Musings of a Pro-Human Woman

So I am going to take anarchist thought and apply it to my activism I have jotted down a few thoughts and I have posted them down below.

I take what I want from a bunch of radical ideas and tendencies while rejecting any aspects of them that I don’t find useful or worthwhile. So I want to reject becoming a messiah of any category, label, or ideological division. I'm interested in social war and autonomy with anyone who shares that same aim, anarchist, insurrectionary, or neither. There’s the saying that in the supermarket of ideas you should take what you find relevant and discard the rest. This should be done without buying into the complete package of an ideology. Steal what you need and burn the rest.

However, insurrectionary anarchism, which is just one anarchist methodology, makes the most sense to me as a tactic and a strategy in opposing the social order. I embrace insurrection as a dynamic and uncompromising attack against everything that makes us not free. It appeals to me because it poses itself against the failures of cooperation with the state, the Left, pacifism, reformism, fetishizing armed struggle, and so on that are prevalent thoughout history.


I think affinity is the best basis for organizing ourselves. Affinity is generally misunderstood because the term was used a lot in the anti-globalization movement in reference to organizing for various summit protests. To these people affinity was synonymous with people you simply know or who you are friends with, which completely empties the word of any meaning. Affinity is deep reciprocal knowledge of people’s ideas, perspectives, personal relations, how they work, and so on.

It’s a way of directly relating to each other that involves delving into our similarities and differences in terms of what we think constitutes the present social order and how to go about combating it. People try to develop affinity with one another with the perspective of building a foundation for action. The face-to-face interactions, in the forms of debate, discussion, planning, etc. provide us a strong base that goes much further than uncritical false unity that others promote. There’s something more genuine and direct about this face-to-face communication that allows us to know each other intimately. The internet and all that has degraded our ability to communicate about things that actually matter.

A common critique you’ll hear brought against affinity-based organizing is that it has the potential for informal hierarchies to develop. In reality the probability of informal hierarchies is equivalent in both formal and informal organizations. No matter what, we have to combat hierarchies, it’s not just the form of organization; it’s also interpersonal relationships as well, like ignoring or erasing people or positions based on someone’s gender, race, etc. On the other hand I’ve seen the reverse mirror image which validates people’s ideas based solely on these identities. I'm not interested in just inverting societal standards, I want to redefine everything.

The notion of us trying to get people active implies an organizer-organized relationship as well. I'm much more interested in relating to people in a horizontal way. Also we are not going to be the main catalyst for getting people to be more conflictual. A lot of that is going to come from men’s everyday experiences in conflict at their workplaces and in their neighborhoods. On the other hand, the part I can play in those situations is to push those ruptures further by intervening in the conflict in a way that promotes, through action and ideas, autonomy, direct action, and the rejection of the political process completely.

Sure... some MRAs may feel alienated from this, but then again, a lot of people are alienated from ritualized demonstrations with hippies, weirdoes, leftist sects, and so on marching around in circles. The thing is, many men are being socialized to be passive, to have shit thrown in our face all day long by bosses, cops, social workers, etc. This society has debilitated them, so they feel like conflict should be avoided, and we should just accept things as they are. Feeling alienated is a condition of their existence under the current paradigm, and I’ve got to undo its effects.

Every model that exists today has failed and we shouldn’t waste any more time. We need to completely abandon the stagnant formulas that dominate our ideas about how we should go about fighting back in this world. We have limitless opportunities to develop our projects exactly the way we want to, with others who share our perspectives and goals. We should attack domination while ensuring that we can sustain social war in the long term.

In solidarity, frith, and freedom

http://musingsofaprohuman.blogspot.c...-activism.html