Crooked Bough News Round-up

— Derek Wittorff - The Property-State Antinomy & the Failures of Anti-State Reductionism

 

at 8/26/26 12:56am

Author: Derek WittorffTitle: The Property-State Antinomy & the Failures of Anti-State ReductionismDate: June 1st, 2012Source: https://mutualist-anarchist.blogspot.com/2012/06/property-state-antinomy-failures-of.html?m=1 The state is not the only socio-political institution that has created the “subsidy of history” [1] that is to blame for the current economic structure of society, as many left-libertarians argue. Private property is an institution that has as much dirt on its name as the state since conventional property norms promote “privatization” over social realms as opposed to what is falsely conveyed by politicians, corporate media, capitalist proprietors, and managers as individual ownership involving purely individual concerns and responsibilities. Private property has historically and existentially dictated the movement has created an inproportionat amount of exclusive control over material, principles, rights, and general institutions and consequently is what defines and reinforces the state since the state defines the institution of property (or that’s what they would prefer us to have us think) in the form of legal right (even though moral right is something different). The relation between state and private property implies deviation and a degree of independence among them. This means institutional analysis should focus on them both in relation and isolation. I will focus on the relation and implied deviation between these institutions. Due to the fact that state and private property are two territorial monopolies on force that overlap in principle there exists a contradiction and inherent antagonism in practice that can only be resolved if those who control the institutions (via the hierarchies within the organizations that the institutions have formed) concede each other a given amount of autonomy over what their classes control thereby legitimizing their roles in society. This way the relative but conflicting functions of private property and state don’t contradict each other in a mutually detrimental way since there exists the potential that politicians, managers and proprietors of the ruling class work against each other at times. However, their net cooperation as a class will exceed their net conflict if said structures manage to effectively synchronize, otherwise the ruling class wouldn’t be coherent enough to justify their own institutions and they definitely don’t want that. Hopefully the current lack of structural synchronicity is what destabilizes the ruling class in this process of globalization, but our efforts to consciously approximate reciprocity within and beyond the system that exists definitely wouldn’t hurt, in fact it would insure a way forward for those engaged at least if not insure a true end to this oppressive system on increasing scales or dimensions at best. Either way their cooperation as a coherent ruling class essentially externalizes their antagonistic social forces onto the public by means of only letting each other share their exclusive domain in the name of preserving their institutions and its failures which are associated benefits for them. Even though though these institutions manage to deviate they are currently necessary for each others existence. Private property contributes to the definition of a state in the sense that what the state has a territorial monopoly over is constituted by many things including what the institution of property happens to maintain control over. Private property operates somewhat independently from the state, but usually in benefit thereof because the manifested centralization of private property, by means of capitalist appropriation and the resulting yields from unequal exchange that reinforces future capitalist appropriation, makes private property more legible for the state to control. The state also functions to benefit the proprietors of the ruling class. Every time the state constructs a law, regulation, tax, or subsidy it is essentially drawing lines on where and how state property in its various forms is “justly” distributed among “us”, or more realistically the elite. Furthermore any manifestation of property in the hands of a given class over a given industry has more say in the operation and decision making of the state than any non-proprietor, making the state as much a proprietary entity as proprietary entities are mini-states. This is not to say that we ought to seek the power of the state, since its principle invalid and its aims unethical, but that’s how it currently works. This property-state antinomy needs to be confronted, but blaming the state for everything that existing private property has also contributed to is disingenuous and is not a way to confront it. Realizing what the state has done is one thing but reducing every social problem to the state is something completely different and ends up aiding the problem. While the state has often historically defined the institution of property within its legal constructs, property theoretically can and historically has formed as a counter-institution in negation to the state in practice, not only as simple deviation deviation but as social revolution. Therefore the solution to the property-state antinomy is to construct reciprocal property norms that negates private property and the state. ...

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— Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine - Draft Declaration of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine

 

at 8/26/26 12:53am

Author: Revolutionary Insurgent Army of UkraineTitle: Draft Declaration of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of UkraineDate: 1919Source: Nestor Makhno: Anarchy's Cossack Adopted on October 20, 1919 at a session of the Military Revolutionary Soviet. ; The toiling classes of Ukraine are today confronting events of enormous importance and historic implications. Without doubt, the significance of these events goes beyond the limits of the revolutionary insurgent army’s activity. But, being in the vanguard of the fight in progress, the latter deems it its duty to spell out to the toilers of Ukraine, Russia and the whole world the aims for which it fights, as well as its analysis of recent happenings and the current situation. In February-March 1917, Russia and Ukraine experienced the First Revolution, which led to the fall of Tsarist autocracy and brought about the advent of a State political power comprised at first of personages from the big industrial bourgeoisie and then of representatives of the small and medium bourgeoisie. Neither of those two governments proved stable. Eight months were enough for the revolutionary masses to overthrow these authorities which had nothing in common with the interests and aspirations of toilers. As early as July 1917, the necessity of a Second Revolution was apparent. This took place at the end of October and paved the way for seizure of State power by the Bolshevik Social Democrat party which looked upon itself as representing the revolutionary proletariat and poor peasantry or, to put it another way, the social revolution. That party was very soon waging an ongoing campaign against all competing parties with an eye to arrogating power to itself. Since its watchwords coincided with the aspirations of the toiling masses, the latter threw their weight behind it when the crucial time came. And so this eight month period of government by the bourgeoisie in coalition and of rivalry between the differing political parties ended in the Bolshevik Party’s taking power. However it very quickly became apparent that this party ad this State power — just like any party and all State power — functioned only for themselves and turned out to be utterly powerless to achieve the great objectives of the social revolution: by virtue of that very fact they were a hindrance to the free creative activity of the. toiling masses who alone were capable of tackling this task. It is self-evident that in controlling the whole of economic and social life, any State power inevitably gives rise to new political and economic privileges and undermines the very foundations of social revolution. The Bolshevik-Communist Party’s inability to offer an authentic avenue of struggle for socialism quite naturally led to discontent, disappointment and bitterness among the toiling masses. The disorganized condition of economic life, the consequence of a bad agrarian policy led to serious disturbances in the countryside. The Bolshevik authorities have succeeded, however, in organizing in Russia a mighty State machine and a compliant army which it uses as its predecessors did, to stamp on any manifestation of popular discontent and resistance. In Ukraine the situation is otherwise. Before making the acquaintance of the Bolshevik authorities, Ukraine was occupied by the Austro-Germans who installed their vassal, the hetman Skoropadsky there. They were replaced by the power of Petliura. The excesses of these authorities triggered an explosion of outrage from the people and a wholesale rejection of the very idea of State power, which assumed the form of a mighty popular insurgent movement, driven by an authentically revolutionary anti-party and anti-authoritarian mentality. In a series of engagements after the departure of the Austro-Germans, revolutionary insurgents purged Ukraine of supporters of the hetman and of Petliura: the Bolshevik-Communist authorities seized upon this to arrive and ensconce themselves in the spring of 1919, bringing disappointment very quickly in their wake. Within a few months, the discontent and hostility of the toiling masses of town and above all of countryside was made violently manifest. Large regions, such as the provinces of Ekaterinoslav and Tavrida, began to drift more and more unmistakably towards economic and social self-organization on a basis of animosity towards parties and State power. No political activity was allowed there. Towards the end of the summer, the whole country was prey to huge peasant insurgent movements against the Communist Party’s arbitrary rule. The Third Revolution comes to light and guides this widespread insurrection. Meanwhile, the reaction had raised its head. The Third Revolution stood against the attempt to restore the old regime. In the hope of finding themselves once again masters of the situation by annihilating both their enemies — the revolutionary insurrection and the reaction — the Bolshevik authorities plotted and treacherously facilitated the crushing of the main core of the Makhnovist insurgent army. However the State machinery and armed forces of the Bolshevik-Communist authorities in turn proved incapable of putting down roots in Ukraine and of replacing the revolutionary insurgent movement in its fight against Denikin. The revolutionary insurgents emerged from these difficult circumstances weakened but not defeated. Driven far from their home ground, they strove to survive at any price and while roaming other regions of Ukraine they prosecuted an all-out struggle against the Denikinists, against Trotsky’s deliberate misrepresentations and the dangerous set-back to the revolution. ...

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— Internationalist Commune - 14 years of Rojava Revolution

 

at 8/26/26 12:31am

Author: Internationalist CommuneTitle: 14 years of Rojava RevolutionSubtitle: A (self-)critical essayDate: 19 July 2026Source: Retrieved on 22nd August 2026 from internationalistcommune.com 18 July 2012, Kobanê, Rojava. A late-night meeting of a group of revolutionaries. “The circumstances are perfect. Society is ready; the regime is weakened and, in principle, no longer has any control over the Kurdish towns. Let’s start the revolution!” 19 July 2012, Kobanê, Rojava. Outside the mayor’s house in Kobanê. “We advise you to leave the town. The social revolution has begun.” The mayor’s wife: “I’m not leaving without my belongings!” The Kurdish revolutionaries organise a large lorry, load the mayor and his wife’s belongings onto it and send them on their way. The revolution is announced. With the first call for autonomy in Kobanê, 19 July 2012 went down in history as the start of the Rojava Revolution. Yet in reality, 19 July was more of a new milestone in a much older struggle. 33 years of preparation When Rêber Apo (Abdullah Öcalan) crossed the border between Riha (Northern Kurdistan/Turkey) and Kobanê (Western Kurdistan/Syria) in 1979, the Kurdish freedom movement began to spread across Syria, from Dêrik to Damascus. Society, which had suffered years of repression and violence under the Ba’ath regime, began to awaken and organise itself. From 1979 to 2012 – a total of 33 years – the people of Rojava organised themselves under the most cruel conditions of the regime’s occupation. Clandestine meetings, underground organisations, uprisings, joining the ranks of the guerrillas, and organising at universities were all building blocks that fostered an enormous spirit of resistance within Rojava’s Kurdish society. The rise of the Arab Spring When the rise of the Arab Spring in 2011 created a power vacuum in Syria, the Kurdish freedom movement and society seized the opportunity for revolution. With neither money nor weapons to hand, the population stood guard with sticks and pitchforks outside the newly liberated towns. With great creativity, motivation and perseverance, the revolution spread. Communes and councils were established, and the YPJ and YPG defence units were formed. Women took the lead in all political and social spheres. Despite constant attacks by the Islamic State, the predecessor of HTS Al-Nusra, the Turkish state and their imperialist allies, the revolution stabilised. Between Attack and Resistance However, it was clear from the outset that the capitalist world system would not accept this oasis of socialism. Consequently, attacks were launched on all fronts – military, political and psychological. Nevertheless, society gained confidence. This was further strengthened by the liberation of the predominantly Arab towns of Minbij, Raqqa and Tebqa, extending as far as Deir ez-Zor, and the defeat of ISIS. For internationalists, too, Rojava became a beacon of hope. Kobanê, dubbed the ‘second Stalingrad’, drew courageous people from all over the world – not only for military defence, but above all to experience a revolutionary way of life, the philosophy of Rêber Apo, and the values of women’s liberation, grassroots democracy and ecology. These opportunities, built up through great effort and the blood of many martyrs, became the foundation for the democratic organisation of society, as well as for the participation of internationalists. Yet, following a series of successes, a certain complacency crept in. Communes, which were initially used with the greatest passion for self-organisation, developed over the years into centres for meeting the material needs of daily life. Actually the communes should have built the heart of the self-governance of the society, but the technical approach weakened the initiative of the society and gave too much political power to the DAANES (Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria). At first, a certain degree of pragmatic administration was necessary in order to make quick decisions in the power vacuum and drive the revolution forward; however, centralist influences also crept into the DAANES. Military defences were strengthened, but the ideological and organisational defence of society was not sufficiently guaranteed. It was precisely following the losses in Afrin, Serekaniye and Gire Spi that a new phase began, bringing with it fresh difficulties. These losses were wounds that remain open to this day. Today, society still wonders what it might have been like had they not abandoned the towns, even if the sacrifices had been greater. Might HTS then perhaps not have had the courage and conviction this year to force the SDF into a position of retreat? This question is difficult to answer. Society is bound by its values and people are prepared to give everything for their country. But after years of war and enormous sacrifices, society is in the same time demanding peace. Is the revolution even still continuing? It is 19 July once again. We look back on 14 years of revolution, full of successes and failures, full of tears of joy and tears of pain. In the internationally orchestrated war of aggression waged by the HTS and its imperialist allies, major concessions have been made. It has reached the point where outside forces are asking: ‘Is the revolution in Rojava even continuing at all?’ We see with our own eyes just how perfidious it is when achievements such as the YPJ or the Kurdish language are called into question. Yet despite this, we answer the question of whether the revolution continues with a resounding ‘Yes’. Why? Because the Rojava Revolution is, first and foremost, a social revolution. However much geopolitical circumstances and military front lines may shift, we can feel the revolutionary spirit of society. Society is frustrated by the situation, yet more determined than ever to seize the opportunities of the moment, rather than merely focusing on the losses. It is prepared, once again, to give everything to defend its values. A young girl, whose family was forced to flee Afrin, is on her way back to her homeland. This is a historic moment for which people have fought with every means at their disposal since the occupation of Afrin in 2018. This girl will see her village, her home and her ancestors’ olive trees for the very first time. Yet she is thoughtful. When asked: ‘Aren’t you looking forward to going to Afrin?’ she replies: ‘But there aren’t any Hevals (friends of the Kurdish Freedom Movement) there.’ A Kurdish father tells us of his frustration with the Arab fighters who have withdrawn from the SDF and “let the Kurds down”. It is an emotion that is understandable after years of oppression and dispossession by the Ba’ath regime and the countless attacks by Arab-Islamist forces on the Kurds. But still it is obvious, that these emotions are dividing the society along ethnic lines and promoting nationalism. Yet when the same father spoke at a commemoration for a Kurdish and an Arab martyr, he pledged his commitment to the unity of the peoples until the very end, in accordance with Rêber Apo’s philosophy. For us, recognising these contradictions and the struggle that arises from them means that the revolution continues – there is no question of it. ...

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— Nathan Stephens-Griffin & Andrea Brock - Challenging academic complicity in the eco-social destruction inherent in policing: a call for saboteur criminology

 

at 8/23/26 3:19pm

Author: Nathan Stephens-Griffin & Andrea BrockTitle: Challenging academic complicity in the eco-social destruction inherent in policing: a call for saboteur criminologyDate: 14 August 2026Source: Justice, Power and Resistance Journal • vol XX • no XX • 1–21, Retrieved 23 August 2026 from https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/jpr/aop/article-10.1332-26352338Y2026D000000077/article-10.1332-26352338Y2026D000000077.xml Abstract Building on insights from critical/green criminology, political ecology, and green anarchism, and drawing on own empirical research (previously reported elsewhere, for example, Brock, 2020; Brock and Dunlap, 2018; Brock et al, 2023; 2026; Stephens-Griffin, 2020; 2021; 2022b) and experience of the policing of ecological resistance and animal liberation, this article makes two core arguments. First, we suggest that policing is not just socially but ecologically harmful, enforcing and defending degradation, extraction, and climate collapse. We illustrate our argument firstly with a case study of policing of (illegal) hunting and hunt sabotage, showing the inadequacy of ‘crime’ as a framework and pointing to the power and politics involved. Mainstream criminology pays insufficient attention to the ecological harms of policing, and reproduces the same statism and anthropocentrism that underlie and legitimise policing. Secondly, to disrupt this complicity of criminology (and academia more widely), we propose ‘saboteur criminology’; an approach that radically rethinks how we engage with police and the criminal justice system, committed to direct action and to supporting and joining those who do ‘whatever it takes’ to stop and reverse ecological harm. Drawing on Aalders and Kioko (2025) and our own work (Brock et al, 2026), we argue for understanding sabotage as world making; as legitimate political strategy and important liberation practice. Saboteur criminology makes space within and outside academia, to challenge and disrupt. This involves moving beyond reformist approaches which seek to produce ‘better’ forms of policing, recognising that reforms merely reinforce the legitimacy of these repressive institutions, perpetuating their harms. Instead, saboteur criminology takes seriously abolitionist alternatives for socially and ecologically just futures. Introduction Policing in contemporary (post)colonial Britain is in crisis. The Casey report found the Metropolitan Police to be ‘broken and rotten, suffering collapsing public trust and … guilty of institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia’ (Dodd, 2023: para 1). Discrimination is ‘tolerated … and has become baked into the system’ (Casey, 2023: 16). While not ‘anti-police’, Casey inadvertently supports a view that many have long held: that the sacred principle of ‘policing by consent’ is a myth (Gilmore and Tufail, 2015; Scraton, 2015). Instead, policing is about control and maintaining a particular social order (Neocleous, 2014; 2021), domestically and internationally (Bell, 2013; Elliott-Cooper, 2021). As Cuneen (2023: 170) argues, ‘the foundations of the contemporary institutions of policing are found in the interplay between the centre and the periphery of the colonial experience’, a phenomenon first articulated by Cesaire (1950/2000) as an imperial ‘boomerang’. Violence, corruption, oppression, harm are therefore features, not bugs, of policing. Meanwhile, we witness catastrophic global climate breakdown (IPCC, 2023), biological annihilation, and mass extinction (Ceballos et al, 2017), driven by industrial capitalist expansion, land-use change, extraction, and pollution. We see the collapse of wildlife globally (Bar-On et al, 2018), and an interplay of ecological crises that disproportionately affect those who are already most marginalised – especially in the Global South. Actuaries warn that while three degrees of heating by 2050 could conceivably lead to four billion deaths globally, yet we currently have no realistic plan to avoid this (Laville, 2025). Instead, governments continue to license new oil and gas exploration projects, permit coal mines, build new roads, and expand airports (all ‘legal’), while pumping resources into repressing and criminalising ecological resistance. Despite harsh criminalisation, policing, and violence against environmental defenders at the hands of corporations and state actors globally – 2,253 murdered between 2012 and 2024 alone, many more abused, assaulted, intimidated, and otherwise harmed (Global Witness, 2025a) – people continue to defend their territories, habitats, and livelihoods. In response to growing climate mobilising in Britain, new policing and public order laws have seen harsher criminalisation of dissent, imprisonment, and long punitive processes (Siddique, 2024). Climate activists are charged at three times the rate of far-right agitators, with nearly 7,000 climate protesters arrested between 2019 and 2025 (Global Witness, 2025b). In the absence of meaningful commitments from politicians or power holders, policing represents the frontline when it comes to snuffing out the popular resistance which might divert us from the path of ecological catastrophe. Policing is thus integral to the imposition and enforcement of ecological and social harm and injustice (Brock and Stephens-Griffin, 2022; 2024; Stephens-Griffin and Brock, 2025; Dunlap and Brock, 2022; Brock and Stephens-Griffin, forthcoming). While not usually acknowledged, the struggles against policing and for ecological justice are intimately entwined (Brock and Stephens-Griffin, 2022), especially when understood in terms of historical continuities of colonial extraction and infrastructural violence. Domestically and abroad, policing and militarisation protect the infrastructures and extractive projects that maintain the flows of ‘resources’, pollution, and degradation. Across the globe, policing not only targets those who pose obstacles to growth, productivism, and capitalist modernity – environmental defenders who resist the imposition of industrial (mega)projects, destruction of ecosystems, and infrastructural colonisation (Dunlap, 2020; 2022; Brock, 2024) – but disproportionately impacts already marginalised people. While we see this in the killing of forest defenders in the Amazon or the disappearance of resistance leaders in Indonesian oil palm plantations, here we focus on the relationship between policing and ecological degradation in the imperial core, the heart of industrialism and modernity. Although the violence and harm tend to be less visible and ‘bloody’ on British soil, the same dynamics are at play. ...

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— Alex Harasymiw - Review: Toronto New Wave Cinema and the Anarchist-Apocalypse by David Christopher

 

at 8/22/26 1:28am

Author: Alex HarasymiwTitle: Review: Toronto New Wave Cinema and the Anarchist-Apocalypse by David ChristopherDate: June 2026Source: Retrieved on August 22 2026 from https://offscreen.com/view/toronto-new-wave-cinema-and-the-anarchist-apocalypse David Christopher. Toronto New Wave Cinema and the Anarchist-Apocalypse. Manchester UP, 2025. $130. As David Christopher notes in the opening of Toronto New Wave Cinema and the Anarchist-Apocalypse, “Chances are you’ve never heard of the Toronto New Wave (TNW)” (1). Maybe you’ve never thought much about the affinities between apocalyptic and anarchist philosophies either. Christopher’s book develops a comparison between the rhetorical strategies and thematic engagements of apocalyptic and anarchist thought to establish their influence on TNW directors such as David Cronenberg, Bruce LaBruce, and Patricia Rozema, and provides a new perspective on the ways in which their films critique the patriarchal social formations of their historical moments. The book is very complex and ambitious as it represents an attempt to reevaluate not only anarchist political philosophy and its relevance as a critical framework, but also the legacy of TNW cinema in contemporary scholarship. Christopher argues that viewing the TNW through the lens of an anarchist-apocalyptic framework provides a sense of conceptual unity for a group of 1980s-1990s filmmakers whose only concrete similarity is often taken to be the city of Toronto. Instead, Christopher argues that there is a coherent set of anarchist-apocalyptic themes and conventions that can be used to characterize TNW films and filmmaking. Generally speaking, Christopher defines “anarchist-apocalyptic” as the combination of an anarchist rejection of authority, hierarchy, and government power with a ceaseless, apocalyptic drive to unmask repressive ideological structures, destroy the status quo, and imagine alternative social systems. He utilizes existing TNW film scholarship alongside original research into anarchist philosophy, formal analysis of TNW films, and his own interviews with TNW filmmakers to argue that this anarchist-apocalyptic dimension is an inherent property of the TNW as a movement. As much as cementing the legacy of the TNW as an influential alternative film movement, he is also clearly interested in demonstrating the relevance of an anarchist-apocalyptic analytical framework for film studies today. Christopher’s book begins with chapters on two of the most prominent members of the TNW, David Cronenberg and Don McKellar, and later follows a more thematic organization with chapters on technology, class, sexuality, and gender. Needless to say, each of the themes is inflected by an anarchist reading of the films and critical literature. Like much of the existing scholarship on the TNW, Cronenberg is treated as the central figure of the movement. Christopher goes further to argue that it was Cronenberg’s early work that exhibited the anarchist-apocalyptic element that would come to define the aesthetic and thematic preoccupations of subsequent TNW filmmakers. Unlike the following chapters on Peter Mettler, Don McKellar, and Vincenzo Natali, the Cronenberg chapter does not contain an original interview with the filmmaker. This is unfortunate considering how foundational Cronenberg is taken to be for the development of both the TNW and an anarchist-apocalyptic aesthetic. However, Christopher does engage with a wealth of secondary scholarship on Cronenberg and a compelling analysis of Cronenberg’s earlier, more obscure films from the 1960s and 70s. Christopher’s ability to bring out the complexity of difficult, unsettling, and often deliberately repulsive works is one of the great strengths of this book as a whole. After developing the anarchist-apocalyptic aesthetic through Cronenberg’s early works, Christopher turns to his influence on McKellar (chapter 2) and Mettler (chapter 3). This influence is taken to be both conventional and philosophical, and Christopher employs a comparative reading of their filmmaking techniques and thematic engagements. Where chapter 2 establishes the relationship between McKellar’s films and anxieties surrounding nuclear proliferation, the third chapter compares Mettler’s and Cronenberg’s anarchist critique of technology. In each chapter, there is an effort to understand how the apocalypse represents not only a destructive, existential threat, but also an opportunity for the destabilization of social hierarchies and progressive revaluation of the status quo. Christopher’s argument is especially strong at the end of his third chapter when he contrasts the treatment of virtual reality in Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999) with The Matrix (Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, 1999). Where The Matrix maintains a more or less clear distinction between the real and virtual world, Christopher writes that eXistenZ complicates this distinction in favour of an “ongoing state of apocalypse” in which the blurring of boundaries promises a form of social emancipation (102). Such comparisons vividly demonstrate the significance of the TNW’s various representations of the apocalypse and provide a compelling foil to more mainstream preoccupations with existential threats. ...

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— Roderick McMillan - Solidarity Without Submission: Nestor, Ulysses, Ukraine and the Glory of Heroes

 

at 8/17/26 4:32am

Author: Roderick McMillanTitle: Solidarity Without Submission: Nestor, Ulysses, Ukraine and the Glory of HeroesSubtitle: How can anarchists fight for national resistance without condoning nationalism?Date: August 7th 2026Source: https://morewretchthansage.substack.com/p/solidarity-without-submission-nestor Greek epics make us all Cassandras, the scenes are set in divine prophecy, but their acts are only understood in hindsight, the most human tragedy. “National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension.” — Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth[1] Huliaipol, Zaporozhye oblast, Ukraine in 2022. Nestor Makhno sits behind sandbags holding the blue-and-yellow flag of Ukraine, while soldiers take selfies with him. Not the man, but a concrete statue and, as with most things in Ukraine, the statue has suffered in the war. Russian shelling decapitated it in May 2024.[2] Even with the strained resources of war, and in a city whose population shrunk from 19,000 to - by one estimate - 500, it was repaired, returned and reinforced. Ukrainian, and Ukrainian-aligned soldiers have posed beside it, some carrying flags or wearing patches inspired by Makhno and his Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine. An anarchist who fought against states standing guard over one. A man who rejected Ukrainian nationalism as strongly as he resisted external imperialism, apotheosis-ed into a symbol of Ukrainian national resistance.[3] From the ivory tower of the Western left, that may appear to be a contradiction. It is more useful to see it as a question. •Why should resistance to an invading empire, to colonialism, always be nationalism? •Can’t people defend a ‘homeland’ without worshipping a nation state? Can anarchists, socialists and internationalists take up arms in pragmatic solidarity alongside a spectrum of nationalists whose politics they oppose – defend the ‘state’ without betraying their own principles? “It is unusual to see anarchists supporting state structures, but they say taking action against Russia is necessary for their survival. “We are fighting to protect the more or less free society that exists in Ukraine,” said an activist, Dmytro. “Without which there would be no space for activism or underground movements.” Isobel Koshiw - The Guardian[4] These questions of what we should set aside in solidarity are not new. More than two millennia ago, according to Homer, the mythological Nestor tried to hold together in solidarity a fracturing alliance that ego, rage and hierarchy were tearing apart. Over a century ago, Nestor Makhno defended Free Soviets of Anarchist Ukraine from an encircling siege of threats – variously from Ukrainian nationalists, European Central powers, joining in solidarity with Bolsheviks to finally defeat White Russian Tsarists before, ultimately, betrayal from Moscow and exile. Parts of the Western left have been lukewarm, or even opposed to practical solidarity with oppressed Ukrainians, citing elements of far-right nationalism even while recognising Russian claims of ‘de-nazification’ as propaganda. Opposition to NATO, Western militarism and the arms industry is justified, so is criticism of the Ukrainian government, oligarchic power, nationalism, corruption, restrictions on labour rights and any attempt to use wartime necessity to suppress political opposition. but focus on them can reduce Ukrainian people to chess pieces on a board in a proxy war. But some in the west have made ideological purity into Achilles’ tent. They withdraw solidarity from those resisting invasion because helping them might appear to align them with institutions they distrust. Their principles remain uncontaminated. Other people do the dying. The elder who sees both behind and ahead. Homeric Nestor, King of Pylos and the oldest of the Achaean commanders, was known for his age and for his ‘wise counsel’. The same is said, by Menelaus, when calling for Priam of Troy, not his sons, to discuss truce. “Always it is that the hearts in the younger men are frivolous, but when an elder man is among them, he looks behind him and in front, so that all comes out far better for both sides.” Menelaus Homeric Nestor’s authority comes earned from experience and long memory. Becoming king after Hercules had killed his brothers, he was granted additional lifespan, and has already lived three generations by the time of the Trojan war. He has known earlier generations of heroes –He has fought in earlier wars, witnessed victories and disasters that the younger commanders know only as stories. Does he treat those two impostors just the same? He is continually reminding them that the present conflict is not the first war, that they are not the first heroes and that courage without judgement can become another form of stupidity. Achilles presenting the prize of Wisdom to Nestor during the funeral games, painting by Charles-Philippe Larivière When Achilles and Agamemnon quarrel they endanger the survival of the entire Achaean expedition. Nestor counsels them both. He does not pretend that both men are equally right. Within the morality of their time and culture Agamemnon should not have seized the enslaved and raped Briseis from Achilles. Achilles should recognise Agamemnon’s kingly authority. Nestor attempts to preserve their focus on their common struggle without concealing, or trying to first solve, the injustice within it. ...

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— Dark Nights - About counter-information practices and a warning

 

at 8/15/26 6:00pm

Author: Dark NightsTitle: About counter-information practices and a warningSubtitle: For Mutual Aid & SolidarityDate: 2026/08/15Notes: Posted on 2026/08/15 — 2026/08/15 by darknightsSource: Retrieved on 16/8/26 from https://darknights.noblogs.org/post/2026/08/15/about-counter-information-practices-and-a-warning/ When we speak, it should be clear, to show reality and not to obscure it and/or reduce it to a spectacle. We issue a warning about suspicious, manipulative and reckless individual(s) behind the “FAI ARCHIVE” – just set up by the “No War But My War” blog and Instagram, who have been trying to contact admins and sites in the international counter-information networks and anti-repression solidarity groups in a duplicitous way and spreading misinformations and smears. We note that FAI/FRI[1] has been recently designated as a foreign terrorist organisation by the American administration for which they also target “Antifa Ost“, etc, as part of a hyped and aggressive move against domestic and foreign radical-left and anti-state anarchist movements and tendencies of all sorts, including single-issue unrelated subjects to anarchism. This individual(s) claims to be in contact and know others in the international anarchist networks, when it has been investigated and found that they are lying, which is deeply suspect. Claiming to be in contact and to have the confidence of others when you do not is unacceptable and treacherous. It is the way of the undercover cop, the infiltrator or, in the “best” case, the self-aggrandizing fantasist. This individual(s) purports to be building an “archive” of actions claimed by FAI/FRI, the anarchist-insurrectionalist open platform and network for direct action. The individual(s) has spent considerable time and energy in researching little-known obscure media clips of the attacks from many different places all over the world, so their claim that they did not know the dates that they are failing to provide on any (missing) notes to the attacks is misleading and false. There are even some actions which were never claimed by FAI that are being reframed as “FAI” actions by this site, using journalistic reasoning. This is always the form with “propaganda”, it becomes a means of disassociation. In fact, we know that “No War But My War” claimed to be in contact with the VICE journalist and general scummy untrustable piece of shit, Jake Hanrahan, who now runs a grift called Popular Front. We know that “No War But My War” approached Palang Hitam (Anarchist Black Cross Indonesia) trying to ask out an interview on Jake’s behalf, we know this because we talk to our comrades. Do not communicate with this email address [nowarbutmywar@proton.me + pammalaysia@proton.me], blog or Instagram account and be aware that not only are there a lot of fools with smartphones, there are also cyber-operations taking place. This confirms to a pattern of electronic disruption and infiltration that has been taking place in Indonesia by the counter-terrorist unit “Densus 88” and that we believe has been informed by the policing tactics of the American, British and European states. It is known that the Indonesian state has been pursuing a violent campaign using systematic torture against the anarchist movement and using special technical spyware and trolling campaigns along with typical surveillance, infiltration and provocation methods. One thing that alerted us to the possible problematic nature of “No War But My War” was their identical lines of thinking to American state narratives, for example, connecting the “Prairieland defendants” with “our prisoners” as European “Antifa” or as “FAI networks”, when there is no connection, not in the sense of a specific terrorist organization nor even between any supposed “extreme-left movement”, which can contain such differing realities as what happened at the ICE Prairieland Immigration Detention Centre, and what passes as “Antifa” in Europe, but what happened in Texas was a tragic consequence of the dangerous and unpredictable social war which is taking place there, and was a political trial to shore up the repression. Certainly, it is absurd to put any FAI cell next to what happened in Texas, or a stretch at least, and one that seems more a fantasy of the prosecutors. We covered the Prairieland trial on our counter-info site, not because they are accused “Antifa” “anarchists” or anything else: we see and recognise the people on the streets of the United Snakes of America who are fighting back against the state. They don’t need to be “far-left”, “anarchists”, “Antifas” etc. Using this premise of creating a “FAI Archive”, this admin(s) contacted us and others, and has sent “propaganda videos” which were initially posted on our site since we didn’t have any problem with it, despite finding the content open to our criticism as mere spectacle, “propaganda”. Recently, “No War But My War” sent us an overblown “propaganda” video which featured an American state official, Marco Rubio, speaking about their plans to focus their counter-terrorism infrastructure on “radical-left terrorism”. FAI/FRI does not need propagandists and will see Marco Rubio come and go as an insignificant politician. The actions and the communiques are the primary world of FAI/FRI. What we have seen practiced by this site is not genuine archiving. Each action or claim has been decontextualised, the dates and sources of the original counter-info site it was taken from are removed entirely and it is never stated which site translated it or first published it, or if it was from the corporate media. The context is removed by deleting the dates of the revolutionary attacks and then what we are seeing is that this admin(s) of “No War But My War” is then posting these actions as if they happened last week, and also sending them to other counter-info sites, which proliferates this kind of noise and fake signal. Allowing this type of behaviour to spread is unacceptable in the counter-information networks. ...

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— Flower Bomb - Intoxication Culture

 

at 8/15/26 4:56pm

Author: Flower BombTitle: Intoxication CultureSubtitle: A Straight Edge Anarchist CritiqueDate: 06/20/2026Source: https://warzonedistro.noblogs.org/post/2026/06/20/intoxication-culture-a-straight-edge-anarchist-critique/ Most people (including many anarchists and leftists) are unaware of the role alcohol, tobacco and opiods played in building colonial empires around the world. For example a major part of the Triangular Trade between the 16th and 19th centuries was the use of sugarcane rum — produced in the Caribbean and utilized as a universal currency that tied European nations, African slave markets, and the colonies together in a global economy. Tobacco served as a vital cash crop and economic foundation in places like Jamestown in the 1600s, fueling the expansion of slavery. Around the world colonizers deliberately used intoxication as a weapon to weaken indigenous populations. Addiction created the conditions for internal conflict, violence, and social breakdown within every indigenous population. While colonizers were profitting from this chemical warfare the relationship between indigenous people and the wild world around them rapidly deteriorated as the killing of non-human animals for furs and skins increased alongside the growing chemical dependency. With indigenous people suffering from the effects of alcoholism, it wasn’t long before colonizers realized the exploitative advantage of using alcohol to sway negotiations in favor of securing long-term land treaties that would eventually lead to genocidal displacement. But today most people will say “it’s just a beer”. Here in America, capitalism demonstrates the power of alienating the consumer from the knowledge of where or how a product is produced. The meat and dairy industries are an example of this. Alcohol, tobacco and marijuana are no different. If a product is profittable then there is a clear motive to conceal any and all present or historical background that might negatively impact its saleability. It is much easier to make a purchase when the social power and control of the product itself is unknown to the consumer who experiences a sense of power and control in purchasing it. Ignorance is bliss, and the ability to destroy ones self is one of the very few forms of power and control capitalism allows us to have. Straight Edge: I don’t care if it’s also used by conservatives, fascistsin Europe, religious zealots, or if some use it as a pathetic attempt to elevate themselves above others. I call myself Straight Edge because I detest intoxication culture – an arena of consumer activities that center surrendering one’s mind and body to alcohol, smoking, and drug use. It’s all just a “good time” – till someone gets hurt. Around 490,000 people die every year from smoking, and about 19,000 people are killed yearly from second hand smoke. But people like Jorge Araya (CEO of R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company) don’t give a shit. These deaths are nothing more than business as usual for making bank with every pack of cigarettes sold to just about anyone — from the wealthy nicotine addicts working on Wall Street to your average tattooed punk in a denim vest. In 2024, the tobacco industry in the United States alone made around $20 billion. I don’t care if I’m “just one person”. I’m not trying to start a movement or a revolution. My repulsion for industries like this isnt driven by the number of people who agree with me. I also call myself an anarchist. I despise authority – including the authority that intoxication culture maintains through both peer pressure upon the Individual, and with its high-demand for natural resources. Intoxication culture isn’t just a static population of people enjoying some brews; it requires resources in order to produce the commodities necessary for sustaining its profitable popularity. Intoxication culture includes a variety of addictive commodities that require the exploitation and degradation of what little remains of wild habitats. In order to manufacture alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, and so on, a complex chain of production must be established. On average, 18 million acres of forest are destroyed every year for the manufacturing of alcoholic beverages. Since 80% of the planet’s terrestrial wildlife live in forests, alcohol production means warfare against the wild. The environmental impacts of alcohol can be seen across the entire production chain, including the depletion and degradation of water resources, and an increase in greenhouse gas emissions, soil and air pollution, and waste production. If that wasn’t fucked enough, every year the tobacco industry kills more than 600 million trees and consumes around 4 million hectares of land. Environmentalist hippies who love to “toke up” rarely consider the environmental destruction associated with their celebrity plant: Cannabis. Marijuana is not only a mono-crop but comes with high demand, making it a source of profit at the center of violent narco-states and corporate-dominated agricultural systems that prioritize yield over environmental protection. Environmentalism aside, I reject drugs, alcohol, and smoking because I refuse to physically (and mentally) subject myself to industrial society’s settler-colonial project of domestication. My mind and body are already fucked up as it is from breathing in a lifetime of industrial pollution and consuming drinking water contaminated by microplastics. I have no desire to cause any more damage than what’s already been done, nor spend my time preoccupied with one chemical dependency or another. I’d rather be focused on developing the skills needed to help navigate personal struggles and survival.There isn’t a single product of chemical escapism capable of healing or fixing the problems of everyday life under capitalism. Any monetary transaction I make involving alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, or drugs would only be a voluntary payment to those who specialize in chemically altering my connection to primal reactions — reactions that I find valuable in maintaining decent judgment and alertness, especially while carrying out illegal activity. ...

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— Arthur Moyse - 'A splendid little war'

 

at 8/15/26 6:13am

Author: Arthur MoyseTitle: 'A splendid little war'Date: Spring 1995Notes: This text was entered manually, copying from a hardcopy of the Raven issue 29 (Volume 8 Number 1).Source: The Raven Anarchist Quarterly 29, ISSN 0951 4066 In 1895 Spain sent in 200,000 troops to quell the revolt of the Cuban people and in 1898 the McKinley American government sent in an American armed force to aid the Cuban people. After three months the Spanish army went back to Spain leaving the American flag and the dollar as a permanent absentee landlord, for the American army moved on to take Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines and any odd souvenirs that tourists and soldiers also accumulate. It was left to John Hay, the American ambassador in London, to write to 'Teddy' Roosevelt that 'it has been a splendid little war' and, allowing for the temper of the time and that the only access to information about the 'war' was through a biased media, it was an understandable but flawed reaction to sanctioned mass killings. War is a blanket term that covers an unmapped history of mass human conflict and to ask what is the 'anarchist interpretation' of World War Two has the fey lunacy of the asylum, for it is the logic of asking what is the anarchist interpretation of malaria: 'on deep consideration we're against mosquitoes with an abstaining disagreement by our Buddhist comrades'. War has taken many fashions and many forms and there are those who choose that their own particular bias will rubber-stamp all mass human conflict with the same value added cost price. It is argued that historians falsify and distort history by adding or omitting 'facts' and creating a conduit for the final and definitive particular history that they favour, but the fault is not theirs but ours if we choose to be selective in our readings, for given a choice of historians we can make our own selective choice to suit our own particular bias and beating the bare breast cry out that here at last is the truth. I read and enjoy every 'authority' but believe no one, not even A.J.P. Taylor when he tells me that the German Army beat the French (and the British) in World War Two because the German High Command used the railway timetables to move the German frontline troops. I read and enjoy the historians' true history with the same pleasure that I read the truth of who killed Kennedy; who wrote Hamlet; which is worse for the heart, butter or margarine; the lost city of Atlantis, Clause 4 or the political manifestos. War has taken many forms and many fashions and has been fought for many reasons and I would state, with complete authority, that the First World War was the last of the great classic wars that was to be fought in the fashion of the Battle of Waterloo with bands and banners, mounted troops and lances and the kiss of the fingertips to the enemy as one died among the scarlet flowers that bedewed the field of battle, but the machine-gun altered the face of war and turned it into carnage. If Britain had stayed out of World War One the German Army would have defeated the French Army, there would have been the triumphant parade through Paris, the takeover of French colonies, indemnities, the frantic writing of history according to one's side and the Frenchmen weeping in the boulevard cafés, but the political balance of power had to be maintained and two generations dined off a meal of carnage. The answer, comrades, is that we should all sit round a table working these things out in a comradely sensible fashion, but tell it not to the starving mob hammering on the doors of the empty food stores, for human despair breeds its own politicians. It is foolish to deny that war has its own romance providing that it is aged in the barrel and on a distant shore for we are of that aged generation who still dine on the printed romance of the Spanish Civil War and still re-quote Kronstadt and the mass death of those sailors to show our hands are clean. Without Shakespeare no Agincourt when Henry VII's 5,000 archers and 750 men at arms defeated 22,000 French knights and 3,000 crossbow-men under Charles d'Albret. Is it important? A British officer stood on the invasion beach in World War Two calling our Shakespeare's 'Once more into the breach dear friends, once more ...? And talk of propaganda and how often was the brutal bombing of the small town of Guernica used for passing round the hat in all those ‘support the Spanish people’ meetings, and how could Hollywood have survived without the Crusades, and I know, comrades, that what started out as a holy war became a hypermarket for loot. We can toss around statistics and I will give you a death list of World War Two with 55,000,000 dead, 15,000,000 Chinese, 3,000,000 Poles and to top the glass 70,000 Chinese civilians slaughtered in Nanking when the young Japanese Officer Corps had their demand for an invasion of China rubber-stamped by the Emperor and the government of the hour. But what I choose to remember is the shelling by artillery of the workers’ tenements in Vienna under the Dollfuss government as Europe came under the domination of their home-spawned Nazi military forces. Dollfuss was murdered in 1934 and Vienna, Austria's land of the Valse, cheered the German troops as they marched in in 1938 to take over, and the trucks to the concentration camps became part of the European railway schedules. ...

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— ziq - You Can’t Build Anarchy by Building Prisons

 

at 8/14/26 12:45pm

Author: ziqTitle: You Can’t Build Anarchy by Building PrisonsSubtitle: Against the Carceral ImaginationDate: August 9, 2026Notes: This essay is also available in zine form at https://archive.org/details/againstthecarceralimaginationSource: raddle.me I’m genuinely disenchanted by how many internet anarchists seem determined to spend their time debating how they would build and administer prisons after their fantasy revolution. This new generation of YouTube-informed “anarchists” is honestly hopeless: people who have somehow managed to take a political tradition founded on opposition to prisons, police, and state coercion and turn it into an endless exercise in designing “better” ways to police and imprison people. We’re not getting a revolution in our lifetimes. More importantly, the world we actually inhabit is already structured around a vast prison-industrial complex. People, including countless anarchists, are being incarcerated, surveilled, policed, deported, criminalized, and subjected to state violence right now. Yet instead of working toward abolition, standing in solidarity with prisoners rotting away in cells, or even imagining radically different forms of social organization beyond police, prisons, and state coercion, this new crop of anarchists would rather spend energy debating the finer points of administering imaginary prisons in some hypothetical post-revolutionary future. The priorities are baffling. There are real prisons, real prisoners, and real state violence happening right now, but the urgent question for these anarchists is what their hypothetical prison system should look like in an imaginary future run by them. Sure, they avoid outright calling them prisons. Their brave leader, YouTuber Anark (Daniel Baryon), prefers the more Orwellian-sounding phrase “monitored democratic rehabilitation communities with required rehabilitative measures.” But word-salad euphemisms don’t change the underlying institution he’s advocating for. He says “permanent separation of citizens from society” should be rare, but necessary when someone is deemed an “active threat to the community.” He then outlines a “tiered justice system,” a “constitution” containing “laws,” and courts i.e. his “community justice councils” that would try criminals, whom he calls “sequestered citizens” and “violators of the common law.” Those councils would determine what “the process of rehabilitation and reparation” should look like, including when someone is forcibly removed from the community and placed in one of these “monitored democratic rehabilitation communities.” According to his fans, it’s not really prison if we call the cells “democratic involuntary living quarters,” the inmates “democratically instituted detainees,” and the guards “democratic rehabilitative facilitators.” WTF is happening with these so-called anarchists who insist their leader isn’t describing a prison? If they ever got their revolution, I suppose disruptive wreckers like me would be sent straight to the Democratic Rehabilitation Internment Facility for reeducation, where I could learn that my confinement is actually liberatory because the not-prison committee voted on it. The whole discussion is perverse. What happened to simply calling coercion coercion? Where is the intellectual honesty? Why are so many self-described anarchists reaching for increasingly elaborate euphemisms for reproducing coercion rather than simply admitting that they want prisons? They loudly insist I propose a “better system” to replace prisons, while treating as the only acceptable answer a marginally more humane or more democratically administered version of incarceration. I offer them something different: anarchy. And their response is always the same: that I’m merely using “anarchy“ as a buzzword, or that refusing to bless their redesigned prisons is just “LARPing.“ Apparently, asking whether we need prisons at all is “unserious,” while building a more egalitarian carceral bureaucracy is treated as radical. It’s maddening that to these kids, prison abolition counts as less serious than Baryon’s patented I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Prison. If you reject anarchy because you don’t believe it can address the problems you’re concerned about, that’s your prerogative. You’re perfectly entitled to want law, government, police, courts, prisons, and the institutional machinery of “law and order.” No one is stopping you from going to law school, signing up to the police academy or applying to be a prison guard so you can work to reform the system. But then be honest about what you’re advocating. To claim that prison reform is somehow “far more egalitarian than anything the world has ever seen” as one of these Breadtube-consumers told me is extraordinarily obtuse. It erases the enormous historical diversity of human societies, including countless indigenous egalitarian societies that existed without anything resembling prisons. It also assumes that the only possible alternative to the prison-industrial complex is a slightly nicer version of the prison-industrial complex. That assumption is precisely what anarchism is supposed to challenge. The endless demand that I provide a “solution” to crime is itself a symptom of the problem. It assumes that every instance of human violence can and should be solved through some universal institutional mechanism of policing, punishment, and confinement. I don’t accept that premise. ...

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— ziq - The Breadtube to Conformity Pipeline

 

at 8/14/26 12:43pm

Author: ziqTitle: The Breadtube to Conformity PipelineSubtitle: Algorithms and the Erosion of AnarchyDate: September 24, 2025Source: https://raddle.me/wiki/breadtube_pipeline Journalist Maria Ressa recently explained how the rise of the authoritarian right has been directly caused by social media algorithms which hack our biology and change the way we see the world. The algorithms targeting leftist audiences can be equally insidious. Breadtubers like "Non-Compete" guide impressionable young anarchists into a feedback loop that gradually shifts their perspectives towards a bland and safe amalgamation of democracy and Marxism, presented with a superficial anarchistic veneer. As a result, they manage to strip the beautiful idea of all its potency and successfully gentrify it. A marked ideological shift takes root in the audience as they consume this content that gently critiques capitalism while advocating for a blend of democratic socialist and Marxist solutions. These solutions are misleadingly presented as historically anarchist, gradually reshaping their beliefs and steering them away from the core tenets of anarchism. Ultimately, this trajectory leads them towards state socialism, which is the inevitable outcome of Marxism. By framing their messaging in a way that resonates with the marginalized identities of their audience, Breadtubers can obscure the authoritarian implications of their ideology, making it easier for followers to adopt these views without fully realizing the departure from anarchist principles they've embarked on. As these people become increasingly conditioned by the denser and denser Marxist ideology the algorithm feeds them, figures like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Deng and Xi start to look like natural extensions of their Marxist beliefs, further entrenching them in an ideology that contradicts their original values. This gradual shift can lead to a profound transformation in their worldview, initially without their conscious awareness. The appeal of belonging to the community that forms around these influencers, along with the desire to adopt a shared ideology to gain the acceptance of the wider fan club, further entrenches these ideological shifts. This sense of belonging can obscure individuals' awareness of the gradual evolution of their beliefs, making it incredibly challenging for them to recognize how far they've strayed from their original anti-authoritarian perspectives. Non-Compete is an example of a Breadtuber who claims to synthesize elements of anarcho-communism, democracy, classical Marxism, and Leninism, while actually rejecting everything about anarchy that makes it anarchy. He frequently glorifies authoritarian government, especially heaping praise on the Vietnamese government as an American expat living in that country. He's eager to promote dialectical materialism as "science" and he even proposes building what he calls a "democratic police force", claiming the problem with policing is that we don't hold elections to choose who gets to police us. He insists these absurd ideas are him being "pragmatic". Many of his videos are wildly off-base, yet thousands of viewers continue to watch and embrace his distorted ideas as truth, then come into anarchist spaces and insist anarchy is when Marx and Kropotkin and Lenin and Obama have a big sweaty orgy. You simply cannot reconcile authority with anti-authority; any attempt to synthesize authoritarian and anti-authoritarian ideas ultimately negates the essence of anti-authoritarianism. There is nothing "pragmatic" about suggesting that authoritarian ideologies and anarchy can be mashed together when a century of history shows otherwise. Authoritarian communists have systematically persecuted anarchists, from imprisonments and forced labour to torture and murder, and have frequently allied with fascists and the police to violently suppress anarchist movements. To be an anarchist means to oppose all forms of social hierarchy, not to endorse it when convenient, as seen in his fawning over the Vietnamese government, the USSR, or democratic cops. His ideology is not a synthesis of anarchy and archy; it is simply authoritarian socialism. The moment one embraces the authority of the state, they abandon the principles of anarchy. The anarcho-Marxist sphere fomented by Breadtube violently conflicts with anything I recognize as anarchy. Within this echo chamber, pro-government or pro-Majoritarianism beliefs are portrayed as the only rational perspective, while dissenters are shunned and ridiculed by both the Breadtube personalities and their most vocal supporters. When the thought leaders eventually renounce their claimed anarchist affiliations and openly embrace authoritarian socialism, many of the followers fall in line behind them. A notable example of this phenomenon is BadMouseProductions, an early breakout Breadtube figure. Initially, he gained significant popularity by creating videos promoting anarchy. However, he later announced he was a Maoist and pushed that authoritarian ideology to his extensive audience. The algorithms that pump Democratic Marxism across the entire Breadtube network and bombard subscribers with ideological sameness create a homogenized environment where dissenting opinions vanish. This relentless exposure to uniform content reinforces existing beliefs and discourages critical thinking, making it increasingly challenging for individuals to question or explore alternative perspectives to those promoted by easily marketable leftism-gurus. ...

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— Hein Htet Kyaw - The Goshal Thesis and the Historical Lies of the Communist Party of Burma

 

at 8/13/26 6:00pm

Author: Hein Htet KyawTitle: The Goshal Thesis and the Historical Lies of the Communist Party of BurmaDate: 23 Jul 2026Source: redandblackanarchists.com.au According to the Vol. I, No. 7 of CPI’s Periodical named “Communist”, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Burma passed a political resolution on July 30, 1947 to Communist Party of India on the situation facing the Burmese people immediately after the murder of General Aung San and his colleagues. In their political resolution, the CPB stated that imperialist intrigues could only be "decisively defeated with AFPFL-CP unity. However, due to the Burmese independence in 1948, CPB had to re-determine whether AFPFL government (along with the socialists inside it) was a “comprador bourgeoisie” or “national bourgeoisie”. The Goshal Thesis (On the Present Political Situation in Burma and Our Task) by Thakin Ba Tin (Comrade Goshal) answered this question before CPB as a party had reached a conclusion. As a result, the Goshal Thesis became a political line formulated by Thakin Ba Tin (Comrade Goshal), a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB), which ignited the sparks of the Burmese Civil War. The original manuscript of the thesis was discovered in research archives kept in Hamburg, Germany, and was published in 1989 by the Verbund Stiftung Deutsches Übersee-Institut (Hamburg) in a compilation titled Documents on Communism in Burma. The Claims of Communist Party of Burma However, Communist Party of Burma (CPB) has been denying the existence of such a thesis. In the November 1992 issue (No. 11) of the CPB’s official journal, ‘People's Power’, an article titled "Clarification Regarding the So-Called Goshal Thesis"—written by Comrade Po Than Gyaung, the current spokesperson of the Communist Party of Burma, with informational assistance from the chairperson of the time, Thakin Ba Thein Tin—argued the following: "Because this analysis [the Goshal Thesis] was written without informing the party and in opposition to the party's line, Comrade Ba Tin was severely criticized by the Political Bureau and the Central Committee. Just prior to this, Thakin Thein Pe had already faced disciplinary action for attacking the party through The Nation newspaper. Comrade Ba Tin explained that he did not write the article himself, but that a leader of the Communist Party of India (CPI) wrote it under his name. With that explanation, the matter was laid to rest. If the Goshal Thesis had truly existed, why would he continuously advocate the concept of a 'general strike and armed uprising' during the nightly Central Committee meetings held throughout March 1948? This concept is entirely different from the spirit of the Goshal Thesis. After the enemy began armed suppression on March 28, Comrade Ba Tin consistently opposed the 'encircling the cities from the countryside (Mao’s People's War)' line during the four meetings held in Yangon, Kyaukkyi Pauk, and Swedawmyaing. In reality, the Goshal Thesis never existed—neither verbally nor in writing. Starting a civil war was never the party’s line. Up until the very last moment, the target of the party’s armed struggle was British imperialism, not a civil war. This final combat line was openly distributed across the entire country." Similarly, in an article commemorating the CPB’s 80th anniversary titled "The Final Beneficial Service in the Twilight Years of Airborne U Ohn Maung for the CPB" published in People’s Power Journal No. 42, the author U Ohn Maung, a member of Communist Party of Burma wrote: "The truth is, the letter sent by the Communist Party of India, along with Comrade Goshal, to the CPB stated: 'When Burma gains independence from British colonial imperialism, the AFPFL (Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League) will come to power. Therefore, you must determine the class character of the AFPFL. Defining class character is essential when formulating a party's strategy. The AFPFL government is a bourgeois government. However, the CPB must decide what kind of bourgeoisie they are. Should the AFPFL government be classified as an imperialist bourgeoisie or a national bourgeoisie? (At that time, the global communist movement categorized the bourgeoisie into these two distinct characters.) The CPB must ponder and decide this for itself. If you decide they are comprador bourgeoisie, oppose and fight them, because the comprador bourgeoisie unites irreversibly with the imperialists. If you decide they are national bourgeoisie, try to cooperate with them, because the national bourgeoisie possesses anti-imperialist traits.' The Central Committee debated this point until the evening of March 27, 1948, but could not reach a decision. During this time, Prime Minister Thakin Nu and Bo Let Ya reached out through Bo Aung Gyi expressing a desire to meet CPB leader Thakin Than Tun, as mentioned in Bo Aung Gyi's articles. Bo Aung Gyi concluded that the communists were planning to go underground and were stalling the meeting. In truth, the meeting was delayed because a decision on whether the AFPFL was a comprador or national bourgeoisie had not yet been reached." The same article further claims: ...

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— BOAK - Solidarity with the Peoples of Ukraine and Palestine in Western Countries

 

at 8/13/26 7:57am

Author: BOAKTitle: Solidarity with the Peoples of Ukraine and Palestine in Western CountriesSubtitle: Questions of Combat TacticsDate: 9 November 2025Source: Retrieved on 13th August 2026 from boakeng.noblogs.org The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022, is a central event for the entire political life of the post-Soviet region, including for the anarchist movement. On October 7, 2023, a new round of confrontation between the colonial state of Israel and the groups operating in colonized Palestine, primarily the authoritarian religious-nationalist movement HAMAS, began. On that day, HAMAS militants and fighters from other Palestinian organizations attacked Israel. Seizing the moment, Salafi jihadists, small and marginal in the Palestinian context, also possibly joined the attack. During this large-scale attack, many Israeli military personnel, security forces, and armed settlers were killed, but there were also mass killings of civilians. The war quickly escalated into a genocide of the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip, which the state of Israel is carrying out through total and indiscriminate bombings, artificially created famine, and other forms of mass extermination of the civilian population. Israel is closely linked with the countries of the so-called “West” by political, economic, military, and other ties, and is particularly dependent on the support of the world’s strongest empire, the USA. Just like the war in Ukraine for post-Soviet anarchists and leftists, confronting the genocide in Palestine has in recent years become a central point of mobilization for anarchist and revolutionary left movements in the West. Anarchist struggle is internationalist; it is waged on different sides of state borders. In this article, we will talk about the methods of doing solidarity with the peoples of Ukraine and Palestine in Western countries and will focus primarily on combat tactics. Addressing the issue from this side seems appropriate, as a significant part of the post-Soviet anarchist and left movement has ended up in emigration, including in Western countries. In the case of Palestine, internationalism and solidarity with the struggle in this region have a long and heroic history, and the Palestinian movement itself views the Western world as an important front of resistance. We will discuss this in more detail below. A Little Background This article does not aim to tell the history of colonialism and occupation in Ukraine and Palestine. In the case of Ukraine, the Russian-speaking reader is familiar, at least in general terms, with both the events of recent years and the earlier imperialist colonial policy of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and Yeltsin’s and Putin’s Russia. It is more difficult with Palestine – there is simply a critical lack of anarchist and revolutionary materials in Russian language that provide a comprehensive insight into the origins and history of colonization and occupation. Therefore, I will limit myself to recommending English-language materials. To understand the origins of the current genocide, I recommend reading the brochure published in June 2024 by the Kurdish Revolutionary Movement, “Reflections on Palestinian and Kurdish Resistance”. Also, the history of Palestinian resistance in recent decades is wonderfully presented in the article by the anarchist collective CrimethInc., “Ya Ghazze Habibti — Gaza, My Love: Understanding the Genocide in Palestine”. Furthermore, the anarchist organization “Compass” operates in Palestine, which includes Russian-speaking comrades. You can probably contact them directly with your questions. Solidarity with the Peoples of Ukraine In the West, from the first day of the full-scale war, a fairly massive solidarity movement with the peoples of Ukraine emerged, joined by a significant portion of anarchists and leftists. Many immediately made contact with the “Operation Solidarity” initiative, which later reformed into “Solidarity Collectives”. Some comrades, including those with experience in armed struggle in Kurdistan, went to Ukraine themselves and joined the Anti-Authoritarian Platoon. Their experience proved very valuable for forming military organizational structures – our fallen comrade, one of the founders of the Combat Organization of Anarcho-Communists (BOAK), martyr Dmitry Petrov, wrote about this in the article “Four Months in the Anti-Authoritarian Platoon in Ukraine”. In the West, after the start of the full-scale war, mass solidarity actions with the peoples of Ukraine took place. Anarchists and leftists participated in them, simultaneously giving the pro-Ukrainian campaign a more radical character, involving anti-capitalist, anti-statist, and environmental agendas. For example, in March 2022, anarchists seized the London mansion of Russian oligarch Deripaska. This was an action directed against Russian aggression, but at the same time, it highlighted the problems of unfair distribution of resources in modern society, homelessness, police repression against refugees and migrants, racism, and colonialism. Also in March 2022, in Glasgow, participants of a leftist climate initiative blocked the office of the ship company “Seapeak,” linked to the Russian state. The goal of the blockade was to hinder the trade of Russian oil. But simultaneously, the action was directed against all energy corporations whose activities have a destructive impact on nature, against the entire capitalist system that is destroying the planet for the sake of power and profit. ...

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— Eternal Weirdo Loser Friend - Never Trust The Diaspora

 

at 8/13/26 1:23am

Author: Eternal Weirdo Loser FriendTitle: Never Trust The DiasporaDate: 2025/11/10Notes: Written on the occupied lands of First Nations people on so-called ‘australia’ (specific nation unknown). Their sovereignty was never ceded, this has always been Blak land.Source: <antieverything.noblogs.org/post/2025/11/10/never-trust-the-diaspora> — Retrieved on 12/08/2026; <zinesquatteshoppe.noblogs.org/never-trust-the-diaspora. — Retrieved on 12/08/2026 Image Description: Thousands of anti communist diaspora rally on the anniversary of the capture of Ho Chi Minh City, prominently displaying the flag of the fallen CIA-backed anti-communist state south vietnam and the western imperialist state ‘australia’ I’ve been thinking about what it’s like as diaspora to combat liberalism within our diasporic communities. The title is obviously a bit hyperbolic, but it’s rooted in the truth that we can’t simply take our own opinions of what’s happening in the motherland for granted as being true. I am diasporic myself – Indian, for my sins. In the imperial order, India is at least somewhat allied with the West, and over fifty percent of funding for the far-right RSS comes from the diaspora, who in general love Modi. Reading anti-caste scholars talk about brahmins and other oppressor caste people with maids, servants and drivers (including my family) who go to the west and remake themselves as “people of colour”, while still maintaining brahmin hegemony within the west and in the motherland[1], has also been enlightening to say the least. Hopefully this article serves to strengthen the revolutionary tendency that is emerging, allows us to better identify and avoid endeavours that waste time and energy, and redirect energy towards those actions that may cause serious impact (both creatively and destructively) There are many factors that create a systematic bias among ‘australian’ diaspora. For one, australian visa policy is designed by and for the ruling classes of australia. We all know about the white australia policy[2]. But it is also fascinating to note that just after the white australia policy ended, South-Vietnamese refugees to ‘australia’ were hand-picked[3] by officials who travelled to refugee camps to select who would be given a visa – functionaries of the same government that had recently been prosecuting an anti-communist war[4]. This led a bolstering of thousands of anti-communists in the polity over the next few years. Today, the ‘character requirements’ for an ‘australian’ visa include whether ‘you are subject to an adverse security assessment by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’[5], with support for an anti-colonial liberation movement resulting in immediate cancellation.[6] australia’s physical isolation supports a particular class position among migrants. australia occupies a series of islands, and is quite far from most neighbouring landmasses. In comparison, the US shares a land border with Mexico, which enables many exploited class people to find ways to cross the border. This is next to impossible here – and creates at the first level a financial hurdle – biasing those among the global south who can afford plane tickets at imperialist exchange rates. Even for refugees who take the extremely dangerous voyage here by boat, these trips are extremely expensive, even when money is collected across multiple family members. Globally 67% of refugees are located across the border[7]. When we take into account visa policy, securing the kind of visa that might allow for permanent immigration to australia requires decent amounts of money and certain kinds of education or job prospects. Thus, regardless of what kind of labour roles a person might take up, on average, people who are able to make it out here are much more likely to come from well off, exploiting class family backgrounds in their countries of origins, and tend to have corresponding political biases and continued familial interests. Also, just in general, things change. People get stuck and romanticize the ways things were in their home countries when they left, or when their parents left, in the case of second-generation diaspora. It’s important to be connected to changing reality on the ground. Like all other settlers on this land, diasporas here benefit from colonial and imperial wealth, and that creates an interest in perpetuating these systems (that we must fight), regardless of where we come from. Liberalism is the dominant ideology in australia and that impacts which diasporic voices get promoted. People on the ABC and mainstream media can be straight up paid actors, useful idiots, or simply just ideologically aligned with these institutions – who trot out whoever support imperial interests. Currently in the case of Iran, that includes the “Australian Iranian Community Organisation”, who had previously called for the Australian government for the Iranian Embassy to be shut and the IRGC to be listed as a terror group – actions which have since been carried out[8]. Even in our social movements, ‘radical’ or otherwise, liberal voices are systematically uplifted. Think of the Palestine Action Group (PAG) in Sydney boosting the totally unfounded claims that Iran is behind supposed anti-semitic attacks in ‘australia’[9], consistently working with police including calling the police on teenagers[10], supporting and enforcing the censorship of people carrying flags in support of the armed resistance, actively discouraging mask wearing, and (most awfully) the constant funnelling of time and energy into symbolic weekly rallies that clearly are doing nothing in terms of stopping a genocide or abolishing the israeli state – rallies that even ASIO considers useful as a “pressure release”[11], moving action away from more effective methods. Just because individuals are from a particular diaspora, doesn’t mean that we should treat them as if they are the be all and end all of all political opinions with regards to those peoples. ...

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— Kevin A. Carson - The Desktop Regulatory State

 

at 8/10/26 7:03am

Author: Kevin A. CarsonTitle: The Desktop Regulatory StateSubtitle: The Countervailing Power of Individuals and NetworksDate: March 2016Source: Retrieved on 8th April 2022 from kevinacarson.org Preface Like every book I’ve written since the first, this book was inspired by ideas I encountered in researching the previous one but was unable to explore and develop as much as I’d have liked within that framework. In writing the material on crisis tendencies of capitalism in Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, the writings by Paul Goodman and Ivan Illich on the hegemony of bureaucratic culture set a train of thought in motion that eventually lead to writing Organization Theory. Researching the chapter on decentralized manufacturing technology in Organization Theory led, in turn, to a stand-alone book on micro-manufacturing (Homebrew Industrial Revolution). This book, in turn, is the development of ideas on network organization and stigmergy I touched on in Homebrew Industrial Revolution. It applies many of the same ideas in the realm of information that I developed earlier in regard to physical production in that book. It also ties in some of the ideas I discussed in the chapter on labor organization in Organization Theory, like open-mouth sabotage, but in much greater scope. This book was a much longer time writing than any of my others, and because so much of its content involved ongoing current news I had much greater difficulty in either finding a cutoff point or setting parameters to filter out excessive detail. In the Appendix I wound up deleting a great deal of detail I’d previously incorporated on the activities of the various networked social movements starting with the Arab Spring, and shifted instead to a greater relative focus on the general principles behind the wave of networked movements since the EZLN uprising in 1994. My judgments on the level of detail to preserve were necessarily somewhat arbitrary; whether the result is satisfactory is up to the reader to decide. This book, in keeping with the spirit of the subject matter, is far more a product of stigmergic organization and the wisdom of crowds than anything I’ve previously written. In an attempt to adhere to Eric Raymond’s principle that “many eyeballs make shallow bugs,” I first posted the roughly eight-month-old draft online at desktopregulatorystate.wordpress.com, warts and all, in March 2011. At the time it was four chapters (which have since fissioned into twelve), consisting mostly of placeholder notes in many places and containing some sections entirely blank except for the title. Since then I’ve automatically updated the online text whenever it was edited. I have benefited from many suggestions and tips from those following the progress of the book, including Steve Herrick’s wonderful job formatting the online word processor template for the online text, as well as all the information I get from email discussion lists (particularly the P2P Foundation, C4SS working group and Networked Labor lists), the leads from friends on Twitter, and the blogs and news sites I follow via RSS reader. And many thanks in particular to my friend Gary Chartier at La Sierra University, who has formatted this as well as two of my previous books for print! 1. The Stigmergic Revolution Several parallel developments are driving a trend toward the growing obsolescence of large, highly capitalized, hierarchical organizations, and the ability of networked individuals with comparatively cheap capital equipment to perform the functions formerly performed by such organizations. They include the drastically reduced cost of capital goods required for informational and material production, as well as drastically reduced transaction costs of coordinating efforts between individuals. I. Reduced Capital Outlays For most of the past two hundred years, the trend has been toward increasing capital outlays for most forms of production. The cost of the basic capital equipment required for production—the mass-production factory, the large printing press, the radio or TV station—was the primary justification for the large organization. The economy was dominated by large, hierarchical organizations administering enormous masses of capital. And the astronomical cost of production machinery was also the main justification for the wage system: production machinery was so expensive that only the rich could afford it, and hire others to work it. In recent decades we’ve seen a reversal of this trend: a shift back from expensive, specialized machinery to inexpensive, general-purpose tools. Although this is true of both material and immaterial production—as attested by the recent revolution in garage-scale CNC machine tools[1]—it was true first and most dramatically in the immaterial sphere. The desktop computer is the primary item of capital equipment required for entering a growing number of industries, like music, desktop publishing and software design. The desktop computer, supplemented by assorted packages of increasingly cheap printing or sound editing equipment, is capable of doing what previously required a minimum investment of hundreds of thousands of dollars. In the words of Yochai Benkler: “declining price of computation, communication, and storage have, as a practical matter, placed the material means of information and cultural production in the hands of a significant fraction of the world’s population—on the order of a billion people around the globe.”[2](Of course since that passage was written the proliferation of cheapening smartphones has probably expanded the latter figure to include over half the world’s population.) ...

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— MAFW Distro - What is MAFW Distro?

 

at 8/8/26 10:21pm

Author: MAFW DistroTitle: What is MAFW Distro?Source: Retrieved on 8/8/26 from https://mafwdistro.noblogs.org/what-is-mafw-distro/ More than just four city streets—Maple, Ash, Farmer, and Wilson—MAFW is a neighborhood born from radical ideas and expression. Known for its artistic and anarchist values, these 4 streets in Tempe, so-called Arizona, make up the neighborhood (MAFW) which we call home. Anarchists have been active in this neighborhood going back to at least the year 2000 when Gentle Strength Co-op was still in existence, serving as a staging ground for the Phoenix Anarchist Coalition. There, the co-op operated as an infoshop, free market, and coordination center for local actions. Unfortunately, this radical eventually momentum died out. The co-op shuttered. The “prominent” anarchists in the neighborhood moved away. MAFW, in the anarchist sense it was known for, was reduced to a mere online presence. Our name is a nod to the local anarchists that came before us, as well as a promise to water, nurture and grow the roots they left behind. As Indígena living north of the imposed border, we recognize a disconnect between Western anarchism and the stolen land we reside on. We hope to mend this by building community solidarity that deeply respects the Tohono O’odham and Piipaash, the rightful stewards of the land Tempe occupies. We stand in solidarity with new life blossoming out of MAFW, and recognize tenant unions, armed community defense, and other radical actions as part of the neighborhood’s undying anarchist spirit.

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— Voltairine de Cleyre - Will this Struggle be Drowned in Blood?

 

at 8/7/26 12:57am

Author: Voltairine de CleyreTitle: Will this Struggle be Drowned in Blood?Date: 1911Notes: From ‘Regeneración’, English Section, November 11 to 18, 1911, Los Angeles, California, edited by William C. Owen. "The following is the English copy of an article contributed recently by the well-known writer Voltairine de Cleyre, to “Volne Listy,” the noted Bohemian weekly [… of] New York City." [-William C. Owen]Source: Retrieved on August 6, 2026 from historyiswhat.noblogs.org Since the publication of my report of the work of the Mexican Liberal Defense Conference I have received a number of requests, on the part of those interested and anxious to do work, for an article of explanation, giving some idea of the scope and present status of the revolution. And indeed, remembering my own ignorance of the subject no longer ago than last May, and the fact that our daily and weekly press, including the Socialist and other reform journals, is almost absolutely silent on the matter, and that the chief source of information is a paper but little known, even to our own comrades — I mean “Regeneración,” the organ of the Mexican Liberal party — I believe it is quite important that an explanatory article be written for the information of the readers of “Volne Listy.” It is important that all anarchists, and sympathizers with anarchistic tendencies and developments among the people, should know that the Mexican Revolution neither began nor ended with the spectacular military movements which culminated in the overthrow of Diaz and the substitution of the present government in Mexico. Those movements were but brief, though important, incidents in the whole mighty effort of a people to overthrow an economic system foisted upon them partly by politicians of their own people, but largely by capitalists of this and other countries, whereby they, the genuine children of Mexican soil, have been reduced to a most hateful slavery. The details of that slavery I do not intend to rehearse; those who wish to inform themselves as to its almost unbelievable horrors should read Turner’s “Barbarous Mexico.” Mexico and its People Mexico consists of twenty-nine States and Territories and a Federal district similar to the District of Columbia. The smaller, but more thickly populated States are those to the southward, in the vicinity of the Federal district. The entire population of Mexico is some fifteen millions, out of which four million are of unmixed Indian blood, descendants of its pre-European-invasion occupants. Of the remaining eleven million, the greater portion are of mixed breed, a relatively small number being of pure Spanish descent. The mass of the population is agriculturist by instinct, habit and the general conditions of economic development in the country. The various tribes of Indians have from time immemorial had communal land-holding arrangements which are very interesting, both for the insight they afford into the character of the people and for the comparisons they afford between theoretic and practical free communism. These Indians have within the last half century seen these communal lands of theirs granted away, thousands of acres at a time, to native or alien landlords, and themselves driven to a hateful toil merely to create profit for the landlords. They have rebelled, and, as the reward of their rebellion, have been shot, tortured or sent away to pestiferous districts where they were bound to die within a few months. Thus the landlords get rid of their “undesirable” tenants. The half-breed population is also communist, having harked back to their Indian forbears in this respect. And both Indian and half-breed have an utter hatred of work for work’s sake. They wish to work in order to live, but they have no wish to work to make others rich. A Rebel Against Slavery The Indian’s “laziness” is proverbial among white men; but, far from its being what the white man thinks it is, it is rather the intense protest of a free soul against a useless and degrading waste of life. He wishes to feel himself a child of the sun and sky, a being through whom moves the breath of life, a thing of the soil and the air, and not a tool for the aimless production of heaps of goods at some one else’s orders. The half-breeds, on the white side again, are the descendants of Latins; and, while the Latin peoples work, they have never hungered and thirsted after purely commercial gain as have northern nations; they have always preserved a devotion to the beautiful (even the useless beautiful) and the mere joys of life — song, dance and festival — unknown to the Anglo-Saxon. Add to all this the enervating climate of much of Mexico, and you have an understanding of what our grab-and-get system of life stigmatizes as “Mexican laziness.” These people want the land; they do not want to live in cities; they want to use the land in their own way, according to their inherited communal customs. Time and time gain they have rebelled, and their rebellions have been murderously put down, but this instinctive hunger for the free field of life is so essentially a part of their being that the only way to kill it to to kill the entire agrarian population. At the present time it has risen up more invincible than ever; and although the people are ignorant — less than 20 per cent being able to read and write — they need no book learning to convince them that the land is theirs by right. Passion of Mexicans for Liberty has been Unquenchable ...

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— Andy Durgan - Reflexions on the Spanish Revolution of 1936

 

at 8/6/26 6:48am

Author: Andy DurganTitle: Reflexions on the Spanish Revolution of 1936Date: 11 July 2026Notes: Translated by David Fagan for International Viewpoint from viento sur 201.Source: Retrieved on August 6, 2026 from https://internationalviewpoint.org/Reflexions-on-the-Spanish-Revolution-of-1936 In the vast body of literature surrounding the Spanish Civil War, it is often presented as a struggle between democracy and fascism. This view is almost hegemonic among sectors of the left, many of them historically influenced by Stalinism. But such an approach clashes with the sociopolitical reality of Spain in the 1930s. The democratic failure The social, economic and political polarisation in the Spanish State in the years prior to the Civil War and the consequent failure of bourgeois democracy determined the outbreak of both the armed conflict and the revolution.[1] The electoral victory of the Popular Front in February 1936, instead of opening a new stage of social reforms, highlighted the inability of republican democracy to defeat the dominant classes determined to avoid any challenge to their power. The victory of the Popular Front unleashed a new wave of mobilisations by the working masses, both urban and rural, which the Republican government, as in 1931, attempted to repress. For its part, the right wing abandoned any hope of destroying Republican democracy from within and opted for a military coup. The future of the Republic itself depended not only on its right-wing enemies, but also on the workers’ movement. In the case of the socialists, the revolutionary faction, led by Largo Caballero, refused to repeat the experience of 1931-1933 and insisted that the PSOE (social-democratic Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) not participate in the new government, leaving the republicans with the task of "finishing the bourgeois revolution." This schematic vision of Marxism meant that Largo Caballero and his followers lacked a strategy for seizing power and remained passively waiting for the Republicans to pave the way for a socialist government. In contrast, the more social democratic faction of Indalecio Prieto, supported by the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), defended the need to return to a coalition government to complete the Republican reformist programme. It was this latter position that was adopted by the socialist movement in the midst of the Civil War. The left wing of the PSOE, having lost part of its base to Stalinism—especially the Socialist Youth (FJS), which would unite with the Union of Communist Youth to found the Unified Socialist Youth (JSU)—was overtaken by events and ended up accepting the same position as its social-democratic rivals. On the eve of the Civil War, the anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labour (CNT) continued to wield considerable influence within the Catalan labour movement—the most important on the Iberian Peninsula—and maintained a significant presence in Andalusia, Aragon, and the Valencian Community. Furthermore, in Asturias and Madrid, where socialists had historically held a majority within the labour movement, the CNT possessed a considerable strength.[2] Activists and union leaders were divided between anarcho-syndicalists and various more purely anarchist sectors, the most important being the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI). All these tendencies shared a common characteristic: apoliticism. However, weakened by repression and ideologically divided, during the first months of 1936, the CNT adopted a less intransigent position in its relations with the political left, which can be considered a prelude to its direct participation in the government during the war. In the February 1936 elections, in order to secure the release of its thousands of imprisoned members, the CNT did not promote an abstention campaign, as it had done in 1933, and its "freedom of the vote" was a factor contributing to the Popular Front’s victory. In May 1936, the CNT held its Fourth Congress in Zaragoza, a landmark in the CNT’s history, both ideologically and for its apparent call for workers’ unity. Shocked by the repression of the Asturian commune in October 1934, the delegates advocated for a revolutionary alliance with the social-democratic General Union of Workers (UGT) as a first step toward social revolution. But the Congress also revealed the limitations of the CNT’s political openness. While there was a long and abstract debate about the nature of libertarian communism, there was no discussion of the current situation or the threat of a military coup. The newly formed POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) also advocated workers’ unity, but through the reorganisation of the Workers’ Alliances that had played a key role in the revolutionary movement of 1934. The POUM contrasted the Workers’ Alliance, as an essential element for overcoming capitalism, with the Popular Front, a political alliance subordinated to petty-bourgeois republicanism. At the same time, it insisted on the need for a large revolutionary party, a missing element that doomed the 1934 movement to failure. The new party hoped to win over the most radical sectors of the socialists, especially the youth. The fall of the Federation of Socialist Youth under Stalinist influence in the spring of 1936 dealt a fatal blow to that hope. ...

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— Revoluciana - If I Don't Get Arrested

 

at 8/5/26 6:51am

Author: RevolucianaTitle: If I Don't Get ArrestedDate: 3 August 2026Source: Retrieved on 5 August 2026 from revoluciana.net I could flee, but where would I go? I've spent a lot of time helping others flee, and even left the US for a minute with my family during a particularly harrowing moment under this regime. I certainly don't have any judgement for those who flee. Maybe a little actually, but not for the marginalized. My judgement is reserved for the privileged, those with means and without targets on their backs. The kind that pass as fascists among the fascists. The kind that are afraid of the fascists, but make friends with them, anyway. Shit, I think I'm just describing fascists again. Nine people sitting down for a friendly meal with a fascist? That's just ten fascists. Or however the saying goes. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I got arrested. I made sure that I'm up to date on my hepatitis b and HPV vaccinations just in case. An ace friend of mine takes PrEP as a precaution so that they don't get HIV if they get arrested at a pride celebration or whatever. You think you know what happens to transfeminine people in prison, but you don't, and if I described it to you, it would wreck your day. You already know they basically all get forced into the men's jails and prisons. I've seen statistics that show between 50% and 70% of trans women who have seen the inside of jail or prison cell, for any length of time at all, even if it's just overnight, report having been sexually assaulted during their time there. A lot of time they get put into solitary for months at a time to segregate them from the general population, which is a war crime under international law when done for more than a couple weeks. Not that anyone cares about international law. If you truly want to wreck your day, look up a term called v-coding, but don't say I didn't warn you. So yeah, I guess I don't really wonder what would happen if I get arrested. I already know. Yet, here I am, writing to you, saying fuck fascists and fuck this regime and I'm an anarchist and I'm anti-fascist and trans and whatever. I print this stuff out and make zines and hand deliver it to bookstores and into people's hands at radical and non-radical events alike and I leave them lying around in conspicuous places. Sometimes I put them in little free libraries. After my medical issues last year, I've been trying to get out to more radical events and protests and whatever. Not nearly as many as I'd like yet, but I'm working on it. I can't be quiet. I'm incapable. I'm not the loudest, but I'm loud. I don't want to lead, I want to be part of a chorus of voices yelling against all the injustice that we're forced to witness and experience every day. Don't you want that, too? But so often people are quiet. And I'm still not leading anything in these circumstances when I'm loud because others don't seem ready to join in. I wish they would. It can get lonely being loud. But I'm loud. I'm fortunate that I have friends and community who are loud, too. It's exhausting being loud when you're the only one. You've got to find others. Solidarity matters. Solidarity is everything when it comes to being loud. If you're reading this, you likely care what is going on around us. Are you loud? If not, why? Don't tell me the answer, look inside, and try to be honest with yourself. I can't stop thinking about the Prairieland case. When I first heard about the case, it was in reference to Daniel Sanchez Estrada who got sentenced to 30 years in prison for moving a box of zines. Have you heard about this? Terrorism. They're all charged with terrorism. Primarily for being "members" of anti-fa which isn't even a group, let alone something someone can be a member of. For a box of zines. I won't lie, one cop got shot after the cops started brandishing their weapons at fleeing unarmed protesters, not by Estrada. In any event, the cop who got shot is fine, and it's not even clear who shot the bullet, let alone whether or not it was intended to hit the guy or just intimidate him. But they're all getting imprisoned on terrorism charges. They brought fireworks because it was a noise demonstration. The government says these were evidence of terrorism because they're explosives. They're getting terrorism charges, regardless of whether or not they were even there when it happened, or if they were there but they were just moving a box of zines out of the way. I had to look what zines there were that were presented as evidence. Do you have any idea how many zines there are out there in the world? Titles, authors, decades upon decades? I took a look at the picture they used as evidence. The top zine in the picture I first saw is one that happened to be sitting in the cupholder of my vehicle at that very moment. It spent the entire winter in my coat pocket because I never bothered to take it out. Yesterday, I was reading a transcript of an interview with Autumn Hill who was sentenced to 50 years on terrorism charges in the same case. She went to the protest, which was outside an ICE facility, made some noise, dispersed when she was told to, and left hours before anything happened. They arrested her the next day. 50 years. ...

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— Nikos Maziotis and Pola Roupa - Interview of the prisoners members of Revolutionary Struggle Pola Roupa and Nikos Maziotis to the International Red Help

 

at 8/5/26 1:56am

Author: Nikos Maziotis and Pola RoupaTitle: Interview of the prisoners members of Revolutionary Struggle Pola Roupa and Nikos Maziotis to the International Red HelpDate: 2019Notes: The interview is included in the book-edition of 2019, “Proclamations — Texts of Revolutionary Struggle 2003–2018”. Introduction In 2017 Red Help International sent some (30) questions to the imprisoned members of the anarchist armed group Revolutionary Struggle, Pola Roupa and Nikos Maziotis. These questions are devided in 4 chapters: The 1st under the title “Context and Genesis”, the 2nd “Political and Strategic Project”, the 3rd “History strictly speaking” and the 4th, “Temporary assessment of Revolutionary Struggle and of the movement in Greece”. Through the answers of the comrades, one can understand the historical conditions in which Revolutionary Struggle was created in 2003 and acted until 2017, the social, political and economical conditions of the entire era. Revolutionary Struggle since September of 2003 until January of 2017 carried out 18 attacks-acts against targets of the regime, state and capital. Bombing attacks against courts, police stations, ministries, banks, against the Stock Exchange of Athens, the Bank of Greece-IMF, armed attacks against officers of riot police, attack against the USA embassy in Athens with antitank rocket, attempt against the former minister of Public Order, and an escape attempt (hijacking a helicopter). The first arrests of the comrades happened in 10 April of 2010, exactly a month after Lambros Foundas –a member of Revolutionary Struggle– was killed by gunfiring with the police in a preparatory action of the group. Pola Roupa and Nikos Maziotis who from the first moment took the political responsibility of their participation in Revolutionary Struggle, were temporary imprisoned until 11 October of 2011 because according to the greek law, nobody can remain in prison over 18 months without sentence and in October of 2011 the first trial against the group had just started and they had not been condemned yet. After 9 months while the first trial was in progress, Pola Roupa and Nikos Maziotis with their almost 2 years old son, who was born in prison as in April of 2010 Pola Roupa was 6 months pregnant, went underground to continue the armed struggle. So, in April of 2014, Revolutionary Struggle carried out the attack with a car-bomb with 75 kilos of explosives, against the building of Bank of Greece close to Syntagma square in Athens, where was also located the office of the permanent representative of IMF (International Monetary Foundation) in Athens. The attack was dedicated to comrade Lambros Foundas, who had been killed 4 years ago. Nikos Maziotis was arrested in 16 July 2014 injured after gunfiring with policemen and pursuit. Pola Roupa attempted alone to hijack a helicopter in 21 February of 2016 for the liberation of Nikos Maziotis and other prisoners from Koridallos prison, but she didn’t complete the operation because the pilot was α former police officer and he was armed. So, after a fight inside the cockpit, the pilot landed the helicopter and comrade Roupa succeeded to escape. Finally the “antiterrorist” service with the help of special units arrested Pola in 5 January of 2017. As a newspaper wrote, the capture of Pola Roupa was carried out after provided information. Pola Roupa and Nikos Maziotis were wanted for 1 million euro each since January of 2014. It was the second time that members of Revolutionary Struggle were wanted with a price on their heads. In 2007, the State Department of USA offered 1 million dollars and the greek state 800.000 euro for the capture of the members of the group after the attack with an antitank rocket against the U.S. embassy in Athens. The interview is included in the book-edition of 2019, “Proclamations — Texts of Revolutionary Struggle 2003–2018”. Pola Roupa and Nikos Maziotis have been convicted to life sentence (for the attack against the Bank of Greece and the office of the IMF) and a hundred years for the rest of the attacks of Revolutionary Struggle. After the completion of all courts of appeal, their sentence has been reduced to 20 years in prison. Roupa was released on parole in November 2023 when she completed the 3/5 of her sentence (8 years and 4 months in prison and 4 years work) and Maziotis will be released in September 2026 when he will have completed the total of his sentence (14 years in prison and 6 years work). Interview of the prisoners members of Revolutionary Struggle Pola Roupa and Nikos Maziotis to the International Red Help 1) Context and genesis. From which militant encounters and which political scene was the Revolutionary Struggle project born? Revolutionary Struggle originates from the Greek anarchist/anti-authoritarian political space and more specifically from the more “classical” anarchist tendency, which has references to class and social struggle and social Revolution aimed at the dissolution of capitalism and the state and the creation of a stateless-classless society. Because of our political backgrounds and political education, we believed and still believe that the formation of social and political consciousnesses arises from the alienating relationship between organized authority and society. A relationship imposed as a necessary condition of social existence itself through violence. State power is imposed through violence, coercion, oppression, fear. ...

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— Martin Sostre - Follow the Principles that Won My Freedom

 

at 8/4/26 2:37pm

Author: Martin SostreTitle: Follow the Principles that Won My FreedomDate: 1976Notes: The following speech, “Follow the Principles that Won My Freedom,” was delivered by Sostre in 1976 shortly after his release from prison and offers a message of revolutionary optimism about how collective action can succeed—as it did for him—in freeing political prisoners and building a new egalitarian society. It is a message that feels as urgent today as it did then... “Follow the Same Principles that Won My Freedom” by Martin Sostre is excerpted from I Cannot Submit to Injustices: Collected Works of Martin Sostre, edited by Garrett Felber and published by AK Press, reproduced with permission of Felber and AK Press.Source: Retrieved on August 4, 2026, from inquest.org It is a great pleasure to be here after being in prison for nine years. I was the victim of a frame-up because I fought for human rights and because I had the only bookstore in Buffalo, New York, that was disseminating socialist and political literature—literature dealing with the struggle for Black liberation here in this country, the struggle for Puerto Rican independence, literature against the war in Vietnam, and all progressive literature. That bookstore in Buffalo became a center for persons of conscience, for youths who were seeking guidance, for college students. Naturally, the power structure did not like this, and as a result I was framed. And this is what happened in all of the Black ghettos, especially during the 1960s, and is still happening now. As a political prisoner and a person of conscience, I suffered eleven beatings in solitary confinement. After one of those beatings I was framed by the same guards who assaulted me. They claimed I was the one who jumped the goon squad of seven that assaulted me. This resulted in another conviction and another four years to run consecutively with the savage sentence I was already serving. This is how they operate in this country. They make everything legal. That’s how this country can claim that there aren’t any political prisoners, because they use the law to repress. I don’t have to tell you about all of the scandals. It is in the press even today about the FBI agents who are burglars, the CIA agents who are murderers. All the disclosures show that this whole country—from the chief executive in the White House down to the little corrupt cop on the beat who shakes down drug peddlers and frames them when they don’t pay—this entire system is corrupt, racist, and repressive. As a former political prisoner, I consider Mustafa as well as other political prisoners throughout the world my brothers because I can really identify with political frame-up and repression of persons of conscience who fought for human rights and dignity. And I oppose all regimes who oppress and silence the opposition. But the very fact that I am here now, after being given forty-one years and then four consecutive years on top of that, is proof positive that even the most repressive state can be forced to disgorge its political prisoners and victims of its oppression. Why did they release me after giving me forty-one years and then four years? Certainly they didn’t have a change of heart all of a sudden. My case is the classic case of what can be done to free a political prisoner. The only reason they released me, or were forced to release me, was because of pressure. That is the only thing that repressive governments understand. Massive pressure, using all means necessary. There were about eight defense committees throughout this country that were formed in my behalf. In addition to that, many political groups and individuals joined with my defense committees in picketing and demonstrations, sit-ins, letter-writing campaigns, and petitions. We flooded them with thousands upon thousands of letters. My defense committee went to Albany and picketed Governor Rockefeller right at the state office building. We gave him no rest. Father Dan Berrigan and his crew sat in at [New York] Governor Carey’s office and forced him to have a meeting with them. Amnesty International in Germany, which was the group that adopted my case in that country, sent contingents to the American ambassador demanding my release. In Holland also, the American ambassador was confronted by delegations of persons from Amnesty International demanding that they release Martin Sostre. Placards, posters, that’s the only language they understand. You have to put a fire to their butts. My being here is a victory of the people. Of course, I served nine years, but I had forty-one years and four years consecutive. So actually, I’m not supposed to be here. When they gave me that forty-one years, I was not a kid; I was forty-four years old then. That sentence meant that I would never see daylight again. It was the equivalent of a death sentence. And yet here I am in the struggle, and they know that they have a staunch revolutionary against them because they never succeeded in breaking my spirit despite the eleven beatings, despite the years in solitary confinement, despite the tear gassings, despite being taken out-of-doors in subfreezing weather buck naked to try to destroy my health. And they will do everything in order to break spirits and obtain complete obedience to their repression. That I could never submit to. Not even the threat of death could force me to do that. As a matter of fact, in the combined eight years that I spent in solitary confinement I have lost that fear of death. Because I have been through hell, and I know how to fight the devil. So these are the tactics that we have to use to release Mustafa and all other political prisoners. This is the most repressive country in the world, oppressive on a world scale. It is a colonialist country that still has colonies like Puerto Rico, a country that, along with South Africa, is one of the most racist regimes in the world. It is a country whose very foundations are on slavery and genocide. The slaughter of the Indians, the enslavement and importation of Blacks, who at this very moment are still maintained in segregated communities. And our president has proclaimed that he will try to do everything possible in order to continue the forced segregation of schoolchildren. ...

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As of 8/26/26 10:34am. Last new 8/23/26 3:38pm.