Little Black Cart discussion

"Rare is the professor who, like Mircea Eliade, frees himself of the armored vision and sees through the iron curtain of inversion and falsification. And even Eliade fogs what he sees by claiming to find analogies and vestiges in our world. The strait that separates us from the other shore has been widening for three hundred generations, and whatever was cannibalized from the other shore is no longer a vestige of their activity but an excretion of ours: it’s shit." - Fredy Perlman, Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!

Many of us experience life as lived in the wasteland, in a crater of a disaster that's already occurred. We all know the ways that dominant society seeks to fill and sate that void in people, and we have many who've devoted their lives to critiquing those techniques. But what of the other side? What of something that might be called culture?

Anarchist culture has taken many forms throughout its history: picnics, marches, punk shows, critical masses, book-fairs. These are places where Anarchists came together, shared time, space and ideas with one another; connected, bonded, parted ways.

We're living in a time when, even pre-covid, many of these forms of Anarchist culture, of Anarchist community for lack of a better term, feel dead, dying, or pushed so far outside of peoples' lives as to only qualify as a hobby. But many of us want more.

So I'm interested in what ways people have felt like they could connect with other Anarchists in a meaningful, long-term way. Places, times, spaces when you felt that you really stood on ground with others firmer than the ever shifting landscape of the protest, the riot, the show.

Also, how do we make more space for these kinds of things in the current Anarchist space? I've heard several Anarchists argue that something like religion, or something like spirituality, something almost like church is what's needed to stop Anarchy from being a youth culture which chews people up and spits them out. Do you agree? Disagree? How so?