Anarkata Is Usually My Happy Place, Ideologically Speaking, So Lets Dive Into Move Like Mycorrhizae

Anarkata is usually my happy place, ideologically speaking, so lets dive into Move Like Mycorrhizae

What are mycorrhizae?

mycorrhizae (pronounced “my-core-ih-zigh”) are mutual relationships between fungi and plant roots. They move nutrients between plants they are connected to. They can also sap nutrients from one part of a fungal network. They spread vastly within an ecosystem in ways that prevent researchers from being able to trace where the network begins or ends. They play both pathogenic and symbiotic roles. They develop in very steady, slow ways. Occasionally you see mushrooms sprouting up, aboveground, but mycorrhizae are primarily an underground entity. In this Kickback we see them as emblems for what Anarkata movement building feels like, since we work from the ground (or underground), and work from the roots (as Black Anarchic Radicals).

I cannot tell you how much I love the fungal comparison for underground/criminalized socio-political actions and spaces, I've been spinning up about it since I first heard it and I'm prolly gonna ramble about that more later lol

I imagine they'll get to it, but part of what appeals to me in that metaphor is the feeling of taking root. Mycorrhizae are critical to the rooting and uprooting of plants. When the Mycorrhizae network is damaged, plants are less resilient and less capable of self-propogation (aka more reliant on intentional spread/cultivation by "predators" and less capable of producing healthy, self perpetuating plant ecosystems).

The goal of Anarkata, to create with direct action and mutual aid the rooted networks of stabilization and survival, is one that serves to cultivate our own essential relationships with those networks, with each other, and with our own sense of agency and selfhood. The collective of individual entities acting in ebb and flow with one another to respond to critical needs triggered by environmental or circumstantial changes. I find the imagery of unseen entanglements that influence and restrict our decisions an incredibly apt analogy for socio-cultural descriptivism, and love the soothing of how raw many of us feel about our responsivity/reactivity to each other in the world. The idea that reactivity/responsibity is its own form of communicated knowledge, and matters in how we make decisions, even as we may often find ourselves needing to let the sensation surge and recede without intervention. There is normalization of the "yes, and..." response to emotional cues that can be so empowering and self-validating.