You do what you would do anyway: organize, build community, build dual power, undermine the state. Any specific politician doesn’t matter. The right will pull the rug out from under people, they’ll do whatever evil thing they’re gonna do, but the left will set up the rug in the first place and give people a false sense of hope.

Authoritarianism is bad at disasters. The more autocraric, the worse they are at responding to dynamic environments. Build mutual aid networks, support people targeted by the state, prepare (collectively) for the collapse or withdrawal of the state.

It never mattered which puppet is pulling the levers, or how authoritarian or not a society is, the assignment has always been the same. If you don’t have the groundwork of dual power, any more radical action is just asthetic.

Edit: IMHO, the two most important things to organize around are anti-police terror and disaster preparedness. Authoritarianism is only tenable if the community believes that having the police is better than abolishing them. In times of crisis the state withdrawals. If people can provide for their own needs, they see proof that the state is unnecessary. Make the state unnecessary, there will be a crisis.

Good luck!

I uploaded a more complete version that’s moving a bit more towards a zine. I created a community to discuss it, if needed: https://slrpnk.net/c/FractalAnarchism

In popular discourse the word “condone” has been conflated with the word “advocate.” These are two different concepts. A pacifist can condone violence while advocating for nonviolence, and Gandhi did exactly that saying that violence is acceptable when no other options exist.

You know, just so we’re all on the same page about words having meaning.

https://codeberg.org/0x29a/Fractal_Anarchism

Thanks, good call. Let me add a working definition here for now.

The definition that’s most applicable here is “a type of object that is isomorphic (has the same shape) at multiple levels.” I’m basically using the Hofstadter definition of “isomorphism” from “Gödel, Escher, Bach,” which is more loose than the strict mathematical meaning.

To say “fractal” here is really to say that something is a recursive structure (defined by itself, or repeating the same pattern at different layers) where metaphors that allow us to understand one layer can also apply to other layers with minimal loss.

The example of authoritarianism starts at interpersonal abuse dynamics, showing that those dynamics apply with similar rules in mass as authoritarian systems, but also within the individual. The authoritarian is afraid, dominated by their own ego, and compensating externally, oppressing others as the individual’s fragile ego oppresses their own identity.

I’m also cheating a bit in my definition of fractal here because a fractal is technically infinitely self-similar. We could probably enrich the metaphor (towards the macro) by talking about the relationship of social subgroups to a society, and the relationships of societies to each other. Since we don’t know any aliens, we can’t really go past that. Going the other direction, towards the micro, we could maybe talk about the relationships between neural clusters or individual neuros, but we run in to the limits of knowledge and maybe knowable things pretty quickly. Consciousness may be truly fractal, but we probably can’t ever know.

So I’m using the term to simply describe multiple iterations of self-similariry, where the domain of self similarity is the ability to losslessly apply metaphors from one to the other. A mathematician might be a bit upset at the use of terms.

One connection to psychedelics (as in the title) is that people tend to see fractal structures while hallucinating on high doses.

Edit: My definition may have made things more confusing.

Thank you!

There’s a bunch of context. I’ll update at some point in the future. Thanks for the feedback! :)

I’d love to collaborate. I’ll update with a link when I get it in to codeberg.

I think this is exactly it. Let the liberals be liberals. They’re only going to learn by failing and seeing other possibilities.

We should be there to say, “yeah, it would be cool to tax billionaires but what if we abolished them? What if we abolished money? Let’s work together until our ways part naturally.”

We don’t racialized them by demanding something we can’t figure out how to get, or by criticizing the things they think are victories. We do it by showing them better ways and offering hope.

I’ve worked with a lot of liberals who’ve become more and more radical because I tell them what’s going to happen next and then it happens. That’s just what an anarchist analysis gives you. Eventually, they want in on it.

I also think there’s subtle opportunities to show where boundary of reformism’s usefulness is. For example, we want to abolish the police and liberals want to reform them. Offer reforms that appear completely rational but are absolutely impossible. E.g. “cops should have to retire if they shoot someone, regardless of if the shooting was ‘justified’ or not”, “police officers should be banned and immediately fired if there’s any evidence they have been involved in any white supremacist group”, “internal affairs investigations should all be made public within 6 months of an initial complaint, and complaints should be made public after PII related to everyone but the officer is scrubbed”, “police should have to go through background checks to make sure they have never been a member of any group identified by the SPLC as a ‘hate group’”, etc. Almost any normal liberal would agree with these and be surprised that they are completely impossible to implement without functionally abolishing the police.

We have so many opportunities now. We also know that reformism will not work. We can articulate why it won’t work. We can help them find the wall. We can continue to organize outside of the political system and help them join us when they realize it’s time.

It actually worked really well. Things could have been much worse. I think they weren’t because of our efforts.

Surprised to not see a reference to especifismo in the history.

Tell me, when did your democracy exist?

So… Trump has promised to carry out a coup if he doesn’t win. A good coup would be indistinguishable from him just winning… Yet, people keep saying “vote harder.” Like, yeah, this is all super important stuff and the more people vote the harder it will be for Trump to carry out the coup… But a lot of people have put in a lot of money to make this happen so he’s going to have another coup attempt. This time it won’t be a bunch of idiots, it will be Eric Prince and the Academi soliders who got deployed in Portland.

If you are in the US, you need to prepare to fight. If he wins, democracy is over. If he doesn’t win, democracy is probably over too since he’s already rigged the supreme court so he can steal the election and make it look legal. Police all over the country have already pledged allegiance to him. When you come out to protest they will run you over with SUVs and just open fire on you. They’ll shoot at reporters to make sure no one can see what’s happening, just like they did during the George Floyd rebellion. But this time they’ll just kill people and claim they were violent.

You all need to be ready for the absolute worst. You also need to vote to make it harder, but voting will absolutely not be enough. You need to prepare.

People underestimate the number of active serial killers there are because so many of them wear badges and their murders are never prosecuted.

Exactly. His relationship with the US is just as cynical as it is with Russia, and as it is with any country or people (including his own). He will do or say anything that gets him more power. That means he’ll be a solid US ally as long as the US is completely stable and functional, and he will take advantage of any weakness (like he did with Trump letting him murder Kurds in Syria).

I think we’re in violent agreement about the overall with perhaps subtle difference in the details.

Erdogan has been close to Putin for a long time. He’s one of the most extreme authoritarians in the NATO alliance. The US has armed it’s enemies in the past, and I don’t think it’s short sightedness has changed.

I don’t believe that Erdogan will help Palestinians, but he very well may materially support Hamas as long as he doesn’t do it openly enough to cause problems. I mean, Netanyahu propped up Hamas for years in order to forward his interests. No one would care if Erdogan helped justify continuing the genocide by making Hamas more dangerous to Israelis, as long as he didn’t send any American weapons to them.

But perhaps I’m just extremely cynical.

It would have been more accurate for me to say that he’s not really aligned with anyone. He works with Israel and the US when it benefits him, he works with Russia and Hamas when it benefits him. He does whatever will get him more regional power.

Erdogan is a fascist who’s responsible for genocide in Northern Syria. He doesn’t give a fuck about Palestinians or the genocide Israel is carrying out against them. He is aligned with Hamas and terrorism because disrupts regional power and gives him opportunities. This is an opportunity for him, and nothing more. His government backed Isis before. This is the same.

It has nothing to do with the very real need to end the genocide of Palestinians or the legitimate desire of Palestinians to resist their oppression. He aligns himself with horrible people because he is himself horrible.

Capitalism is a pyramid scheme.

But this is really more a product of capitalism than anything else. Under capitalism you just have to keep moving even if you’re just making garbage and debt. There’s no reason to stop and think, because that is seen as a cost (even though it costs more to move without thinking).

Even the best companies that do factor in planning (at least in concept if not actually in practice most of the time) end up with the other problem of “resume driven development” where things that are totally fine and actually working get replaced with things that don’t work because someone needs a new project to get their promotion.

Capitalism produces garbage and puts the people who are least qualified in decision making roles. This still happens in natural systems, but much less. In (healthy) anticapitalist organizing, the people who know the most are generally asked to lead and when they don’t know what to do they stop and figure it out before moving forward.

Aimless wondering can still be a problem, but it’s not forced by the system to continue it’s just people who are learning.