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

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

~Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.

~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.

~Murray Bookchin, Post Scarcity Anarchism

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

~Abdullah Öcalan

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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How the Koreatown Popular Assembly Organized Neighborhood Power to Confront ICE (itsgoingdown.org)
submitted 2 weeks ago by Five@slrpnk.net to c/anarchism@slrpnk.net
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[–] AntiBullyRanger@ani.social 2 points 2 weeks ago

#Dream Big, Start Small, Prepare For The Long Haul BRRN: There’s lots of interest and excitement about popular and neighborhood assemblies now, as Trump has returned to office. Having gone through this experience, what advice and lessons would you want to share with organizers interested in experimenting with this kind of neighborhood structure in their backyards?

M: Don’t be grandiose. If you go out and just declare “I’m going to have a neighborhood assembly,” it’s probably not going to happen. I think if KPA had been called at any other moment, it would not have happened in the way it did. I think if we had tried to do it the same way after Trump’s election in 2024, it would not have happened. [Trump’s first election in 2016] was a unique moment when we could just flyer the streets and random strangers who had never come to an organizing meeting before would show up, all speaking different languages. Today it would take much more ground work.

You need to have built a lot of connections with people before you ever call a first assembly. If there are a bunch of churches or other social institutions on board and they can vouch and turn people out, that’s something. … There were people who had a lot of connections in the neighborhood, but [KPA] was put together without much background, without much organizing on the ground initially, again because of the moment we were in. We built connections to various churches later. If you have that kind of history and those kinds of connections, then you can build something like KPA. Otherwise, I think it’s quite hard in our present political context and in a context where people aren’t very used to neighborhood assemblies. If you’re going to do it, you have to start small and be prepared to put in years of work.

The other key lesson is that, if you reach a place where you have the capacity to actually call an assembly, you have to have a structure and decision making process in mind as you begin. Really, you have to make sure your spaces are democratic, open decision-making spaces and have a clear idea of what you’re going to do with that. I think that moment was also special [when] the first assembly was in February 2017, right around the inauguration, because the problems and the answers were both quite clear to people. The problem in the neighborhood was immigration raids and the solution was to stop them, to keep them out. Our task was to develop a strategy and set of tactics for how to actually do that.

In times when it’s more diffuse, when there’s a whole bunch of competing issues and nobody is quite clear on what to do about it, it’s a lot harder and it’ll take a lot more time. But it’s also, I think, the responsibility of revolutionaries to think through those and propose the key issues and the key solutions, which is what these spaces are for, right? Then from there you come to a concrete project. I think a neighborhood assembly, like any other meeting, is kind of pointless to most people unless it’s clear: this is what we’re doing, this is how, and this is what the purpose is.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Koreatown Popular Assembly, we recommend watching A Year in Popular Power #2: Stopping ICE Raids with Koreatown Popular Assembly and reading Koreatown Popular Assembly: Shutting Down ICE, Building Popular Power.