NOTE: This text is an excerpt from this space:

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=01/05/21/5929612

poster's note: what begins as some pretty cynical thoughts about holding anarchist ideals in today's world ends with this gem! (edited and "chopped up" into paragraphs for easier reading)

(...)

With a benign sense of resignation and a heartsick gut, I fled the snows of the Cascadian winter and headed of to warmer climates. I had no idea I was to experience things that would highlight the validity of my [anarchist] politics like so many thousands of flaming churches.

A heavy pre-dawn mist waited in from the Andes, swirling its way through the stagnant air, pausing only slightly as it clung desperately to the overgrown jungle along the banks of the Rio Napo. A pair of bats the size of pit bulls bickered back and forth overhead as our canoe slid silently through the muddy brown water. After too many days dodging buses and riot cops in Quito, it was quite a descanso to sit idly by with my partner Mamy watching kilometer after kilometer of wild jungle pass as we plummeted downhill with the river on its tireless journey Eastward. Within a matter of days, the Rio Napo would gouge its way through the artificial boundaries of Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil before conjugating with the glorious Amazon and washing into the saline bliss of the Atlantic ocean. But for now, the river was gracefully carrying us to a small Quiche Indian village 30 miles downstream like a giant liquid freight train.

this is a great testimonial, however fictional it might be. As a reaction to capitalism, anarchist politics, like socialist and Marxist etc., is a Western result of capitalism itself, and so it seems like it can't really exist or be put into practice outside of this context, and that points to what might be an inherent flaw that it will never be able to escape, and that will always doom it to failure in its attempts to challenge capitalism. But in looking around at cultures where "anarchistic" ideas have been put in practice and have functioned for thousands of years, i think maybe we can figure a way out of this that will actually work. indigenous cultures, ancient philosophical ideas (ie, taoism)--maybe these are the way around capitalism. political anarchism seems like an oppositional way to attack or fight against capitalism; these other ways seem like ways around it, and unlike the couple centuries we have had political anarchism in the Western world, and the several centuries we've had of market capitalism, these ways and ideas have been around and have been in practice since...well...since who knows when. In terms of betting on which ideas/ways will be around in the future, I'd bet on the ones with the longer, deeper history. Something that's lasted a couple thousand years has much more chance of lasting a couple thousand more than something that's only been around a few centuries.

I agree,

Industrial collapse and the reverse to what capitalism and Euro-centric ideas have created in our world is the first step to liberation. The concept of anarchy has been around before the ideal was even named. It has existed in primitive cultures.

-Rampage