User Tools

Site Tools


politics

This is an old revision of the document!


Politics

As Solar Punk envisions a free and egalitarian world, its politics take the form of Libertarian Socialism; a group of anti-authoritarian political philosophies inside the socialist movement that rejects the conception of socialism as centralized state ownership and control of the economy. Libertarian socialism criticizes wage labour relationships within the workplace, instead emphasizing workers' self-management of the workplace and decentralized structures of directly democratic political organization. It often rejects the state itself, and asserts that a society based on freedom and justice can be achieved through abolishing authoritarian institutions that control certain means of production and subordinate the majority to an owning class or political and economic elite. All of this is generally done within a general call for libertarian and voluntary human relationships through the identification, criticism, and practical dismantling of illegitimate authority in all aspects of human life.

Social Ecology and Communalism

Communalism is a system of government in which virtually autonomous local communities are brought together in a confederation under the principles and practice of communal ownership. Social Ecology is its recognition of the often-overlooked fact that nearly all our present ecological problems arise from deep-seated social problems.

Dialectical Naturalism

Dialectical naturalism is the philosophical underpinning of social ecology. Through dialectical naturalism we reason the evolutionary becoming of the biological world or “first nature”, the emergence of the realm of culture or “second nature”, and the potentiality for “free nature”—a rational and ecological society.

The History of Hierarchy

From dialectical analysis we can deduce a history of hierarchy, which traces the emergence of hierarchy from the rise of government by elders, the emergence of patriarchy, shamanistic guilds, warrior groups, chiefdoms, and eventually the state.

Ecological Critique

With history for evidence, an ecological critique finds that the idea of dominating nature emerges from the domination of human by human. Economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many others, lie at the core of the most serious ecological problems we face today. Minimally, an ecological society must eliminate the domination of human by human.

Libertarian Municipalism

We develop a political strategy, from ecological critique, for a libertarian municipalist society - organised as a confederation of directly democratic municipal assemblies, production would be municipalised and brought under the control of the assemblies, and the market economy would be replaced with a moral economy.

Utopian Vision

Seeking to reconstruct society both physically and institutionally, this utopianism includes practical experiments and alternative technology.


Anarchism

Anarchism is a political philosophy that advocates self-governed societies based on voluntary, cooperative stateless societies, rejecting hierarchies they view as unjust. Anarchism holds capitalism, the state, and representative democracy to be undesirable, unnecessary and harmful. Anarchism specifically entails opposing authority or hierarchical organisation in the conduct of all human relations. Anarchism does not offer a fixed body of doctrine from a single particular world view. Many types and traditions of anarchism exist, ranging from collectivism to individualism, not all of which are mutually exclusive.

Works

Libraries

Classical Schools of Thought

Anarcho-Communism

Anarcho-Communism advocates the abolition of the state, capitalism, wage labour and private property in favor of common ownership of the means of production, direct democracy, cooperativism, equal distribution of valuables, and a horizontal network of workers' councils with production and consumption based on the guiding principle: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.

Mutualism

Mutualism is an economic theory that advocates a society with free markets and occupation and use, or usufruct property norms. Mutualism is based on a version of the labor theory of value holding that when labor or its product is sold, in exchange it ought to receive goods or services embodying “the amount of labor necessary to produce an article of exactly similar and equal utility”.

Individualist Anarchism

Individualist anarchism refers to several traditions of thought that emphasize the individual and his will over external determinants such as groups, society, traditions and ideological systems. Individualist anarchism is not a single philosophy, but it refers to a group of individualistic philosophies that hold “if the individual has the right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny”.

Post-Classical Schools of Thought

Anarcha-Feminism

Anarcha-feminism generally views patriarchy and traditional gender roles as a manifestation of involuntary coercive hierarchy that should be replaced by decentralized free association. They believe that the struggle against patriarchy is an essential part of class conflict and the anarchist struggle against the state and capitalism, and vice versa.

Anarcho-Pacifism

Anarcho-pacifism rejects the use of violence in the struggle for social change, the abolition of capitalism and the state. Anarcho-pacifists criticize the separation of means and ends, they also tend to see the state as 'organised violence' and so they see that “it would therefore seem logical that anarchists should reject all violence”.

Green Anarchism

Green Anarchism is a school of thought within anarchism which puts a particular emphasis on environmental issues. A green anarchist theory is normally one that extends anarchist ideology beyond a critique of human interactions, includes a critique of the interactions between humans and non-humans as well, and argues that the hierarchical domination of nature by human stems from the hierarchical domination of human by human.

Religious Anarchism

Religious anarchists view organised religion mostly as authoritarian and hierarchical that has strayed from its humble origins. The original messages to live a simple life, to share the wealth of the earth, to treat each other with love and respect, to tolerate others and to live in peace invariably gets lost as worldly institutions take over. Religious leaders accrue power to themselves, draw up dogmas, and wage war on all who dissent. They seek protection from temporal rulers, bestowing on them in return a supernatural legitimacy. As a result, in nearly all cases organised religions have lost the peaceful and tolerant message of their founders.

Contemporary Schools of Thought

Post-Anarchism

Post-anarchism is an anarchist philosophy that employs post-structuralist and postmodernist approaches. Post-anarchism is not a single coherent theory, but rather refers to the combined works of any number of post-modernists, post-leftists and post-structuralists.

Post-Colonial Anarchism

Post-colonial anarchism is a re-envisioning of anarchism in an explicitly anti-imperialist framework. Where traditional anarchism is a movement arising from the struggles of proletarians in industrialized western European nations - and thus sees history from their perspective - post-colonial anarchism approaches the same principles from the perspective of colonized peoples throughout the world.

Queer Anarchism

Queer anarchism advocates anarchism and social revolution as a means of queer liberation and abolition of homophobia, lesbophobia, transmisogyny, biphobia, transphobia, heteronormativity, heterosexism, patriarchy and the gender binary.

Agorism

Agorism is a philosophy that advocates creating a society in which all relations between people are voluntary exchanges by means of counter-economics, thus engaging with aspects of peaceful revolution. The goal of agorism is the agora; the society of the open marketplace as near to untainted by theft, assault, and fraud as can be humanly attained is as close to a free society as can be achieved. And a free society is the only one in which each and every one of us can satisfy his or her subjective values without crushing others’ values by violence and coercion.

Organizational Forms

Anarcho-Syndicalism

Anarcho-syndicalism is a theory of anarchism that views revolutionary industrial unionism or syndicalism as a method for workers in capitalist society to gain control of an economy and with that control influence in broader society. Syndicalists consider their economic theories a strategy for facilitating worker self-activity and as an alternative co-operative economic system with democratic values and production centered on meeting human needs.

Insurrectionary Anarchism

Insurrectionary anarchism is a revolutionary theory, practice and tendency within the anarchist movement that emphasizes insurrection within anarchist practice. It is critical of formal organizations such as labor unions and federations that are based on a political programme and periodic congresses. Instead, insurrectionary anarchists advocate informal organization and small affinity group based organization. Insurrectionary anarchists put value in attack, permanent class conflict and a refusal to negotiate or compromise with class enemies.

Platformism

Platformism is a tendency that stresses the need for tightly organized anarchist organizations that are able to influence working class and peasant movements. “Platformist” groups reject the model of Leninist vanguardism. They instead aim to “make anarchist ideas the leading ideas within the class struggle”. According to platformists, the four main principles by which an anarchist organisation should operate, are ideological unity, tactical unity, collective responsibility and federalism.

Synthesist Anarchism

Synthesist anarchism is a form of anarchist organization which tries to join anarchists of different tendencies under the principles of anarchism without adjectives. It is the main principle behind the anarchist federations grouped around the contemporary global International of Anarchist Federations.

Dual Power and Infrastructure-as-Resistance


Libertarian Marxism

Libertarian Marxism refers to a broad scope of economic and political philosophies that emphasize the anti-authoritarian aspects of Marxism. Early currents of libertarian Marxism, known as left communism, emerged in opposition to Marxist-Leninist vanguardism, it is also often critical of reformist positions, such as those held by social democrats. Libertarian Marxist currents emphasize the Marxist belief in the ability of the working class to forge its own destiny without the need for a revolutionary party or state to mediate or aid its liberation.

Autonomism

Autonomism emphasises the ability of the working class to force changes to the organization of the capitalist system independent of the state, trade unions or political parties. Autonomous social movements involve people directly in decisions affecting their everyday lives. They seek to expand democracy and to help individuals break free of political structures and behavior patterns imposed from the outside.

Chaulieu–Montal Tendency

The Chaulieu–Montal tendency is the political philosophy of the French libertarian socialist group 'Socialism or Barbarism' and its British counterpart 'Solidarity', following from the belief that what the working class was addressing in their daily struggles was the real content of socialism. It was critical of Leninism, rejecting the idea of a revolutionary party, and placing an emphasis on the importance of workers' councils.

Communization

Communization means the abolition of property itself along with any state-like institutions claiming to represent a given subset of humanity. In these accounts humanity as a whole, directly or indirectly, would take over the task of the production of goods for use (and not for exchange). People would then have free access to those goods rather than exchanging labor for money, and distribution would take place according to the maxim “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

Council Communism

Council communism is a current of socialist thought characterized by its opposition to statism and its advocacy of workers' councils and soviet democracy as the basis for dismantling the class state. It is opposed to the party vanguardism and democratic centralism of Leninist ideologies and it contends that democratic workers' councils arising in the factories and municipalities are the natural form of working class organization and authority. Council Communism also stands in contrast to social democracy through its formal rejection of both reformism and “parliamentarism”.

De Leonism

De Leonism is a libertarian Marxist current combining the theories of revolutionary syndicalism with orthodox Marxism. According to De Leonist theory, militant industrial unions as the vehicle of class struggle will bring about the change needed to establish a socialist system. Unlike Anarcho-Syndicalism, De Leonism believes in the necessity of a central government to coordinate production as well as in the use of a revolutionary political party in addition to union action to achieve its goals.

Freudo-Marxism

Freudo-Marxism is a loose designation for philosophies that have been informed by or have attempted to synthesize the works of Karl Marx and the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud. Freudo-Marxists chose what parts of Marx's thought might serve to clarify social conditions which Marx himself had never seen, and drew on other schools of thought such as that of Weber and Freud to fill in Marx's perceived omissions.

Marxist Humanism

Marxist humanism concluded that, as there was no true socialist society existing anywhere in the world, a return to the fundamentals of Marxism was in order - emphasizing the Marxist Theory of Alienation and Hegel's philosophy as being the foundation of Marxism.

Luxemburgism

Luxemburgism professes a commitment to a generalized democracy in an unarticulated form, and the necessity of a revolution to bring it about.

Open Marxism

Open Marxism is a school of thought which draws on libertarian socialist critiques of party communism and stresses the need for openness to praxis and history through a dialectical method grounded in the “practical reflexivity” of Karl Marx's own concepts. The “openness” in open Marxism also refers to a non-deterministic view of history in which the unpredictability of class struggle is foregrounded.

Situationism

Situationist theory represents an attempt to synthesize this diverse field of theoretical disciplines into a modern and comprehensive critique of advanced capitalism. The situationists recognized that capitalism had changed since Marx's formative writings, but maintained that his analysis of the capitalist mode of production remained fundamentally correct; such as his theory of alienation. They asserted that the misery of social alienation and commodity fetishism were no longer limited to the fundamental components of capitalist society, but had now in advanced capitalism spread themselves to every aspect of life and culture.

politics.1548111602.txt.gz · Last modified: 2019/01/21 23:00 by greenandblack