TOTW: NEEDS

Can a minority that profits as renters and employers via private ownership of the means of production
be supplanted by a common ownership of property, and an egalitarian mode of production and distribution
ensuring the greatest freedom and well-being for everyone, rather than only the wealthy and powerful?
A revolution is necessary to put such a scheme in place.

This is wholly accurate. Collective social struggles with a transparently clear goal of anti-capitalist social revolution - the abolition of wage labor, commodity production and the state - are exactly what's needed now, especially under the increasingly advantageous circumstances provided by the fact that the United States is circling the drain.

Anarchists risk life and livelihood when they live freely and attack oppressive institutions.

"...when they live freely..."

Hmmmm. This sounds like you are saying that you are a threat to the social order based on lifestyle choices you make. Is this the author's intention?

Hums... putting a Red flag (or square) as the rollover pic is a pretty DOA move.

industrial society sees the living world as resources, instead of a relationship with the land that is more like a communion, an enmeshed ecosystem of mutual aid. in such a way, the relationship to land can be the basis of freedom, hence the old slogan “land and freedom”

unbridled freedom without equality isn’t anarchism, since a free-for-all in which the mighty rule over the weak is what we have now. anarchism is no rulers and no hierarchies, not the freedom to amass and hoard wealth at the expense of others while others starve

but a revolution won’t happen so looting, scamming, and squatting will have to do

"Man is not a being whose exclusive purpose in life is eating, drinking, and providing a shelter for himself."
https://www.elephanteditions.net/library/peter-kropotkin-the-conquest-o…

people aren’t just needy receptacles of aid, they are active agents, crafty creatures that compete (as well as collaborate) and seek advantage, striving to improve their circumstances. they aren’t helpless victims waiting to be rescued by communism, they are co-creators of the unfair and unequal world we live in

"A glorious workers revolution where everyone unites and sings Kumbaya?" All the loyal products of the United States of 'Murika diss this in exactly these terms. Better stick to playdates with fellow slumming children of the upper middle class.

Most of the responses here are the usual, U.S. anarchism is the dandruff of US consumer society stuff, and a measure of the fact that this scene can't generate anything that can make a different in the larger world around us.

Note the use of the word "commie," beloved of USA right-wing assholes and the turds they excrete. Servile and stupid 'Murikans can't tell the difference bet. Marxism and Stalinism.

We true anarchs have transended physiological based needs, all we need is a spontaneous human response delivered without censure or prohibition. Thecollective take note!

My NEED... is to become an immortal so not only I can become really good at assemblies and nonprofit bureaucracy skillz, but also can start seriously believe in the prole revolution with a straight face, coz I can now pretend to care for what'll MAYBE happen in a few generations from now (assuming humanity's still around or hasn't been brought under the full control of an AI). Yah.

I tend to want to comment immediately!

"Oppression is glaring when it kills,
as well as when it deprives, restricts, and controls others’ livelihood."

LOL, that's why it's called oppression! People say "the oppressive air" because the air has this quality of bearing down, making it hard to go about, doing what you do.

I do think capitalism is oppressive: there is classism and social darwinism, but that's equally as oppressive as the counting and splitting up of "resources", which is also implied by egalitarian systems.

The impersonal nature of partially-soc neo liberal capitalism is why nothing has replaced it to scale. Stirner said "the boog want an impersonal leader". People like it when they can pretend they are masters of their fate. This way, nobody has to care when someone complains, and when the abuse becomes untense, you can write a book or a rap song.

The more juvenile, right-wing type responses here are as always completely abstract, and clearly not a product of previous efforts by their authors to assert what they claim to be about in the larger world outside.

Ward’s ‘anarchist approach’ to housing is defined in opposition to the ‘High Modernism’ of post-war British housing policy and to the associated managerialist approach which sees housing as a good which the state, local or central, will provide to or for the people, drawing on the insights of planning and architectural experts. In a 1974 open letter to Tony Crosland, the then Labour Minister for Housing, Ward characterizes this perspective acidly as follows: ‘You ... see the homeless, the ill-housed and overcrowded and the newly-weds just coming up for membership of the Housing Shortage Club, as the inert objects, the raw material of policy, waiting to be processed by the Housing Problems Industry’. Ward is not against collectivism in the sense of public support, but, reacting against the modernist architects and planners—‘the dreadful and expensive saga of the tower block era’—he does affirm the principle of ‘dweller’s control’: the people should be enabled to house themselves, not be housed by authorities.

Ward’s commitment to the idea of dweller control manifests itself, firstly, in his sympathy for squatting movements. Ward’s early anarchist journalism covered the squatters’ movement which emerged in Britain in the late 1940s. The squatting movement of the late 1960s also drew his supportive commentary. In Ward’s view, squatting is a constructive form of direct action to meet social needs, one which works to improve not only the prospects of those who squat, but the housing situation as a whole: ‘The real crime, and perhaps the real achievement of the squatters’ movement, is that it has called the bluff of those who believe in political action. The squatters have shown that they can rehabilitate housing more quickly and more effectively than the official system can’. Taking the direct action approach further, Ward has written widely on the history of popular self-build, episodes in which poor people have achieved title to cheap land, or squatted it, and have then gradually built on the land (sometimes to the consternation of local planners or those of supposedly more refined aesthetic tastes). He has also supported contemporary efforts at urban self-build and has written on the architecture of self-build. Taking this approach a step further, Ward floated in the 1970s the idea of the ‘Do-it-Yourself New Town’ in which a planning body locates a site and organizes the provision of basic services such as power and sewerage, but then allows people to come and, within some parameters, build for themselves.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/stuart-white-making-anarchism-r…

What is the relation of needs and anarchism?
Anarchy is a fluid, creative, and sometimes collaborative approach to meeting human needs. As opposed to rigid and dominating approaches to meeting needs. Of course, some ppl who call themselves anarchists are hella rigid and dogmatic but they are annoying and I'm not counting them.

How do anarchists satisfy their needs keeping in mind the principles of freedom and equality?
Weird question. Everyone and every place is so different. I don't think there's one anarchist way to do this.

Is freedom a need?
Duh

If so, Is it a basic need or a premium need?
This distinction is pointless. What even is a "basic" need versus a "premium" one? Something you will physically die without like food or water? Life is miserable without freedom, or dignity, or creativity. Without them, I shrivel and die inside. No matter how you want to rank needs, the outcome of going with them unmet is usually pretty much the same: feels really bad. I say might as well treat them all as important.

Is it a luxury?
Insane

Is a hierarchy of needs justified?
Your mom's justified

Does freedom and self-actualization only come after your basic needs are met?
Okay Mazlow didn't realize it was the 1940s

Is it a byproduct of having all your needs met?
I'm over answering these questions. I thought I had more stamina right now, oops

Or is it an inherent capability, modified by intrinsic and extrinsic factors, that allows you to choose the degree by which you are governed by necessity, and be creative in the way you prioritize, satisfy, and ignore -even neglect- your needs, and that of others?

this prompt seems designed to trick people into the kind of ideological posturing going on in many of the comments, specifically by holding up two models of social organization each couched in the language of meeting people's needs as abstractions, then obliquely critiquing the idea that needs can or should be thought of in that way.

if that was the intention, well done. i more or less agree that freedom is "an inherent capability, modified by intrinsic and extrinsic factors, that allows you to choose the degree by which you are governed by necessity, and be creative in the way you prioritize, satisfy, and ignore -even neglect- your needs, and that of others." this means to me that neither "needs" nor "freedom" are the kinds of things that can be neatly theorized or quantified as part of a general social "scheme" for distributive justice. they describe important aspects of one's experience within any given context, under any kind of constraint. the idea for me anyway is not to solve or maximally satisfy them across any given population but to change the way that we perceive them, again as suggested by the prompt, as "necessities," so that we can become more "creative" about changing the ways we relate to ourselves, the non-human world, other people, other places. too easy otherwise to become trapped by the idea that we need the institutions, forces, modes of being and so on that seem to be responsible for producing the things that we need to survive or find comfort, on that basis, and so the only thing thats really wrong with them is that they're not done to our liking, or under our direction, or that other people are just not savvy enough to have gotten their little bubble of autonomy from it all. all positions which more or less passively demand the reproduction of those conditions.

"What is the relation of needs and anarchism? "
In dystopian 2024, Anarchism needs relations!

Why do we waste our lives reading and commenting on these TOTWs? We could be gardening or having wild sex all day and night in our gardens or throwing our dynamite strapped bodies into the machinery of our enemies! Instead a little Anews and routine pooping before crying ourselves to sleep why?

Hold me closer, tiny dancers.

in the breadbook, kropotkin is more trying to overcome people’s initial knee-jerk opposition to expropriation, assuaging them, telling them it’ll be alright, they’ll figure it out as they go, it won’t be that bad, rather than providing a specific blueprint as to how things should be.