I've picked up David Graeber's latest book, The Utopia of Rules, and it's been resonating quite a lot with some ideas I've been toying around with. Graeber talks about the growing bureaucracy in all facets of life, where more and more labor is spent performing rules checking on others rather than actually doing anything meaningful beyond order for order's sake. But I think the question being begged from the book is if the ruling classes can turn the microscope on most, if not all, of us, to observe us as much as they please, then where is the transpose of such a system?

This is hitting on game theory and that's where I'm coming up short. Are there any texts that try to explicitly lay out a political-economic or hierarchical game theory or theories? What categories can we generalize physical and conceptual moves/actions under predatory capitalism, bureaucracy, etc.? I'm not entirely sure where I would want to go with this analysis, but I'm quite done with merely reacting to the latest capitalist, imperialist catastrophe. Does anyone have any suggestions in this area? Thanks :)

So I've been reading on anarchism for two years now, I'm no expert on the subject by any means, but I feel as if I am well enough read to find myself in agreement with much of it and critically thinking about specific issues such as collectivism vs. individualism etc.

I find myself broadly speaking in the anarchism without *adjectives line of thought, given that a prescribed way to survive without unnecessary authority (and what in fact constitutes a necessary authority) varies on the situation, environment, culture, etc. etc..

That being said, I'm having trouble getting started. I find myself not knowing how to proceed further than personal choices and lacking the network to actually work with an affinity group, find one or figure out how to create one.

I find, I'm not incredibly sociable and so find myself unable to really bring people together. How do I proceed? As a young and budding anarchist wishing to be more involved. How do I get there? I'm in Canada, I've look for resources online for Canadian anarchists, would there be local listing I could see or a list of infoshops.

Edit: switched objectives to adjectives. Any personal experience with the subject would be greatly appreciated, I've been on the sidelines for far too long and would like to get on with it so to speak.

Thanks in advance.

Because I want to have a chat about it and this subreddit needs to feel less dead than it currently does.

So, for me, veganism is a natural extension of anarchism. It's the removal of an oppressive hierarchy that causes death and harm on an incredible scale. To me, this is as clear as day, and I have a hard time expounding on exactly WHY they're intrinsic. It feels tautological. Obviously not everyone agrees, and I like chatting about why or why not.

hey, is there interest here in starting a reading group kind of thing? I've never done it before, but I'd really like to, in part simply to get to know you all a bit better. thoughts?

I think we can assume that everyone here is aware that Reddit (well actually the Internet as a whole) has a trolling problem. There have been a number of attempts to deal with this in many different ways, and I don't really find any of them satisfactory. It seems like every solution is one that disempowers users by:

• requiring identity verification
• relying on a few empowered individuals to keep us safe

There has to be a better way.

What if we stopped waiting for the admins or mods to take action, and we could ... 'ban together'?

I'm thinking of something along the lines of https://blocktogether.org/. It would be a browser plugin (maybe even an addition to RES). The plugin would have the following features:

• Ability to block users (All of their messages, posts, comments would never be shown to you).
• Ability to autoblock users with accounts less than 7 days old or with less than some amount of comment karma.
• Ability to "trust" other users and auto-block users that they block

I'm curious if anyone would be interested in such a plugin. If there is enough interest I could work on it. Do you have other ideas or thoughts that would improve a project like this?

I am not suggesting social justice minded anarchists abandon /r/anarchism and /r/metanarchism, but I think reviving this space could also be useful because

• all the white liberal feminism in various parts of the fempire gets old (e.g. people complaining that criticizing the white supremacy in that street harassment video are being divisive, people who don't get why anti-capitalism has to be part of feminism/social justice, a thread on homelessness where half the comments were "I don't give money to homeless people because they'll just spend it on drugs and alcohol", etc. etc.)

• there may or may not be a reactionary coup in progress in /r/metanarchism (a mod unilaterally demodded the most social justice oriented mod, and there's a push to get rid of meta and "leave it to the downvotes")

• even if things settle down close to how they had been in /r/(met)anarchism, it's never going to make sense to have full blown SRS-style moderation there - it could be nice to have a safer space anarchist forum in addition to the broader audience (but still relatively anti-oppressive) /r/anarchism

Basically, I'd like to have a leftist, feminist space where we don't have to bother with social justice 101, anti-capitalism 101, or intersectionality 101, and this seems like the best candidate. Thoughts?

Edit: please comment on moderation/consensus ideas!

I feel like legalism is the veneration of the abilities and knowledge of the deceased over that of the living: a coercive hierarchy of death over life. Implicitly, there is the hierarchy of a living, centralized class (the rich) over everyone else under statism, but I think legalism stands out on its own as a distinct form of coercive hierarchy.

Statism doesn't necessarily require laws to function, because states largely make things up as they go and enforce these laws arbitrarily anyway. Statism is a system of belief that we must have a group of living masters to keep society functioning, with no definition of what functioning means.

Legalism, however, is a set of laws passed down from generation to generation. Society is therefore bound to rules written by the dead, which are made difficult to change, even if a statist society changes the type of state it lives under. Invariably, the laws of the dead will pile up and become coercive because society moved on and the laws by definition cannot be changed* without significant mass movements working to change them.

Am I right in making this distinction between statism and legalism? What do y'all think?

Support is fucking awesome, so that's why I made it. if you have PTSD, or someone who does and have questions how to help them come and join us! /r/RadicalPTSDsupport