Us anarchists, we want to change the world badly. We feel the suffering capitalism creates, we live it, and we fight like hell for change. But that fight is rarely organized in a way that’s sustainable in the long term.
It’s common in anarchist circles, especially in anarchist circles full of young activists, to have everyone pushing themselves too hard, trying to go to every protest, putting their body on the line, fighting every fight, running 5 community projects at the same time. A lot of us have a fulltime job to survive under capitalism and a second fulltime job changing the world.
And as a result a generation of anarchists is often completely worn out
within 5 to 10 years. Tired, overworked and ready for rest, that generation withdraws from activism only to have the next group of teenagers and twenty somethings throwing themselves into activism. And these young activists will mourn the absense of the older anarchists that, in their view, became ‘moderate’ or ‘passive’, but they see little of what happened to create this and they are engaging in the same process of exhausting themselves.
If we want to change this, if we value ourselves and want all the great things that comes from having a multigenerational community, we need to change in ways that both take pressure of our activists and make our spaces more accessible to older anarchists.
When we organize constructive projects like bike repair shows and libraries, we need shorter hours for our activists, less responsibility resting with one or two people, and more projects focussed on truly freeing us from having to work under capitalism. When we organize actions, we need more roles for those that can not cope with getting arrested or beaten up. When we organize marches we need more resting points along our road and transport for those that can’t march. We need accessibility for people with disabilities in all our spaces. When we organize benefit parties, we need more parties that don’t run from midlight to 4am and more parties where the music isn’t loud. We need comfortable sleeping places at festivals for those that can’t cope with crashing on a sofa anymore. We need more child care at our events and people willing to babysit so others can go to actions.
But most of all, as communities, we need to be far more aware of these processes that are burning up our activists and creating one-generation spaces, so we can be more compassionate with ourselves, so we can create more rest and healing, so we can put less pressure on each other to participate in protests and actions, so we can talk to our comrades who are clearly burning themselves out.
We need our anarchism to be something we can practice our whole lives.
QueerAnarchism 