers to any of this.
The shift towards anti-thought based elements like that are one of the main problems that create danger for us though, which while I completely get the individualism, part of the reason for this post is I dont think we can all uncoordinatedly swim through this with no problem.
Like look at how mainstream sources portray anarchism. Think they would not label us as “terrorists who just want chaos” while not even understanding what we want?
We are having a lot of the last rights we have being attacked in that same shifting viewpoint that is being leveraged against us in ways that are only going to get worse as this goes on, but I think we need to all be on the same page collectively at least to individually work from there, which with the increasing policies and censorship / surveillance is a major problem.
Either way I hope youre doing ok shit is too much right now
