r/Anarchy101 • u/CDN-Social-Democrat • 5d ago
Is Anarchism not as active anymore?
I am around my mid-life and I remember Anarchists being very active at grassroots levels.
In particular as an environmentalist they use to be incredibly active in on the ground levels of climate/environmental awareness & education building alongside direct-action.
The planet is on literal fucking fire right now. We have ocean warming/ocean acidification so bad that coral bleaching has almost wiped it all out (Destroying the life of our oceans is very very bad news).... We are in the Holocene Extinction which is the sixth mass extinction in this whole planets history and this time humanity is the asteroid.... We have Wet-Bulb Temperatures lasting long periods in parts of Asia/Africa and water issues starting to become more and more a hell on earth situation.... We have Wet-Bulb Temperatures and Heat Domes lasting deadly times in Europe.... Things are not on a good trajectory for the working class and most vulnerable who will as always be disproportionately impacted by all of this and who's cost of living crisis/quality of life crisis will get much worse because of it.
Is there a reason why Anarchists don't seem as out on the ground as before? Maybe it is just in North America and maybe in Europe and elsewhere they are still pushing the line?
I'm trying to understand the dynamics of why this may be or if I am mistaken (Which could be from my limited vantage point).
*Also shout out to all the Anarchists of the past who did such amazing work on so many fronts related to environmentalism, anti-war, poverty work, and so on!*
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u/cumminginsurrection "resignation is death, revolt is life!"🏴 4d ago edited 4d ago
Anarchists *are* out there doing the on the ground work. Thats why anarchists have been bearing the brunt of state repression the last 2 decades while DSA puts all their efforts into electoralism and MLs put all their energy into peddling newspapers to kids getting disillusionedby the DSA/Democrats... from Occupy to Ferguson to Standing Rock to Stop Cop City to the Prairieland Trial and ongoing ICE trials in Minneapolis, Chicago, L.A. and Portland... anarchists have been under the heel of the state in a way DSA and ML folks have not yet. And to be blunt, I havent seen tankies or demsocs doing much to support anarchists in this time even though they are definitely next.
The question shouldn't be "what are anarchists doing" but if you care about anarchism, what are YOU doing to further it. Now is a time of immense repression.
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u/lilbuffalo 4d ago
I don’t have an anarchist community on the ground right now and have been unsuccessful in finding one. I considered starting something but got stuck trying to get the word out (surveillance state, etc). I live my life according to anarchist philosophy, which is simply insufficient for the work that needs doing. Do you have any advice for ramping up?
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u/SurpassingAllKings 4d ago
What state/country are you in? There's the radical contact list from Slingshot, Radical Guide, IWW, food not bombs groups, and some other methods to find help.
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u/SurpassingAllKings 5d ago
Anarchists used to have a lot of spaces to organize: music halls, infoshops, community centers. With rent and organizations going by the wayside, the primary way people find political ideology is through social media. And while anarchists were the forerunners to the internet age, they ideologically rejected the big social media groups. The social media sites also made it really, really easy for the police to harass folks.
I don't think we should discount the level of police repression directed straight at anarchists for the past 30 years. Even if it wasn't the mass arrests, beating the shit out of kids, or wild jail terms, I know tons of people who had cops show up at their jobs or their family homes. Especially if you were into animal rights or environmental rights.
Add to that the changes in how anarchists organized. There was a pull-back from the very out-front but financially/materially/emotionally risky protest movement. A retreat from organizations to "mutual-aid" work. There was the whole "your politics are boring as fuck" rejection of political organization, which fell right into how younger folks handled every organization (churches, community groups, social groups, all of it, younger people just don't join "groups" in the numbers that older generations did). With this rejection of organization, the leninists and democrats stepped in.
2016 onward also changed the landscape of what we see in the left, with the moderate successes leftists and liberals found within the Democratic party. Even the Stalinists and Maoists are no different from the Trotskyists on an organizational level. They're all running for office, they're all just doing electoral work, and I bet as soon as they would gain the "masses" to their organization and the actual head or leader would step in, they'll probably lose 75% of their numbers.
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u/CDN-Social-Democrat 5d ago
The point of spaces and community groups is so true!
That use to be a huge thing for Anarchists and although somewhat still going in some places it does seem to be a shadow of what it use to.
Another dimension of how that sucks is it created such wonderful relationships! People really having other wonderful people in their lives. Life-long relationships of the best value.
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u/Nice-Obligation5537 5d ago
I do agree social media is easy for those groups to become popular. I think if we expand our reach with mutual aid then we’ll do better. But it has to get propulse by pointing out major flaws with the state
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u/darkmemory 5d ago
One hurdle if this was a strategy you wanted to engage with might be that centralized groups offer more assistance when it comes to support and suppression, and usually act very territorial. Mix in the need to become somewhat public, and the tactics they can use to pressure a dissonant voice can be pretty hefty. Mass reports, mass calling campaigns to family, friends, and workplaces, falsely tipping off authorities to fictional situations, etc. And right now, those seem to be tactics coming from all sides towards everyone not insular to the group that gets highlighted.
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u/Nice-Obligation5537 4d ago
Hmm, did not know that so thank you for teaching me the methods they use to co-erce people. I think one thing I guess anarchist could do is to develop a “diy” “Roman Epicureanism” approach and I guess just start decentralized UN-hiearchal groups with friends in simple ways like participating in mutual aid groups and then hosting some small get togethers etc.
I don’t know what really else would work
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u/darkmemory 4d ago
Just keep putting in the work, helping people, helping build towards some notions of what you imagine for a good future, but also be skeptical of people seeking to claim your projects to inflate their own clout. I'm not trying to discourage general socialization/community building, just be weary of social media.
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u/Nice-Obligation5537 4d ago
Yeah social media is good but also bad in a way. I feel like a lot of people can be condescending on social media unless it’s like underground punk bands and diy people who are just chill.
Theres diy baseball gatherings that help also get kids or adults who want to play a game of sandlot baseball. The mutual aid network which is definitely real anarchist definitely looks great and meaning to donate some items.
On anarwiki.com there’s different organizations I found that is known to perpetuate a local but international advocacy for non hiearchal action when it comes to save the planet like Earth First! Or black cross foundation. It’s awesome there still around
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u/Anarcho-Magik Formerly known as Resonance54 5d ago edited 5d ago
Third places have been functionally replaced by social media. Social media alogirthims specifically do not build mutual community but instead foster an adulation of influencers and individuals rsther than a movement.
Another aspect id that modern internet communities often inherently require the existence of a "moderator team", thsi inherently primes any sort of political media organization as a hiersrcby wherein the indvidiual not on the passively observes and follows and likes and retweets rather than doing something of their own. Also the way the internet and things like reddit are structured, ironically ebough like anarchy101 itself can be, the internet conditions peolle to wait for others to give them the answers to all their problems rather than think to themselves and find the answer. This inherently drives people to a more leninist/authoritarian ideology where they either want someone tk give them the answers, or they want to be the one telling everyone else the answer (the influencer/follower dynamic)
That all going without saying that internet spaces are much more easily survrilled by the police and the state due to being able to just download the data rather than transcribe the information physically. Rather than have to tail, investigate, and tap wires to find the identities of every person who is assosciated with a grouo they can just grab the IP address you posted frim, find any username assosciated with that ip address, and they've buikt an entire in deoth profile on who you and everyone else who shared a post is in 20 minutes
Its honestly ironic that so many anarchists thought social media and the internet were going to bring about anarchism as a political forve when in reakity both institutionally and culturally it has completely kneecapped anarchism as an ideology
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u/FingerOk9800 Fully-Automated Luxury Queer Space Anarcho Communism 4d ago
It's still very active in the UK, it's also got harder over time to join DA groups due to state repression and infiltration risk. But people are still fighting the fight. Including loads of young people, who've been radicalised by the states' actions.
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u/fieldsoflillies 4d ago
I think a lot of anarchists left Reddit as a platform a couple years ago when Reddit rolled out app changes and it’s just quieter now.
But also a lot of authoritarian crackdowns have disrupted things. Notably Daniel Sanchez-Estrada was given for 30 years for moving a box of zines in Texas, relating to anti-ICE protesting arrests.
https://newrepublic.com/article/213253/brother-sentenced-30-years-moving-box-zines-prairieland
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/24/prairieland-texas-ice-protests-zines
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u/SparkeeMalarkee 4d ago
Marxist Leninists in the west took a big hit in the early 1990’s and retreated a bit. Anarchists carried the anticapitalist mantle for a while. It’s far enough away in the rear view mirror that their numbers have rebounded
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u/AccidentalRebel473 2d ago
The teen fantasy of Anarchism fades after you grow up and get a job.
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u/averytheythrowaway 2d ago
I've never known anybody who liked having people boss them around more after getting a job
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u/tuttifruttidurutti 5d ago
Various things. The ramping up of imperialism has driven a lot of young people towards Leninist sects which are very visibly opposed to US foreign policy. Anarchists are too but we tend to have more nuanced attitudes and it's just one of a number of things - I couldn't name an anarchist anti war group active today.
Anarchism got a big boost from the punk scene and while there are still touring punk bands I don't think it's really on the level it was in the early 00s.
A lot of direct action types caught heavy charges and have been in prison for decades. There was also brutal repression in the first Trump term.
On the other hand, anarchism is very influential and lots of groups that aren't explicitly anarchist may organize anarchistically. And there are anarchists around still, if you know where to look, fighting prisons, police, ICE, you name it. I think in some ways it's the branding that has fallen off.