Leftist groups of all stripes have a long history, and with that history comes books, essays, and pamphlets on strategy, analysis, philosophy, and outlook.
Having never done it as part of one such group, I don’t know exactly what goes on, but essentially there’s a large body of literature on leftist political concepts, covering the ideas of why anarchy rather than archy, how to practice it, how to organise etc. I’m definitely the wrong person to explain it, generally socialists (at least here) are the ones doing all the reading, I’m a lot more interested in praxis tbh.
Some classic anarchist writers include Kropotkin, Bakunin and Proudhon. But the communist and socialist literature often applies too.
Pleasently surprised to see Bakunins name dropped! Since there seems to be some misconceptions in this thread about what Anarchy actually is, I thought I’d share one of his quotes that has stuck with me through the years:
Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality
We do! In my area there are quite a few of us and we operate a number of collectives providing things like:
Of course there’s a lot of direct action going on for various causes.
What is “theory reading”?
Leftist groups of all stripes have a long history, and with that history comes books, essays, and pamphlets on strategy, analysis, philosophy, and outlook.
So many fucking essays
Having never done it as part of one such group, I don’t know exactly what goes on, but essentially there’s a large body of literature on leftist political concepts, covering the ideas of why anarchy rather than archy, how to practice it, how to organise etc. I’m definitely the wrong person to explain it, generally socialists (at least here) are the ones doing all the reading, I’m a lot more interested in praxis tbh.
Some classic anarchist writers include Kropotkin, Bakunin and Proudhon. But the communist and socialist literature often applies too.
The anarchist library has lots to browse and the anarchist faq is a great starting place despite its huge volume of content, I highly recommend casually browsing it.
Pleasently surprised to see Bakunins name dropped! Since there seems to be some misconceptions in this thread about what Anarchy actually is, I thought I’d share one of his quotes that has stuck with me through the years:
The only problem with all the facts Bakunin spits is that sometimes he’ll follow it with “and that’s why we must exterminate the Jews.”
19th century Russians, man.
Like Bible study but with more books
And based on observations of reality
If not always necessarily based on reality
Hell yeah, this is a principled anarchist.