Anarchism

The following is something I wrote earlier. I don't know the validity of it, and I'm not sure I correctly expressed the concepts of "power" and "rights" after translating them from italian.

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Lately I had in mind the concept of right. Specifically, the idea Stirner had about it.

When I read The Ego and It's Own, that passage stuck with me.

[omitted unrelated stuff, because I started thinking about other things before writing what follows]

I'm thinking how the whole action of Giorgio Rosa [1] was anarchist in it's essence. He created that island just because he could do it: he had the power to do it.

I'm thinking about how many times I did something just because I could, and because I felt like it. I'm sure that more than once me and that-one-friend answered the question "why?" with "because we can". And I'm thinking how "because I can" is one of the fundamental hackers' "ideology" - mostly.

I'm thinking about how "because I can" is one of the most genuine motive that people have to justify their actions.

And, in fact, what I'm saying is somewhat tied to the concept of right. Right now, the first to decide if I have the power to do something is exactly my right to do it. And my rights, at the same time, are decided by people who have power over me! And so I say that the concept of "right" has no meaning, because I won't allow those people to hold power over me.

[1] (but not in its execution) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Rose_Island

Since the early morning of July 2, 2025, the community of Cherán K’eri has been under armed attack by unknown subjects seeking to enter the areas of Rancho del Pino and Cerrito del Aire. In response, our Community Round (autonomous security force established by our system of self-government) has resisted the aggression, activating the barricades to protect the population. At the moment, one person has been reported killed and another injured, both members of the Community Round. This fact fills us with indignation, sadness, and rage.

This attack is not an isolated act. It is part of an escalation of violence that has intensified in the state of Michoacán, where organized crime fights over territory with total impunity, seriously affecting rural and Indigenous communities. In recent weeks, the aggressions have intensified in different regions of the state, including the Purépecha Plateau, where communities like Nahuatzen, Arantepacua, Capácuaro, and Santa Fe de la Laguna have also been the target of threats, armed incursions, and territorial dispossession.

Hey yall, dunno if this is the right community for this kind of talk. I was just wondering if anyone has read up on Michael Malice' and his work. I've been watching some of his interviews and debates, and one thing that I've noticed is he seems very staunchly anti-communist. I found it's quite common for fellow leftists to be critical of the Soviet Union etc, but he makes the point of communism being the failure of the Soviet Union and China, not authoritarianism. And on more often occasion, he never really talks about collectivization. I noticed he always kind of talks from this sort of individualist point, that anarchy requires "everyone fend for themselves." He never really makes a case for anti-capitalism.

This guys an anarcho-capitalist, no? Is it common for anarcho-capitalists to nab socialist anti-state talking points but then justify them by doing capitalism the libertarian way? If yes, it seems like a very disingenuous way of presenting anarchism. If I remember correctly, there were a lot of libertarians in the tech-bro sphere, who naturally turned to monarchism, because (surprise, surprise) anarchy for them just meant "I get to do business MY way, with no rules.

I feel like it's a very important discussion to be had. There's anarchy being presented the wrong way. And it should be called out. Because right-wing libertarianism and libertarian socialism are two very different pairs of shoes. It'd be interesting to read what your peeps' thoughts are.

Any time I try to learn about these topics it always references super old books that are written in a complicated English that's beyond my simplistic knowledge.

I'm Gen Z and didnt know the difference between Democrat and Republican until like 4 years ago because I never cared about politics (and pretty personal reasons), this has obviously changed as of recent. As I went through highschool in one of, if not THE most censored history classes in the country (and from a trump supporter teacher too..) I wasn't given the best background knowledge for these topics.

I would like a book that essentially explains the ideas and some of the historical events in a more understandable way that won't lead me to the Wikipedia page for some random person from Russia in the 1900s confused as hell.

Any recommendations would be appreciated.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/32103393

Emma Goldman (1869 - 1940)

Sun Jun 27, 1869

Emma Goldman, born on this day in 1869, was an anarchist writer and activist in the United States whose works, including "My Disillusionment in Russia" and her journal Mother Earth, influenced anarchist movements all over the world.

Attracted to anarchism after the Haymarket affair, Goldman became a renowned writer and lecturer. She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick as an act of "propaganda of the deed".

Frick survived the attempt on his life, and Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed for "inciting to riot" and illegally distributing information about birth control.

After their release from prison, Goldman and Berkman were again arrested and deported to Russia. Initially supportive of the October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power, Goldman changed her opinion in the wake of the Kronstadt rebellion, denouncing the Soviet Union for its repression of political dissent. She left the Soviet Union and, in 1923, published a book about her experiences, "My Disillusionment in Russia".

Goldman was an extremely well-known anarchist in her lifetime, with a reputation as a powerful orator. Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, free love, and homosexuality.

"If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution."

- Emma Goldman

• Date: 1869-06-27
• Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, www.marxists.org.
• Tags: #Labor, #Birthdays, #Anarchism.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

I fear that if we (anarchists and fellow travelers) cannot explicitly articulate the need for action, within the context of upending daily life as it is currently lived, the horrors that are the existent world will continue along with it. Even when protests become riots, if we find ourselves continuing to inhabit the position of waiting for specialized locations of resistance to make themselves known we will fail to meet the moment at hand, perpetually stuck in a reactive cycle of prairie-dogging into moments of rupture only to fall back in line when the tides subside. If we truly desire the end of this world of death machines, we cannot afford to wait and take action only once ruptures become clear. We must embody the constant state of rupture. But to do that, we need to recognize why we so often wait.

As momentum builds under the banner of “No Kings!” liberals and other activists in the U.S. should consider the real question of how we got here and how we can move forward and away from Trump’s authoritarianism altogether. The question isn’t about monarchy versus presidency, but about the myth of representation itself.

Cross-posted from "Inside the scrappy network of volunteers protecting their neighbors from ICE" by @[email protected] in [email protected]

source

Note, I'm neither American, nor heavily in that scene. I'm merely signal boosting what I feel is important information countering lib propaganda.

What could be real uses of AI (llm, or generative) for anarchist organizations ?

Is there any ?

So far I didn't come for any AI use except for some fun with creating images, or text. It just gives junk data most of the time.

But are there some real life uses that showed beneficial ?

Hi!

A bit of background/motivation: Sharing photos of protests can be an important part of the PR of political organizations. However, not everyone feels safe sharing their faces in connection to political organizing. That's why usually, faces are pixellated, or people wear face covering masks (which might be illegal on protests in some juristictions). Pixellated/hidden faces are quite ugly to normies, though, which can reduce the effectiveness of the publication.

So I had this idea: What if instead of pixelating the faces, I run some CV software on the image and all the faces get swapped with the faces of Hedy Lamarr, Diego Luna, or JC Denton. I remember that Snapchat could do live faceswaps with the selfie cam ten years ago, so some desktop software like that shouldn't be too hard to find in 2025, right? /j

Unfortunately, all the stuff I managed to find was some computer science projects in which you train some monster model with one hell of a dataset of each face you want to replace/emplace (which defeats the purpose of anonymizing political activists). Or some obnoxious AI startup which is waaaaay too busy sucking off Elon Musk and/or Sam Altman. I don't want to give my money/data to some doomed AI startup which ends up selling our likenesses to the NSA.

TL;DR: Is there some kind of desktop software which detects faces in an image and swaps them with another face? It's ok if there's only a framework (as long as it's not as bad as all the horrible OpenCV results you find in online tutorials).

Edit: I found something that I can work with

I found this zine interesting and on-topic for Anarchy. These tactics should be in everyone's mind, specially nowadays.

You have several different formats in the link, pdf, doc, etc.

Cross-posted from "For Saturday protests" by @[email protected] in [email protected]

I found https://lausancollective.com/ (HK-based) and https://chuangcn.org/ which both seem to be quite libertarian, writing from the perspective of the Sinosphere. I'm really interested in exploring more contemporary Chinese Anarchist circles though. Anyone that knows anything? I'm able to read in Chinese (or at least work myself through texts) so Chinese sources are also welcome. I just find it hard to find online sources for this, I guess it's all quite a bit underground still and not really organized to a large degree taking the the oppressive state of the mainland into account.

Archive link

Just came across this post today and thought it might be a topical issue to discuss from an anarchist perspective.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29190434

AI has become as a deeply polarizing issue on the left, with many people having concerns regarding its reliance on unauthorized training data, displacement of workers, lack of creativity, and environmental costs. I'm going to argue that while these critiques warrant attention, they overlook the broader systemic context. As Marxists, our focus should not be on rejecting technological advancement but on challenging the capitalist framework that shapes its use. By reframing the debate, we can recognize AI’s potential as a tool for democratizing creativity and accelerating the contradictions inherent in capitalism.

Marxists have never opposed technological progress in principle. From the Industrial Revolution to the digital age, we have understood that technological shifts necessarily proletarianize labor by reshaping modes of production. AI is no exception. What distinguishes it is its capacity to automate aspects of cognitive and creative tasks such as writing, coding, and illustration that were once considered uniquely human. This disruption is neither unprecedented nor inherently negative. Automation under capitalism displaces workers, yes, but our critique must target the system that weaponizes progress against the workers as opposed to the tools themselves. Resisting AI on these grounds mistakes symptoms such as job loss for the root problem of capitalist exploitation.

Democratization Versus Corporate Capture

The ethical objection to AI training on copyrighted material holds superficial validity, but only within capitalism’s warped logic. Intellectual property laws exist to concentrate ownership and profit in the hands of corporations, not to protect individual artists. Disney’s ruthless copyright enforcement, for instance, sharply contrasts with its own history of mining public-domain stories. Meanwhile, OpenAI scraping data at scale, it exposes the hypocrisy of a system that privileges corporate IP hoarding over collective cultural wealth. Large corporations can ignore copyright without being held to account while regular people cannot. In practice, copyright helps capitalists far more than it help individual artists. Attacking AI for “theft” inadvertently legitimizes the very IP regimes that alienate artists from their work. Should a proletarian writer begrudge the use of their words to build a tool that, in better hands, could empower millions? The true conflict lies not in AI’s training methods but in who controls its outputs.

Open-source AI models, when decoupled from profit motives, democratize creativity in unprecedented ways. They enable a nurse to visualize a protest poster, a factory worker to draft a union newsletter, or a tenant to simulate rent-strike scenarios. This is no different from fanfiction writers reimagining Star Wars or street artists riffing on Warhol. It's just collective culture remixing itself, as it always has. The threat arises when corporations monopolize these tools to replace paid labor with automated profit engines. But the paradox here is that boycotting AI in grassroots spaces does nothing to hinder corporate adoption. It only surrenders a potent tool to the enemy. Why deny ourselves the capacity to create, organize, and imagine more freely, while Amazon and Meta invest billions to weaponize that same capacity against us?

Opposing AI for its misuse under capitalism is both futile and counterproductive. Creativity critiques confuse corporate mass-production with the experimental joy of an individual sketching ideas via tools like Stable Diffusion. Our task is not to police personal use but to fight for collective ownership. We should demand public AI infrastructure to ensure that this technology is not hoarded by a handful of corporations. Surrendering it to capital ensures defeat while reclaiming it might just expand our arsenal for the fights ahead.

Creativity as Human Intent, Not Tool Output

The claim that AI “lacks creativity” misunderstands both technology and the nature of art itself. Creativity is not an inherent quality of tools — it is the product of human intention. A camera cannot compose a photograph; it is the photographer who chooses the angle, the light, the moment. Similarly, generative AI does not conjure ideas from the void. It is an instrument wielded by humans to translate their vision into reality. Debating whether AI is “creative” is as meaningless as debating whether a paintbrush dreams of landscapes. The tool is inert; the artist is alive.

AI has no more volition than a camera. When I photograph a bird in a park, the artistry does not lie in the shutter button I press or the aperture I adjust, but in the years I’ve spent honing my eye to recognize the interplay of light and shadow, anticipating the tilt of a wing, sensing the split-second harmony of motion and stillness. These are the skills that allow me to capture images such as this:

Hand my camera to a novice, and it is unlikely they would produce anything interesting with it. Generative AI operates the same way. Anyone can type “epic space battle” into a prompt, but without an understanding of color theory, narrative tension, or cultural symbolism, the result is generic noise. This is what we refer to as AI slop. The true labor resides in the human ability to curate and refine, to transform raw output into something resonant.

People who attack gen AI on the grounds of it being “soulless” are recycling a tired pattern of gatekeeping. In the 1950s, programmers derided high-level languages like FORTRAN as “cheating,” insisting real coders wrote in assembly. They conflated suffering with sanctity, as if the drudgery of manual memory allocation were the essence of creativity. Today’s artists, threatened by AI, make the same error. Mastery of Photoshop brushes or oil paints is not what defines art, it's a technical skill developed for a particular medium. What really matters is the capacity to communicate ideas and emotions through a medium. Tools evolve, and human expression adapts in response. When photography first emerged, painters declared mechanical reproduction the death of art. Instead, it birthed new forms such as surrealism, abstraction, cinema that expanded what art could be.

The real distinction between a camera and generative AI is one of scope, not substance. A camera captures the world as it exists while AI visualizes worlds that could be. Yet both require a human to decide what matters. When I shot my bird photograph, the camera did not choose the park, the species, or the composition. Likewise, AI doesn’t decide whether a cyberpunk cityscape should feel dystopian or whimsical. That intent, the infusion of meaning, is irreplaceably human. Automation doesn’t erase creativity, all it does is redistribute labor. Just as calculators freed mathematicians from drudgery of arithmetic, AI lowers technical barriers for artists, shifting the focus to concept and critique.

The real anxiety over AI art is about the balance of power. When institutions equate skill with specific tools such as oil paint, Python, DSLR cameras, they privilege those with the time and resources to master them. Generative AI, for all its flaws, democratizes access. A factory worker can now illustrate their memoir and a teenager in Lagos can prototype a comic. Does this mean every output is “art”? No more than every Instagram snapshot is a Cartier-Bresson. But gatekeepers have always weaponized “authenticity” to exclude newcomers. The camera did not kill art. Assembly lines did not kill craftsmanship. And AI will not kill creativity. What it exposes is that much of what we associate with production of art is rooted in specific technical skills.

Finally, the “efficiency” objection to AI collapses under its own short-termism. Consider that just a couple of years ago, running a state-of-the-art model required data center full of GPUs burning through kilowatts of power. Today, DeepSeek model runs on a consumer grade desktop using mere 200 watts of power. This trajectory is predictable. Hardware optimizations, quantization, and open-source breakthroughs have slashed computational demands exponentially.

Critics cherry-pick peak resource use during AI’s infancy. Meanwhile, AI’s energy footprint per output unit plummets year-over-year. Training GPT-3 in 2020 consumed ~1,300 MWh; by 2023, similar models achieved comparable performance with 90% less power. This progress is the natural arc of technological maturation. There is every reason to expect that these trends will continue into the future.

Open Source or Oligarchy

To oppose AI as a technology is to miss the forest for the trees. The most important question is who will control these tools going forward. No amount of ethical hand-wringing will halt development of this technology. Corporations will chase AI for the same reason 19th-century factory owners relentlessly chased steam engines. Automation allows companies to cut costs, break labor leverage, and centralize power. Left to corporations, AI will become another privatized weapon to crush worker autonomy. However, if it is developed in the open then it has the potential to be a democratized tool to expand collective creativity.

We’ve seen this story before. The internet began with promises of decentralization, only to be co-opted by monopolies like Google and Meta, who transformed open protocols into walled gardens of surveillance. AI now stands at the same crossroads. If those with ethical concerns about AI abandon the technology, its development will inevitably be left solely to those without such scruples. The result will be proprietary models locked behind corporate APIs that are censored to appease shareholders, priced beyond public reach, and designed solely for profit. It's a future where Disney holds exclusive rights to generate "fairytale" imagery, and Amazon patents "dynamic storytelling" tools for its Prime franchises. This is the necessary outcome when technology remains under corporate control. Under capitalism, innovation always serves monopoly power as opposed to the interests of the public.

On the other hand, open-source AI offers a different path forward. Stable Diffusion’s leak in 2022 proved this: within months, artists, researchers, and collectives weaponized it for everything from union propaganda to indigenous language preservation. The technology itself is neutral, but its application becomes a tool of class warfare. To fight should be for public AI infrastructure, transparent models, community-driven training data, and worker-controlled governance. It's a fight for the means of cultural production. Not because we naively believe in “neutral tech,” but because we know the alternative is feudalistic control.

The backlash against AI art often fixates on nostalgia for pre-digital craftsmanship. But romanticizing the struggle of “the starving artist” only plays into capitalist myths. Under feudalism, scribes lamented the printing press; under industrialization, weavers smashed looms. Today’s artists face the same crossroads: adapt or be crushed. Adaptation doesn’t mean surrender, it means figuring out ways to organize effectively. One example of this model in action was when Hollywood writers used collective bargaining to demand AI guardrails in their 2023 contracts.

Artists hold leverage that they can wield if they organize strategically along material lines. What if illustrators unionized to mandate human oversight in AI-assisted comics? What if musicians demanded royalties each time their style trains a model? It’s the same solidarity that forced studios to credit VFX artists after decades of erasure.

Moralizing about AI’s “soullessness” is a dead end. Capitalists don’t care about souls, they care about surplus value. Every worker co-op training its own model, every indie game studio bypassing proprietary tools, every worker using open AI tools to have their voice heard chips away at corporate control. It’s materialist task of redistributing power. Marx didn’t weep for the cottage industries steam engines destroyed. He advocated for socialization of the means of production. The goal of stopping AI is not a realistic one, but we can ensure its dividends flow to the many, not the few.

The oligarchs aren’t debating AI ethics, they’re investing billions to own and control this technology. Our choice is to cower in nostalgia or fight to have a stake in our future. Every open-source model trained, every worker collective formed, every contract renegotiated is a step forward. AI won’t be stopped any more than the printing press and the internet before it. The machines aren’t the enemy. The owners are.

It is an attempt at a crowdsourced alternative to An Anarchist FAQ, mainly aiming to eliminate any biases by having multiple people write this work.

Thought this was a fun little essay on one of Graeber's last books :)

Cross-posted from "Deep in Mordor where the shadows lie: Dystopian tales of that time when I sold out to Google" by @[email protected] in [email protected]

Memoirs of the almost a year I lasted at Google. The name of that year? 2008. Yeah. Topics include: Third World, precariat, tech elitism, queerness, surveillance, capitalism.

Y'all encouraged me to submit this as a full post, and I clearly overcommited to this blog so I hope TechTakes fits for it lol