Add new comment

The idea was clearly for the very long term. In any case lots of anarchists aren’t from cities or don’t currently live in one. So regardless an anarchist strategy and outlook for non urban anarchists and their allies seems useful. Besides seaweed, I don’t know of any other anarchists who have tried to develop an explicitly rural or semi rural anarchist practice that might have widespread application - apart from rewilders- but they seem more one dimensional.

I know that one of the ideas that seaweed put out there was for anarchists to try and pick a place - ecological/social region or town or village - and stick to it - the smaller the better. So they invited lots of anarchists to the town where they live - beginning in the early 1990s. Thirty years later and the impact of constantly having a couple of dozen anarchists in one smallish place is there - including how having lots of comrades making a life in the same place makes it feel like it’s not just a scene. The original excitement might have died down, but he started an intentional community that is successful AFAIK, and lots of other projects and actions have come from it.

I just reread some of their essays and they do say that we should leave the city and move to the countryside as a long term strategy and for ones own health. But they also say that anarchists just need to acknowledge that cities aren’t habitats and therefore don’t have much potential for creating autonomous zones that can last very long - at least not outside of a capitalist context - because they need food, energy sources, etc from outside the city. They write that the rural subsistence zones they are writing about could be ‘a network of base camps ‘ for comrades in a whole region - “ city friends can hide out there, heal there, regroup there etc and the rural comrades can bring fish and meat to their friends in the city...etc.,”.

But to get back to your original comment re insurrection- depends how you use the term to some extent. Is Wolfi Landstreicher still an insurrectionary if he mostly just drinks wine and writes poetry? If you mean upheaval in the streets - then no. But if you mean trying to take control of ones life in a collective context as anarchists, I.e., trying to create an anarchic culture in a region through making long term connections with indigenous peoples and practicing mutual aid and solidarity with them, often on the front lines, and exploring possibilities for reindigenizing then yes, there seems to have been some success.