Anti-authoritarianism in practice
Anti-authoritarianism in practice typically looks like crime to those who support authority. A trivial example is troll-sysop struggles which are characterized as criminal by sysop power structure even though most trolls are harmless. Serious anti-authority action may follow lines like this, first published as how to organize an anarchist group at the old Recyclopedia which was apparently run by a mole for authority who hated it:
How to organize an anarchist group
(outline)
- finding a basis for unity - no confusion with group entity itself
- sharing individual personal experience and declaration of bias; meeting styles appropriate to anarchize
- extremely open discourse and exchange of ideas and vocabulary - looking for ideal language to engage and debate others, especially in other ethical traditions, to establish rules of mutality and common causes
- identifying shared concern and common causes
- no operational contact with any party not completely trusted
- establishing due process for fairness - avoiding groupthink; when to require response to hearsay
- dealing with financial capital shortages, e.g. sustainable trades, how to make small honest money fast
- protecting helpless members, e.g. from police, outing, other abuses.
- limiting size, i.e. rule of 150, eco-village
- growing social capital via empathic integrity (trusting each other)
- squats and the cockroach ethic
- scavenging and the raccoon ethic
how to explain what you're doing
How Four Pillars (of Green Parties, peace movement, ecology movement, altermondialistes) can help explain what you're doing and why:
- Pillars are generally considered interdependent, reinforcing each other in non-obvious ways - you can usually show in any debate that without one of them, the other three will fall apart. This validates defensive tactics and builds unity with those who operate within the political system (e.g. seeking bourgeois revolution)
- social justice begins with intra-group equality and protecting helpless members
- consensus democracy and deliberative democracy methods may help when the entire group must make a single decision and commit to it completely; ways consensus decision making can vary to adapt to different risk levels
- nonviolence as rhetoric; satyagraha; relevance to direct action and civil disobedience; how to make bullying you not worth it
- terrist and troll ethics - saving your planet by annoying society
- hominid personhood and animal rights - who or what are you most like?
How situationiste and absurdist tactics can help, e.g. with distraction, mass media attention. How situated ethics applies, and can keep you unified even in difficult situations, i.e. solidarity.
what not to do
when to break up
References
methods
- Fight Club (film, novel) - how to build completely decentralized ops
- The Great Escape (film, book) - how to operate under operational pressure
- Nineteen Eighty-Four (book) - how language reflects and alters values, see also Green:greenspeak for a modern project of this nature, and list of Islamic terms in Arabic for one that's over a millenium old.
- The Diamond Age (book) - Reformed Distributed Republic, phyle mechanics, etiquette and hypocrisy, easiest cryptography primer!
- Loompanics - best book catalog for anarchists
society and what's going on
- Three Days of the Condor (film) - the current oil imperialism
- Rollerball (film) - corporate globalization and its consequences
- Network (film) - mass media and how it manipulates your priorities
See also Black bloc:bibliography for the above and quite a few more. Some overlap with Green:bibliography, especially for nonviolent anarchism.