Paul Watson’s Likes tagged “Anarchism”

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Ursula Le Guin’s SF novel The Dispossessed is still by far the best account of an anarchist society, warts and all. It won both the Hugo and Nebula awards but, more importantly, it secured a place in the heart of many anarchists and even if its author denied she was anarchist, she expressed the ideal well. So well, in fact, its publication should be discussed and a few claims made about it refuted.

Bubblegum dystopia perfectly captures the vibrant yet achingly vacuous aesthetic (after all, bubblegum is totally ineffective as form of consumption) that dominates our media and popular culture, reflecting the contradictions and catastrophes inherent in capitalism. In our bubblegum dystopia, the surface is endlessly appealing, even as we’re totally aware it conceals our demise and sells the end of the world back to us.

This archive is an open-source repository of anarchist or anarchy-adjacent science fiction. Featured on the site are books, movies, and other media which are either anarchist in their politics or of interest to anarchists.

There would be no timetable, no compulsory lessons, no uniform, no hierarchy. Teachers would be called by their first names. The children would make up the rules and decide what they wanted to learn.

There’d be no fees, fixed hours, term times or holidays. They were to be schools without walls - and open whenever the community wanted them.

Many of them quickly folded - with some communities not receptive to the idea of educational anarchy. But a few put down solid roots.

I would very much like to say that the anarchists in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday aren’t really anarchists. I am, after all, at least anarchism-adjacent myself, and value the movement because of its peaceful and patient resistance to centralizing and domineering powers, especially, in our moment, the Power that’s sometimes called Technopoly.