i see

so right now a lot of anarchists tend to support progressive candidates who help remove capitalist reliance, and focus on buildin alternative ways of living

Is there anarchist politicians rn?

no

best we've got are some communists and progressives

Oh that makes it kinda hard

without support from powerfull people

it's funny because anarchists naturally tend towards "I don't want to lead nor anyone to lead" but also go "well these communists are kinda like us, so we'll support them to advance our goals"

but feel free to think about it yourself. Imagine you're fed up with the world

and want to live on your own

or maybe with a small group

how would you go about doing it?

Id probably go to a farm or small town

generally speaking most people don't know how to farm nor have the land for it. We can't build our own electronics nor generate our electricity

some people can build, but we don't have the materials to do it

things like mining are pretty heavily regulated and under statist/capitalist control

What if they use communist to rise in power a little, and then "betray" the commies?

see the problem is that you have your leading communist+anarchist party

and then the masses

the masses start supporting the party, and are either communist or anarchist

the anarchists then go "fuck you we're done with this"

and try to dismantle

so all the anarchists pull support

the communists go 🤷 and continue their powerstructure

and we end up with the same communist system

Oh thats bad

anarchists could perhaps try *enforcing* anarchism

but the problem is that without the support communists will just continue pushing communism

and historically they have outnumbered us anyway

as anarchism is kinda a weird idea

I see

and one that really is only attractive in today's society

rather than in a historic communist one

like today we can easily imagine automated systems doing a lot of cool stuff

but back then?

Is there any effective way for you guys to rise in power and stay?

like legit most people were farmers and working in factories

the only way to really do that would be to go against anarchism

since the whole point is to *not* have a coercive violent government enforcing it's will

this is why IMO the best solution is to instead focus on building alternatives

rather than trying to fuck with the existing stuff

maybe make nonprofit organizations that help push anarchist causes

do anarchist acts even if illegal

etc

I see

digitally this is really easy

we have stuff like scihub and torrents

that help share knowledge and media to all

copyright is a very easy thing to reject

we've also got censorship resistent distributed networks and infrastructure

so things like website takedowns can't happen

the hardware for the internet is still reliant on the statist+capitalist one, but mesh networks are being built that avoid that

and I mentioned earlier about electricity and solar power and all that

If no one owns anything, how would internet work?

it's a complicated question

so as it stands the anarchist idea of using things that exist, is that people should be free to use them if they please and see fit

so building systems around that is the goal

a modern day example would be those bikes and cars you pay to use and then park when you're done and someone else can pay and use them

or something like public transportation

I see

just remove the payment models and pretend no one owns them

for the internet, it's structured using routers and wires/wireless connections

and then we have individual devices connect to it

so basically we've have nodes, similar to how cell towers are

that anyone can connect to

and those nodes would connect to each other in a decentralized/distributed way

the structure of the network is called a mesh network

there's no central authority to ask where to route the packets

so if one node goes bad, the system still works

And if someone steals the car? would that be considered "hurting anarchism" and you guys would use violence to get the car back?

likewise, since it's a share system, people have more incentive to keep it running

well the concept of "stealing" isn't a thing in anarchism

so say someone takes the car and uses it

they drive it somewhere

eventually they will get out of the car

and when they do, someone else may use it

the only way to prevent that is physical violence

at which point we arrive at the "how do you prevent opposing ideologies from attacking"

so some anarchists have gotten the idea to *use* capitalist systems to help enforce anarchism

So someone takes a gun and says "well i control this land now and if you dont like it you die"

at least for the time being

right

that's how capitalism functions

you basically have to threaten the person

Which is against anarchism?

in today's society we abstract that threat

we go "if you dont' get off my land, I'll call the police who will then hurt you"

right

so how some anarchists go about fixing this problem is by owning things under capitalism, but then making access anarchistic

in copyright terms this is called "copyleft"

the idea is that using the copyright system they say that anyone can use it, but they *must* also adopt the copyleft model

for copyrighted works and software it works well, since anyone who uses it then provides their changes for everyone else

for physical stuff we can see groups that buy land and then allow people to squat there

or buy food and share it with the poor

and of course anarchists still participate in capitalism (we have to pretty much)

so we all have our own things as well

I see

because we don't live under anarchism just yet

but we can still try to adopt anarchist ideas

one big issue people tend to have is "I don't want to share my toothbrush" or whatever