Anarchism and addiction recovery

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16439581

What have been some anarchist organizations or approaches to the problems of addiction and recovery? I’ve done a little bit of reading on the anarchist library and I’ll continue with that. I know there are concepts of radical sobriety as well as critiques of the hierarchy within twelve step programs and the idea of addict as identity. I’m interested in any perspectives and ideas.

Something I personally find acutely annoying about recovery programs is that they’re almost solipsistic not just about the profits involved and the larger political historical and economic story of addiction. Maybe it’s taboo because it’s not something one can solve the same way one can make choices in one’s own life, but I feel like a bit of a pariah every time I want to remind people that we arent just fighting ourselves but the people who actively make money on our suffering. To me right now anarchism is the best model to describe reality, so I want to know how people who share this model have dealt with and thought about these urgent issues. Keen to be introduced to literature or communities in this vein

Social Ecology

Social Ecology, developed from green anarchism, is the idea that our ecological problems have their ultimate roots in our social problems. This is because the domination of nature and our ecology by humanity has its ultimate roots in the domination humanity by humans. Therefore, the solutions to our ecological problems are found by addressing our social and ecological problems simultaneously.

Quotes

Poetry and imagination must be integrated with science and technology, for we have evolved beyond an innocence that can be nourished exclusively by myths and dreams.

People want to treat ‘we’ll figure it out by working to get there’ as some sort of rhetorical evasion instead of being a fundamental expression of trust in the power of conscious collective effort.

~Anonymous, but quoted by Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.

~Murray Bookchin, “A Politics for the Twenty-First Century”

There can be no separation of the revolutionary process from the revolutionary goal. A society based on self-administration must be achieved by means of self-administration.

In modern times humans have become a wolf not only to humans, but to all nature.

The ecological question is fundamentally solved as the system is repressed and a socialist social system develops. That does not mean you cannot do something for the environment right away. On the contrary, it is necessary to combine the fight for the environment with the struggle for a general social revolution…

~Abdullah Öcalan

Social ecology advances a message that calls not only for a society free of hierarchy and hierarchical sensibilities, but for an ethics that places humanity in the natural world as an agent for rendering evolution social and natural fully self-conscious.

~ Murray Bookchin

poVoq@slrpnk.net

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6 months ago

To be honest, in my experience there is a bit of a deniyal that some people seems to be (genetically?) especially vulnerable to addictions and people just extrapolate from their own healthy or at least not problematic substance-use onto others. So often people just think drugs are not really a problem.