I am an anarchist activist living in the midlands of England. This post is a summary of what I currently think is happening, and my prescription for it. I have a middle class background and used to be fairly liberal, but I have moved to the left and I no longer believe in the liberal capitalist project, or their superiority complex and idea of “meritocracy”. I am going to try an explain in plain language why that attitude happens to horseshit. I’m also going to try and be entertaining, because I know that this is the internet – you could be looking at pornography right now. That’s the baseline: I’ve gotta make reading this blog at least as fun as jacking off.
This is an “about” page, so I’m going to state plainly my beliefs: I am a leftist, which means I believe that different people are good at different things, and you can’t assign every person to a single metric of worth. I am an anarchist, which doesn’t mean I believe in chaos and disorder – look at the word: an-archy. It means I believe that all hierarchies must be able to justify themselves as useful to the people they affect, and if they can’t do so they must be dismantled or changed. It follows that I am an egalitarian, which means that social systems that produce injustice, such as sexism and white supremacy, must be removed from us. I am a socialist, which means I believe in democratic control of wealth and the sources of wealth, and that any person that needs help should be given constructive help. I believe that capitalism is exploitative and at the very least unnatural, and that war and imperialism are evil and doubly unnatural.
I’ve found that knowledge of what politics actually is – that being, organization of ordinary people to achieve a common goal – has all but been obliterated from the minds of the people who grew up alongside me. More than that, the closest representation of “the left” in the media are liberals who think politics consists solely of voting and writing op-ed columns. These people are wrong, and if you think like them, surely you are staring into an abyss. We don’t live in a nice system that we can just tinker with to make it a little better. The way we’re living is deranged, and no-one you vote for can fix that.
I’m part of generation living in a strange age, with a difficult path ahead of us. It’s easy to feel despair; our future seems cursed by people we have no connection with, and who treat the world like a party that they got to at the right time. But there’s got to be a path forward. I’m going to read and work and write about what I learn here, maybe other people on this network can teach me things too. It’ll be cathartic for me, and if it helps one person, so much the better.