Crooked Bough News Round-up

— ziq - The People Aren't Alright

 

at 10/12/26 4:43am

Author: ziqTitle: The People Aren't AlrightSubtitle: Preserving Anarchy in a Fascist WorldDate: September 21, 2026Source: https://raddle.me/wiki/The_People With authoritarian and fascist parties gaining substantial popular support all across the world, maybe it's time for anarchists to reconsider one of our movement’s most persistent assumptions: that "the people" are, in some latent sense, a revolutionary force waiting to be awakened by true believers. As fascists and other authoritarians outnumber us by practically ten thousand to one in this rapidly collapsing empire, anarchists ought to take a sober look around them and abandon the comforting fiction that we live to serve "the people" and bring about their emancipation. That "the people" yearn for freedom and would stand with us if only we could inspire them with our good deeds and thoughtful theory. The people are not automatically allies of liberation. Mass-society is much more often the social base through which domination reproduces itself. Again and again, when the masses have their privileges threatened, they rally to hierarchy, nationalism, nativism, patriarchy, and obedience, expunging class solidarity in favor of the promise of a higher place on the ladder of whiteness. Anyone with any instinct for self-preservation ought to abandon the fruitless fantasy that our mission under this fascist social order is to educate the masses — to reveal their "true" interests and thereby set them on the path to class consciousness, even as an overwhelming majority of them toil feverishly to bring their fascist despots to power and to wage genocide on the most impoverished souls on the planet. The idea that our zines and memes can compete with billionaires and the 24/7 algorithms that feed billions of people a relentless stream of authoritarianism, fear, and hatred is laughable. I’ve long been rebuked within the milieu for rhetoric deemed too hostile, too alienating, too negative, too likely to frighten away the poor, innocent reactionary elements whose support we are apparently expected to cultivate. The truth is I never cared about "converting" feckless authority-cravers to anarchy. My mission was never to win over every liberal settler, every future landlord, every aspiring bureaucrat, every eager democrat, every left-wing Zionist, every comfortable professional, or every reactionary who might be persuaded to call themselves an anarchist. It was never to assemble the largest possible coalition by sanding down every point of conflict until anarchy became palatable to people invested in the existing order. All I ever cared about was confronting the relationships and institutions through which domination is reproduced, and to foster solidarity with those ready and willing to resist them. The people are not sacred. Their collective will is not inherently virtuous, nor is it beyond criticism. Their democratic "right" to choose fascism is not inviolable. Majorities forge domination much more effectively than the hapless, disconnected few who dare resist it. Anarchists should be ready to confront, contest, and push back against the masses, while understanding how they become vehicles for hierarchy and oppression. Every anarchist is at war with mass-society — not with humanity, but with the social order that turns domination into something ordinary, legitimate, and reproducible. And every anarchist must be prepared to stand against the tide when it inevitably brings tyranny crashing down on us again and again and again. Fascism is no longer rising, it has risen. We are again in a fascist era. We live in fascist society. "The people" are fascists. "The people" are the enemy of everything anarchy stands for. A clear and present danger to the continued existence of anyone who resists the fascist order. Yes, it is tragic that people who are genuinely being squeezed can be persuaded to blame those being squeezed alongside them. When wages stagnate, housing becomes unaffordable, public services buckle, and economic security evaporates — migrants, trans people, disabled people and ethnic minorities become an obvious and convenient target: visible, vulnerable, and lacking the institutional power to fight back. It's tragic, but the people holding the pitchforks are utterly unworthy of your sympathy. The drag queen is visible and within reach; the billionaire's ownership structure is not. The migrant competing for housing is tangible; decades of weakened labor bargaining power are abstract. A politician promising to "take back control" offers an identifiable enemy and an immediate emotional outlet, while confronting concentrated economic power demands a much more difficult analysis. The people are lazy. Yes, the billionaires, the media and the political class are the ones channeling the wrath of the people toward the vulnerable rather than toward the structures and interests that produced those conditions. But that does not absolve the immense number of people who choose to direct their anger at the most marginalized and downtrodden within their reach. They do it because it's easy. Because it feels good to punch down. ...

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— Daphne Lawless - Realism in Revolt

 

at 10/11/26 6:15pm

Author: Daphne LawlessTitle: Realism in RevoltDate: Winter 2026Source: New Politics, Vol. XX, No. 4, Whole Number 80. <www.newpol.org/review/realism-in-revolt> Did the Science Wars Take Place? The Political and Ethical Stakes of Radical Realism By: William Gillis Center for a Stateless Society, 2025{1} I follow William Gillis—veteran anarchist activist and writer, and trained physicist—on Bluesky because he’s funny, and because he makes me think. If you share his burning hatred for fascism, a sneering (remember that word) contempt for establishment liberalism, and deep disgust for Stalinists, “tankies” and other authoritarian Leftists, I’d recommend it. It also helps if you like Star Wars and Star Trek. One reason why I enjoy his work is that he flips a lot of widely held assumptions about anarchist beliefs. For example, the clichéd response to the concept of prison/police abolition is that anarchists (or libertarian communists) must be foolish utopians who think that everyone is deep-down good. On the contrary, Gillis’s closely argued position is that some people are just plain “bad,” due to whatever combination of nature and nurture, but that these “bad” people are precisely the ones who will become cops and judges. Hence, abolition of those structures, and their replacement with informal social incentives based on game theory, is the only way to stop bad people.[1] It’s also fun, when you’re watching liberals discuss why “prison abolition” couldn’t work because the only alternative is lynch mobs, to toss in Gillis’s article on the moral imperative to Kill Your Local Rapist and see what happens.[2] But I’ve always appreciated Gillis’s commitment to science as a concept and, more importantly, as a practice. We live in increasing conditions of “weaponised unreality”[3] where the ascendent form of “postmodern fascism” is built around not Blackshirts fighting in the streets but the creation of an “alternative reality” based on social media bubbles and captured mass-media outlets of the FOX/GB News variety, in which the downwardly mobile masses voluntarily segregate themselves. Expanding from its origins in Christian “creation science” and the tobacco industry, populist science denial has been weaponized over decades to prevent any serious attempt at mitigating climate change—and, more recently, has pushed forward from outrage at COVID-19 restrictions to “antivaxxers” apparently rejecting the germ theory of disease itself. A strict adherence to scientific materialism used to be the common sense of the Marxist movement. In the era of the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions, with the world being turned upside down, the Communist Manifesto spoke enthusiastically about the possibility of “subjection of Nature’s forces.” The only problem was that the tools of science (and the fruits of its successes) were in the hands of the bourgeoisie, who had used it to defeat feudal oppression and were keeping it away from the exploited proletariat. In Ferdinand Lassalle’s famous phrase quoted by Rosa Luxemburg, the key to the golden future was to bring workers and science together.[4] How, then, did we end up in a period where a lot of the radical Left—especially those coming out of the social movements of the 1980s and the 1990s, and the academic currents vaguely described as “postmodernist”—end up critical or even denialist toward science, ending up helplessly swept along by the new populist obscurantism? Gillis’s Did the Science Wars Take Place? attempts to tell the story. Veterans of the Science Wars As Gillis tells it, in the years following World War II, in the developed Western world, the hard sciences (STEM—science, technology, engineering, mathematics) saw increasing patronage from the military-industrial complex, and in reaction, the humanities became increasingly “left-coded.” Gillis brings in the fascinating historical footnote that this is a reversal of how things used to be: Before the second world war, the hard sciences carried relatively low-class associations and were hotbeds of leftism while in contrast the humanities broadly a place of retreat for the remaining aristocratic class or at least their culture and values.… [O]verall the hard sciences carried a particularly pedestrian cultural association closer to a trade school than a dinner party discussing Cicero. The mark of a classical aristocrat (like the brahmin in India’s caste system) is not having to think about actual material reality; that’s left to the help. Moreover, the hard sciences were clearly associated with radicalism—which is defined as attempting to grasp reality at the roots (radix)—whereas the humanities of the time were fixated on conserving culture and warning about the dangers of rapid change—the classic position of reaction. (25) Gillis elsewhere makes an explicit appeal to class by categorizing the “brahmin” academy’s attitude to the STEM disciplines as “janitors” (151). The argument that the hard sciences, as materialistic, should be politically radical should make an obvious kind of sense for anyone coming from the Marxist tradition. As Gillis notes, Albert Einstein was a cosmopolitan socialist, and theoretical physicists were disproportionately targeted by McCarthy’s purges. But this is so different from the consensus discourse of the contemporary radical Left—based in the humanities and social sciences academia for many decades—as to provoke a shock. We might remember, however, that Peter Thiel—billionaire tyrant, doyen of neoreaction, and declared enemy of the Antichrist—has a postgraduate degree in philosophy. ...

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— Center for Especifismo Studies - 104 Steps To Recovery of the Social Vector

 

at 10/11/26 12:34pm

Author: Center for Especifismo StudiesTitle: 104 Steps To Recovery of the Social VectorSource: Retrieved on 10/11/26 from https://especifismostudies.org/the-104-steps/ While these words originally come from Social Anarchism and Organisation by the FARJ, this edited and abridged version represents our organizational understanding of this text which has been essential to the development of the Center for Especifismo Studies and the continuation of Militant Kindergarten. We have composed, numbered, and subtitled the following paragraphs by adapting our “Reading Guide” without page numbers or ellipsis to make for a smoother reading: 1. TWO AXES OF ESPECIFISMO By especifismo, we refer to a conception of anarchist organization that has two fundamental axes: organization and social work/insertion. These two axes are based on the classical concepts of differentiated actuation of anarchism in the social and political levels (Bakuninist concept) and specific anarchist organization (Malatestan concept). 2. ESPECIFISMO IDEOLOGY Synthesis advocates a model of anarchist organization in which are all the anarchists (anarcho-communists, anarchosyndicalists, anarcho-individualists etc.). So, it presents many of the characteristics that we criticize. We recognize that within synthesist organizations there are also serious militants committed to social anarchism, so we do not want the criticisms to seem generalized. Although we never question whether these organizations are anarchist (for us, they all are), they do not, in most cases, converge with our way of conceiving anarchist organization. There are diverse anarchist organizations that do not come out of the especifismo current. So, especifismo implies much more than to advocate anarchist organization. We understand anarchism as an ideology, that is, a “set of ideas, motivations, aspirations, values, a structure or system of concepts that have a direct connection with action – that which we call political practice”. Especifismo advocates an anarchism that, as an ideology, seeks to conceive a model of performance that transforms the society of today into libertarian socialism by means of the social revolution. In this case we seek to differentiate this understanding of anarchism from another, purely abstract and theoretical, which only encourages free thinking, without necessarily conceiving a model of social transformation. Anarchism, thought of only from this model of critical observation of life, offers an aesthetic freedom and endless possibilities. However, if so conceived, it does not offer real possibilities of social transformation, since it is not put into practice, into action. It does not have the political practice that seeks the final objectives. 3. ORGANIZATION IS ESSENTIAL In the especifismo model there is necessarily this differentiation between the political and social levels of activity. So, the specific anarchist organization is an organization of anarchists that group themselves together at the political and ideological level and that carry out their main activity at the social level, which is broader, aiming to be the ferment of struggle. When we conceive this separation between the social and political level we do not mean to say by this that we wish to be in front of the social movements, nor that the political level has any hierarchy or domination in relation to the social level. In anarchism, broadly speaking, this division between the social and political levels is not accepted by all the currents, which understand the anarchist organization in a diffuse manner, it being able to be a social movement, an organization, an affinity group, a study group, a community, a co-operative etc. There are anarchist currents that support “anti-organizational” or even spontaneist positions and believe that any form of organization is authoritarian or averse to anarchism. Some anarchist individuals that defend these points of view and who are willing to do social work cannot deal with the authoritarian forces and, without the proper organization, end up being laborers and “sleeves” for authoritarian projects or they leave frustrated because they cannot obtain spaces in social movements. These and other attempts to ideologize social movements, in our understanding, weaken both the social movements – which no longer operate around concrete issues like land, housing, employment etc. – as well as anarchism itself, since it does not allow for the deepening of ideological struggles, which occur in the midst of the social movement. It also weakens, since the goal of these anarchists to turn all the militants of the social movements into anarchists is impossible, unless they significantly reduce and weaken the movements. In this way, or even on seeing that it is natural to find people of different ideologies in social movements that will never be anarchists, these anarchists get frustrated, and often shy away from struggles. As a consequence, this anarchism is often confined to itself. 4. CLASS STRUGGLE For us, anarchism was born among the people and that’s where it should be, taking a clear position in favor of the exploited classes that are in permanent conflict in the class struggle. So, when we talk about “where to sow the seeds of anarchism”, for us it is clear that it has to be within the class struggle; in the spaces in which the contradictions of capitalism are most evident. There are anarchists that do not support this class struggle bias of anarchism and, what is worse, there are those that accuse it of acting like trying to be a savior or of wanting “to apologize for the poor”. Denying the class struggle, most of these anarchists believe that as the classic definition of bourgeois and proletarian classes does not take today’s society into account, then one could say that classes no longer exist; or that this would be an anachronistic concept. We fundamentally disagree with these positions and believe that, regardless of how we define classes – whether we put more or less emphasis on the economic character etc. – it is undeniable that there are contexts and circumstances in which some people suffer more than others from the effects of capitalism. And it is in these contexts and these circumstances that we want to prioritize our work. When we seek to apply anarchism to the class struggle, we assert what we call social work, and which we defined earlier as “the activity that the anarchist organization performs in the midst of the class struggle, causing anarchism to interact with the exploited classes”. As we also said, for us, social work should be the main activity of the specific anarchist organization. We argue that, through social work, the anarchist organization should seek social insertion, “the process of influencing social movements through anarchist practice”. ...

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— Kevin Tucker - The Ghosts Knocking At My Door

 

at 10/11/26 7:32am

Author: Kevin TuckerTitle: The Ghosts Knocking At My DoorSubtitle: An Excerpt from the book: What is to Be UndoneDate: 2026Notes: Originally published by Bread and Roses Press. For Wildness and Anarchy Gathered Remains Cull of Personality What is to be Undone Dedicated to: Klee Benally, Fischer Jex, Thea Cassidy, Dora McGrath, the Missing and Murdered Women, Girls, Queer, Trans and 2-Spirits, and all those lost to thisdying civilization. Free Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan and the Congo. To the death of all colonizers and the destruction of the megamachine. © 2026, Kevin Tucker Reproduction or usage of any contents by any law enforcement, government agencies, or bootlickers will be acted upon. Suck it, douche bags. Anti-authoritarians & mutual aid projects: please reproduce and distribute widely.Source: Retrieved on October 11, 2026 from https://www.blackandgreenpress.org/ghosts The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat. James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work Raise your hand, bite your tongue Conversation is over and done We let ‘em out, we let ‘em in We’ll let ‘em know when it’s the tipping point, the tipping point Tears for Fears, The Tipping Point Author’s note: This is a section of my book, What is to Be Undone. And it is not necessarily easy reading. The book has a singular focus: we face an impossible moment in this global, dying civilization. In the violent fits of fascistic might, we see the old colonial apparatus showing itself in full light. For many of those held captive by it, the reality of its systemic brutality has been kept at bay. And for the rest, that brutality has been a lived experience. The veneer is quickly fading, and the costs of this technological nightmare are exponentially impossible. We face a world where climate instability has shaken every facet of life as our species has known it. Everywhere, the consequences of this Empire flood our lives, and that will only continue. The point is this: civilization is dying, but we don’t need to share its fate. It is never too late to fight the Leviathan. And I don’t say this in a way to instill false hope or naivety: there is no guarantee we survive this. That is all the more reason to fight. How the book unfolds is meant to identify the falsehoods civilization is built upon: to lay waste to ideas that History has led the victor by divine right. Civilization is a willingness to brutality, and it has advanced, not by ingenuity, but by opportunism and cruelty. This chapter is a plea to understand how deeply civilization’s narratives burrow, showing how vital it is to divest from this horror by facing our own. The path of the book is a series of challenges to the way we view and interact with this world, culminating in a plea to understand that the fires have come for this Empire, and they inevitably will again. We need to understand what we face, because all life depends upon it. By dragging it into the light, we free ourselves to act in kind. This section draws me in as a character because it had to. I did not intend for that to be the case, but it came out this way. As such, there are content warnings for triggering sections. If necessary, please heed them. I’ve been struggling to write this. I really have. I keep asking myself why, but it’s because I’m dancing around it all. I know why. What I had planned to write and what I need to write are two different things. There are many aspects about this book, in particular, that kind of hedge me out of my own comfort zone. There is no doubt that’s important, especially when the book is ultimately about seeing civilization and its realities from literally any other perspective than that which civilization sells us. I know how hard that can be. Because these things unfold infinitely, don’t they? We’re moving from the artificial safety of preordained boundaries. We want to believe that there’s an adult in the room, for all the horrors that civilization can throw at the world. We want to believe that there’s a bottom for how much evil individuals and organizations are capable of unleashing. The truth is that there isn’t. You and I might have boundaries and limits, but those that seek power and control just do not have those things. You see, civilization didn’t invent horror. It didn’t invent the capability of doing terrible things to other living beings. It didn’t invent cruelty. Those things all existed. To a large degree, egalitarian societies function because they saw this from the outset. They don’t hide from cruelty. They make tales of it. They put energy into conflict resolution. They dealt with these things before they could become endemic. They were capable of having hard conversations, of doing hard things. And all the better for it. What civilization did, stretching back into the origins of domestication, was different. It rewarded cruelty. It took nightmares and gave them forms. It birthed institutions of barbarity. Civilization gave the tools of abuse, and coerced a social order which granted power to abusers. Every single step of the way, the worst things imaginable were empowered and encouraged. It took time. It took atrocities. It took the tiering of society, and the suppression of many at the hand of the increasingly fewer. Every step, it just gets worse, and it grows larger. Then it spreads, by force. It conquers. It colonizes. It steals what it needs to grow. It becomes the war machine. It becomes the police. They build the fortress, and all of its walls have two sides. It exports its brutality. It imports its spoils of war. It standardizes and compartmentalizes itself. It becomes industrialized. Capitalists create a measure for it. Socialists respond in kind. Of all the possible routes life could take, we end here every time. Not because it was inevitable, but because no amount of hindsight will change the fact that we live in a world haunted by the means of its own extermination, thousands of times over. And every single threat was constructed from within it. ...

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— Hein Htet Kyaw - On the Question of Ethno-Nationalist Burmese Federal State

 

at 10/11/26 7:20am

Author: Hein Htet KyawTitle: On the Question of Ethno-Nationalist Burmese Federal StateSubtitle: In Favor of Geographical Multicultural FederalismDate: 10 Oct 2026Notes: English Version of https://sea.theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hein-htet-kyaw-on-burma-ethnostate?__language=enSource: redandblackanarchists.com.au Regarding "Bamar State" Today, the political and federalist demand for a "Bamar State" has become a preliminary political and federal roadmap for a third-way coalition outside the NLD/NUG factions. Why is a "Bamar State" Needed? The political and federal demand for a "Bamar State" has emerged due to several reasons. In the article "The Eight-State Principle Must Be Fundamental" published in the May 2022 issue of New Society Journal (Vol. 3, No. 10), the author Lun Nway Nyein from Democratic Party for a New Society wrote: · "It is completely unacceptable for any single ethnic group to hold disproportionate rights or powers under any pretext. To be precise, it is unacceptable that the Bamar ethnic group has taken 7 units while other ethnic groups have taken less." Similarly, quoting an interview on Federal FM titled "Why a Bamar State Should Exist" with Maung Saungkha, commander of the Bamar People's Liberation Army (BPLA): To establish an equal state-structure, a Bamar State must be included. This will foster an understanding of ethnic fraternity between Bamar and non-Bamar groups. The term "Pyi-ma" (Mainland) should no longer be used as it implies greater importance; instead, it should simply be called the "Bamar region." Thus, I understand the political and federal demand for a "Bamar State" as an effort by other ethnic minority groups to check the political overreach and excess federal units claimed by successive rulers—from U Nu to U Ne Win, down to present-day leaders—who claimed to represent the majority Bamar ethnic group. At the same time, when discussing the federal structure of the state alongside the "Bamar State," we can observe ongoing debates over whether the design should be purely ethnic-based, geographic-based, or an ethno-geographic hybrid model. In an excerpt from Essential Interim Constitution in 2022 (Part 10) broadcast by NST, U Aung Htoo, an influential intellectual regarding the law (especially the constitutional laws) and the founder of the Legal Aid Network stated: “States flying a nationalist flag should be designated as "National States." “New states can be formed if other existing states accept them (e.g., Kachin, Shan).” “States inhabited by a diverse mix of different ethnic groups should be designated as ‘Multi-National States’ (e.g., Yangon Region).” In a September 21, 2022 interview with CNI News, Saya Than Soe Naing, a former member of Communist Party of Burma who currently is a heterodox political commentator remarked: · "Our country cannot be organized purely along ethnic lines, nor can it easily be divided purely by geography. We need to consider both factors together." The Historical Concept of a "Bamar State" To trace the concept of a "Bamar State" back through history, we must start with the Eight-State Shan Federal Proposal. Around 1960, when the Shan Proposal was first presented to the public, U Tin Aye, a lecturer at the Yangon University Translation Department, was among its key proponents. I also recall reading from past interviews that in 2013, Dr. Aye Maung, chairperson of the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, discussed the eight-state concept at the Taunggyi Conference of the Nationalities Brotherhood Federation (NBF) in Shan State. Furthermore, the concept of a "Bamar State" was reportedly deliberated during the first session of the Union Peace Conference held in Naypyidaw in 2016 (pro-military agenda). "Bamar State and the Eight-State Model" In the article "The Eight-State Principle Must Be Fundamental" in the May 2022 issue of New Society Journal (Vol. 3, No. 10), author Lun Nway Nyein wrote: · "No ethnic group should hold excessive rights, power, or territorial units, whether formally or substantively. The Bamar ethnic group must take a single Bamar State, just like the other ethnic nationalities. This is what it means to base our system on the Eight-State principle." Similarly, Dr. Aye Maung, chairperson of the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, once remarked regarding the Eight-State Model: · "To shape a genuine Union, the Amyotha Hluttaw (House of Nationalities) must function as an Ethnic Chamber. The seven administrative divisions should be merged into a single Mainland State." Unpacking Bamar Chauvinism We can approach majority Bamar oppression through three distinct lenses: 1. State-Based Bamar Oppression This is straightforward. Successive military leaders who seized state power—from U Ne Win to U Than Shwe—forcefully claimed to represent the Bamar majority through the barrel of a gun. Consequently, Bamar people themselves have struggled under the banner of the pro-democracy movement to reclaim their representation from this military-bureaucratic apparatus. From this perspective, the genocides, atrocities, and human rights violations committed by consecutive military dictatorships were not carried out by the Bamar people, but rather by a military-bureaucratic class operating under the label of "Bamar," while the Bamar population itself was oppressed, suffered violence, and resisted. ...

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— Jeff Shantz - Speed Kills

 

at 10/8/26 11:26pm

Author: Jeff ShantzTitle: Speed KillsSubtitle: Snuff Capitalist AccelerationDate: 1996, FallSource: Scanned from Anarcho-Syndicalist Review #95, Fall 2026 Whether we like it or not, capital is accelerationist. Speed-up is built right into the very engine of capitalism. Capital’s drive for accumulation, in competition with other capital for profit, means that it must always go faster, must always accelerate exploitation and value extraction. This is the drive behind the ceaseless, permanent, push for technological advance, from motors to assembly lines to robots to computers, to AI, and beyond. Speed is the means by which capital beats its competitors in extracting value. More surplus value in an ever-shorter period of time. Any worker knows the tyranny of the clock in the capitalist workplace. Marx suggests that this surplus value extraction is either absolute, the lengthening of the working say, so we work longer beyond the point that we produce the value equivalent to our wages or relative, narrowing the time it takes us to produce the equivalent of our wages. Relative surplus value is the logic of the speed up—using technology to get us producing more and faster. Both forms of extraction, though, dominate the worker’s lifetime. Denying us rest, breaks, mealtimes, or even bathroom breaks. Stealing our life times— time away from family, from loved ones, from ourselves. Speed also, significantly, overcomes obstacles—first and foremost among them the slowness built into human labor by the physical and mental limits and frailties of our bodies. Technological acceleration is therefore about overcoming the human element in labor. It is about controlling us too, taking initiative away from us. Reducing and then replacing our numbers, and our capacities to resist or control the labor process. Fundamentally it is about rendering our human labor irrelevant, while doing the same to the embodiment of that labor itself—us. Capital has used speed to overcome the limitations posed by workers on value extraction and accumulation. But under current and emerging conditions of accelerating electronicization (AI and its ilk are exemplars), capital is accelerating, not with workers, but without us. The working class becomes an obstacle to be overcome, not only at work but increasingly outside of work. The living bodies of the working class slow down the circuits of capital in distribution (consumption) as well as in production. Capital moves quickly from stealing our life times to stealing our life itself. The elimination of jobs at the workplace now coincides with the elimination of former workers outside the workplace under snuff capitalism. And this elimination too must be done at accelerating rates. Time, as always, is money from capital’s perspective. From Social Services to Snuff Services Those expelled from production and (simultaneously) from consumption are too costly for capital, too much of an obstacle to accumulation. As capital becomes more desperate it increasingly sees any supports that might sustain the unemployed, such as welfare, unemployment insurance, social housing, health care, as a transfer of wealth by the state away from capital and to the unproductive and unnecessary. They are, from capital’s perspective, expendable. They must be eliminated. This is the impetus, and organizing principle, of snuff capitalism. Like production and consumption themselves, this elimination must be done quickly, at accelerating speeds. Every day the unneeded are kept around is an impediment to accumulation, a drain on capital. This elimination must at least keep pace with the elimination of jobs, of workers from work, of consumers from consumption. Time, as always for capital, is money. First and foremost. This is driving expansion of and innovation in snuff industries, innovation and expansion of murder infrastructures, innovation and transformation of capital’s states from neoliberal tools (of crisis) to democidal weapons (of extermination). This is made to happen through the dual spheres of the state as usual, through law (legality) and force (police). Increasingly it will happen through what were once called social services—health care as assisted suicide and coercive detention, social assistance as death camp labor and medical experimentation. One focus of democidal states has been the removal of laws and regulations that would impede capital or slow its circulation, such as environmental or workplace protections. While writing this piece the US Supreme Court issued a decision protecting Bayer from lawsuits over cancer related to glyphosate, the active ingredient in the company’s Roundup weedkiller. Ominously, it protects capital from having to warn about deadly ingredients in their products. Why worry about warnings when death is the point? Snuff capital cannot even wait for people to die before treating them as if they are dead—killing them legislatively. The same month it was learned that the Trump administration had plans to falsely declare 2.7 million people dead as part of the government’s mass deportation efforts. According to a whistle blower, the White House planned to have people’s names and Social Security numbers added to the Death Master File which tracks when a person has died in order to stop government benefits. ...

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— Gary Dean Jaworski - Pitirim A. Sorokin’s Sociological Anarchism

 

at 10/8/26 11:22pm

Author: Gary Dean JaworskiTitle: Pitirim A. Sorokin’s Sociological AnarchismDate: 1993Notes: Paper presented at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, Arlington, Virginia, April 1992. The author gratefully acknowledges the advice of Robert K. Merton, Lewis A. Coser and two anonymous reviewers for this journal.Source: journals.sagepub.com. History of the Human Sciences, 1993, Vol. 6 No. 3 © 1993 SAGE (London, Newbury Park and New Delhi) pp. 61–77. doi: 095269519300600304 Introduction Pitirim A. Sorokin (1889–1968) was a Russian emigre, an internationally renowned sociologist, the first chairman of the Department of Sociology at Harvard University, a president of the American Sociological Association, among many other honors, and a gadfly to the discipline of sociology (Sorokin, 1950a, 1963a, 1963b). Robin M. Williams, Jr (1980 : 103), a former student of Sorokin’s at Harvard, called his teacher a sui generis thinker and a man who thinks otherwise. He was a thinker who, as Nietzsche might have said, was ‘out of season’ with the discipline with which he identified. Sorokin was a lone scholar during the ascendancy of team research (cf. Merton, 1959), a pessimist during a period of postwar optimism, an antipositivist during the reign of positivism, an internationalist during the rise of American sociological hegemony, an advocate of cyclical theories of change while the contrasting view of liberal progressivism prevailed, and a grand theorist during a period of skepticism and hostility toward such theories. But times change. At present, when there is a renewed appreciation for grand theory (e.g. Skinner, 1985), when there is a return to cyclical theories of change (e.g. Kennedy, 1987), when there is a renewed interest in altruism (Piliavin and Chamg, 1990), and when, with the evident conclusion of the cold war and collapse of state communism, there is a revived interest in global harmony (see Goldfarb, 1989), the time is ripe for a re-examination of Sorokin’s work. The challenge of this undertaking has been accepted by scholars both here and abroad. Not only is a Russian scholar writing Sorokin’s comprehensive intellectual biography,[1] but in the United States Barry Johnston (1986, 1987, 1991) continues his efforts to elucidate Sorokin’s life and work. The present essay contributes in a modest way to this re-examination. It does not provide an analysis of Sorokin’s work in its entirety, which, given the extensiveness of his output, would be a monumental task (e.g. Cowell, 1952). Rather, the present study investigates an important but neglected strain in Sorokin’s oeuvre, the anarchistic dimension of his work. With few exceptions, such as Tiryakian’s (1968) encyclopedia article on Sorokin, most studies fail to mention Sorokin’s links to the anarchist tradition. Yet, my recent survey of Sorokin’s published writings and unpublished correspondence demonstrates the centrality of this tradition to his works.[2] A re-examination of his writings along these lines is long overdue. In what follows I first establish the pertinence of this line of thought to an understanding of Sorokin’s work and, second, explore the ethical project of Sorokin’s writings and reveal its roots in ethical anarchism. In the conclusion, I draw implications for future Sorokin studies and for contemporary theorizing. Sorokin as ‘Conservative, Christian Anarchist’ Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin was born in a rural village in the north of Russia in 1889. The beauty of the terrain, its pristine rivers and lakes, vast forests and flowery meadows, provided an aesthetic counterpoint to the simple but harsh conditions of life. Sorokin’s mother died when he was about 3 years old, and his father, an itinerant artisan, and a loving man when he was sober, became depressed and violent during his occasional alcoholic binges. Leaving home to escape their father’s domination and wrath, Pitirim Alexandrovich and his older brother moved from village to village while earning their living in their father’s trade, as gilders of religious icons and other cult objects (Sorokin, 1963b: 4–7). Sorokin’s background in the village communities of northern Russia at the turn of the century provided fertile ground for developing sensibilities favorable to the anarchist tradition in at least two respects. First, the Russian anarchist literature, such as the writings of Peter Kropotkin, was consistent with the rural experience and homespun political ideas of the peasants and local artisans, such as their vigorous individualism, their preference for local autonomy, and their commitment to communal ownership of land. A receptiveness to the anarchist literature was based, in no small measure, on the fact that those writings systematically expressed the relatively inchoate ideas and sentiments voiced by the peasants.[3] Second, in the early years of the 20th century, revolutionaries from the rival political parties — Social Revolutionaries, Social Democrats, Anarchists, among others — went directly to the peasantry to propagandize, recruit support and spark revolution (Perrie, 1990). These newer revolutionaries were added to the older radicals of the late 19th century who had settled in remote villages as country doctors, teachers and artisans (Venturi, 1960; Walicki, 1989: 88–107). Networks of revolutionaries of many stripes were in place, then, to shape the thoughts and sensibilities of the relatively insular peasantry. It was contact with representatives of the various political parties, along with the influence of crystallizing events such as the 1904 Russian-Japanese War and the 1905 Russian revolution, which shaped Sorokin’s early political views and led him to join the ranks of the anti-tsarist revolutionaries (Sorokin, 1963b: 21). At the age of 14, while enrolled in the Khrenovo Teachers’ School, Sorokin travelled throughout the town and nearby villages preaching revolutionary ideas to the peasants, the students and the local textile-factory workers. ...

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— Anarcho-Syndicalist Review editors - So much peace

 

at 10/8/26 10:59pm

Author: Anarcho-Syndicalist Review editorsTitle: So much peaceSubtitle: EditorialDate: 2026, SummerSource: Scanned from Anarcho-Syndicalist Review #94, Summer, 2026 US advisors participating in military raids in Ecuador. Nearly 200 fishermen (some of whom may have moonlighted as smugglers) murdered in the waters off the Venezuelan coast. Dozens dead in U.S. concentration camps—some murdered by guards, others by withholding medical care. (ICE confiscated the body of a person killed in one incident, refusing to release it to the local coroner because he ruled that the last corpse he received was the victim of murder by ICE guards.) A Quisling regime installed in Venezuela under US military supervision. Bombs raining down in Gaza, Iran and Lebanon. At least three U.S. citizens shot dead in the streets this year by government thugs. With all this peace breaking out around the world, Trump surely has proved that he’s every bit as worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize as Henry Kissinger was. The U.S. has by far the largest military in the world, and one which has for many, many years rained down terror on hospitals, schools, and also some brutal thugs. It deliberately murders people, including several citizens. It routinely commits war crimes, and is now threatening new war crimes on a scale not seen since World War II. It endangers not only the rest of the world, but as can be clearly seen in the current U.S.-Israel war on Iran and Lebanon, inflicts serious harm on workers in the United States as well. If politicians did not have this enormous killing machine at their disposal they could not inflict this terrorism regardless of their homicidal tendencies. We can’t afford this global rain of death. It undermines the security of everyone on the planet.

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— Samuel Edward Konkin III - An Agorist Primer

 

at 10/8/26 6:45pm

Author: Samuel Edward Konkin IIITitle: An Agorist PrimerDate: 2008Notes: * If this area of study appeals to you, by all means go to the source: Human Action by Ludwig Von Mises. You’ll find all the terms starred herein are derived and defined in detail.Source: Retrieved on 2026-10-08 from https://archive.org/stream/SEK3_AnAgoristPrimer/An_Agorist_Primer_by_SEK3_djvu.txt DEDICATION This book is dedicated to Teny Rule Fisher, Thelma Rule, and John Fragnito, without whom this book would not have happened. Most of all, though, this book is dedicated to my son, Samuel Edward Konkin IV, to whom I offer this blueprint for liberty as his legacy. PREFACE Ideas evolve and grow. At some point, an idea connects with so many other concepts that it becomes central to a way of thinking — an ideology. At some state of an ideology’s life, between its birth and death, it reaches a level of maturity such that someone is motivated to divert his efforts from expanding it outward and upward and begins to look downward. That is, the theoretician pauses to pass on the knowledge to those not specializing in theoretical development. Perhaps the theoretician is reminded for whom he developed the ideology in the first place. Agorism is a way of thinking about the world around you, a method of understanding why things work the way they do, how they do, and how they can be dealt with — how you can deal with them Agorism was meant to improve the lot of everyone, not a chosen elite or unwashed underclass. Hence an introductory work that presents ideas without going through the long intellectual history and conflict of competing ideas that produced them. As the creator of agorism, it is most incumbent on me first to attempt to reduce it to basic intelligibility. I hope my efforts find some small reward. — Samuel Edward Konkin III PUBLISHER’S NOTE Samuel Edward Konkin III wrote An Agorist Primer in 1986. A small number of Xerox copies were circulated to investors in the hope that they would finance the publication of a high-quality, hardcover edition. Though some money was raised, it proved insufficient to produce the book. Even though the photocopies bore text reading “First Edition”, it was meant to refer to the proposed hardback edition. This, then — the book you hold in your hands — is the true first edition as SEK3 intended it. An effort has been made to update the book in order to keep it relevant, though none of the timeless — and timely — agorist philosophy has been altered. Such archaic terms as “videotapes” and “cassettes” have been replaced by “DVDs” and “downloads”. Information about major wars since 1986 have been added, staying — we hope — in the spirit of SEK3’s other analyses. Notice has been taken of the collapse of Communism, brought about in no small part by Counter-Economics. Any mistakes, failures to catch archaisms, or errors of analysis added to the original text are entirely the fault of the current editor and not of the late author. — V.K. INTRODUCTION Agorism can be defined simply: it is thought and action consistent with freedom.The moment one deals with “thinking,” “acting,” “consistency,” and especially “freedom,” things get more and more complex. Hold on to the virtue of consistency. The refusal to compromise, to deceive oneself, to “sell out” or to “be realistic” created agorism. Consider “being realistic.” This usually implies that theory is fine for thinking, but in practice one must deal with reality. Agorists believe that any theory which does not describe reality is either useless or a deliberate attempt by intellectuals to defraud non-specialists. When someone urges you to be realistic, may you pick an agorist book to get the best description you can find of how agorism actually works. If you want to find books and articles that will “fake reality” for wishes, whims, fears, and spite, look for labels such as “Liberal,” “Conservative,” “Socialist,” “Communist,” “Fascist,” or — worst of all — “middle of the road” and “moderate.” Reality knows no moderation; it is — all the way. One way of thinking came close to agorism and is fairly well-known today; we will deal with Libertarianism later in some detail. An ideology of Liberty, it had to choose at one point between consistency with reality and being the “politics of liberty.” It chose the latter: the contradiction of seeking political power over others to eliminate political power over others. Those who continued to seek liberty consistently and without the practical contradiction of Libertarians became agorists. This is a second, historical definition for you. Agorism is an ideology, then, but it is also a scientific and definitely materialist way of thinking. It is not a religious view — save that it believes absolute freedom to be moral — nor does it wish to displace anyone’s religious views — unless they lead to slavery. Agorism wants no “true believers” in the sense of blind followers. Like any scientifically based mode of thought, it will evolve as does our understanding of reality. One who has faith in something proven false that was once a tenet of agorism is not an agorist. Reality is our standard. Nature is our lawgiver. In a general sense, agorism is scientific in that it bases itself on verifiable observations about reality. But it is scientific in a specific sense as well. It may be hard for chemists, physicists, and engineers to believe that a “hard science” was ever developed in fields such as economics and political science; but the discovery of this science by me — a hard-bitten theoretical chemist, cynical of “soft” science — led eventually through libertarianism to agorism. ...

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— Jeff Shantz - From Climate Crisis to Climate Culling

 

at 10/8/26 6:21pm

Author: Jeff ShantzTitle: From Climate Crisis to Climate CullingSubtitle: Dis-Ecologies of Snuff CapitalDate: 1996, SummerSource: Scanned from Anarcho-Syndicalist Review #94, Summer, 2026 We have entered a period which I have taken to calling snuff capitalism—accumulation by elimination. Capital has moved past the mere accumulation by dispossession that David Harvey has written about extensively. Beyond dispossession, which Harvey argues clears routes for capital circulation, capital has moved to eliminate anything and everything that might pose a drain on accumulation (anything that might “waste” a penny for capital). This includes even minimal social spending that might support poor and unemployed working-class people, such as social housing, unemployment benefits, welfare, health care, etc. Increasingly it involves eliminating the poor and unemployed themselves—those deemed by capital to be useless to production or consumption —as through assisted suicide and elimination of supports for drug users (safe supply, harm reduction) or unhoused people such that the expected outcome is most likely death. It can include removal of health and safety protections for workers (in industries where capital believes those workers can be readily replaced). War, of course, remains a key means for capital to kill people. Capitalist eliminationism also includes active pursuit of ecocide. This is occurring through the elimination of regulations on industry, opening previously protected natural spaces for extraction, conversion of land into pesticide wastelands for industrial farming, mining of the seas and oceans, etc. We see numerous examples, such as the Trump regime’s plans to open pristine areas for oil drilling, as in the Arctic. Perversely, the United States government has formed a committee that has the power to decide when extinction is acceptable. The Endangered Species Committee—colloquially known as the God Squad—was created under the Endangered Species Act. It can exempt projects from law when protecting a species interferes with major economic interests. After three decades without meeting, the committee recently approved drilling in the Gulf of Mexico that could lead to extinction of the critically endangered Rice’s whale (only 51 of which are still alive). Ecocidal eliminationism also includes new wars and occupations. The recently launched Israel-US war on Iran is causing immense ecological crises in addition to the thousands of people murdered in the imperialist assault. I will address this in detail in an upcoming article. Climate crises provide opportunities for eliminationism on mass scales at accelerated pace. For capital, it is a low-cost way for clearing away human and natural obstacles to accumulation. And it allows them to do so in a way that permits them to make claims of blamelessness (as opposed to wars for example). Most of the people and places most severely impacted by climate crises are poor— excluded from production and consumption for capital by regimes of enforced scarcity. While reasonable people would view this as an atrocity, and reason to more quickly address climate destruction, for capital it is a boon—and reason to allow, or even encourage, climate crises to occur, and occur more precipitously. Entire regions and areas are designated for culling. Mike Davis refers to national sacrifice zones, “using this term to think about the ecological disaster to which certain regions of the US have been relegated, since neither these spaces nor their inhabitants are considered to be productive elements of the capitalist system.” (Sayak Valencia, 2018, Gore Capitalism. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), p. 182) Accelerating Past the Point... There are more and more indications that some of the world’s tipping points, such as drastic changes to ocean currents, could be breached in a future that is no longer very distant. Today’s rate of global warming—more than 1.3 degrees C (2.3 degrees F) in only the last hundred years—is already completely unprecedented in human history. And it is only getting worse. Global warming is accelerating, going from 1.4 to 1.6 degrees C in 2023 to two degrees C and rising by the 2030s. It could blow past two degrees before the end of the century. New research published in March 2026 in Geophysical Research Letters, finds that the rate of global warming has accelerated since 2015, even after accounting for other phenomena such as volcanic eruptions, solar radiation and natural variability, “with faster warming over the last 10+ years than during any previous decade.” Wall Street analysts are already anticipating a world that has warmed at least 3 degrees, an eventuality that would render parts of the world uninhabitable and cause widespread economic devastation. Most aspects of our current society, from logistics to infrastructure to food systems, are unsuited to withstand such shocks. But that devastation, ecological and economic, would of course be borne almost entirely by the poor working class and peasantry. Snuff capital is not only fine with this, it is planning for it. Capital envisions its own flourishing in a world of protected enclaves with robots for labor, military protections, and circulation among those who remain with enough wealth to purchase. ...

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— Mark A. Sullivan - An Anarchist View of the Land Problem

 

at 10/8/26 5:55pm

Author: Mark A. SullivanTitle: An Anarchist View of the Land ProblemDate: 1984–85Notes: Originally published in the The Storm! (Issue 14/15 – 1984/’85)Source: Retrieved 10/08/2026 from cooperative-individualism.org The land problem is one of apparent scarcity: The supply of land appears to be insufficient to meet the demand. Many individuals who seek access to land — whether in rural or urban areas — find land values (rents and prices) too high. This apparent scarcity is an illusion — an illusion created and perpetuated by the state. The state creates the illusion of land-scarcity by: (1) TAKING land away from some people (like Native Americans, small-scale farmers, and low-income inner-city dwellers); (2) creating and protecting TITLES TO ABSENTEE-OWNERSHIP over land, which it grants to non-using individuals and legal (i.e., fictitious) “persons” or corporate “entities”; and (3) levying compulsory tribute or TAXES upon the use of the land. All these methods tend to transfer control of land away from those without sufficient money (i.e., power) to hold on to it. To these, then, we may add (4) the monopolization of money, the means of credit and exchange: the current legal-tender/banking scam. If you do not have enough money to buy land (for a house, business, etc.) you must either borrow some at exorbitant rates of interest, or pay for the mere USE Of land — i.e., RENT. Usually the poor, who cannot get credit approval from the banks or afford high interest rates, pay rent all their lives only to be thrown out of their homes at the whim of landlords and the so-called “market” — with the state, of course, upholding the landlords by force if necessary. The killing of Eleanor Bumpers clearly illustrates the function of “police protection” in a confrontation between landlord and tenant. Titles to absentee-landownership allow for the non-using title-owner to collect monopoly rents from the non-owning users. (A building-owner who does not own the land must collect enough in building-rent to pay the land-rent — thus acting as a “middleman” in the process.) Absentee-owners can also speculate and hold their land out of use while they wait for someone to come along willing and able to pay a monopoly rent for use, or a monopoly price for title. Taxation and monopoly interest rates penalize those who would put their land to more efficient use. Thus they prevent land from being used to accommodate larger numbers of people. This can be seen in cities with slums and acute housing shortages. In both urban and rural area poorer “marginal” land is thus forced out of use, raising monopoly rents and prices on other land, encouraging land speculation, raising the costs (thus prices) of commodities, and disemploying workers and lowering wages. Kent, interest, and taxation are Monopoly tributes paid by the user of land to non-users who have legal claims upon a percentage of the wealth produced by the user. The title of the absentee-landowner is a LICENSE to collect tribute as a sub-monopoly granted by the supreme monopoly of tribute over the land, the government, or more exactly: the state. And the state is nothing but a group of people who have got away with CLAIMING a “right” or mandate from “the people” to exercise force over everyone within certain geographic boundaries. The sub-monopoly which the state grants to absentee-landowners (and similar privileges to others) is protected or paid for out of the taxes collected from land-users (i.e., workers or producers). Thus folks are paying the state to protect their-own exploiters! Naturally, in the irony of the problem lies its ultimate solution. One false solution — because only a half solution — to the land problem is proposed by many “free market” libertarians who advocate abolishing taxation while leaving monopoly titles to absentee--landownership intact. Some even suggest these titles should be made virtually absolute. They regard the state as interfering with land titles — not creating them. Of course, one may ask how the state is to protect these titles, if taxation is abolished — or even greatly reduced? The great amount of taxes needed to fund “welfare” benefits are spent to protect absentee-landownership and other privileges. “Welfare” is but a way to take care of the dispossessed — as compensation and to quell dissatisfaction which could otherwise lead to violence, expropriation, even revolution. Other market libertarians do acknowledge the role played by the state, historically, in granting monopoly land titles to a favored few. Absolute absentee-landownership is only legitimate, to these libertarians, if based upon “first come, first served.” The first person to use a piece of “virgin land” can claim a “natural right” to own it — used or unused — in perpetuity. Libertarians such as Murray Rothbard have called this the “homestead” principle. I call it the virgin theory of property. (it is similar to the treatment partriarchal societies have imposed upon women: a woman should preserve her virginity until the “right man comes along”; then she should “surrender” her virginity and belong monopolistically in obedience to him until death do them part. The parallel can be extended with polygamy, where a man can accumulate “titles” to more than one woman, perhaps as many as his money will allow, owning them as slaves.) ...

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— Ilya Kharkow - Spotlight on Ilya Kharkow

 

at 10/8/26 10:38am

Author: Ilya KharkowTitle: Spotlight on Ilya KharkowSubtitle: Anarchism, Ukraine, and war in the new book THE MINING BOYSDate: 08/10/2026Source: https://www.radonjournal.com/interviews/ilya-kharkow-mining-boys Ilya Kharkow is a writer from Ukraine who refused to fight. After nine months of trying to escape the country, he finally crossed the border. That experience became The Mining Boys, a novel about war and the cost of staying alive. His work explores masculinity, queer identity, and life in wartime Europe. More of his work can be found at ikharkow.com 1. Why do you write books that some people probably shouldn’t read? Because not every book wants to be liked. You know, I’m a gay guy from a homophobic country. A bookworm from a mining town. A pacifist at a time when everyone demands that I die for a country. I simply describe my life in Ukraine and in exile. People do the hard work of finding it offensive. That makes it even more fun. 2. What’s the biggest misconception about your work? At first glance, my work looks like it’s about war. It isn’t. It’s about what war does to intimacy. I’m interested in people, not governments. My short story “Hotel,” for example, is about guys trying to go on sex dates while hiding from forced mobilization. 3. Do you keep a journal / notes? Some people pray when they’re afraid. I take notes. That’s probably the biggest difference between me and healthy people. 4. Bataille, Mishima, and Palahniuk all influenced your writing. What’s one book by each that you’d recommend? I’d recommend throwing all your books away and going outside. Don’t even read me. To hell with literature. Grab your friend and go swim in the nearest lake. Eat something greasy. Food poisoning is an underrated teacher. Then come back to Bataille, Mishima, and Palahniuk. 5. Who are some contemporary writers (besides Palahniuk) you’re excited about, and why? Over the past month, four different people recommended that I read Denis Cooper. Then, a few nights ago, I couldn’t sleep. In moments like that, I usually choose between masturbation and self-improvement. That night, I chose self-improvement and decided to Google Denis Cooper. Damn... the more I read about his books, the more I thought: I wish I’d written that. And that. And that. Then I realized why I’d never heard of him. He’d barely been translated into Russian. His subjects, his tone of voice, the intention behind his writing – they all felt strangely close to me. Suddenly it hit me that my own books will probably never be published in Russian for the same reason. So there really are nights when masturbation is the better choice. 6. What projects are you working on right now that we can look forward to? I just finished the second volume of Holes in the Shape of Humans and returned toThe Mining Boys. There’s still one publisher considering the novel. I sincerely hope they reject it this autumn. When they do, I’ll make it available on my website. The best thing about having no publisher is having no limits. I have no contracts, no sponsors, no permanent address, and no country whose censorship I need to worry about. My only responsibility is my own conscience. And I intend to use that freedom to prove that a world without violence is possible. If that made you smile, let me remind you that in wartime, being a pacifist can be dangerous as hell. 7. What was the reader reaction to the first volume? I thought I knew what my work was worth. My readers disagreed. Only two people paid the asking price. Everyone else paid more. One reader paid $50 for a $10 book. Readers like that make it possible for me to continue after years of writing into the void. What stayed with me wasn’t the money. It was realizing that somewhere in the world, a complete stranger believed in my work that much. But what stays with me even longer are the emails and comments I receive from readers. Recently, someone from the US left a long comment on my Buy Me a Coffee page about his father, who refused to fight against Hitler. One day, I’m certain it will become one of my short stories. 8. Have you ever regretted publishing something? Who cares? Once a text is published, it’s already too late. Literature is a severe form of alcoholism. I only pretend to have control over it. 9. Do you listen to music while you write? Sometimes. I never get tired of literature. I get tired of myself. After a long writing session, I often listen to The Knife’s “Still Light.” It’s sung from the perspective of someone waking up from a coma. That’s exactly what writing feels like. 10. If your books were banned tomorrow, what sentence would you want people to remember? The moment someone wants to protect you from a book is the moment you should read it. 11. The worst advice you could give us? Don’t read books by writers you wouldn’t sleep with. 12. Which text of yours should people read first? “Hotel.” I made it free on my website because it’s an excellent filter. It’s short. It has weird dates, civil disobedience, and an unhealthy fascination with anonymous sex. Most people probably won’t finish it. If you do, welcome. The stories only get more dangerous from there.

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— Raymond Craib - Lxs anarquistas

 

at 10/6/26 11:34pm

Author: Raymond CraibTitle: Lxs anarquistasDate: 2023Source: Craib R. Lxs anarquistas. Latin American Research Review. 2023;58(3):717–729. doi:10.1017/lar.2023.27 This essay reviews the following works: Rebellion in Patagonia. By Osvaldo Bayer. Chico, CA: Edinburgh AK Press, 2016. Pp. 425. $21.95 paperback. ISBN: 1849352216. Anarchism in Latin America. By Angel J. Cappelletti. Baltimore: AK Press, 2017. Pp. 429. $20.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781849352826. Writing Revolution: Hispanic Anarchism in the United States. Edited by Christopher J. Castañeda and Montse Feu. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2019. Pp. xvi + 305. $30.00 paperback. ISBN: 9780252084577. 155: Simón Radowitzky. By Agustín Comotto. Madrid: Nórdica Libros, 2018. Pp. 269. $46.00 paperback. ISBN: 8417281525. Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire and Revolution in the Borderlands. By Kelly Lytle Hernández. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2022. Pp. 384. $24.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9781324004370. For a Just and Better World: Engendering Anarchism in the Mexican Borderlands, 1900–1938. By Sonia Hernández. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Pp. xxiv + 222. $28.00 paperback. ISBN: 9780252086106. El anarquismo y la emancipación de la mujer en Chile, 1890–1927. By Manuel Lagos Mieres. Santiago de Chile: Centro de Estudios Sociales Lombardozzi, 2017. Pp. 436. Anarchists of the Caribbean: Countercultural Politics and Transnational Networks in the Age of US Expansion. By Kirwin R. Shaffer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xiv + 318. $49.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9781108489034. The World in a City: Multiethnic Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles. By David M. Struthers. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2019. Pp. 310. $28.00 paperback. ISBN: 9780252084256. For those who learn of anarchism via pop culture, the idea must be confusing. Take the recent HBO offering The Anarchists.[1] A six-part documentary undertaken in 2016, it follows the trials and tribulations of a small and fairly motley crew of US expats and fugitives in Acapulco, Mexico, who aspire to a life free of the regulatory state and its laws, taxes, and restrictions. An opening scene involves a group of adults and young children gathered around a beach bonfire screaming “Fuck the State!” and throwing bound regulatory volumes into the flames. We soon learn they have relocated to Acapulco to find personal freedom and to help establish and run what would be billed as the world’s largest anarcho-capitalist annual gathering: Anarchopulco. Things that begin with book burning do not end well. By the series finale, three of the main protagonists are dead (one shot in his driveway, one from suicide, and one from cirrhosis of the liver); the Bitcoin bonanza that had financed the annual gathering and enriched its attendees had collapsed; the hypercapitalist colonial enclave had fractured, and many of the surviving enthusiasts had dispersed, gone elsewhere to pick up the pieces after an experiment destined to go awry. Viewers, meanwhile, are left with a version of anarchism that would be unrecognizable to most anarchists. This is not a surprise. A political philosophy and approach to social organization that arose simultaneous with other grand isms, anarchism was, and continues to be, misunderstood, misrepresented, and condensed by its critics into a set of often contradictory caricatures: bohemian communities of nihilists, their rebellion culturally innovative but politically impotent, bookended by Friedrich Nietzsche and Johnny Rotten; or a murky underworld of conspiratorial bomb throwers, held together less by bonds of solidarity than by a commitment to violence; or disaffected and disorganized leftists enamored of immediatism and averse to central planning; or, as The Anarchists suggests, individualist libertarians who walk in the ideological footsteps of Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand and fly to Acapulco for an annual festival to celebrate their pale young edginess.[2] Such caricatures always have constituted little more than dismissive fictions, but it is telling that they continue to have such staying power given the resurgence in and visibility of anarchist politics over the past three decades. Sometime around 1990, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, anarchism sat up from the cold slab to which it had been consigned after the Spanish Civil War and seized history’s undertaker by the wrist. Granted, if those conducting its postmortem had been more attentive, they might have seen it had been breathing all along. In place of organized mass anarchism—with its roots in nineteenth-century socialism and the Bakuninist wing of the International Workingmen’s Association, which called for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the immediate demise—rather than a Marxist withering—of the state—a small-a anarchism persisted, dedicated to antiauthoritarianism in everyday life and attempting, in prefigurative fashion, to practice daily the world it wished to see come to fruition.[3] It was the neoliberal counterrevolution of the 1980s, the strictures of the International Monetary Fund, and its theology of austerity that generated the conditions that seeded the ground further for the emergence of a more visibly anarchist-inflected politics in the 1990s and after. Such tendencies coursed through the 1994 Zapatista uprising in southern Mexico, the protests in Oaxaca in 2006, and the “territories in resistance” in other parts of the continent.[4] They appeared prominently in the Seattle and Quebec protests against the World Trade Organization; in the Common Ground collective that organized care, aid, and sustenance for communities in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; and in the Occupy movements after the economic collapse of 2008.[5] Anarchist practices and ideals appeared via ideas of horizontalidad and autogestión during the Argentine economic crisis of 2001, both in the parks and streets of Buenos Aires and in factories across the country.[6] They were central to the student-led insurgencies in Chile in 2006, 2011, and 2019, and self-identified anarchists such as Melissa Sepúlveda held leadership positions in the important Chilean Student Federation in the 2010s.[7] Across the Americas and beyond, similar forms of anarchist organizing appeared. The Berlin Wall may have fallen, but history had decidedly not come to an end. ...

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— AnarchoGuac - The Role of Insurrectionary Anarchism in Contemporary Hacktivism

 

at 10/6/26 9:06pm

Author: AnarchoGuacTitle: The Role of Insurrectionary Anarchism in Contemporary HacktivismDate: 8/22/26Source: https://anarchistnews.org/content/role-insurrectionary-anarchism-contemporary-hacktivism Note for readers The essay you are about to read was written in the past when I was an early grad student still becoming a realized writer of anarchism’s ideas. Some of the information may be overly moralistic and other points may be overly empirical. Some of the writing may be overly casual while other areas may be overly academic. Some information that should be cited may not be, and some information that is cited may not have to be. My standpoints and interpretations of ideas throughout this piece may have changed since its writing, but it was my analysis at the time that I stood behind and defended. For any questions on the information presented, my updated perspectives and beliefs, or anything of the like, feel free to message me directly. If you believe the question you are asking is of good faith and may encourage a fruitful conversation including others, feel free to comment below to start the conversation. Be kind. Introduction On December 29, 2025, a hacker known as Martha Root took the stage at an annual hacking convention in Hamburg, Germany. Dressed in a pink Power Rangers outfit, she shared how for months, she had been infiltrating three white supremacist dating websites by creating AI chatbots to interact with users while collecting their personal information. In the panel’s final fifteen minutes, she remotely accessed and deleted all three websites, much to the neo-Nazi website creator’s disapproval, which he described in a tweet as “cyberterrorism.” Root noted how easy it was to hack into the websites, citing “poor cybersecurity hygiene that would make even your grandma’s AOL account blush.”[1] Root’s actions can arguably show how the principles of insurrectionary anarchism, such as direct, autonomous, and disruptive intervention, can extend from physical spaces into the digital realm. Such actions can include Root’s hacking/hacktivism as well as DDoS attacks and the targeted takedowns of extremist, corporate, or state-controlled websites. Cyberspace itself can be seen as a loosely-governed libertarian space that offers hackers near-total freedom to translate traditional anarchist tactics into digital actions. Insurrectionary anarchism can take form in contemporary digital spaces through autonomous hacktivism, the disruption or removal of oppressive online networks, and decentralized digital interventions. Anarchism and Insurrectionary Anarchism Anarchism can be defined as a sociopolitical philosophy that is against hierarchies wherever they may be found. Such hierarchies can include political ones such as the state and representative democracy, economic ones such as capitalism and wage labor, and social ones such as patriarchy, homophobia, and organized religion.[2] It is widely seen as one of the only ideologies that fully confronts and wishes to dismantle all forms of capitalism along with the state and its power without utilizing either for personal benefit. Although anarchistic ideas can be found throughout history and cultures, the modern anarchist movement developed in Western Europe after the Enlightenment period in the 18th century. Subsequent developments in the field of anarchism led to many variants, including but not limited to anarcho-communism, eco-anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, and more. While anarchism largely began as an anti-capitalist and self-determinist philosophy, today, it has greatly expanded to include anti-racism, environmentalism, feminism, Black, Indigenous, and Queer liberation, and other intersecting struggles that reproduce domination of the many by the few. The philosophies of anarchism vastly predate the advent of the anarchist movement in Europe. In other words, anti-authoritarian thought did not originate with the creation of a European society built around industrialism and the centralized modern state. Ancient Greek writers wrote of characters navigating conflicts brought on by the state, and Socrates himself posited that the only way to oppose Athenian authority was to encourage individuals to be able to make their own decisions. Cultures that operated for thousands of years prior to the creation of the state, and therefore private property, are anarchistic in the sense that they are non-state. Anarchists famously point towards the decision-making processes of Native and Indigenous groups around the world as existence of a complex life prior to a state. As expected, the classical anarchist movement was a response to fierce European industrialization and not a solidarity with colonized people around the world. After all, the state that European anarchists wanted dissolved was the same state that acquired wealth upon colonization of the Global South. In 1866, European working class activists came together to discuss the material conditions of the working class. This meeting became known as the First International, which sought to bring together left-wing groups and trade unions around the idea of class struggle. The organization is remembered for the divide that formed between two major factions, Marxists and anarchists. Karl Marx, the German philosopher and economist, led the “statist” faction. His supporters argued that a temporary worker-run state would be necessary to abolish capitalism and foster socialism. The opposing faction, guided by Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakunin, identified themselves as mutualists and collectivists. They shared Marx’s desire of ending capitalism, but rejected the idea of establishing a workers’ state. Their standpoint grew from their belief that a state run by workers would not resolve their concerns and would only replace one group of rulers, and therefore oppressors, with another.[3] While both groups agreed on opposing capitalism, abolishing the private ownership of production, and criticizing liberal capitalism, they both disagreed fundamentally on the role of the state, control, and authority. Visually, this means both groups share the same far-left point on the x-axis of the left and right spectrum, but are on opposing ends of the y-axis separating authoritarianism and libertarianism. Fierce debates erupted, eventually leading Marx to famously expel Bakunin and his supporters from the International entirely.[4] ...

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— Kevin Carson - Juneteenth, and the Right-Wing Conception of “Freedom”

 

at 10/6/26 6:00pm

Author: Kevin CarsonTitle: Juneteenth, and the Right-Wing Conception of “Freedom”Date: November 18th, 2024Source: https://c4ss.org/content/59964 Billy Binion (“Juneteenth is a Celebration of Freedom,” Reason, June 19) writes that, despite widespread right-wing aversion to Juneteenth as a holiday, the GOP “in some sense still fashions itself as the party of freedom.” Matt Yglesias is most famous these days for his almost daily garbage takes; but years ago, back when the Republican progression toward fascism had gone no further than the Tea Party stage, he aptly commented on the incoherence of right-wing conceptions of freedom: I continue to be fascinated by the way in which the rhetoric of “freedom” is always so closely associated with authoritarian populist nationalist movements. Absolutely nothing in the imagery of the video or the policy agenda of the Republican Party is suggestive of freedom. It’s full of flags and grim-faced folks and bourgeois respectability and military jets flying in tight formation. It’s an ad from a conservative politician that’s about exactly what an ad from a conservative politician ought to be about — about preserving a way of life against Muslims, freeloaders, sexual deviants, and other threats. Whenever the white, right-wing, and Evangelical demographic talks about its “freedoms,” you can get a good sense of what they mean by “freedoms” by translating it into “white folkways.” Whatever substantive content “freedom” has for them is wrapped up in a haze of 90s CMT video imagery about little white frame churches, porch swings, pickups, checkered picnic table cloths, gingham, flags, guns, and Murca HOO-raw! And the “threats” to these “freedoms” — i.e. white folkways — all boil down in one way or another to anything that undermines their status as the American cultural default by allowing people who are unlike them to exist in public: e.g. the very sight of multiracial commercials or TV sitcoms, trans people on beer cans, people speaking Spanish or same-sex couples holding hands in public, or schools teaching the actual history of slavery and acknowledging the existence of LGBT people. In short, their idea of “freedom” has about the same substantive content as “Freiheit” in Nazi ideology. Remember when Sarah Palin talked about the “pro-America parts of America”? Just change “the people” to “Volk,” and we’re getting into some serious deja vu. This is true as well for much of the “libertarian” right. Witness, for example, this tweet from the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire’s Twitter account: “Anyone who celebrates Juneteenth should be deported from America.” This is far from atypical for them. They subsequently tweeted: “Degenerates must be expelled in order to maintain a libertarian social order.” You might think “libertarian” is an odd self-designation for people who object to a holiday celebrating the end of slavery, and who call for physically removing “degenerates” from society. The Mises Caucus, which controls both the national and New Hampshire Libertarian Party organisations, has about as much to do with actual liberty as the crossed-hammer stormtroopers in “Waiting for the Worms” (a song which LPNH probably has on repeat — probably only a matter of time until they adopt “final solution to strengthen the strain” as an official motto). But it’s nothing new. There has long been an authoritarian strain on the “libertarian” right. This was true at least as long ago as 1969, when Walter Block enthusiastically defended “voluntary slavery” — along with the implied right of the slave owner to beat, torture, and mutilate the person who “voluntarily” sold themselves into slavery — as a logical implication of self-ownership and freedom of contract. And this has become even more true in recent years, starting with the rise of the so-called “paleolibertarian” movement of Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell in the 90s. The intellectual gray eminence — or Joseph Goebbels, if you prefer — of this movement is Hans Hermann Hoppe, and its primary institutional home is the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Unsurprisingly, the Hoppean/paleo community includes under its umbrella the ruling Mises Caucus of the Libertarian Party, and Walter Block (who continues to advocate “voluntary slavery” to this day). The essence of the Hoppean project is to create an authoritarian society — their ideal society is one in which every square foot of land is privately appropriated by predominantly white, Christian owners, no one can exist anywhere without permission from the land-owners, and “degenerates” and socialists are “physically removed” or “helicoptered” in order to purge the society of those who are incompatible with its “libertarian” character — but to do so entirely in ways that are fully consistent with self-ownership and the non-aggression principle. It’s odd that people whose substantive values are thoroughly authoritarian, and who have no have no sympathy whatsoever with human agency or human flourishing, even care about consistency with formal “libertarian” principles… but here we are. And here’s where we also are: If you want to know anything about actual human freedom and liberty, don’t listen to right-wingers.

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— Kenyon Zimmer - “The Whole World Is Our Country”

 

at 10/5/26 11:54pm

Author: Kenyon ZimmerTitle: “The Whole World Is Our Country”Subtitle: Immigration and anarchism in the United States, 1885–1940Date: 2010Notes: Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.Source: <https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/7910> <br> University of Pittsburgh <center> <strong>“THE WHOLE WORLD IS OUR COUNTRY”: IMMIGRATION AND ANARCHISM IN THE ; UNITED STATES, 1885–1940</strong> <br> by **Kenyon Zimmer** BA, Bennington College, 2002 MA, University of Pittsburgh, 2005 <br> Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy <br> University of Pittsburgh 2010 <br> <br> UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH SCHOOL OF ARTS & SCIENCES <br> This dissertation was presented by Kenyon Zimmer <br> It was defended on April 29, 2010 and approved by <br> Donna Gabaccia, Professor, Department of History, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis Patrick Manning, Professor, Department of History, University of Pittsburgh Marcus Rediker, Professor, Department of History, University of Pittsburgh Dissertation Advisor: Richard Oestreicher, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Pittsburgh <br> Copyright © by Kenyon Zimmer 2010 <br> <br> **“THE WHOLE WORLD IS OUR COUNTRY”: IMMIGRATION AND ANARCHISM IN THE UNITED STATES, 1885–1940** Kenyon Zimmer, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2010 </center>   From the 1880s through the 1940s tens of thousands of anarchists were active in the United States, the overwhelming majority of them first- and second-generation immigrants. But most were not yet devotees of the anarchist cause when they arrived on American shores. Instead, a clear link existed between migration and the embrace of anarchist ideology. This study asks how and why thousands of migrants became anarchists, and how their embrace of an anti-nationalist and cosmopolitan ideology shaped their identities, experiences and actions. Utilizing anarchist publications, government surveillance files, and archival materials, it focuses on Eastern European Jews and Italians—the two largest segments of the anarchist movement by the turn of the century—and the development of anarchism among these groups in three important centers of American anarchism: New York’s Lower East Side, Paterson, New Jersey, and San Francisco. It then follows the changing fortunes of the movement in the face of war, the Russian Revolution, the First Red Scare, and the birth of communism and fascism, and ends with an examination of immigrant American anarchist participation in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39, and that conflict’s dramatic impact on the movement in the United States. This study argues that it was American conditions that usually made immigrants into anarchists, rather than European ones, inextricably linking the histories of migration and American anarchism. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of post-migration radicalization defies categorization within most historiographical paradigms of European immigration that focus on the construction of “hyphenated” American identities or “hybrid” transnational ones. Anarchists chose an alternative: they embraced an ideology that opposed both Americanization and Old World nationalisms, severing their attachments to their states of origin while willfully resisting assimilation into their host society. They formulated a radical cosmopolitan outlook and identity that embraced diversity, rejected hierarchies, and extended solidarity across national, ethnic, and racial divides. This cosmopolitanism was ultimately unable to withstand the onslaught of competing nationalisms ranging from Americanism to fascism to Zionism, but it stands as an important example of a transnational collective identity delinked from nationalism, the nation-state and racial hierarchies. List of Tables Table 1. Total Known Circulation of the American Anarchist Press, 1880–1940 Table 2. Total Known Circulations of the American Yiddish and Italian Anarchist Press, 1880–1940 Table 3. Italian-Born Population of Paterson, 1890–1930 Table 4. Number of Silk Firms in Paterson, 1890–1909 Table 5. Nativity of San Francisco’s Population, 1900 Table 6. Italian-Born Population of San Francisco, 1890–1920 Table 7. Composition of Selected Occupational Categories in San Francisco by Parents’ Place of Birth, 1900 Table 8. Deportations under the Anarchist Exclusion Act, 1918–1925 Table 9. American Anarchist Publications with Known Circulations, 1880–1940 Table 10. Known American Anarchist Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 Acknowledgements I have incurred many debts while working on this dissertation. First and foremost I must thank Amanda Zeiders, my partner in crime (and life) throughout the years I was writing it. She has put up with more than I ever could have asked her to, and in return has kept me sane and never hesitated to remind me of what is important. As promised, she will receive two copies of this manuscript, one to read and one to burn. I hope she enjoys the first activity as much as the second. I have been privileged to work with a number of wonderful mentors over the years. The prehistory of this project dates back to my classes with Derek Hutchinson and Jim Jennings at the Mendocino Community High School, where Derek exposed me to the writings of Howard Zinn and Jim introduced me to academic research and writing. At Bennington College my growing love of history and interest in radical politics were nurtured by Ron Cohen, Mansour Farhang, David Phillips, Miroslava Prazak, Eileen Scully, Susan Sgorbati, Carol Symes and Paul Voice, as well as outside of the classroom by my friends and fellow members of the Bennington Student Action Network, and through innumerable discussions back in California with Clay Hinson and Dan Young. A senior year Field Work Term internship at the Emma Goldman Papers under the guidance of Candace Falk, Jessica Moran and Barry Pateman cemented my continuing fascination with the history of anarchism. At the University of Pittsburgh I was fortunate to work with a number of inspiring and supportive professors including Kathy Blee, Alejandro de la Fuente, Patrick Manning, Lara Putnam, Marcus Rediker, Rob Ruck and Bruce Venarde. Richard Oestreicher and Donna Gabaccia, in particular, have been unflagging in their encouragement and assistance even as I subjected them to endless chapter drafts. ...

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— An Insurrectionary Pursuit - In The Ashes of Antifascism

 

at 10/5/26 11:13pm

Author: An Insurrectionary PursuitTitle: In The Ashes of AntifascismDate: October 9th, 2025Source: Author, previously published on NoBlogs, which became defunt. Antifascism, as a meaningful path for resisting fascism, has been dead in the water for some time now. Perhaps, it was dead on arrival. It is not entirely or even mostly the fault of many enthusiastic anti-fascists, I do not want to dismiss the brave souls that took to the streets, that took up the gun to fight back by any means necessary, but rather those who constructed the scaffolding for what antifascism out to be and failed to illustrate what exactly fascism was and how it was to be defeated. Anti-fascism may have emerged from the most radical sects of society, the anarchists and communists, but it was immediately tainted, defanged, and co-opted by capitalists so thoroughly as to mean nothing. My analysis is not simply a critique, but it’s an introduction into how I think we must move forward if we want to survive what is to come. There are multiple problems here. First are the people unwilling to engage in history and theory, it is a form of anti-intellectualism where they seek to solve for a problem they aren’t capable of diagnosing. They call themselves antifascists, they fail to meaningfully study anything, then other antifascists who are bit more well-read tend to coddle these people, a thousand excuses to avoid theory are given, and then theorists are made to simply be bookworms, which is absolutely true if you’re a liberal, but radicals have shown that our theorists are often engaging in action as much as they are theory. Their view and understanding of anti-fascism permeate the scene, so you get god awful takes like American soldiers being anti-fascist or you get groups like the American Iron Front, and these people don’t eagerly create resistance, they eagerly recreate the conditions for failure. Second, the people who are willing to engage in history and theory, but they only do so from the lens of recent antifascist authors who themselves completely neglect radical history and theory. Their work is so egregious that we almost must start a theory of anti-fascism from scratch entirely, if it were not entirely too late, and if there was not another means to address the current political moment. So, who are these authors? Robert Paxton, author of the Anatomy of Fascism, will be the focus of this episode to illustrate how bad our framework is. I don’t even know if he identifies as an anti-fascist. He is seen as the leading expert on fascism, having been well-sourced by many modern antifascists, and I’ll break down why he is so bad at being said-expert, to include that he didn’t even identify Trump as a fascist until after his first term as president. Next is Mark Bray, supposedly an anarchist who could not be bothered to even reference one of the first Italian antifascists and one of the best anarchist theorists, Errico Malatesta, in his Antifascist Handbook. He also couldn’t be bothered to source Daniel Guerin, another anarchist, who like Malatesta, had thorough firsthand experience with fascism, and wrote extensively on the subject in his book, Fascism and Big Business. That brings me to my last author, Alexander Reid Ross, who, despite referencing Daniel Guerin and Errico Malatesta, did not actually expand on either of their work about fascism, and also participated in a whole host of Israeli war crimes denialism in which he later deleted a ton of tweets where he suggested that Israel wasn’t in fact bombing hospitals and there was a real chance the Palestinian resistance did it. Open-Source Intelligence has poisoned the well so to speak and requires more intelligence than its adherents are typically capable of. As far as I’ve scanned through his tweets, he’s never made any apologies for doing Israeli Occupation Force’s PR for free, but I digress. The main common thread between these three is that their ability to create and produce analysis relies on the fact they’re American college professors. I mean that more as a derogatory statement than an analytical statement, again I digress. As you may have noticed, I keep referencing Daniel Guerin and Errico Malatesta, mainly because of Alexander and Mark’s unfortunate proximity to anarchists, and I don’t expect a liberal like Paxton to reference them, but Mark Bray is the only one who does not fail to source Aimé Césaire, who rather brilliantly conceptualized fascism as the terrific boomerang that I’ll go over later from his writing, Discourse on Colonialism. Here, we have the Holy Trinity of American antifascists whose conclusions are ultimately that we must stop fascism without destroying American democracy, which is in fact the root cause of American fascism. It is unfortunate because Bray clearly doesn’t believe this, towards the end of his Antifa handbook, but he barely touches on the need to do more, the necessity of anarchism, and it is such an absolutely narrow and shallow analysis that it makes you wonder who he was writing to, cause most of the folks I know who’ve read and recommend his work don’t remotely think it’s important or share that analysis. In turn, I think that despite it being a handbook for anti-fascism, it simply ensures they won’t defeat fascism. ...

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— Anonymous - A Theory Of Sabotage

 

at 10/5/26 10:41pm

Author: AnonymousTitle: A Theory Of SabotageSubtitle: Anti-Zionism, Disruption and National LiberationDate: August 25th 2026Source: Retrieved on 2026-09-16 from <backlashblogs.wpcomstaging.com/2026/08/25/new-zine-a-theory-of-sabotage-anti-zionism-disruption-and-national-liberation> “Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it … As for we who have decided to break the back of colonialism, our historic mission is to sanction all revolts, all desperate actions” Things fall apart; the center cannot hold Anti-Zionism has entered the phase of sabotage. Lobbying governments to sanction Israel has been replaced with breaking drones and dismantling factories; boycotts traded for slashed truck airlines and arson; rallies and peace marches superseded with red paint and shattered office windows. It is a medium of tactics signaling a shift in the repertoire of collective action undertaken against Zionist Imperialism. This form of resistance did not emerge out of Al Aqsa Flood – but it too signals a new terrain upon which Palestine will be fought. It deserves an uncompromising theory of struggle. The time has arrived for us to create something new. The mainstream Palestine Solidarity Movement has demonstrated its inability to effectively counter the growing international Zio-fascist alliance. It continues to rely on outmoded, outdated and counterinsurgent formulas of struggle while putting considerable effort into restricting, internally-policing, ignoring and countering the most dynamic, effective and generative aspects of Anti-Zionism that have emerged over the past six years. In both theory and practice, the Palestine Solidarity Movement has been co-opted by self-aggrandizing opportunists, NGO/Academic careerists and racist paternalists,[1] committed to an understanding of social struggle that has no room in its conceptual landscape from which to comprehend what has been happening in front of it. Inside its performative rallies, on the edges of its peaceful pickets and fake boat blockades, circulated anonymously on social media: militant Anti-Zionist resistance. Interpersonal opportunism, peace policing and activist influencers only explain a part of the problems many of us have experienced since October 7th 2023. Individuals, spokespeople and careerists are provided platforms by the rest of us in a movement that remains confined to theories, ideas, strategies and weapons of struggle which we must now finally discard. The mainstream Palestine Solidarity movement is based upon a strategy provided by the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions model. This organization initially began as a solidarity call by Palestinian civil society, but has since become consolidated under a comprador petit-bourgeois class of opportunists and counter-revolutionaries run by an undemocratic Boycott National Committee with ties to the traitorous Palestinian Authority. The strategy they provide is based on a historically whitewashed picture of the South African Anti-Apartheid struggle. It is a picture where groups engaged in peaceful acts such as boycotts, divestment campaigns, protest marches, trade union organizing and other practices of “civil disobedience” that eventually led to the economic, diplomatic and political isolation of the White Supremacist regime and the collapse of Apartheid. This counterinsurgent[2] picture of what constituted that struggle has been increasingly addressed,[3] but suffice to say the Anti-Apartheid struggle involved not only boycotts and peace marches but riots, sabotage, armed struggle and military conflicts across multiple continents.[4] “Engaging in wanton destruction of property as their main tactic [can not be] associated with the BDS name.”[5] This was the Boycott National Committee speaking of Palestine Action at the BDS Europe Forum in February 2021. At this time Palestine Action had not achieved the domestic or international status it was going to. A number of its founders were on the run and had been detained under charges of “terrorism” with many others facing lengthy prison sentences. It was this context in which both the Boycott National Committee and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign – Britain’s largest Palestine NGO – went out of their way to undermine, condemn and distance themselves from what was about to become the most successful Palestine resistance network in the Imperialist core.[6] The BDS Movements “Guide to Boycott and Pressure targeting” states that its model reflects the “historically successful method of targeted boycotts, inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement, the US Civil Rights movement, and the Indian and Irish anti-colonial struggles, among others worldwide.”[7] The operational principles of these stated methods are “Gradualness (incrementalism in building power to achieve the ultimate goals); Sustainability (sustaining victories and building on them to move forward)” with the associated tactics to achieve these objectives involving “boycotts when reasonable alternatives exist, lobbying, peaceful disruptions, social media pressure, strategic litigation, etc.” As mentioned, this framework fails to accurately represent a lot of what historically consisted of the Anti-Apartheid struggle, or any of these movements — all of which had “violent” elements which engaged in armed self-defense, property damage, looting and riots, if not explicitly armed struggle.[8] It is however a strategic framework that is similar to many of the arguments cited over the last few years that have worked to legitimize a specific set of practices, namely: “getting workers onside”[9] (and prioritizing unions); A to B protest rallies where marshals policed any attempts at material disruption;[10] student encampments[11] which were often policed from the inside into compromising with university administrations; peaceful family pickets of weapons factories, political offices and voting. During much of these events organizers, self-appointed spokespeople and activist influencers went out of their way to delegitimize – or at best treat as a useful, but ultimately politically ineffective and immature – “autonomous direct action” or materially disruptive resistance. In some cases the organization of the former was directly dependent upon the subduing and rejecting of the latter. ...

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— Lewis Hyde - The Gift

 

at 10/5/26 5:51pm

Author: Lewis HydeTitle: The GiftSubtitle: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the WorldDate: 1979Notes: Third Edition (2019)Source: <www.lewishyde.com/the-gift>   By now a modern classic, The Gift is a brilliantly orchestrated defense of the value of creativity and of its importance in a culture increasingly governed by money and overrun with commodities. This book is even more necessary today than when it first appeared. An illuminating and transformative book, and completely original in its view of the world, The Gift is cherished by artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers. It is in itself a gift to all who discover the classic wisdom found in its pages.   Lewis Hyde is a poet, essayist, translator, and cultural critic with a particular interest in the public life of the imagination. In addition to The Gift, he is the author of Trickster Makes This World; Common as Air; A Primer for Forgetting; and a book of poems, This Error Is the Sign of Love. He has also published two volumes of translations of Nobel laureate Vicente Aleixandre’s poetry and is the editor of On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg and The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau. A MacArthur Fellow and former director of creative writing at Harvard University, Hyde was the Richard L. Thomas Professor in Creative Writing at Kenyon College until his retirement in 2018. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, the writer Patricia Vigderman. www.lewishyde.com   FOR MY PARENTS   “What is good is given back.” Foreword by Margaret Atwood Gifts pass from hand to hand: they endure through such transmission, as every time a gift is given it is enlivened and regenerated through the new spiritual life it engenders both in the giver and in the receiver. And so it is with Lewis Hyde’s classic study of gift giving and its relationship to art. The Gift has never been out of print; it moves like an underground current among artists of all kinds, through word of mouth and bestowal. It is the one book I recommend without fail to aspiring writers and painters and musicians, for it is not a how-to book—there are many of these—but a book about the core nature of what it is that artists do and also about the relation of these activities to our overwhelmingly commercial society. If you want to write, paint, sing, compose, act, or make films, read The Gift. It will help to keep you sane. I doubt that Lewis Hyde knew while he was writing it that he was composing such an essential work. Perhaps he felt he was merely exploring a subject of interest to him—in its short form, why poets in our society are seldom rich—and enjoying the many tributaries he was uncovering through his exploration without realizing that he had hit on a wellspring. When asked by his original editor who his presumed audience was, he couldn’t really pinpoint it but settled for “poets.” “That’s not what most editors want to hear,” as he says in his preface to the 2007 edition. “Many prefer ‘dog owners seeking news of the dead.’ ” As he then tells us, “the happy fact is that The Gift has managed to find an audience beyond the community of poets.” This is an understatement of some vastness. I first encountered both Lewis Hyde and The Gift in the summer of 1984. I was in the midst of writing The Handmaid’s Tale, begun in the spring in that combination of besieged city and consumer showcase that was West Berlin at the time and where the twentieth-century clash between communitarianism gone wrong and Mammon worship gone wild was most starkly in evidence. But now it was July, and I was in Port Townsend, Washington, at a summer school for writers of the kind that were then multiplying. In that secluded area, all was bucolic. Lewis Hyde was also teaching at the summer school. He was a genial young poet whose hobby was lepidoptery, and he shyly presented me with a copy of The Gift. In it he wrote: “For Margaret. Who has given all of us many things.” I like the slipperiness and ambiguity of this—“many things” could include anything from the poems and novels I hope he had in mind to “a case of herpes” and “the heebie-jeebies”—for the word “gift” is itself slippery and ambiguous. Think of “Greeks bearing gifts,” a reference to the fatal Trojan horse, and the poisoned apple given to Snow White, not to mention that other apple given to Adam and the wedding gifts that burn Medea’s rival to the bone. The doublehandedness of gifts is in part what Lewis Hyde’s book is about. The Gift was first published in 1983, when it was originally subtitled “Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property.” On the cover of my 1983 Vintage paperback (and again with this edition) is a Shaker painting of a basket of apples—a choice explained in a note by Hyde: The Shakers believed that they received their arts as gifts from the spiritual world. Persons who strove to become receptive of songs, dances, paintings, and so forth were said to be “laboring for a gift,” and the works that they created circulated as gifts within the community. Shaker artists were known as “instruments”; we know only a few of their names, for in general it was forbidden that they be known to any but the church elders. This note is followed by a copyright line that, in view of the origins of Basket of Apples, reads ironically: “Basket of Apples is reprinted through the courtesy of The Shaker Community Inc.” So the community of gift givers has now become incorporated, and its gifts have been transformed to property by the commodity market that now surrounds us on all sides. One of the questions Hyde asks is whether a work of art is changed by the way it is treated—as gift or as commodity for sale. In the case of Basket of Apples, I would say not: the word “courtesy” implies that no money changed hands. But it could have, whereas under the Shaker rules such a thing would have been impossible. Hyde’s point is taken. ...

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— Vancouver IWW - What Does the IWW Mean By ‘Abolition of the Wage System’?

 

at 10/4/26 7:30pm

Author: Vancouver IWWTitle: What Does the IWW Mean By ‘Abolition of the Wage System’?Date: 1984Source: Retrieved on October 4 2026 from vancouveriww.org/mean-by-abolition-wage-system/ The Industrial Workers of the World believe in a better life for all. In considering what’s right and what’s wrong with our present society, the IWW naturally includes how we are paid for the work we do: wages and salaries. What Are Wages? Wages or salaries are the money given to us by the boss in return for a set amount of time we spend at the job. We get so much an hour, or so much a month. Whether we’ve spent the day working hard or had to “look busy” much of the time, we receive exactly the same amount. But for the same eight hours of employment, people are paid greatly varying amounts. We are paid different rates for doing the same job in different locations (i.e., truck assemblers get paid more in Windsor than in Vancouver) and for doing different jobs in the same location (i.e., in Vancouver accountants are paid more than daycare workers). Even when we’re employed by the same company in the same building, various tasks are often paid at varying rates (i.e., electricians, assembly line workers, secretaries); These differences in pay are mostly a result of events which happened in our past: our history. Certain jobs get a particular rate of pay because of some decisions by the boss. Other jobs get a particular rate of pay because of actions taken by our forefathers and foremothers. As teachers grew more militant. for example, that task changed from a low-paying to a better-paying one. Overall, unionized jobs show the results of past fights for better pay and conditions. On the other hand, a failure to stay militant results in lower comparative wages There was a time in B.C.‘s history when woods workers overall were among the highest-paid blue-collar employees. No longer. On every job, a number of excuses are offered to explain why I should get more pay than you, and why he or she receive more than both of us combined. Years of education and training are often cited, though this education is largely supported out of taxes we all pay. So those who receive this education really benefit twice. Meanwhile, should employees with four years of university receive more than employees with seven years of an apprenticeship? Another argument is that some people have more responsibility or take more risks. This can be in connection with our own life or others’ lives, or concerned with valuable items or money. But then, why aren’t those who work at the most hazardous jobs (as determined by Workers’ Compensation Board statistics) the most highly paid? Or, why don’t bank tellers earn a lot of money? Should the people who produce what society needs most be the best paid? This would mean that farmers and agricultural laborers who produce our food would be among the highest paid people. They aren’t now! And those who manufacture our clothing are still often immigrant women working for very, very low pay in sweat-shop conditions. And the host of non-union carpenters and others building our housing aren’t very well reimbursed for their work, either. What’s Wrong with Wages? As can be seen, then, the present wage system is totally irrational. It is a hodge-podge of differing amounts paid to people for a range of often-contradictory “reasons”. In fact the work of all of us (however humble) is equally necessary to keep this society going. About the only sure conclusion that can be gathered from the present wage system is that the further up the corporate ladder from actually producing goods or services a person is, the more money he or she takes home. As well, most of us are really paid only enough to meet our basic needs. Advertising makes sure we consume as much as possible, and the widespread extension of credit makes sure we spend most of our lives in debt. Besides being irrational, the present wage system is completely undemocratic. We are constantly told by teachers, the media and politicians that we are free citizens of a democracy. But this democracy ends for us the moment we show up for work. On the job we not only do not make the decisions, but we have to obey the orders of people we definitely did not elect to rule over us. If we don’t like it, we are “free” to quit. After that, we can either “freely” starve to death or “freely” agree to obey the orders of some other employer on some other job. When we are employed, we get as wages only a part of the value of what we produce. We are therefore robbed at the point of production; this is the true meaning of exploitation. Besides our wages, the product of our labor goes to pay for raw materials, for research and development, for things our community needs (paid for in the form of taxes) and for profits taken by the already rich owners and managers. It’s true that in any social system workers would not be able to receive as wages the complete value of the product of our labor, for all systems require plant maintenance, research and development, etc. But the decision as to how to divide up among these categories the wealth produced as a result of our work is not made by us. ...

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— Adam Gary Lewis - Cultures of Anarchist Anti-Colonialism

 

at 10/4/26 9:33am

Author: Adam Gary LewisTitle: Cultures of Anarchist Anti-ColonialismSubtitle: Considering Anarchist Prefigurative Possibilities for the FutureDate: 2026Notes: *A text edited for the workshop “Cultures of Anarchist Anti-Colonialism” at the 2026 Hamilton Anarchist Bookfair. **Note: This zine is a heftily edited version of chapters, ideas, and discussions that appear in the 2026 PhD dissertation. I have aimed to condense this work, and dispense with some of the excess academic referencing, language and theory. This is not to suggest that these elements cannot be useful to anarchists, but in the spirit of generating wider forms of discussion I present this initial edited version. The interviews referenced here come from my conversations with 17 anarchists in Southern Ontario, that span a range of cities, communities, and scenes, and encompass a range of complex social identities. In particular, I highlight the words and perspectives of Indigenous participants. Pseudonyms were used to help to maintain some aspect of anonymity. I hope these ideas further some of the ongoing and important conversations on anarchism and anti-colonial politics both here in Southern Ontario, but also further afield as well. My heartfelt and ongoing thanks to all who participated and supported this project over many years, and all the anarchist crews in Southern Ontario. Of course for those with more academic and theory oriented desires I invite you to check out the full dissertation work as well: Adam Gary Lewis. 2026. Cultures of Resistance, Cultures of Potential: Anarchist Value-Practices, Settler Colonialism, and Indigenous Resurgence. PhD Dissertation. York University.Source: Retrieved on October 4, 2026 from https://anarchistnews.org/content/cultures-anarchist-anti-colonialism Someday, somewhere, today’s empires are tomorrow’s ashes. —Propagandhi Commitments to resist settler colonialism and articulate affinities with Indigenous struggles carry potentials for greater forms of anti-colonial politics within anarchism. Such commitments are important points of resistance and action within anarchism, but they are often limited, and require greater expansion in both theory and practice in order to actually generate disruptive forms of anarchist anti-colonialism. Anarchists have long named settler colonialism as a key form of oppression and domination that needs to be opposed, alongside more standard anarchist oppositions like the state and capitalism. This is most readily visible in intro to anarchism books, zines, and discussions. Opposition to colonialism is nestled alongside the wide range of opposition to all forms of oppression and domination that characterizes contemporary anarchist politics. In many of these accounts, and especially those that are more theoretical in nature, there is little discussion as to what this sort of anti-colonial opposition might look like. There may be vague nods to support for Indigenous resurgence, or wider histories of complicity with international forms of anti-imperialist struggle, but rarely is there more detailed discussion of how committed form of anti-colonial politics might be enacted in here and now –in specific places at specific times– and with direct reference to the histories and flows of struggle that might disrupt anarchism for the better. This results in a tendency to leave colonialism among a wider laundry list of things to be opposed, and lacking in greater qualification and consideration of what this means as practical forms of politics. How, then, are anarchists actually seeking to practically, materially, and intentionally oppose settler colonialism, and support Indigenous resistance and resurgence? This zine attempts to shed light on some of the everyday ways that anarchists in Southern Ontario are engaging this work, and how they are thinking about the relationship between anarchism and anti-colonial politics. I consider how spirituality, history, relationships to land and place, and prefigurative imaginations for the future interact with anarchist anti-colonialism. I begin with spirituality as a tension that is perhaps even less discussed amongst anarchists, but which intersects directly with Indigenous resurgence politics, given the centrality of Indigenous cosmologies, grounded normativities, and relationships to land. The limited anarchist approach to spirituality is a stumbling block for anarchist affinities with Indigenous struggles, as well as settler anarchist attempts to reorient our own connections to land and the sorts of grounded relationships to land that our ancestors once had. Considering spirituality allows anarchists to begin to think carefully about their own traditions, ancestors, and grounded connections. I argue that anarchist celebrations and traditions around May Day are potent examples to more carefully understand anarchist connections to the past and enact greater anti-colonial politics in the future. This further points to the ways that anarchists might reconceive their relationships to land and Indigenous resurgence movements, and inform their relationships to the future. Anarchists can draw strength from our own traditions and practices, as ‘subaltern knowledges,’ to foster accountability, to land, place, and Indigenous resurgence movements, while refusing appropriation. I argue for a greater expansion and articulation of committed anarchist anti-colonial politics, and for furthering our accountabilities and complicities with Indigenous resurgence to enact a greater commitment to radical imaginations and futures. Engaging with the tensions discussed above, putting them to work, and fostering wider collective consideration of them can create moments of contention and disruption to animate anarchist anti-colonial politics going forward. Anarchism holds a great many potentials, it is incumbent on us, as anarchists everywhere, to continue to realize them. Spirituality, Ancestry, and Tradition Spirituality is a tension that is intimately connected to relationships and the construction of anti-colonial possibilities. As Indigenous resurgence theorists like Glen Coulthard and Leanne Simpson (2016) argue, Indigenous grounded normativities reflect the ‘ethical frameworks’ and forms of relating provided by ‘Indigenous place-based practices and associated forms of knowledge’ (p. 254), firmly rooted in Indigenous worldviews. Any construction of affinities, relationships, and complicities with Indigenous resurgence need to consider and be accountable to these forms of relation. Spirituality asks how anarchists can understand our orientations to Indigenous struggle and the lands we inhabit, but also our relationship to our own ancestors, traditions, and histories. Raised in early interviews, spirituality finds tension between the recurrent atheism of anarchists and the culturally grounded spiritualties of Indigenous perspectives. These differing approaches to spirituality are more likely to be a place of lacking affinity, rather than an easy space to build upon it. The frequently dogmatic or dismissive position of anarchists and anarchism in general results in disagreements that limit the abilities for more pronounced relationships and alliances (see, for example, Sloan Morgan, 2016; Fortier, 2015). Those who discussed spirituality in my interviews, however, tended to adopt a critical view to such anarchist dismissals, and were beginning to consider the implications of such an approach, given the context of settler colonialism and Indigenous resurgence. This is a tension that needs greater unpacking, interrogation, and reformulation within anarchist culture if we are to expand anti-colonial anarchist politics further. ...

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