this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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Anarchism and Social Ecology

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Anarchism

Anarchism is a social and political theory and practice that works for a free society without domination and hierarchy.

Social Ecology

Social Ecology, developed from green anarchism, is the idea that our ecological problems have their ultimate roots in our social problems. This is because the domination of nature and our ecology by humanity has its ultimate roots in the domination humanity by humans. Therefore, the solutions to our ecological problems are found by addressing our social and ecological problems simultaneously.

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Poetry and imagination must be integrated with science and technology, for we have evolved beyond an innocence that can be nourished exclusively by myths and dreams.

~ Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom

People want to treat ‘we’ll figure it out by working to get there’ as some sort of rhetorical evasion instead of being a fundamental expression of trust in the power of conscious collective effort.

~Anonymous, but quoted by Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us

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~Murray Bookchin, "A Politics for the Twenty-First Century"

There can be no separation of the revolutionary process from the revolutionary goal. A society based on self-administration must be achieved by means of self-administration.

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In modern times humans have become a wolf not only to humans, but to all nature.

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The ecological question is fundamentally solved as the system is repressed and a socialist social system develops. That does not mean you cannot do something for the environment right away. On the contrary, it is necessary to combine the fight for the environment with the struggle for a general social revolution...

~Abdullah Öcalan

Social ecology advances a message that calls not only for a society free of hierarchy and hierarchical sensibilities, but for an ethics that places humanity in the natural world as an agent for rendering evolution social and natural fully self-conscious.

~ Murray Bookchin

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I recently discovered this movement thru this article, there's also a page on Wikipedia.

It seems very interesting to me since it's basically decentralized proactive anti-capialism mutual-aid. I really think in-real-world decentralized projects like this may be the single most efficient "weapon" we have today.

Do you have any experience with this? I feel like RRFMs are more suitable in big cities and not in little ones, but happy to be wrong about it.

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[–] perestroika@slrpnk.net 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Do you have any experience with this?

I have participated in holding about ten, and when it moved indoors to become a freeshop, I have volunteered a dozen times.

  1. Unless local climate favours you - if you hold it outdoors, your biggest concern will be weather prediction. You'll want people to exchange their goods, but not a truckload of abandoned goods damaged by rain. Avoid rainy dates, avoid announcing too far ahead (when the error margins are big), if risk of rain becomes likely, have a large quantity of plastic sheet available to cover goods. If possible, avoid changing dates - information travels slowly. If you have to cancel, announce the cancellation well, visit the site and put up a sign saying the market's canceled.

  2. Your market will have a "surplus". Some people will bring more goods than others take. You will need to make a compromise between warehousing and discarding goods. We used the local autonomous social center for warehousing goods between markets. We lacked a good plan for offloading surplus to others who might distribute them to people, since we were the first local phenomenon of this sort.

  3. Transporting goods to warehouse will likely require a car. I used a heavy electric bike with a towed cart first, but that quickly became insufficient. My car had no towing hook, so it was full of goods up to the ceiling. As the warehousing situation becomes more dire, be prepared to inform people about capacity limits. As a last resort, ask "unsold" goods to be taken back. Some will ignore this, but you can handle a few.

  4. If you observe hoarding behaviour, set reasonable limits (e.g. "as much as you can lift with one hand"). I have observed serious hoarding only once.

  5. Our market typically offered some easily prepared vegan snacks and drinks. It is always good style to display a list of ingredients and potential allergens.

  6. This can wear you out. Never do this alone, we had at least 8 bored people on our team and also used the opportunity to spread anarchism.

[–] SolarPunker@slrpnk.net 2 points 4 months ago

Hey, thank you very much for the report!

[–] veganpizza69@lemmy.vg 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] SolarPunker@slrpnk.net 4 points 3 months ago

interesting read, thanks

[–] keepthepace@slrpnk.net 0 points 4 months ago (2 children)

The main problem these sort of things are confronted with is people who take free stuff and resell it. It limits them to low value items

[–] JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

If I'm out there giving shit away, it's because I don't need it. I follow the tenant "Give what you can, never what you need."

If you come to this event, take my item and go resell it then I just assume you needed that money more than I did. I could have resold it to but didn't need to

[–] JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I don't have access to a marketplace like this but I do a lot with our local free groups. Between my household and helping some neighbors cleaning out their homes, and relocating a fair bit of corporate ewaste, we've given away thousands of items. We've also obtained quite a bit of stuff we would have otherwise had to buy.

We've definitely run into resellers a few times, especially with electronics and big-ticket items. With an online group I can vet them if I'm really worried about the fate of the item - sometimes for something really nice that a lot of people want, I'll check someone's profile and if it's nothing but them claiming expensive electronics, I might pass it to the person who gives at least some stuff away. But I also recognize that the folks who are asking for lots of stuff and aren't offering up much might just be in hard times and need groups like this the most. So I try to err on the side of giving stuff to whoever can take it.

Most of the time I just want the thing gone and as long as I'm not worried they'll throw it out themselves, if a reseller will take it and find a home for it, that's fine by me. For a handful of items, like special brackets for wireless access points, I deliberately gave them to someone I suspected was reselling because I knew they'd do a better job finding a destination for them on eBay than I would in our local free group.

In the end of the day, my goal is to keep stuff out of the landfill, and I suppose resellers are a just a scammy, middleman part of the stuff-moving ecosystem that gets these items to someone who wants them. Even at a reseller's markup, having this stuff circulating in communities instead of sitting in a landfill reduces demand for new products and hopefully diminishes - even just a little - how much has to be extracted.

[–] keepthepace@slrpnk.net 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

In the end of the day, my goal is to keep stuff out of the landfill

A commendable goal and indeed you don't care much if people reuse or resell in that context. However if your goal is to create and grow a bubble of non-merchant economy, the problem becomes different.

I recognize that it is unavoidable that some people may resell and it should not be a show stopper, but it should be part of the thought around how to set it up.