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+1 vote
I understand the state and repression side as an obstacle, but what about methods of organizing, inclusiveness, and being able to demonstrate the viability of anarchism?
If clarification is needed, let me know.
by (350 points)
Clarification is needed.
What keeps us from building stronger communities of reSistance? Here in the Midwest we have difficult times building safe, sustainable, and effective projects.
One reason is certainly the mobility of people. Another is related to breeding. Still another is that the people with the greatest contempt for contemporary American culture live with the most (inter)personal contradictions, making them really difficult to like, let alone collaborate with.

Also, you need to clarify "safe," "sustainable," and "effective."
You seem to be asking what the biggest problem facing the anarchist movement is, but I don't think that question makes very much sense because there isn't really a single global anarchist movement with one single set of concerns and problems. There's actually a bunch of discrete local anarchist scenes and movements that often don't even know that much about one another.

The things I would point to as major problems would probably say as much about where I live and what my own perspectives are as they would about some kind of objective global situation. Kind of like how the answer that you embedded in your question seems to reference a very specific set of goals, strategies and concerns that not everyone necessarily shares.

1 Answer

+1 vote
This question is difficult to answer. It requires that there is one anarchism, that there is a goal to that anarchism, and that the problems facing that goal are both identifiable and ordered by the difficulty involved in overcoming them.

I do not believe there is one anarchism. There are many different ideologies under the term anarchism, and they are not all compatible with each other. There is also within each anarchist a series of tensions that redefine themselves, and relationships with other things that evolve and permutate. In all of these anarchys we find a wide range of goals and visions, and a huge variability in the understanding of success. In these anarchisms there also lies the possibility for failure, for dissonance, and for tendencies that do not define goals as things to reach, or to be faced by identifiable and ordered problems.

Often problems are identified as "the big problem" as a way to avoid how complicated the world is, and how likely we are to fail. If the biggest problem is location, we can all move to one place. If the biggest problem is sexism we can find ways to call each other out and standardize accountability. If the biggest problem  is violence, we can police each other. etc, etc. I don't think we can be that righteous.

Perhaps one problem is our fear of the variability of anarchism, and the variability of its outcomes.
by (1.5k points)
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