This playlist presents the main video series based on Practical Anarchy – A Guide to Self-Determination. Taken together, these episodes form a connected, cumulative argument rather than a collection of standalone videos. Each part builds on what came before, gradually dismantling familiar assumptions about power, authority, money, work, democracy, punishment, technology and control. Rather than treating anarchism as a political identity or future blueprint, the series approaches it as a practical method of analysis. It asks how authority is normalised, how obedience is learned, and how social systems that present themselves as natural or necessary are historically contingent and actively maintained. The series moves from critique to construction. Early sections expose the myths that underpin the State, markets and hierarchy. Later chapters explore how people already organise life outside those frameworks through mutual aid, informal cooperation, shared resources and non-coercive forms of accountability. The emphasis throughout is on understanding why existing systems fail before asking what might replace them. These videos are designed to be watched in sequence. They assume attention, patience and a willingness to question deeply held beliefs. The aim is not persuasion or recruitment, but clarity – offering tools for thinking about freedom, responsibility and social organisation without rulers.
Curated by: Dicky Dread's mixes and books (67 videos)
I have produced this short critique because the same question keeps surfacing in Facebook discussions – usually in good faith, sometimes with a bit of exasperation on all sides. Someone will invoke Marx or Bakunin as if the argument is settled, as if a citation from 1871 should end a conversation about life in 2025. I’m not writing this to dismiss those thinkers, or to be provocative for the sake of it, but because the habit itself is worth examining. If anarchism is meant to be a living practice rather than a historical reenactment, then it seems reasonable to ask whether theories forged for steam engines, mills and early nation-states still do the work people expect them to do now. A recurring habit in radical circles is to treat the theories of Mikhail Bakunin, Karl Marx and other 19th-century anarchists and socialists as if they were written yesterday, waiting patiently to be applied. This may be comforting, but it is likely to be misleading. Their work emerged from a very specific historical moment, and while parts of it still illuminate, much of it no longer maps cleanly onto the world we actually inhabit. Marx and Bakunin were responding to early industrial capitalism – mills, mines, visible factory discipline, and a State still in the process of consolidating itself. Capital was largely national, production relatively local, and class antagonisms often physically concentrated in a single workplace or district. That world has not simply evolved – it has been rearranged. Contemporary capitalism operates through global supply chains, financial abstraction, digital platforms and debt mechanisms that would have been difficult to conceptualise in the 19th century (Marx 1867). As discussed in Chapter 7 of Practical Anarchy, power today is often indirect, outsourced and deliberately opaque, which complicates classical accounts of domination and resistance (Dread D 2025, Sections 56 to 58). Early socialist and anarchist theory also rests on assumptions about political subjects that appear increasingly fragile. The industrial proletariat – imagined as a coherent, shared social force – has fragmented into precarious workers, platform contractors, migrants, carers, debtors and the intermittently employed. Appeals to “the workers” can sound more like a memory than a description. Bakunin’s faith in spontaneous insurrection, and Marx’s confidence in historical inevitability, may have underestimated both the unevenness of struggle and the capacity of systems to absorb shock without collapsing (Bakunin 1871, Marx and Engels 1848). There is also the issue of adaptability. Classical theory often assumed that exploitation would become unbearable and expose capitalism’s contradictions. Yet modern systems appear capable of redistributing pressure, offering limited concessions, and turning dissent into lifestyle or brand identity. As argued in Practical Anarchy, participation, representation and even resistance are frequently managed in ways that reduce their disruptive potential rather than amplify it (Dread D 2025, Sections 37 and 57) Cultural distance matters too. Many early radicals held views shaped by their time – on gender, colonialism, nature and violence – that now sit awkwardly with contemporary struggles. This does not invalidate their insights, but it does suggest caution. Treating these figures as timeless authorities risks importing blind spots along with useful critique. None of this implies that Marx or Bakunin should be abandoned. Their work still helps us recognise exploitation, hierarchy and the moral emptiness of authority. The problem arises when their theories are treated as scripts rather than tools. Relevance is not inherited – it has to be rebuilt. If anarchism is to remain alive, it may need to start from present conditions outward, borrowing selectively from the past rather than trying to relive it. References Bakunin M 1871 God and the State (Mother Earth Publishing Association) Dread D 2025 Practical Anarchy: A Guide to Self-Determination (The Leach Press) Marx K 1867 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I (Otto Meissner Verlag) Marx K and Engels F 1848 The Communist Manifesto (Workers’ Educational Association)