by thecollective Sep 1, 2024

Are you an anarchist? Do you have things? Do you own them? If so, tell us how!

Pick and choose any of the questions you prefer, or make up your own with regards to the topic of property:

What are your anarchist ethics with regards to property? Which anarchist author has helped shaped your attitudes and theory towards property? How do you acquire, maintain, share, and manage your property anarchically? Do you steal, borrow, pay? Do you use it "for the cause"? How do you employ it in mutual aid? Is property freedom? Is the regime of property inherently civ and not anarchist? Can it be abolished? Talk to us about community gardens and collective housing projects. Can you own land? Can you give it back? How is owning land different than owning a toothbrush? How is a land project different than a toothbrush project? What are the pros and cons of squatting a house vs owning a house? How do you deal with your last will and testament, including the legal aspects?

Listen to the conversation here!

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anon (not verified) Sun, 09/01/2024 - 18:21

I'm a boot-licking lackey of whatever's Existent. Property for me is the source of freedom, which I will fully obtain once I get rich enough. Yeehaw!

anon (not verified) Sun, 09/01/2024 - 18:23

We anarcho-Calvinists will not be dissuaded by the rabble's slothful inability to wake up in the morning and produce a surplus to consume on useless luxuries, as we do!

anon (not verified) Mon, 09/02/2024 - 10:41

Where would anarcho-Winnie the Poos get the delicious honey from if loyal disciplined anarcho-calvinist bees wouldn't be working everyday for the revolution to happen in the Afterlife? Then we wouldn't be around to feed your prisons... Ah, the Circle of Life.

anon (not verified) Tue, 09/03/2024 - 02:04

Dude, worker bees aren't "anarcho-calvinist", they're monarchist serfs with A KAMAKAZE DEATH WISH!! Read a book about politics and the surrender by the masses to the pursuit of the consumption of material things and status in exchange for the loss of their individual uniqueness.

anon (not verified) Mon, 09/02/2024 - 22:24

I put my properties on AirBNB and make bank while helping to drive up the taxes to the neighborhood. Doing my part to collapse civ.

anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/03/2024 - 19:33

or you could take any part of the topic or question and respond with your thoughts on it.

people who require spoon feeding, gottdam.

anyway, i think that people have had thoughtless responses to this totw because it's scary. i think that people don't have easy answers for how to deal with property as an anarchist (that lack of ease is probably appropriate). i recall someone on his way out of @ making the argument that anarchists are puritan in our rejection of the pleasures of life that most frequently come from money, and it was a good provocation even though he also was not up to the challenge of the anarchist tension.

we want to have fun and have pleasure. sometimes that means partaking of the culture we hate. and acknowledging that we're not pure icons of The Revolution (nechaev's sons or whatever). i mean, now i'm also simplifying shit, so i will stop that. anyway, this question of what we do around property seems like one of those topics that is super subjective, which also makes it ripe for apologia and hypocrisy.

so yeah, hard to talk about here, i guess.

anon (not verified) Wed, 09/04/2024 - 08:33

it seems like it's possible to forego even claims upon one's "own possessions" ala infographic, when conditions are appropriate. if the people around you are on a close enough page wrt goals and approaches, or if the most probable errors can be fixed by resources close at hand, there may be room for anyone nearby to decide how to use a limited "your possessions" however they want to at the time. eg in a shared house there's often room for extra residents, so if a roommate decides to invite three extra people without consulting the other residents (autonomous action) as long as there is another place for you to sleep it doesn't really matter if some strangers are using your bed any given night. in this way, with flexible enough people, many household resources can be allocated without defaulting to consensus or minidemocracy.
And if the results of these autonomous actions are not to your liking wherever you live, then freely dissociate yourself and move in with others who's approaches are more in line with your own.
in my experience, there are often at least a few punk houses to choose from in a town, although the gen z or socialistic "talk to everyone in the house before doing anything" is unfortunately a more common model.

on a scale larger than household economy, property can be abolished and personal withholdings obsoleted from the bottom up through simple free-use. when "owners" are miffed that their windows broke and petty merchandise was distributed, chalk it up to their decision to lock the shop. ofc "middle class" ppl don't seem to see it that way; so you gotta inure yourself to their suppressive hog-soldiers at the same time.

selfreply (not verified) Wed, 09/04/2024 - 08:43

to succinctly clarify: i guess i'm rejecting the debate boi gotchya-premise at the totw top, bc i'd say usage doesn't need to be defined as ownership, and if some normies think otherwise, that doesn't really have any bearing on me now does it? the ways of the king are often touted as ubiquitous and hegemonic, but that's only in the symbolic order, and in reality many ppl regularly opt out of property norms. also, using the method of the king, such as property deeds or debit purchases, doesn't mean you subscribe to those methods. oftentimes it makes a difference how and why ppl do things, as well as what they accomplish.

anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/04/2024 - 09:57

you're talking (afaict) about living like the revolution has happened. there are a vanishing small number of people who can still do that after years of trying and surviving (or not) burnout, betrayal, abandonment, isolation, and other hard things that come with bucking the system in such a material (and long term) way.

is that small number of people who can manage it (usually through luck and/or hidden resources) to be extolled, held up as exemplars for us all? or can we look at what it takes for the vast majority of us to do the best we can (and what "the best we can" means for all the non-heroic folks--heroic used here firmly tongue in cheek).

selfreply (not verified) Wed, 09/04/2024 - 10:13

bandits have always lived in the peripheries. some do it through craft and force, some through evasion, and some simply live with minimal expenses and minimal labor while a pyramidal treadmill rolls on and on above their heads. any of these is preferable to full time work and a "high material standard of living"--not necessarily for the "personal responsibility" aspect of damage control but simply for keeping the practices of autonomy, pursuit of agency, class obsolescence alive. otherwise the gen z might think grindset nihilism is the only thing in this world. i am about the furthest person from imagining that a rupture is possible at the hands of a few do gooders or individualists individuals, but simply having more diverse ways of conducting oneself within the alleged hegemony is an end in itself, where all other forces encourage conformity to a minimum of structures and specific variations of such. structural forces are like tides and winds that beat upon the surf and rock, but kelp anchors itself far below the torrent and slowly nourishes. crabs have hard bodies and don't mind the roughness; they scuttle back after being pounded. and mussels attach themselves and mostly hold on tighter than the waves push. these are all viable strategies for a living, and what individuals are looking for under the weight of a pyramid is, most fundamentally, a living. carry out further analogies if you wish.

anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/04/2024 - 14:00

you're still basically saying there is one way to be an anarchist, or one way to resist, or one way to be... virtuous, right? which is, if i'm reading your rigght, to reject ownership of stuff?
is that what your'e saying?

anon (not verified) Wed, 09/04/2024 - 15:06

no, i said there's kelp and crabs and mussels, and even more creatures, lol.

some ppl work under the table jobs so they don't pay taxes, some work part time and live with few expenses but buy their things from the store, some go houseless and take what they can from gov aid, and some garden the empty lots and try to run local soup feeds. some even nomad around on foot and drink their milk from the goat's teat through the summer. are you kinda bad at ecology? there's lots of ways to do things. unfortunately the most of the slaves i know are resigned to their wages and just try to buy what comfort they can on their weekends etc. any more clarifying questions?

Jay Cee (not verified) Mon, 09/09/2024 - 13:38

All else aside, I really enjoyed your analogy using the different sea creatures and how they get along underneath the crashing waves. If that's something you came up with yourself, you could write it down and I'd pay to read it. :P I'm only half-kidding, that was really good.

Babylon (not verified) Mon, 09/09/2024 - 10:36

According to the king everything belongs to the king. He benevolently allows his subjects to use most of those posessions, but they do so only at his grace. If we all used the approach of the king that would be another form of universal ownership, since we'd all own all the things and let one another use them by our royal grace.

neopunk scanvenger (not verified) Thu, 09/05/2024 - 21:47

In my area they're just waiting rooms with crappy cheap beer consumerism, for either the art yuppie upgrage or the death by overdose or stds. Fucking dogs are also violent and disgusting when domesticated like this.

Anyways possession... property... two different things that often got different spaces too. Your bike is in my possession even tho you still got the receipt coz you normie bought it from the bike shop ;-)

anon (not verified) Wed, 09/04/2024 - 19:38

I'm going to an anarchist cosplay party in the Bay Area and thinking of going as a Capitalist. Should I just dress up in a suit and tie? Any thoughts?

anon (not verified) Thu, 09/05/2024 - 20:16

How many comments did the collective delete in the past "7 hours 7 minutes"?
or was there no engagements at all??
SAD EITHER WAY

Can you own your mistakes? Can you give them back? How is owning your mistakes different than owning a toothbrush?

anon (not verified) Thu, 09/05/2024 - 20:43

the anti-terf parody one about "should i just wear a crop top and skirt" is gone, i would opine it made a solid critique about aesthetic and gender both being socially cultivated phenomena and equally constraining at that, but without having the exact words here to reply to, we'll never get to talk about it wrt property...

anon (not verified) Fri, 09/06/2024 - 07:19

It's a shame it's so difficult to talk about a figure like Ernst Jünger, and sorry for mentioning yet another nazi philosopher, but the forest wanderer/anarch "approach" is interesting in dialog with the questions posed by the totw. Nietzsche, too. Basically an amoral anarchist is going to position themselves outside the reach of stuff like poverty fetishism, self-sacrifice, bad breath, tooth decay, whatever they want, because they want to, or not. Maybe this totw is just a collection of moralistic riddles? Kinda glad it's not just cliches and Stirner?

anon (not verified) Fri, 09/06/2024 - 22:58

Are you an anarchist? Is this your subculture identity?

The above topic is one among many wholly unconscious, operating on autopilot acknowledgements that what gets called anarchism in the U.S. is merely a subculture for self-involved drop-outs. Beginning, middle and end, it is about a certain kind of utterly self-involved drop-out's need to accommodate themselves to the larger world around them, mostly by pretending that the larger world outside of the subculture does not exist. It has nothing to do with a real world fight against the character of the surrounding social order, let alone tying this day by day fight to a vision for the mass revolutionary toppling of market society in a social revolution -- and this as the blight on the planet United States is now past its sell-by date, rapidly circling the drain, and ripe for a subversive revolutionary mass social struggle response.

It's not for me to go to bat for anarchism as such, but when contrasted with the long-ago fully communist, class against class anarchism of Kropotkin, Berkman, Goldman, the Magonistas, the Makhnovist and Spanish anarchism prior to Sept. 1936 -- and much that is useful in the works of Murray Bookchin -- the red white and blue contemporary USA consumer society brand is a shameful disgrace. It has nothing to do with Kropotkin and company, anyway; its point of origin is the hippie drop-out culture of the United States in the 1970s. It is about people who are passively estranged from the social order because they are passive and they are estranged, and their extremely United States of America brand of passivity and estrangement is the beginning, middle and end of what they are about.

Happy shopping, consumers.

anon (not verified) Sat, 09/07/2024 - 05:34

Nothing to say -- and no words to say it with.

Your response is an excellent example of what comes from a subculture that cannot be credibly defended.

anon (not verified) Sat, 09/07/2024 - 10:35

To 06:59

"Not a single person gracing this website takes Murray Bookchin seriously."

And this might speak well of Bookchin! Assessing the strengths and weaknesses of his or anybody else's work isn't a middle school playground popularity contest.

He wanted to abolish capitalist social relations, and a critical relationship to his work could be very useful here.

anon (not verified) Sat, 09/07/2024 - 10:52

Considering that he defended the continued existence of the always-capitalist state of Israel & looked to the popular white social movements for the nascent slaver-capitalist United States for inspiration, the claim that he "wanted to abolish capitalist social relations" is questionable. We can also look at his adoption by the also-Zionist Öcalan during his "democratic transformation" - really, his move to the right after being captured - as further evidence there are better writers to turn to for anticapitalist ideas.

anon (not verified) Sat, 09/07/2024 - 20:48

It seems the Palestine pill has got you a tad too obsessed with "Zionism", as if it's the roots of White supremacy and capitalism worldwide. Ever heard of European imperialism too, as well as the imperialist ambitions of Turkey and Iran? Or what Russia's been trying to do?

There's some powers over there that aren't neolib capitalists, tho their political views are brutally retrograde and authoritarian (i.e. fascism, religious or political). They don't deserve such nice treatments as being kept in geopolitical dead angles.

anon (not verified) Sat, 09/07/2024 - 07:24

you really think you wanna 'organize' with a bunch of individualists? what are you gonna do when they ignore your meeting consensuses? what are you gonna do when they 'steal' from your community reserves?

i don't think you can handle it, bub. and by handle it i don't mean "emplace rules and procedures to prevent autonomous uses of communitay resources;" i mean "accept that others have autonomy and aren't afraid to use it." if you can get to that point, then you might have something more interesting to say.

anon (not verified) Sat, 09/07/2024 - 08:42

Fun fact is that autonomist lefties and ancoms only ever talk of autonomy when it's blurry collective formations, and autonomous individuals don't seem to exist in their universe. Representative of how they're weak beings who can't go outside or maybe even wipe their asses without having Friends around.

anon (not verified) Sat, 09/07/2024 - 08:58

i'm not convinced enough to ad hominem them, although their patterns indeed frustrate me regularly. in delving into the carl-jung-and-russian-derived personality "pseudoscience" (observational studies) of Socionics i've found decent explanations for why some end up as lefties and some as post, why some are afraid of/cannot conceive of unrestricted autonomy etc. and also some of the unhealthy patterns ppl can get stuck in when immersed and brainwashed by trauma and violence from every direction.

it's understandable but regrettable, and it's basically just another way of looking at disciplinary/control society and how social structures are larger and last longer than individuals and their bodies/lives...

lumpy (not verified) Sat, 09/07/2024 - 12:38

Lol "fun fact"

*throws out lazy, shitty, cartoon generalization*

I dont doubt you're having fun so hey! That's 50% not bullshit. Way to be! I like those odds!

anon (not verified) Sat, 09/07/2024 - 16:13

Calm down boi... I don't recall reading any ancom print or online material or whatever talking about individual autonomy. But please do correct me with examples if I'm wrong. I'm not referring to texts about past celebs like Emma or Malatesta, but texts being supportive or even acknowledging autonomy at an individual level.

lumpy (not verified) Sun, 09/08/2024 - 07:28

Love your opener, "calm down"

As if I wasnt openly and casually mocking the thin gruel of bullshit you're serving up.

I'm dismissing your nonsense, not engaging with in. Are you less confused now? Happy to help!

anon (not verified) Sun, 09/08/2024 - 09:17

Thank you Comrade Dimwit!

Every person is an autonomous being, *especially at a physical* level, as far as biology goes. Unless you got a handicap you don't need others to breathe, drink water, sleep, shit and pee, walk around, or even... think. Tho this might not be true for everyone especially with the latter.

anon (not verified) Sat, 09/07/2024 - 10:07

i knew it would break yer brain. those aren't direct quotes, they're paraphrases of positions one might see in the world. just like how words are flexibly defined and redefined through use, punctuation is too. sometimes quotation marks mean 'direct quote,' and sometimes they mean 'i'm using air quotes as i say this.' sometimes they mean "i'm expressing this position as a tool of my rhetoric and using quotes to indicate the start and end points of the metaphysical object that is contained therein."

if you object to this flexibility of usage, that simply indicates some differences in approach between myself and yourself. please ask any other questions you want to clarify.

anon (not verified) Sat, 09/07/2024 - 10:20

I hope you find the help you need. You might find benefit in taking moments of self-reflection before lashing out with blame and doubling down on mistakes. Just a thought. Someday maybe you could be loved and look back at this period in your life, hopefully, with a little forgiveness to this version of yourself. Stay golden, 10:07.

anon (not verified) Sat, 09/07/2024 - 10:23

have you ever approached communication from the pov of pursuit of mutual understanding?

you could've just said you disagree instead of letting me spend energy here...

You (not verified) Sat, 09/07/2024 - 10:33

Look, "communication" is a spook. Sometimes "what is best in life" is to merely point out to others that they are embarrassing themselves. To say "energy can't be created or destroyed" is only what they say now but who knows how things will be thought about in hundreds of years from now? I'm not sure about all this "property taxes are too high" stuff but I do know that "to crush your enemies and hear the lamentations of the women" is what most Muricans are thinking, right? Check a box and dangle your chads, right??

anon (not verified) Sat, 09/07/2024 - 10:47

yes. i appreciate your hostile/supportive tone in this one. my brain can only handle few to no tenets at any single wave of the conscious/unconscious momentary cycle, and for the american tendencies, the tenet i usually come to is "inure yourself." i don't mind being individual-opposed-to-individual, but when bootlickers are posed to involve aggro authorities i'd rather make myself scarce than wait around to watch it unfold. for the chuds and chads my inurement is often already total.

anon (not verified) Sat, 09/07/2024 - 13:53

Regarding Murray Bookchin:

"... looked to the popular white social movements for the nascent slaver-capitalist United States for inspiration..."

Hmmmm. Please clarify specifically what these " looked to the popular white social movements for the nascent slaver-capitalist United States for inspiration" I'm fresh outta coal to shovel into the back of my Maoist ideology translation box and now the batteries are dead.

anon (not verified) Sun, 09/08/2024 - 00:39

Individualism is the reigning ideology of the United States, and this is at the heart of why the criminal psychopaths who own and rule this social order get over on the rest of us to the degree that they do.

anon (not verified) Sun, 09/08/2024 - 07:17

Wall Street and academia isn't led by autonomous individuals but finance capital gangs and networks. Leading political factions of the state are also GANGS. even when focused around a single leader cult (as with Trump). Same for labor unions... all gang interests, of in-crowds, more often against disenfranchised workers, unemployed, Black people than they're against the "bosses". The sub-capitalist of organized crime is made 99% of gangs... Then you got religious groups in their myriads of Muhrican cultist insanity... Then also the hyper-regulated industry with all its obsession with IP.

ALL collectivism.

Even Graeber admitted it; this is a socialistic system run by capitalists.

lumpy (not verified) Sun, 09/08/2024 - 07:38

That's not ... what most of those words mean. You're really lost, hey?

"Collectivism" for example, doesnt just mean "a group", it refers to how the decision making is structured. By your logic, if I was to put a bunch of european monarchs in a room, they'd be a "collective" just because theyre sitting near each other.

They would form trade agreements and military alliances but that didnt make them a "collective", more like a union of egoists actually haha

Anyway, you're being too literal or something. It's fine if you're still learning but like, maybe dont be a pompous ass about it? Do better.

anon (not verified) Sun, 09/08/2024 - 10:07

."By your logic, if I was to put a bunch of european monarchs in a room, they'd be a "collective" just because theyre sitting near each other."

*sighs* No... you didn't get anything. Collectivities are about people crowding up together, for some collective goals or values or beliefs. Just a bunch of people thrown in a room together doesn't mean anything.

lumpy (not verified) Sun, 09/08/2024 - 10:46

Yes .. I know. Your wall street examples are proof that YOU don't get it. The finance world IS modern monarchists

I literally said "you're being too literal" and you responded by reading one small piece of an analogy too literally... again

Are you a bot or just have a brain problem?

anon (not verified) Sun, 09/08/2024 - 13:22

can take on this question without tripping up! The Thought Police are the purist of them all, ain't that so mirror? The Authoritarian dwells ibside one and all. The mirror has everything and nothing, it's partner is smoke. This is my attempt at being arty and cool. Be gentle.

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