Ken MacLeod: Red Futures in the Gutter

From The Dark Forest

This is MacLeod’s great refusal: no radiant tomorrows, no shining cities in orbit, no anarchist communes beyond corruption. Every faction is cracked. Every ideology is compromised. Every rebellion curdles into dogma, every revolution ossifies into bureaucracy, every insurgency becomes indistinguishable from the power it once opposed. And yet it never stops. People still fight, because they cannot not fight. Ideas still mutate, because they cannot die. The wheel of ideology keeps turning, grinding flesh beneath it, even when all that’s left is rubble.

The Dispossessed at 50

From The Conversation by Alexander Howard

Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘anarchist utopia’ was an anguished response to war. Its political power endures

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the most revered science fiction writers of all time. Her groundbreaking science-fiction novel The Dispossessed, written against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, speaks to historically specific forms of geopolitical violence and societal malaise. However, it continues to resonate today.

Tristan da Cunha: The utopia that worked

From Freedom News UK

When I was a teenage frequenter of espresso bars the arguments about ‘anarchy – would it work’ enlivened the wait for the bus home from school. I held my ground – ‘yes it would’ – till that bloody film Lord of the Flies came out. Then I was subject to derision and the gleeful scorn of ‘I told you so – human nature’s not like that’ and without authority life would be ‘nasty, brutish and short’. “If it wasn’t for that PC Plod down the road,’ opined my best mate, ‘you’d kill us all for the next Coke’. I didn’t really see it like that but alas so it seemed as I read about massacres and mayhem on remote islands like Pitcairn and Clipperton. Maybe human nature wasn’t as benign and co-operative as I supposed and anarchy might not work after all.

Parenthesis Eye Breaks Down His Anarchist Utopia

From Cyber Dandy

We welcome back Parenthesis Eye to the show and discuss the down and dirty details of his Utopian Anarchism. Using his latest two blog entries as a guide, Parenthesis Eye addresses the theoretical influences on his utopian thinking and the practices that come from it!

Imagining Utopian Anarchist Communities

From parenthesiseye dot blogspot dot com

Having elaborated upon the kind of anarchism that I believe in, the question that immediately then comes up for me is: "How does one move forward with all these big ideas? How does one actually practice all of this stuff?" Okay, maybe that is really two questions, but my answer remains the same: Create new intentional communities.

Envisioning a Utopian Anarchism

From parenthesiseye.blogspot.com by Ian Mayes

I've noticed a pattern that I have. Every few years I feel the need to publicly re-think and re-clarify what exactly it is that I personally believe regarding anarchism. This usually corresponds with me affixing a new anarchist label to my beliefs and presenting it as being a new and unioque anarchist school of thought. The very first time that I did this I was calling my kind of anarchism "communitarian anarchism" and some friends and I created a short-lived organization related to that, the the Anarchist Communitarian Network, to promote this perspective. Following that, there was compassionate anarchism, then Buddhist anarchism, and most recently humanistic anarchism. Now I am calling my approach "utopian anarchism", and while I have already spoken about this on YouTube as well as in a small informal workshop at the 2022 Online NVC Conference, this is my first time publicly writing about this.

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The Utopian Function in the Anarchist Imaginary

from Autonomies

Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, it swiftly slips ten steps ahead. No matter how far I go, I can never reach it. What, then, is the purpose of utopia? It is to cause us to advance.

Fernando Birri quoted by Eduardo Galeano

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