What's your favorite Anarchist quote?

That is a personal opinion, actually, with restrained industry and fair distribution, I think the planet can sustain current populations.
When a planet cannot sustain a population, the population falls naturally.

However, the sudden removal of industrial infrastructure would guarantee the deaths of millions upon millions of people, you have no right to make those sorts of choices in the name of your utopia, and cannot honestly ever expect anyone to be sympathetic to your views, since the majority of the planet relies on large-scale production to survive.

Your pointing at human flaws, not technological ones.
Industry doesn't force people to be greedy.
You're anthropomorphising industry into a devil-figure, but the fact is that if people are humane and responsible, their tools follow suit.

And if I wasn't threatened with prison, I wouldn't contribute to your welfare cheque

The fact that people who refuse to work so often rely upon those that do, points to the inherent flaw in their philosophy.

Unless you live off the land as a hunter-gatherer, in which case I retract the previous statement.

Any worse than the crimes that would take place in your primitivising of the moderns?
You've taken me out of context, what I've suggested is working towards a society that takes the best from modern innovation, and primitive lifestyles and priorities.

I haven't suggested we use force to modernise savages, that is entirely your own extrapolation

 

Unfortunately, I don't think we can win without the red and black flags. But they must be destroyed afterwards" - Jean Genet, Paris, 1968

 

How quaint. It's been a long, long time since anyone's accused me of receiving welfare... Do you drive truck by chance?

With all due respect, that's also an opinion. I hear all kinds of promises made, but thats all. The crisis deepens. And yes. I expect the population will fall.

I actually have my doubts about how drastic the crash will be. Like I said, the planet cannot naturally sustain this population, but my feeling is that the default mode of any living being is one of wild freedom. Once the obstacles are removed and our feet can finally "touch the earth", so to speak, most of us will simply revert back to our natural state. Most primitive survival skills are pretty basic, and require no specialized skill. I would even go as far as to say that they are innate to our being. Didn't you ever play indian as a child? The finer points of something like flintknapping or bowmaking can be learned with practice, and eventually passed on generationally, but it doesn't take a genius to bang two stones together to get a cutting edge, or to tie a simple loop snare to catch small game. As I said, I have my doubts. For now, doubts are all they are. But there you go.
Modern civilization, on the other hand requires an extreme and ever increasing degree of specialization. This is one of it's defining Characteristics. Besides seeming quite precarious (extreme degree of social conditioning and organization are also required) it's extremely alienating. It's hard for one to feel one's life has any meaning when so disconnected from the productive process. (I'm hearing the words of Peter Tosh in my head now--Can I plant peas and reap rice
Can I plant cocoa and reap yam
Can I plant turnip and reap tomato
Can I plant breadfruit and reap potato)
This behavior must be learned, and it was a hard lesson. This just does not come naturally to us.

If you think these are human flaws, then I wonder what makes you think an anarchist society would be any better than an authoritative one. Paleolithic life, as I said, seemed to be far more egalitarian, and we certainly didn't exterminate and exploit ecosystems like we do now. I would say that quite the opposite is true- that if our tools are humane and responsible, people will follow suit.

Okay... Your probably right. Sorry. I have a kind of knee jerk reaction to this type of thing- White supremacists are not often very explicit about their racism, and try to introduce their ideas through various subtle guises which your no doubt familiar with. And they have been trolling in these forums. So bear with me. Call it a misfire.
However, it's hardly ever done by any other method other than force, and in all cases the results are disastrous. The underlying logic is always that OUR culture is superior.... I don't thats our judgement to make.

But hey. I think we both just want a freer, happier world for everyone. Lets not get carried away and forget about that, eh? :cheers2:

I tend to agree with the sentiment expressed by Green, just above me. Until the glorious luddite revolution, we're gonna need to survive the daily horrors modernity throws at us.... the ole red and black may be the ticket. Thanks for trying to drag us back on topic Green.... perhaps Me and Bonsai Ent should behave like gentlemen and take this outside..

 

LOL!

Oh yes, this is actually an anarchist quotes thread

I see your points,
my welfare comment was based on the fact that you seemed to state you didn't work, though I did include the proviso that if you're actually a hunter-gatherer (or survive by other means than work) then I retract my statement.

I suppose we may have different definitions of "work", mine tends to cover most human productive exploits.

 

I like this one:

"If you find yourself in a fair fight, you failed to properly plan beforehand."--Anonymous

 

lol I like that.
Similar to Sun Tzu's adage

"A successful warrior wins, and then goes into battle, a defeated warrior goes into battle, and then seeks victory"

 

To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

 

Will you and your government teach eagles to fly and tigers to hunt? Of course not. No one is so arrogant with nature. But you and your government want to tell me what to buy and how to live, and I am more complex than any eagle or tiger. Give me only the same respect you pay the badger and the blue jay, and leave me alone.

After all, anarchy means nothing more than human ecology.

Allen Thornton, Laws of the Jungle

 

I really like that one

 

"Everyone loves democracy but hates the government. Anarchy is democracy without the government" - CrimethInc

 

"I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time."
H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Editor Baltimore Sun

 

"We're bumping up against the very real limits of the planet to endure the civilization we've built and our generation has the opportunity to reimagine and reinvent for the first time in ten thousand years what it means to be human."​

-Reinvent 09​

 

This one

 

"The great are great only because we are on our knees. Let us rise!" -Max Stirner

 

"if they have the power, they already screwed you"

 

“No Revolutionary movement is complete without its poetic expression. If such a movement has caught hold of the imagination of the masses, they will seek a vent in song for the aspirations, fears, and hopes, the loves and hatreds, engendered by the struggle. Until the movement is marked by the joyous, defiant singing of revolutionary songs, it lacks one of the most distinctive marks of a popular revolutionary movement; it is the dogma of the few and not the faith of the multitude.”
— James Connolly​

 

"No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution... revolution is but thought carried into action."
-Emma Goldman

 

"Obedience is death. Each instant in which a person subjects herself to a outside will is an instant taken away from her life."

Alexandra David-Néel Pour la vie (1898)

Belgian-French explorer, spiritualist, Buddhist and writer, most known for her visit to Lhasa, Tibet, in 1924, when it was forbidden to foreigners. David-Néel wrote over 30 books about Eastern religion, philosophy, and her travels. Her teachings influenced beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, philosopher Alan Watts, and Theosophist Benjamin Creme. (taken from wikipedia)

 

"All societies tremble when the scornful aristocracy of tramps, inaccessibles, unique ones, rulers over the ideal and conquerors of the nothing resolutely advances. So, come on , icononclasts, forward! "

Renzo Novatore from "Iconoclasts forward"

(Renzo Novatore is the pen name of Abele Rizieri Ferrari (May 12, 1890 – November 29, 1922), an Italian individualist anarchist, illegalist and anti-fascist poet, philosopher and militant, now mostly known for his posthumously published book Toward the Creative Nothing (Verso il nulla creatore) and associated with left wing futurism. His thought is influenced by Max Stirner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Palante, Oscar Wilde, Henrik Ibsen, Arthur Schopenhauer and Charles Baudelaire.)

 

Government is an evil,It is only the thougtfullness and vice of men that make it a necessary evil.When all men are good and wise,government will of itself decay. Percy Bysshel. Shelley