limit equation

on becoming more anarchist

2026-05-27

i wrote this in a single draft and didn’t really edit it - please excuse the mess.

this bitch is sooo impressionable, all she has to do is read Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed ONCE and now she’s an anarchist.

ok, and also have a couple of anarchist friends and also have spent several years drifting into leftist ideologies on account of many things. there was a lot of heavy lifting done to depathologise the idea of anarchism for me first, but reading the book I couldn’t help but feel like there were an awful lot of things about the structure of its anarchist society that made far more sense than its capitalist one.

anyway i get the vibe that people don’t like to take anarchists seriously. something about the anarchist vision of society being “too idealistic” or “not practically possible”.

I think that assumption is questionable but there’s no use running in circles trying to debate it. Let’s be scientific about it instead, shall we? Let’s move the goalposts wherever you want them to be, and assume that an anarchist society is truly, definitely, provably impossible. There’s still another question to address: how close can we get?

Now things get more interesting. We’re not talking about a fixed goal anymore, we’re talking about a limit equation. We’re getting mathematical. If the answer turns out to be “all the way”, then woohoo! we’ve proven anarchism is possible! If it turns out not to be, then oh well - at least we’ve managed to make whatever progress we could.

The goal of creating anarchism is very big and hard to wrap one’s head around. But the goal of becoming more anarchist feels tangible, meaningful, useful. We can work to reduce our reliance on structures of power, or to create small-scale alternatives to their offerings. We can form our own organisations that deliberately lack any kind of hierarchy, and use them to undermine the existing institutions. We can address the people around us as equals, even where it’s not traditionally appropriate.

So that’s the philosophy that’s guiding me at the moment. I don’t know much about organising and I’m still far too shy for my liking, but everyone’s a work in progress and I’m certainly not afraid of learning :)