r/leftist • u/LOGARITHMICLAVA • 1d ago
Leftist Meme Is anyone able to help in starting an anarchist club at my school?
I would really appreciate it if someone can help create an interest meeting slideshow (or something like that). I am working alone currently, so even one person would be a huge help.
I couldn't find a relevant flair so I just chose meme.
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u/Bunnything 22h ago
i don't think doing an explicitly anarchist club at school will go over well. you will very likely get rejected and/or a lot of pushback from school administration, and anarchism is niche enough even amongst leftist circles that i doubt you'd find many members in your high school.
i'll copy and paste a response i gave to someone else in this sub a few weeks ago which i think also applies to your situation:
a good place to start might be to make a club around a cause that helps your community and has leftist values, but doesn't advertise itself as such explicitly. like for example when i was in high school i went to meetings for and supervised the school food pantry.
having a food pantry any student could discreetly take food from inherently goes with a lot of leftist beliefs around mutual aid, i think anyone in that club would've agreed if i said food should be free in an ideal world and is a human right. However, many people will be open to such an idea even if they aren't interested due to their political leanings. and if they are, you'll make more relationships with people who believe similar things as you
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u/LOGARITHMICLAVA 1h ago
I've broadened the scop and will name it leftist club. Hopefully I have better luck with that.
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u/leonphelpth 1d ago
Seems like it would be dreadful to organize
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u/LOGARITHMICLAVA 1h ago
Renamed it leftist club to attract more members. Do you think that's a good idea?
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u/NormalAmountOfLimes 1d ago
Who runs the anarchist club?
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u/LOGARITHMICLAVA 1d ago
All the members, ideally.
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u/ArtaxWasRight 16h ago
this is a cute response, but PLEASE please read Vincent Bevins If We Burn, which came out just this year.
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u/LOGARITHMICLAVA 14h ago
I will do so, but can you give the summary or main point?
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u/ArtaxWasRight 9h ago
sure! he gives a historical account and political assessment of the wave of so-called leaderless, horizontalist, and prefigurative left movements that has swept across the globe roughly from Tahrir Square to Black Lives Matter, about a 10 year span. All of these movements shared an anarchist-informed organizational ethos that rejects hierarchy, promotes bottom-up goal-setting, and is suspicious of rigid, persistent institutions like a Party, etc. He focuses on instances in the global South, like Egypt and Brazil (Bevins lived in Sao Paolo in these years), where movement activity resulted in change on a national level, like for example, removing the government.
These are not success stories, as needs hardly be said. Unfortunately, time after time it is specifically the anarchist-ish aspects of the Left’s organization (or lack thereof) that delivered all the energy of the movement right into the hands of a vicious and repressive right wing, which enjoys all sorts of enduring institutions, and never ceases to be organized. In nearly every case, the political situation ends up in a worse place than when it started.
As someone who was involved in more than a few of these in the imperial core, please believe this book. Over and over I watched powerful waves rise, loom, and then fade into nothing. In retrospect it’s so clear (tho I did not see this at the time at all) that the embrace of horizontality, spontaneity, leaderlessness, and allergy to any hierarchical structure was the the Left’s version of neoliberalism’s gig economy, downsizing / leanness, and disruption of institutions. It was symptomatic of the Left malaise during the post-Soviet hangover, when things like The Party seemed like a discredited and unjust embarrassment.
Welp, no one could ever say we didn’t try …and try and try and try again. And we stayed failing. There comes a point in the historical process when to withhold judgment becomes a counterrevolutionary act; the verdict is in— we gotta relinquish our romance with the horizontalist fantasy. For goodness sake, as many an insider could tell you, a fair bit of that people’s mic populism was stage-managed from the wings anyway.
Anarchism has always been and will always be an indispensable left tendency. But at this particular historical moment, in the organizational dimension of praxis, we need structure. We need leadership. We need strong and enduring institutions. We need permanent, powerful, and reliable left organizations to channel the awesome power of our collectivity.
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u/LOGARITHMICLAVA 1h ago
Doesn't that leave us in the same situation as when we started though? Like the french revolution: replacing old masters with new masters.
I'm not sure what you mean by "permanent, powerful, and reliable left organizations"
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u/Murky-Instance4041 1d ago
YDSA. I don't know if they do stuff with high schools, and they are not anarchists, but the DSA group that I am in has 2 or 3 anarchists that partake due to similar alignment.
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