May all roads lead to solarpunk - by Peter Clayborne

Peter Clayborne responds to Elle Griffin by saying anarchy is a stateless, moneyless, classless ideal, and that the task is to turn present social relations upside-down rather than refine control. He argues that safety should come from voluntary cooperation, mutual defense, and shared norms against hoarding and domination, not from institutions that punish and separate people from community.

Reading notes

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• He says the core disagreement is whether people need to be controlled, and argues that government and capital are not necessary pillars of a free society.
• He frames anarchist social revolution as a spontaneous and voluntary transformation of social life, unlike reform or political revolution that leaves control intact.
• He uses sex as a metaphor to show that apparently similar acts can be qualitatively opposed, then applies that contrast to revolution and rape.
• He says shame should fall on hoarding and exploitation, while current systems shame poverty, disability, race, and sexuality and increase harm through punishment and exclusion.
• He rejects scapegoating individuals and prefers spreading anti-social norms through culture to make attempts at accumulation and domination socially risky.
• He argues that self-governing is the wrong frame because anarchism is about making space for people to make their own decisions, supported by networks of care and mutual self-defense.
• He says capitalism was resisted, built through enclosure, and is often mistaken for a natural endpoint, while many older exchange systems were based on gift and interdependence.
• He claims anarchists want to recover older practices and stop imposing ideological blueprints, so people can decide together how to live.
• He says the label “anarchist” matters less than how people live together, and that he wants the people he loves to live well without converting others.
• He closes by praising Chesterton’s idea of “cosmic patriotism,” the loyalty to the world that makes it possible to love it and still turn it upside-down.