Crooked Bough News Round-up

— Gustavo Rodríguez - From Caracas to Tehran with a stopover in Havana

 

at 4/14/26 3:36pm

Author: Gustavo RodríguezTitle: From Caracas to Tehran with a stopover in HavanaSubtitle: Reflections on the ongoing war from an anarchist perspectiveDate: March 29, 2026Source: via email “We know full well that there are values that are born old and that, from the moment of their birth, bear witness to their conformity, their conformism, and their inability to disrupt any established order.” Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche.[1] Thirty-six years ago, I wrote an article condemning the U.S. invasion of Panama. The “reasons” for the attack—cynically dubbed “Operation Just Cause”—were “based” on three pillars: 1.) the “war on drugs,” 2.) the “restoration of democracy,” and 3.) the “protection of U.S. residents” in that Central American country. On January 3, 1990, eleven days after the incursion of 13,000 Marines,[2] General Manuel Antonio Noriega was taken prisoner.[3] The following day, he would be transferred on the orders of George H. W. Bush to Miami to stand trial on charges of “drug trafficking.” Instead, they imposed Guillermo Endara’s puppet government at bayonet point; within hours of the invasion beginning, he was sworn in as constitutional president at a U.S. military base. In my article, despite the overabundance of pro-sovereignty rhetoric, typical of leftist propaganda—currently in vogue within “revolutionary anarchism”—I did not shy away from calling a spade a spade. I titled it “Rival Drug Gangs Clash in Panama.”[4] The facts truly demanded that title. Tilly’s reflections on the analogy between war, state-building, and organized crime left no room for doubt.[5] It was a dispute between gangs over control of “the turf.” As always happens in such skirmishes, the strongest and best-armed gangster ended up imposing his dominance. At the time, it was an open secret that the deposed dictator was, in fact, a common drug trafficker who had amassed a vast fortune through drug trafficking, arms smuggling, and money laundering. Furthermore, there was ample evidence of his regime’s repressive nature, evident in the imprisonment of opponents and the assassination of social activists and guerrilla fighters. It was also common knowledge that he had interfered in the electoral fraud that secured the victory for Carlos Duque—the military regime’s candidate—of the National Liberation Coalition (COLINA), disregarding the results obtained by the conservative opposition led by Endara. However, the left-wing and far-left factions of the power, along with the champions of revolutionary nationalism, tore their clothes in outrage without a hint of shame, denouncing the “kidnapping” of the drug-trafficking general and “the flagrant violation of national sovereignty and the self-determination of peoples.” At that time, Anarchy was awakening, brazen and seditious, after a long winter imposed by fire and sword by “actually existing socialism” and the ethno-nationalist pathology that had subjugated it throughout the 20th century. Fortunately, and despite the pernicious remnants of liberalism and “anarcho-Bolshevism,” an anarchism that was “vocationally impertinent and incorrigibly mocking [continued] to surprise, time and again, the heterogeneous, out-of-tune, and reactionary chorus of its gravediggers with intermittent outbursts that [placed it] on the agenda of rebellious possibilities.”[6] Perhaps that is why—or as a result of the erosion and discrediting of the experiences of “real socialism,” the theoretical and political crisis of Western Marxism, the discrediting of social democratic governments, and the decline of workerist ideologies— that shrewd anarchism remained aloof from the “anti-imperialist” outcries of nationalpopulism and the tantrums of Chomskian libertarianism and other specimens of the left of the power. In contrast, it reaffirmed its anti-sovereignist vocation as it went along. Ergo: stateless and insubordinate. Thus, a consistently anarchist praxis came to life, one that recognizes “total liberation” as our sole banner and drives us to confront power in all its forms. Consequently, it made no distinction between one gangster or another. There was an awareness that there was no place in either “camp.” Neither in the trenches of the Panamanian oligarchy’s nationalist capitalism, nor in those of imperialist capitalism. Under the pretext of the “war on drugs” and the “restoration of democracy,” the Washington reaffirmed its political and economic hegemony in the hemisphere. With this sweeping move, the White House sought to regain control of the Panama Canal and assert its dominance over the continent. All with the sole aim of securing a vast backyard. There was never any interest in eradicating the lucrative narcotics trade. Much less in “restoring democracy.” The fact that corrupt military officers and notorious drug traffickers remained in power after the post-invasion “purge” was clear proof of this.[7] Of the 1,069 officers loyal to Noriega, 980 retained command positions within the military. In reality, the military intervention took place during the final throes of the so-called “Cold War,” marking a significant shift from the “fight against communism” to active military involvement in narcotics interdiction. The “war on drugs,” launched in 1971 by President Richard Nixon after declaring narcotics “public enemy number one,” materialized beyond borders, extending the war urbi et orbi. That strategy, focused on criminalization, was never a public health campaign as the U.S. government and the media attempted to portray it.[8] However, subsequent administrations continued with this approach until it became an effective tool for domestic social control—with particular ferocity during Ronald Reagan’s presidencies—and a powerful interventionist resource on the international stage, which George H. W. Bush deployed on January 3, 1989. ...

[Link to media]

— Idris Robinson - How It Might Should Be Done

 

at 4/12/26 12:18pm

Author: Idris RobinsonTitle: How It Might Should Be DoneDate: July 20, 2020Notes: The following is a transcript of a talk delivered in Seattle on July 20, 2020, lightly-edited by the author for readability. A video recording produced by Red May is online here. This text was first published by Ill Will Editions.Source: <https://libcom.org/article/how-it-might-should-be-done-idris-robinson> I want to begin with a shout-out to what happened here last night, and to the working class of the city of Seattle, to the rebels of the city of Seattle: I really liked what I saw, that’s why I’m here, you know, to feel that vibe. I would also like to send my solidarity to comrades in Greece. It was they who allowed me to experience insurrection for the first time in 2008. The lessons I’ve learned and the experiences I had there have been so valuable this time around, even though we are in a much different social context. Moreover, a comrade was recently killed at the hands of the police there. To the fallen comrade, Vasillis Maggos, I want to say: rest in power. My title demands a little bit of explanation. It is a reference to Chernyshevsky[1], and to the novel he wrote from inside a Czarist prison. Lenin borrowed the title for his 1902 pamphlet, What Is to Be Done?[2], which provides answers to what he calls “the burning questions of our movement”: what does it mean to constitute a vanguard party? how do we spread consciousness from this vanguard party to the working class? how do we move beyond strikes to a full-on revolutionary political struggle?, etc. Later, in 2001, a text entitled “How It Is to Be Done” appeared in the journal of the French collective Tiqqun.[3] Rather than stating what our goals or objectives should be, Tiqqun sought to shift our focus to the means and the techniques of struggle. Instead of thinking about ends, they thought about the means that we should employ. My aim here is far less ambitious. As for the grammatical construction, “might should”, from the southern dialect—I tried to Blackify the title a little bit. But it’s also serious, because these are in fact tentative theses and proposals: I’m perfectly okay with being completely wrong about every single thing I put forward today, just so long as it creates a further deeper discussion on strategy. What I really want to do is open up this discussion, and I want to leave it, for people to engage with it as they want to, and to push it further. At the same time, I want the dialogue to be honest. There’s a kind of prevailing posture of cynicism, nihilism, and democratic moralism that holds back insurrection. And I think now is the time: we are experiencing an uprising on a scale that many of us have never lived through. Even if we compare present events to Greece, this thing has gone much further. There are far more martyrs in this struggle than there ever were in the Greek uprising. The time has arrived for strategic thought and reflection. It’s of course weird to find myself saying this in America, the most counter-revolutionary place on the globe. But we must reorient ourselves, and take these questions seriously. The stakes have been raised to the next level, they’re extremely high now. It’s time for us to think seriously about them.   1. A militant nationwide uprising did in fact occur. The progressive wing of the counter-insurgency seeks the denial and disarticulation of this event. The obvious is not always so obvious. We all saw it. We all saw what happened after the murder of George Floyd. What occurred was an extremely violent and destructive rebellion. It was a phenomenon the likes of which we have not seen in America in 40 or 50 years. Very few of us have experienced anything of this magnitude: a precinct was immediately torched in Minneapolis, after which entire cities went up in flames—New York, Atlanta, Oakland, Seattle. Comparisons were quickly made with the riots after Martin Luther King’s assassination. However, I think that we’ve gone further in this case, that 2020 went harder than 1968, and we’re not even done yet. Despite all of this, the reformers have had the audacity to claim that all of this never actually happened. They are trying to make the burning cop cars disappear, to extinguish from memory the police stations on fire, as if it didn’t happen. Again and again, I hear the same script: someone comes on the news, a political activist gives a talk, and we hear them say something like, “the protests were peaceful and non-violent, they stayed within the bounds of law and order.” No: cops being shot at in St. Louis is not within the bounds of law and order. They’re doing their best to make the event disappear. One has to to wonder what planet they are on that a torched police station appears within the bounds of civility. This delusion is something that we need to think about. Ultimately, it’s more than a delusion. It unites veritably all the progressive liberals who chatter on about what’s been going on over the past summer. From the Biden democrats to virtually all of the mainstream media not affiliated with Fox News, to the Black Lives Matter™ people, the agenda pushed by all these groups is the claim that the insurrection did not take place. I even read a recent study by some sort of consulting firm that sought to prove through quantitative means that there was a very civil nature to the protests.[4] ...

[Link to media]

— Gianfranco Sanguinetti - An Orgasm of History: 1977 in Italy

 

at 4/12/26 12:15pm

Author: Gianfranco SanguinettiTitle: An Orgasm of History: 1977 in ItalySubtitle: Digression on the Thread of Memory by a former SituationistDate: 2017Notes: "We thank the notbored.org collective for sharing this text...."Source: https://autonomies.org/2026/04/an-orgasm-of-history-1977-in-italy-digression-on-the-thread-of-memory-by-a-former-situationist/ They think I’m severe? I know I am, I force them to think. Vittorio Alfieri, Epigrams, 1783 The catastrophe of the ideologies. There were two 1977s in Italy, one of which was nothing more than the final gasp, the death rattle of the illusions, lies and crimes of which the pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese bureaucracies and their local followers were the bearers and the beneficiaries, still constituting the dead weight and false consciousness of the purportedly extremist groups that arose from the ashes of 1968. As early as 1969, the Italian situationists, in the editorial notes for the journal Internazionale Situazionista, affirmed that: “The critique of ideology is the premise of all critique […] However, we must accelerate the process of decomposition of ‘Marxism’ (workerism-bureaucracy-ism, theoretical underdevelopment-ideology of underdevelopment). […] To become aware of its own content, the social conflict against modern conditions of survival brings to the surface all the carcasses of the past, which it takes pains to clear away. […] The consumption of ideology must once again support the ideology of consumption. […] There is only one step from ideas to facts. Actions will improve them. […] But in the current movement, the SI simultaneously prefigures the future of the movement itself. When all the internal conditions are met […] to abolish the division into classes and the classes themselves, the division of labor and labor itself, and to abolish art and philosophy by realizing them in the liberated creativity of life without dead time, when only the best will do, the world will be governed by the greatest aristocracy in history, the only class in society and the only historical class of masters without slaves. This possibility occurs today, perhaps for the first time. But it occurs.”[1][2] The devastation of critical thinking. In the frightening and desolate landscape of the devastation of critical thinking brought about by hegemonic, dogmatic and arrogant ideologies that served the Left and the far Left and to which all the intellectuals conformed, the explosion of the 1977 revolt – later known as the Metropolitan Indians – was a disruptive and unexpected event, an uninvited spoilsport at the wedding of the Communists to the Christian Democrats, an embarrassing and inappropriate scandal, a public and brazen orgasm of history. It is therefore inappropriate to speak of it, and indeed almost no one has. This was the other 1977, the one that knew how to say a new word, in a new way, to borrow Girolamo Savonarola’s expression. Despite the silence that still surrounds it, this movement of social revolt was the most modern of the postwar period. The rejection of the ideologies. In its most genuinely subversive aspect, the 1977 revolt was a radical rejection of the voluntary servitude imposed by every ideology; it was a rejection of militancy, politics, representation, hierarchy, and irrevocable delegation, and a rejection of any compromise. It was also an explosion of creativity and imagination, open to every artistic influence, from the Futurists to the Situationists. The langue de bois[3] of vulgar Marxism had permeated, infected and poisoned not only its own doublethink, which was indigent and counterfeit, and the petty and miserable language of the mainstream Left, but also that of all those small groups of people who believed themselves to be extremists, from 1968 onward, almost without exception. The “social practice” of these militants, who later joined the Autonomists in 1977, was worthy of their bureaucratic language – confusing, pompous, threatening, apodictic and redundant, just like the totalitarian ideologies they propagated. Among them were many well-intentioned individuals, but not the leaders they had accepted. It was precisely these arrogant leaders, admirers of terrorism and armed struggle, yet cowardly and stupid, combined with police provocations and repression by the ICP [Italian Communist Party], who were the true gravediggers of that movement: no honest historian will contradict me on this point. An execution in effigy. On 17 February 1977, the powerful leader of the Communist trade-union police, Luciano Lama, was mocked, humiliated and driven out of the University of Rome like a dog. This was the founding scandal of the movement, for it was the absolute novelty of a free assembly that managed, in actual practice, to own its own freedom and its own public square, driving out those who still hoped to muzzle and usurp it. It was a veritable execution in effigy of the trade union and the Communist Party, and, in the same square, for additional ignominy, a derogatory effigy of Luciano Lama was hung. Despising the intellectual dishonesty of many who retrospectively project their current judgments back onto a time when they showed neither lucidity nor honesty, I will quote below what I wrote at the time, and what I still hold today. I am not among those who change their minds when the wind changes. ...

[Link to media]

— Yavor Tarinski - Déjà vu and the Horizontal Reinstitution of Future

 

at 4/12/26 2:22am

Author: Yavor TarinskiTitle: Déjà vu and the Horizontal Reinstitution of FutureDate: April 8, 2026Source: https://autonomies.org/2026/04/deja-vu-and-the-horizontal-reinstitution-of-future/ We become epigones or spectators, but epigones or spectators of our very own potential-to-be. ~Paolo Virno[1] Within bureaucratic settings time seems to simultaneously rush and stay frozen – an endless cycle of past-presentism that shrinks leisure and creativity, producing a feeling of déjà vu and futurelessness. It is a condition that withers imagination and makes life miserable. It conditions us to simply observe our future, rather than allow us to inhabit and actively shape it. To alter this we first must obtain an understanding of why we tend to experience our present as stagnant and the structural architecture that corrodes our ability to imagine beyond the horizon of what currently exists. Our daily experiences are being rushed by the capitalist clock. We feel as if there is never enough time for all the things we have to do or desire to experience. And this is true, as our daily temporalities are being densely fragmented in a highly precarious setting, where we have to rush from one task to another, in increasingly fragmented routines, if we don’t want to find ourselves at the bottom layers of society, among the most disempowered. On the central political stage, characterized by oligarchic elements such as professional politicians, elections, and supposed representation, there too seems to be a lot going on in the short-term. On daily bases we are bombarded, both on social media and on mainstream media, by the spectacle of rival partisan factions clashing with each other in their never-ending pursuit for political authority. On the geopolitical field too, competing blocks of Capital clash with each other. But there is simultaneously another feeling, that of time saturation, when looking at the world on a long-term temporal scale. We are not speaking here of history repeating itself, as argued by Marx when quoting Hegel.[2] Instead, what we have is a general feeling of déjà vu. People grow older, things get worn out, the planet keeps spinning, politicians quarrel, but on the social level things remain generally the same. Yes, governments still change, new reforms are being passed and alliances are forged or disbanded etc., but the general political architecture of our societies remains unchanged. This is the promise of stability and normality offered by the genuinely bureaucratic Capital-Nation-State complex—an oligarchic order, whose institutions remain unapt for alteration and only harden their grip on society. The only choice people have beyond begging the ruling class for minor reforms is to revolt and initiate their own alternative institutions from below. But this is by no means an easy task as the status quo is aware of this potentiality and develops an ever increasing array of obstacles to prevent people from even thinking of revolution. Even before Fukuyama’s proclamation of the end of history we had two opposing sides, each claiming to be the alternative to the other. But, in reality, they were the two faces of the same coin. Cornelius Castoriadis described them as Fragmented (i.e. Western) versus Totalitarian (i.e. Soviet) bureaucratic capitalism,[3] thus underlying their core similarity. The same holds, to an even greater degree, for the emerging multipolar geopolitical reality of today or for the rival partisan factions that quarrel in parliaments worldwide, as they all are inclined to operate strictly within the frameworks of statecraft and capitalism. This “similarity” is not a product of mere “chance” or a political failure, but the logical outcome of the way our temporal imagination is systemized. When we think of the future, we lean on our conception of the past, and our thinking takes place at the present. In every moment we reflect on time, we find ourselves both immersed in and detached from a temporal flow that seems to supersede us in every way. Immersed, since our envisioning of the future is never in nihilo or cum nihilo, but rather conditioned by our present situation, which, in turn, is framed by the past; detached, since our envisioning of the future places us at an imaginative a-temporal point of view, which functions as an imaginary escape from our past and present reality. However, neither this immersion nor this detachment is complete, since we are always present, always open to outside temporality, but also, we are always individuals, always rooted in our own personal perspective. Social time is what mediates between natural temporality and psychical temporality and the common field where our conscious individual time is formed and integrated within our collective history. No society could exist on a ‘no future’ assumption and the terror of such a possibility nurtures the most nightmarish dystopias. Yet, our capacity to determine our own future is constantly sabotaged by the very structures we inhabit. This reality corrodes our abilities to imagine a future that will go beyond that déjà vu. We hear of Degrowth, Commons, Circular economy, Zero Waste economy, etc. but often the advocates of such new theories seem to remain entrapped within the very same imaginary they aim to challenge: Thinking of social change mainly in economic terms. Of course, this does not mean that we can be led to a state of being where an alternative will be forever unimaginable, but only that imagining will require more effort. ...

[Link to media]

— Ron Sakolsky and James Koehnline - Gone to Croatan

 

at 4/11/26 9:14pm

Author: Ron Sakolsky and James KoehnlineTitle: Gone to CroatanSubtitle: Origins of North American Drop Out CultureDate: 1993Source: <www.archive.org/details/gonetocroatanori0000unse> & <www.autonomedia.org/product/gone-to-croatan>   “America” was founded as a land of drop-outs. Almost at once it began to produce its own crop of dissidents—visionaries, Utopians, Maroons (escaped slaves), white and black “Indians,” sailors and buccaneers, tax rebels, angry women, crank reformers, “tri-racial isolate” communities—all on the lam from Babylon, from control. Their self-liberation was carried out under the sign of Wild(er)ness and its guardians, the “Natives.” Having disappeared from “History,” they have ever since been ignored by the Consensus and its guardians, the academics. Now here they are again, coming back at you, claiming to have been the real “America” all along. They speak from the past, through the mediumship of radical historians, and in the present, in their own voices. They are speaking of other possibilities—speaking for a romantic becoming—for an insurrectionary moment—for a restoration of the unknown.   “Gone to Croatan”The first “drop-outs” from English colonization in North America left the “Lost Colony” of Roanoke and went to join the natives at Croatan (also spelled Croatoan).   MAP OF 1590. INDICATING LOCATTION OF “CROATAN”(From J. Hariot, “Brief and True Report...”)Courtesy New York Public Library Acknowledgements For their inspirational support and encouragement in the realization of this project, we take this opportunity to duly acknowledge the sharing of time, ideas, words, images, and embraces on the part of: Larry Abrams, Rane Arroyo, Carolyn Ashbaugh, Gerard Barbot, Ann Becher, Meda Chesney-Lind, Kevin Dann, Linda Grant DePaux, Chris Dodge, Steve Effingham, Silvia Federici, William Furry, Larry Giddings, John Graywood, Grigsby Hubbard, Tuli Kupferberg, Elaine Leeder, Rachel LeSueur, Steve Macek, Jason “Lev” McQuinn, Hal Rammel, Joe Richey, Ruby Rohrlich, Roberta Rosen, Franklin Rosemont, Sal Salerno, Neala Schleuning, Glenn Sheldon, Alix Kates Shulman, Karen Starr, Fred Whitehead, and John Wright... and the lost-found voices of William Ryan and Pooch Van Dunk. Special thanks to Autonomedia’s publishing “wizardario” par excellence Jim Fleming, and to Peter Lamborn Wilson for the original idea for the book and his continously nurturing energy towards it. Warm thanks to Miekel And, Liz Was, and Eric Hiltner of Dreamtime Village for providing the unglatiated hypermedia setting for doing the final “down to the wire” editorial work/play. And a final tip of the fez to the ubiquitous Hakim Bey, wherever you are... For their technical assistance in the publication process, we would like to offer our appreciation to the Institute for Public Affairs at Sangamon State University, to Karen Fifer for her last-minute efforts, and most particularly to Brenda Suhling, without whose editorial expertise this project would have been overwhelming. The following poems, articles, or excerpts have been previously published in whole or in part in periodicals and books. We gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint from authors and publishers. Carlos Cortez, “The Downfall of Disease-Giver” in Crystal-Gazing the Amber Fluid and Other Wobbly Poems, Charles H. Kerr, 1990 (originally printed in the Industrial Worker). Joy Harjo, “Trickster” in Mad Love and War, Weslayan University Press, 1990. John Knoepfle, “lines for the tribe of ben ishmael” in poems from the sangamon, University of Illinois Press, 1985. Hugo Prosper Learning, “The Ben Ishmael Tribe; Fugitive Nation of the Old Northwest” in The Ethnic Frontier: Essays in the History of Group Survival in Chicago and the Midwest, (ed. by Melvin G. Holli), Eerdmans, 1977. Meridel LeSueur, “Wounded Knee” in Word Is Movement, Cardinal Press, 1987. Thom Metzger, “Transform and Rebel: The Calico Indians and the Anti-Rent War” in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed (Summer, 1992). This piece was originally commissioned for Gone to Croatan. Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, “The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves and the Atlantic Working Class in the Eighteenth Century” in Journal of Historical Sociology, (Sept, 1990). Sally Roesch Wagner, “The Iroquois Influence on Womens’Rights” in Akwekon Journal (Spring 1992). William Van Dunk, “Indian Heritage,” Talking Wood (Winter, 1979). Peter Lambom Wilson, “Caliban’s Masque: Spiritual Anarchy and the Wild Man in Colonial America” in Gnosis #23, (Spring, 1992). Preface THIS VOLUME IS AN EPISODIC ACCOUNT OF THE ANCESTRAL dance of our crossblood brothers and sisters across the vagaboundaries of North America. By taking a liminal, rather than only a marginal, perspective on its subjects, it seeks to open doors whose very existence may have in some cases not previously been apparent to historians. It does not claim to be a comprehensive history, but it is a start in plotting the points on this particular cognitive map. Its subjects are the people who lived out their individual and collective dreams in the tragicomedy of survival/resistance/disappearance called North American history. The encounter of these dream warriors with the historical context provides the drama. Some dreams arose in the moment of the vision quest. Others were formulated in advance by utopian visionaries. Some burst forth in the spontaneous combustion of the uprising. Others were forged in protracted struggles of resistance to oppression. Still others bear the mark of the trickster or the festaludic embrace of Desire. ...

[Link to media]

— Rui Preti - Mutual Aid

 

at 4/11/26 3:36pm

Author: Rui PretiTitle: Mutual AidSubtitle: A Fight for a New FutureDate: 2025, SpringNotes: Fifth Estate #416Source: Fifth Estate #416, Spring 2025, Vol. 60, No. 1, page 45, accessed April 10, 2026 at https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/416-spring-2025/mutual-aid/ a review of Fight for a New Normal? Anarchism and mutual aid in the Covid-19 pandemic crisis Ed. Jim Donaghey, Foreword by Ruth Kinna; Afterward by Rhiannon Firth. Freedom Press, 2024 People all over the world, including in the U.S., are facing increasing authoritarianism, natural disasters, industrially-produced destruction of the living environment and intensifying social breakdown. Nevertheless, there is some basis for hope because of the growing numbers of mutual aid projects with the potential to be part of strengthening community defense and decentralized liberatory communities, emerging everywhere. Many people who had previously found it difficult to imagine breaking out of the limits of modern capitalist civilization have experienced social solidarity and have discovered that a return to the old normal state of things is not the only possibility. In the context of what people have learned from experiences of the pandemic, many are talking and writing from an anarchistic perspective about what normal is worth aspiring to. The anthology Fight for a New Normal? is part of the conversation. The articles in the collection explore both the positive and challenging aspects of mutual aid in general and with reference to several specific situations. Articles include descriptions of mutual aid groups in places as diverse as industrial towns in the process of gentrification and those undergoing irreversible deterioration, in Britain, the U.S., Australia, the Philippines, and Indonesia, among others. Anarchist mutual aid has a political perspective of cooperation as part of a model for how a whole society can be run, and the pandemic created a new awareness of interdependence. So, it is not surprising that anarchists have been active in many projects from Appalachia in the U.S. to Chile to Italy and many other countries. Several articles and books have been published recently which give us the opportunity to compare experiences in different social settings. Fight for a New Normal? provides descriptions of several different kinds of anarchist-inspired mutual aid groups. These demonstrate what is involved in providing social solidarity and individual support through bottom-up organizing. One chapter is devoted to mutual aid groups in two cities, Glasgow and Brighton in the United Kingdom. An experienced anarchist activist, Sam, relates the development of Brighton’s No Fixed Abode Mutual Aid into a well-functioning, decentralized group, able to respond collectively to complex issues of housing, poverty, mental health and support for migrants, by building up links with other groups already addressing these concerns, some anarchist influenced and some more mainstream. Sam notes that his and other anarchistically inspired groups differed in significant ways from groups focusing on charity work or government assistance programs. For one thing, the former refused to evaluate and divide people in need into deserving and undeserving categories, with the undeserving judged as personally and morally responsible for their desperate situations. Instead, they gave assistance without demanding proof of worthiness. They were able to provide support to those who might otherwise have been denied it. This was an important aspect beyond what even the most generous charity can do because of financial obligations and entanglements. Sam and his friend Aidan also describe some of the challenges faced by mutual aid projects in Brighton and Glasgow, which over time contributed to burnout of participants. They note that despite hopes of mutual aid helping to create community bonds, in those projects, all too many providers and recipients of assistance were unable to move beyond the division between helpers and those being helped. They recognized the division as “disempowering those who receive support by keeping them in a passive role in relation to the groups, and creating a proprietorial `activist’ mentality in those who provided support.” Volunteers continually tried to explain the difference between the mutual aid they were providing as acts of solidarity and the approach of charities and government welfare agencies. But this was not generally convincing to the grateful recipients. Given the continuing context of modern capitalist society, no satisfactory way of dealing with the problem was found. An article about East London Scrub Hub describes a somewhat different kind of mutual aid activity, one which was a self-organized group of health workers and apparel crafts people who provided personal protective clothing and necessary accessories to healthcare workers in hospitals and clinics who were not receiving them from their employers. Katya Lachowicz, an anarchist and one of the main organizers of the group, describes the development of two parallel types of scrub hub groups, one organized top-down and one bottom-up. The East London group was among the bottom-up type. It succeeded in producing high quality clothing and accessories, and also in bringing together many people who might otherwise never have had the opportunity to collaborate. ...

[Link to media]

— Ignatius - Fairy Dust and Toxic Waste

 

at 4/9/26 8:22am

Author: IgnatiusTitle: Fairy Dust and Toxic WasteSubtitle: Against the Spectacle of "Artificial Intelligence" and the World it ServesDate: 04/04/2026Source: https://cryptpad.fr/file/#/2/file/PpLd4x9pk5bHyXmXT7Qeky2t/ Are My Eyes Still Bleeding It is April 2026. The U.S. is once again escalating its violence against the people of Iran through continued bombardment of population centers, notably including a school for young girls. The bombing of this school killed 168 people at best estimate, over 100 of them children. The depravity of this violence is matched only by the stupidity of the Trump administration’s incredulousness that a country under bombardment and threat of invasion might use what leverage it holds to enact economic harm on their enemy, namely that Iran would choke the strait of Hormuz. Within the brutality of the present moment, there is a grim humor to watching U.S. officials stumble around in the dark looking for explanations for how they might have vastly miscalculated their militaristic strategy. The moments of grim humor are short lived, replaced by images of Israel taking advantage of this war to expand their ethnic cleansing further into southern Lebanon (as they remain equally committed to their genocidal project against the Palestinian people within their borders and without). Colonial projects are wont to foment and act upon their colonial ambitions whenever possible. Amidst this ever-expanding offensive, multiple massive tech companies have been in the news for their collaboration with the U.S. military in its project of massacring school children, specifically OpenAI and their competitor Anthropic. This is far from the first time such companies have made headlines as of late, given how desperate their CEOs and billionaire investors are to justify their valuations and secure their path towards becoming vital infrastructure of modern capital and the modern state. Those who stand to gain incredible sums of wealth and power if “AI” were to truly be mass adopted speak endlessly of the inevitability of this technology infecting all aspects of daily life. They sell the vision of a utopic future ever approaching on the horizon while the tools they claim will build that utopia burn the world around us, send bombs into children’s schools, and enable the expansion of genocidal apartheid regimes. The hype of what “AI” might one day do for us is used to choke out all criticism of what these technologies are doing in the present, including eroding our ability to think for ourselves, to think critically writ large. But the imposition of these technologies onto our daily lives is not inevitable. We don’t have to sit back and passively watch as a handful of egomaniacs consolidate their wealth by expanding the already incomprehensible brutality of the state and racial capitalism. We don’t have to swallow the shit they are forcing down our throats with every dollar, every gallon of water, every stick of RAM they can get their hands on. But if we are to meaningfully fight against this imposition, we must be able to articulate the types of violence these technologies produce and expand. I am taking the time to write the following observations down, not because my thoughts on the topic are somehow unique. I write because, in a world where our very ability to construct a language of meaningful dissent is actively being stolen from us, I believe it is vital to contribute whenever possible towards the preservation of antagonistic positionalities to the world as it is. As with everything I write, my goal is not to change minds, but to carve out space, to light a small beacon in a vast (and often frighteningly dark) sea. My hope is that such a beacon may proliferate, in word and more importantly in action. I leave the decision of that proliferation up to you. Machines and Intelligence: Against the term AI Before I attempt to outline the various horrors enabled and expanded by the technologies that have come be known colloquially as “Artificial Intelligence”, shortened to “AI”. I want to argue against the use of this term. First, this term is purposefully vague so as to collect disparate (albeit related) technologies under one umbrella. This collection allows the developers of individual technologies (say the Large Language Models powering ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.) to evade meaningful critique by hiding what their product actually is behind a billboard covered in the science fiction of what it may or may not become. It is hard to hit what you cannot see, harder still to strike against what is purposefully obfuscated. For the purposes of this zine, I will be focusing mostly on Large Language Models (LLMs), the technology powering the chatbots primarily sold as the “Artificial Intelligence” science fiction has long promised. I put “intelligence” in quotes because to call these technologies “intelligent” is, too, a purposeful obfuscation as to what mechanisms are working behind the scenes. The companies peddling LLMs desperately want you to believe that they have created sentient, genuinely thinking (and perhaps even feeling) beings. They want you to believe that the machine with which you are interfacing is actually just like you, maybe even more like you than any existent physical person. They need you to believe this to hide the fact that they expect you to base your life around a glorified (proprietary) calculator, albeit one that has the ability to adapt its algorithm based upon the data fed to it (a process known as machine learning that has been used in computational research for decades). ...

[Link to media]

— Leonardo Caffo - Antonio Gramsci: A Folk Philosopher Who Still Resists

 

at 4/9/26 2:34am

Author: Leonardo CaffoTitle: Antonio Gramsci: A Folk Philosopher Who Still ResistsDate: 2026Source: caffocabinetofcuriosities.blog Coming into contact with Antonio Gramsci for the first time feels like stepping inside a poor Sardinian peasant house at the beginning of the twentieth century there is the smell of burning wood freshly baked bread books read by candlelight and the heavy air of prison Gramsci is not a high philosopher in the dusty academic sense of the term he is a small hunchbacked chronically ill man who spent the last eleven years of his life in fascist jails and despite everything managed to write thousands of pages that still speak to us today as if we were sitting with him at a kitchen table Gramsci is a folk figure in the most beautiful and most political sense of the word he belongs to the people speaks their language even when he uses difficult terms he bends them to the dialect of struggle comes from below from the colonized South of Italy from a poor family in Ghilarza and carries within himself the rage and the hope of those who have always been subaltern his thought is not a closed system to be studied at university and then shelved it is a work tool a hammer to break the invisible chains that in twenty twenty five are called algorithms influencers public debt green passes cancel culture smart working resilience Big Brother Netflix and TikTok This long article aims to do two things at once explain to those who know nothing about him who Gramsci was and what his key concepts are hegemony organic intellectuals historic bloc war of position war of maneuver subalternity common sense good sense passive revolution trasformismo civil society political society and so on and brutally actualize them in the present showing how twenty first century fascism no longer wears black shirts but logos and how hegemony today is exercised not through direct violence but through mass entertainment and spontaneous consent But let us proceed in order beginning with Gramsci’s life in order to contextualize his thought born in eighteen ninety one in Sardinia the fourth of seven children Antonio suffered from a form of bone tuberculosis from an early age that left him hunchbacked and physically fragile thanks to a scholarship he studied at the University of Turin where he came into contact with socialism and the workers’ movement in nineteen nineteen he founded L’Ordine Nuovo a newspaper that became the organ of the factory councils movement inspired by the Russian Revolution but adapted to Italian reality in nineteen twenty one he was among the founders of the Communist Party of Italy elected to Parliament in nineteen twenty four he was arrested in nineteen twenty six despite parliamentary immunity first sentenced to five years of confinement and then to twenty years in prison he died in nineteen thirty seven at the age of forty six after writing the famous Prison Notebooks and hundreds of letters These works are not systematic treatises they are fragmentary notes written in secret in a coded language to evade censorship yet it is precisely this folk form almost oral that makes them alive and accessible Gramsci writes the way a Sardinian peasant speaks direct concrete full of metaphors drawn from everyday life this is the secret of his enduring resistance a thought that starts from the people and returns to the people The heart of everything is hegemony in nineteen twenty seven in a cell in Turi prison Gramsci wrote a sentence that remains an unexploded bomb the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear this quotation from the Prison Notebooks captures the essence of his thinking on historical transition today we are exactly in that interregnum the old the neoliberalism of the nineteen eighties to two thousand eight is in terminal crisis but the new a more just ecological feminist decolonial society struggles to be born and in this vacuum proliferate the morbid symptoms sovereigntisms conspiracy theories collective burnout influencers selling detox water for seventy nine euros wars mass depression But what exactly is hegemony Gramsci develops the concept in the Notebooks as the way in which the dominant classes do not merely rule through force the State police army but direct society through cultural consent he writes the State equals political society plus civil society that is hegemony armored with coercion here political society is the repressive apparatus while civil society is the ensemble of private institutions schools churches media associations that produce consent hegemony is the cement that holds power together the dominant classes impose their own political intellectual and moral values on society with the aim of welding and managing power around a common sense shared by all social classes especially the subaltern ones It is not only repression it is conviction Gramsci explains that in the West unlike Tsarist Russia the State is protected by a robust civil society made of cultural trenches and fortifications that is why revolution cannot be a frontal assault war of maneuver but must be a slow erosion of consent war of position ...

[Link to media]

— Leonardo Caffo - Inoperativity in the Garden

 

at 4/9/26 2:14am

Author: Leonardo CaffoTitle: Inoperativity in the GardenSubtitle: Preliminary Notes on the Fifth HutDate: 2026Source: caffocabinetofcuriosities.blog Anticipationism is not a grand philosophical program for the global transformation of the world, nor a strategy for reassembling what is already assembled. On the contrary, it is the deliberate decision to stop working for the world as a totality and to begin working inside a landscape. Far from being a quietist surrender, this is an act of extreme conceptual lucidity: the recognition that the only space in which human action can still make sense is not the world itself, but the point of view from which the world appears. Here, finally, one ceases “working” in the sense of the great historical project, collective redemption, or the universal correction of the real. Instead, one begins to care for a fragment, knowing that this fragment is all that remains habitable. What, then, is a “landscape”? Giorgio Agamben, in his dense reflections on the visible and the invisible, defines landscape not as an objective portion of territory or a mere collection of things arranged in space, but as the encounter between eye and world. Following Wittgenstein—particularly the Remarks on Colour—we can sharpen this by noting the obvious yet decisive point: landscape exists only as a point of view. There is no landscape in itself; there is only a collapse between world and self that we call “landscape.” Hence, there exists only a landscape-for-me, a landscape that looks at me as I look at it. It is pure relation, a perceptual event, a threshold where subject and entity touch without ever fully coinciding. There are, strictly speaking, no landscapes—only perspectives, cuts, openings through which the world manifests itself to someone. Yet—and this is the crucial paradox—these points of view do not remain private. The moment they are experienced and, above all, shared, rendered visible, painted, filmed, or described, they become public. They enter the common patrimony, even if no one can ever inhabit them exactly as the one who first opened them did. Consider Van Gogh’s landscapes: the wheatfield with crows, the starry night over Saint-Rémy, the twisted olive trees beneath a turquoise sky. These are not faithful representations of a slice of Provence. They are extreme, almost unbearable points of view in which light becomes matter, colour becomes emotion, and sky becomes vortex. Van Gogh does not paint “the” landscape (which ontologically does not exist by itself) but the landscape-that-looks-at-him, the landscape that is devouring him. Precisely for this reason, those paintings escape his retina and become public landscapes—landscapes that millions have inhabited with their gaze, even though no one can inhabit them with Van Gogh’s eyes. The same holds for Turner’s seas, Cézanne’s cypresses, and Caspar David Friedrich’s snow-covered expanses. Landscape is always already public the moment it is experienced as such. Like Leibniz’s monad as reinterpreted by Husserl, it exists only insofar as it becomes intersubjective. Ecology, then, always and only concerns a landscape. You cannot fix the world. Anyone who tries commits the supreme anthropocentric error: believing that the world is an object to be repaired, a machine to be optimized, a project to be completed by reaching some moral equilibrium—which is usually nothing more than bourgeois moralism disguised as a false will to power. This is cognitive anthropocentrism in its most insidious form: turning the WHOLE into a human task. Genuine ecology can only tend to a landscape—and must do so while knowing its irrelevance with respect to the total world. You can care for a garden, a wood, a river, a stretch of coastline. You can decide that this fragment of the visible deserves to be preserved in its present form. But you cannot “save the planet.” You can only save the point of view from which the planet still appears worthy of care. Everything else is ideology, infinite labour, the old theological pretension to redeem the entire creation. The garden is the micro-landscape par excellence. It is the place where the encounter between eye and world contracts to its smallest dimension, yet retains its full ontological power. Derek Jarman’s garden at Dungeness exemplifies this: not an allotment, not a park, not an extension of natural landscape, but a point of view made material. Every circle of pebbles, every piece of driftwood, every poppy sprouting among the shingle is a cut, a frame, an act of delimitation. Jarman did not “fix” the world; he chose to inhabit a landscape that the world had already declared irrelevant and radioactive. He transformed black gravel and salty wind into a point of view from which the sunset of the world becomes visible—and therefore habitable. The garden is a micro-landscape because it reduces the whole to a fragment; yet in that fragment the whole still shows itself—not as a totality to be dominated, but as a totality to be welcomed in its mutation. Salvation, at this point, becomes inextricably linked to landscape. Salvation is no longer eschatological, universal, or collective. It is a form of landscape salvation. One is saved only by accepting to inhabit a point of view. And here Wittgenstein’s decisive critique of private language becomes relevant. Just as there can be no private language (meaning is use, shared rule, common form of life), there can be no purely private landscape. The moment a landscape is experienced as such, it ceases to belong exclusively to the self. It becomes public, shareable, a form of life. ...

[Link to media]

— Ilya Kharkow - Journalism and Control in Ukraine

 

at 4/8/26 5:45am

Author: Ilya KharkowTitle: Journalism and Control in UkraineDate: 05/04/2026Source: https://theleftberlin.com/journalism-and-control-in-ukraine/ First, one group of journalists writes that the president has signed a decree introducing a minute of silence. Now, every day at 9:00, the entire country must fall silent in memory of the victims of the war. These texts usually include an exhaustive list of who can be considered a victim. As you might expect, the men who died while trying to escape conscription are not included in that list. Then a second wave of journalists joins in. They add details: pedestrians and vehicles must stop in the street for exactly 60 seconds during the minute of silence. Violations may result in a fine. Later, a third wave appears – the debunking one. It turns out that kids in public schools are not required to kneel during the minute of silence. It turns out that fines will not be imposed on pedestrians, but only on drivers, and only in exceptional cases. Be that as it may, the very idea of a minute of silence could be quite worthy. There is nothing wrong with honoring the memory of the dead. It becomes repulsive only at the moment when grief is turned into an obligation. *** I scroll through the news in bed at night. My eyes hurt, but I keep going. And suddenly I catch myself thinking that reading news about nuclear war no longer scares me, it entertains. The modern world is suffering from vision problems. A new symptom is the inability to plan. In 2026, I cannot say where I will be in five, seven, or ten years. I cannot even be sure within what borders the country that issued my passport will exist or whether it will exist at all. What will happen to the EU? Will the United States leave NATO? What will become of NATO if that happens? What will happen to Russia after Putin? Will there be a third world war? And if there is, will it bring about the end of the era of nation-states? Ukrainian journalism makes almost no attempt to answer such questions. It does the opposite: it clouds the future with sugary propaganda that produces new corpses on the battlefield. Then it publicly takes offense when someone criticizes the customer of the propaganda – the authorities. Society is not the same as the state. But Ukrainian journalism persistently pretends that there is no difference between the two. It also never tires of repeating that no one is interested in cultural news. News about science drowns in reports about inflation, prisons, and the front line. This is not an accident, it is a mechanism. Mikhail Bakunin believed that the liberation of the people begins with education. Modern journalism makes education unfashionable, placing thieves, celebrities, and scandals on a pedestal. Today I want to hold a mirror up to contemporary Ukrainian journalism, because its reflection is the best proof of its worthlessness. *** A few facts about culture that no one cares about. During his lifetime, Vincent van Gogh sold only one painting – The Red Vineyard. It was bought by the Belgian artist Anna Boch in 1890 for about 400 francs. In his short life, van Gogh managed to paint around 900 works and more than a thousand drawings. He died an unrecognized artist. Today, his paintings are worth tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. The problem with journalism is that it is almost always interested only in what has already been recognized. What is already expensive. What has already become success. But culture almost never looks important at the moment it is happening. *** Symbolic initiatives are increasingly replacing real problems. Streets are being renamed. Sometimes even cities, though mostly small ones. All of this is explained by a noble goal: get rid of the Soviet legacy. But journalism is not only about transmitting facts. It is also about a critical view. Questions. Is this necessary? What will it change? Perhaps the same resources should have been directed to the front? Journalism, like the judicial system, is supposed to be impartial. But when news outlets are funded by political parties, impartiality becomes a luxury. And as for the judicial system… try for a moment to imagine that the biblical line “judge not, and you shall not be judged” was meant literally… about courts. That changes a lot, doesn’t it? *** On social media, a woman writes that her husband has been mobilized. She has one newborn child. A rented apartment. Almost no money. She asks: what should she do? Society remains calm. It believes that the state acts fairly. After all, everyone knows that men with three or more children are not mobilized. If she has fewer than three children, then she should manage. The state must have decided this for a reason, and therefore there must be good grounds for it. After some time, another post appears. Another woman writes that her husband has just been mobilized. She has three children. She also asks: what should she do? Society remains indifferent, because it believes that the state is fair. If her husband was mobilized, then the children must not be his. Ukrainian journalism does not cover this. *** A separate genre of Ukrainian journalism is news about how the world admires Ukraine. An ambassador of some country says a few polite words, and soon an article appears. ...

[Link to media]

— Anarchist Front of Iran and Afghanistan - Review and Critique of Recent Protest Movements in Iran

 

at 4/8/26 2:33am

Author: Anarchist Front of Iran and AfghanistanTitle: Review and Critique of Recent Protest Movements in IranSubtitle: From an Iranian Anarcho-Syndicalist PerspectiveDate: April 7 2026Source: Retrieved on April 7 2026 from https://www.instagram.com/p/DW2zCcfADR1/ Many revolutionary movements begin with emancipatory intentions, yet in practice end up reproducing the very patterns of power they rose against. “Avoiding the reproduction of power” is not an abstract principle, but rather a set of practical and organizational methods that can be summarized along several key axes: 1) Horizontalization of structures In anarchist thought, the emphasis is on the “abolition of hierarchy,” which in practice means enabling voluntary and direct participation of all through decision-making in general democratic councils (federalist/confederalist general assemblies), and avoiding the presence of permanent leaders. Horizontality can be slow, exhausting, or prone to “informal powers” (influential individuals). 2) Rotation of responsibilities and roles One way to prevent the concentration of power is the temporary nature of roles; for example, a facilitator should only manage the discussion to maintain order during meetings, and individuals should be constantly replaced. No one should become a “permanent specialist of power,” because even in horizontal movements, roles are unavoidable. 3) Immediate and direct accountability Every individual or group must be accountable to the collective for their words and actions without any hierarchy, and there must be the possibility of immediate removal of spokespersons, representatives, or coordinators. This means that the selection of such individuals is limited, temporary, and revocable. 4) Fast but collective decision-making One common problem is either dictatorship or paralysis in decision-making. Therefore, for practical action, methods such as relative consensus (not full consensus) can be used. In this case, decisions are made quickly in small groups and on a small scale, without waiting for directives from a “center.” 5) Self-organization on a small scale Instead of creating a “single center” and operating under a central command, small self-managed (autonomous) groups that network with one another should be formed. For example, forming groups of 5 to 15 individuals with relative trust, where each group makes its own decisions rather than waiting for orders. This is the model that can later evolve into a network. Its advantage is that, on one hand, repression becomes more difficult, and on the other hand, concentration of power is reduced. Also, if one part is suppressed, the entire network does not collapse. This model has been seen in many labor-syndicalist movements and anarchist actions such as occupations. 6) Transparency and free circulation of information Power often arises from the monopoly of information. Therefore, to address this issue, there should be no backroom negotiations; all decisions must be public, and everyone must have access to information. 7) Prefiguration of the alternative “Live as you want the future society to be.” This kind of alternative-building means: if the goal is freedom, the means must also be free; and if the goal is equality, the structure of the movement must also be egalitarian. 8) Resistance to the “leadership moment” Almost all movements face a moment of pressure: “We need a single leader to be effective.” This is precisely the starting point of the “reproduction of authority” and a very serious warning, because even popular individuals can lead to the concentration of power. Practicing “saying no to power,” even within the movement, is one of the most important and difficult tasks. Therefore, if a person or current begins to exert excessive control, it must be openly criticized and limited, even if highly popular. 9) Continuous internal critique Only movements that continuously critique themselves can survive, thereby exposing hidden class, gender, and charismatic power relations. 10) Complete independence from states and geopolitical powers No financial, political, or media dependence on states, and maintaining independence in decision-making in practice — not just at the level of slogans — because any external dependency quickly creates hierarchical structures. 11) Attention to everyday life, not just the “moment of revolution” If a movement is formed only around street protests, once it subsides, old powers return. However, if alongside it local-regional solidarity networks, mutual aid, and forms of socio-economic self-management are created, the imposition of power from above is eliminated or redefined to a minimum. Practical activities may include helping detainees and their families, the injured, those who have lost income, creating small local (or, if possible, regional) funds, and sharing resources (food, medicine, information). These actions build trust and, most importantly, move the movement from the “street” to “everyday life.” 12) Review and critique of the movement in Iran If we apply these anarchist principles to the protests of recent decades in Iran, a complex picture emerges: on one hand, strong elements of spontaneity and horizontality; on the other, serious obstacles to stabilizing these models: ...

[Link to media]

— Various authors - Stronger than Death

 

at 4/7/26 1:25pm

Author: Various authorsTitle: Stronger than DeathDate: 24 March 2026Source: https://organisemagazine.org.uk/2026/03/24/stronger-than-death/ On March 20, two Italian Anarchists, Sandro Mercogliano and Sara Ardizzone, died in an explosion on the outskirts of Rome, as covered here by Freedom. The below is a statement signed by various groups hosted on Anarchist Cultural Circle “Gogliardo Fiaschi”’s website, originally hosted here. There is an enormous difference between the violence of the oppressed and that of the oppressors: the former follows an ethic, the latter doesn’t. – Sara Ardizzone Our ability to speak and communicate does not allow us to venture down the unbeaten paths of personal accountability for the risks we take. Any discussion along these lines remains inevitably tentative and inadequate. To truly seek freedom — in its authentic and complete form, not in the counterfeit versions bestowed and imposed by the state — means entering into the realm of risk inherent in the quest itself. In this realm, our choices — often wild and solitary — carve out a path of no return. Freedom is a quality that is experienced by putting oneself at risk. We say this without resorting to any rhetorical indulgence: the two anarchists found dead after the collapse of a farmhouse in Rome, Sara Ardizzone and Alessandro Mercogliano, are our close comrades, we are proud to have them as our comrades. The paid hacks, from whose trashy paper we learned of the incident, write about the detonation of an explosive artefact. The attempts to distance oneself, always aimed at ensuring a shameful sense of security, do not belong to us. We are used to never believe what is uttered by the propaganda machine, but if there is a glimmer of truth about the “leaked” information we cannot fail to dwell on the fundamental fact: Sara and Sandro died in action, died in the battle. Social war is not a stunt, a life style or a subculture. It is, first and foremost, a war. Sara and Sandro are a shining example of the inseparable bond between thought and deed which inspires the anarchism, revolutionaries until the very last moment of their lives, and in death. Sara and Sandro are and will always be a piece of our heart, a heart which simply cannot bring itself to write an obituary. The rants of today’s lords of the inquisition and repression go hand in hand with those of the warlords and exploiters. The perpetrators of massacres, the mass murderers, the purveyors of death cry out in outrage the scandal of the bombs of the anarchists. With Sara and Sandro we have shared the unextinguishable passion for the anarchist thought and action. Some of us lived alongside them, sharing the feverish intensity of moments that no clock could ever measure. With them, when we have been under investigation by the repressive machine of the State, we have maintained our dignity consolidated in the tenacity of our choices. We are certain of this: those endless days of ours will never fade into a distant memory. Moments that were not based on ideological rhetoric, but on the conviction of our paths, on feelings, on mutual trust, and on the joy of life. All of us who knew them deeply know that there will never be words adequate to describe their modesty, their tenderness, and their dignity. This is why the revolutionary will of Sara and Sandro has the strength to go beyond time, overcoming sorrow and pain. Their passion for life will be stronger than death. Their integrity will always serve as an admonishment to every oppressor. March 21, 2026 Anarchist Cultural Circle “G. Fiaschi” (Carrara) Anarchist Circle “The Fault” (Foligno) Danilo Cremonese and Valentina Speziale Anarchist Circle “G. Bertoli” (Assemini) Anarchist Nucleus “It is. Henry” (Cagliari) Anarchist Library Sabot (Rome) Natasha Savio Louis of Faenza

[Link to media]

— Nicolas Trifon - Preface on Minority Nationalities in the Balkans

 

at 4/7/26 12:16pm

Author: Nicolas TrifonTitle: Preface on Minority Nationalities in the BalkansDate: 2008Notes: Translated (using digital tools with manual checking) by Andrew McLaverty-RobinsonSource: « Petits peuples » et minorités nationales des Balkans, Les Cahiers du Courrier des Balkans n°6 (Arcueil, France) This is the Preface to Small Peoples and Minority Nationalities in the Balkans (« Petits peuples » et minorités nationales des Balkans), Les Cahiers du Courrier des Balkans n°6 (Arcueil, France) Translated (using digital tools with manual checking) by Andrew McLaverty-Robinson. Nicolas Trifon was a French-based Romanian anarchist of part Aromanian ethnicity, who edited the anarchist journal Iztok in 1989-91. He is known for his critiques of eastern European socialism, which he considered to be a form of state capitalism transitional between caste and class systems. (Translator’s Introduction) In Southeast Europe, the landscape of minority nationalities is more varied and unexpected, more pleasant to contemplate and intellectually more stimulating than that of majority nationalities established as nations. The diversity of the constituent traits (religious, linguistic, social, professional, territorial, political...)[1] of minorities and the strong variation observed from one case to another are as disconcerting, especially at first, as they are fascinating, once one becomes more familiar with them. From this perspective, the range of populations discussed in this issue of Courrier des Balkans is revealing. Groups constituted as national majorities are more alike than these minority populations, which often owe their specific existence to the slow decline of the Ancien Régime of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empire, a situation more favourable to minorities than to nations. Each of these nations, all of relatively recent formation, has a glorious historical past, at least in the eyes of its members, an ethnogenesis as obscure as it is exhilarating, a language codified down to the smallest details, etc. If the data varies, the structure of the national narrative of the majority nationalities is of the same kind throughout the Balkans. It is precisely these strong similarities that make national ideologies incompatible. The breakup of Yugoslavia created unusual situations whose complexity was not always fully grasped at the outset. The accession to independence of the former constituent republics of the Yugoslav Federation has significantly altered the situation of the minorities present on these regions (Serbs in Croatia, Hungarians and Croats in Vojvodina and the rest of Serbia, Albanians in Montenegro...), while in Kosovo the recent constitution of a former minority (within Serbia) into a nation has created a new national minority (the Kosovo Serbs) and puts the already existing minorities in Kosovo (Roma, Gorani, Croat, Bosnian...) in an uncomfortable situation. The materials gathered here provide an account, sometimes in detail, of the redistribution of power on the Balkan chessboard. While deploring the so-called ethnic tensions and ethnic conflicts, outside observers also have a tendency to deplore the preservation of the population diversity in this region, whose complex configuration, inherited from an even more complex history, fuels these tensions and makes these conflicts possible. In doing so, the observer effectively aligns themselves with the various Balkan majority nationalists. In the eyes of these nation-states, the presence on their territory of individuals who define themselves or can be defined as members of another nation, as well as the presence of their compatriots in neighboring nations, constitutes above all an anomaly that must be eliminated at any price. From this perspective, the Aromanians, who identify as such, distinct from the Albanian, Greek, Macedonian, and Slavic worlds in which they live, and from the more distant Romanians whose language belongs to the same linguistic family as theirs, appear to be an anomaly. However, upon closer examination, they are not alone in this situation, if one considers the Pomaks of Bulgaria and Greece, or the Gorani of North Macedonia, Kosovo, and Albania. We should also not lose sight of the fact that, while it remains common, the perception of minority realities in terms of anomaly or aberration is ultimately doomed by the prospect of European integration. Two or three other things must also be taken into account regarding the issues addressed in this collection. Minorities are not homogeneous, far from it, and not all of them aspire to become so. Some may be tempted by nationalism, of their own or other groups, if they think they can gain advantages from it; others indulge in nostalgia for political regimes of the past. The fact of having maintained themselves for centuries, for reasons that are not solely of their own will, does not protect them from rapid changes once confronted, in modernity, with new social and political situations. The precipitous decline in the number of members of some minority communities inside the region is not only due to pressure and power-plays by majority nations anxious to occupy the place taken today by minorities, but also to migratory movements explained by the search for better living conditions. This is, for the case, for example, for the Saxons of Transylvania (Romania) and, on a completely different scale, for the Croats of Kosovo, discussed in this volume in the reports by Markus Tanner in Grossau and Laurent Geslin in Letnica. ...

[Link to media]

— Max Shaver - Can permaculture be confrontational?

 

at 4/7/26 10:35am

Author: Max ShaverTitle: Can permaculture be confrontational?Subtitle: Gardening for the middle-class or a challenge to capitalism?Date: April, 2025Notes: Max Shaver is an anarchist student and thinker in the Pacific Northwest.Source: Retrieved on 3/1/26 from https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/416-spring-2025/can-permaculture-be-confrontational/ The greatest alienation that capitalism has wrought on humanity is perhaps not labor power, as posited by Marx, but rather the ability to live a life reliant on nature. Where once humanity was in intimate contact with the natural world, cityscapes, abstract economies, and industrial technocracy now dominate our lives. Capitalist economic and legal structures have been extremely efficient at prohibiting subsistence economies. Land ownership is now a necessary requisite to interact with nature beyond supervised visitation to mismanaged landscapes. This alienation has occurred with such efficiency that nature’s absence from society is practically perceived as a given. The expulsion of peasants from the commons in the 17th century was the first primary action of modern capitalism. Removing the means for a subsistence economy made them dependent on social hierarchy, forcing them to sell their labor. As colonialism propagated across the Atlantic, it was necessary to destroy the lifeways of the Indigenous population, resulting in atrocities such as the murder of millions of bison. This caused the Indigenous people to become dependent on Western commerce, racking up debt and coercing them into signing unfavorable treaties. Throughout history, one of the primary interventions of social hierarchy in human society has been to remove the capacity for communities to maintain subsistence lifestyles. If nature can provide the necessary resources for life, then accumulation is unnecessary. The illusion that systems of subsistence based on an accurate observation of nature cannot provide for our needs is crucial for the complicity with social hierarchy. The promise of permaculture has been to eliminate this illusion through the application of extensive observation in the design of material systems that simultaneously enhances the evolutionary process of nature and provides for human needs. Accurate observations of the entire apparatus of ecosystems (rather than the dissection of components) allows the permaculture practitioner to replicate nature’s material success. The principles observed are applied to meeting human needs, ensuring that both present and future generations can enjoy lives with all material necessities met. Food, fiber, water, building materials, etc. are grown and produced in sophisticated systems of interconnection and interdependence that strongly resemble the ecosystem within which they reside. Through the permaculture design process, the inherently sustainable and resilient qualities of natural ecosystems are replicated in material human systems. The ability of permaculture to provide for all human needs can preclude the social accumulation of power and the material accumulation of wealth. While some degree of authority is required due to the expertise required to design and maintain these systems, this authority is not highly technical or esoteric. Juxtaposed with the technological expertise required to operate and maintain the extensive extraction-manufacturing economy, permaculture is extremely accessible. A centralized, hierarchical, de-localized system of resource management is unnecessary. Because the global capitalist economy is dependent on the extraction of materials, the transportation of these materials across vast distances, and the extensive manufacturing process required to produce consumer goods, the social hierarchy of technocrats, bureaucrats, the wealthy, and their enforcers who oversee this system lose their place in a material system that seeks to replicate nature in a localized system of interdependent components. The ability for humans to learn from their environment and meet their needs utilizing accurate observations of nature has been a crucial part of our evolution. Permaculture is simply a modern, Western iteration of this inherently human capacity. Indigenous societies around the world have thoroughly embraced this component of our humanity and have accomplished amazing things through its application. As posited by anarchist social theorist Murray Bookchin, the history of human development is the development of social institutions that successfully interface with nature in increasingly sophisticated ways, enhancing both the egalitarian components of society and the scientific. To this end, Indigenous societies have been wildly successful. The development of Indigenous science has allowed countless societies to develop environmentally sound, sophisticated means of providing for human needs. Generally, Indigenous science consists of traditional ecological knowledge, wherein observations of the environment are embedded in cultural traditions and both preserved and added to for generations. This practice has enabled Indigenous societies to accomplish feats such as long-term weather predictions because of the sheer volume of specific, localized data that their cultural traditions contain. Feats such as this are unreproducible by Western science due to the generalized, global nature of the data it can accumulate. ...

[Link to media]

— Luisa Landová-Štychová - Marriage, Family, and Free Love

 

at 4/7/26 10:19am

Author: Luisa Landová-ŠtychováTitle: Marriage, Family, and Free LoveDate: 1912Notes: The author was a Czech anarchist during the 1910s. She was also a feminist, socialist, neo-Malthusian, and philosophical monist. In this piece, she argues that religion, capitalism, housework, and romantic love all alienate women from their interests and pursuit of justice. This piece was written in 1912, while she was an anarchist. It was a speech at an anarchist event and was printed in an anarchist journal. However, the author later became a member of parliament for the Social Democrats and then the Communists. Her activism focused on ‘free love’ and the critique of marriage, as well as birth control as an aspect of working-class women’s liberation. (Note by Andrew McLaverty-Robinson; the original piece contains a longer introduction). Translated by Melinda ReidingerSource: https://filosofia.flu.cas.cz/upload/__files/Contr_2_2023 In the gloom of the past we find traces of woman’s freedom until the period when her maternal and civic rights were abolished with the fall of communism. Woman, taken by surprise by nature, which had weakened her with involuntary, frequent motherhood – was made into man’s prey. It’s entirely logical that the male human being, who had already dared to set boundaries around a piece of land for himself, didn’t hesitate to go farther and also appropriate for himself the female human being to give birth to his blood heirs. Perhaps she resignedly surrendered – perhaps she defended herself and lost – we don’t know. But it’s certain that all of us proletarians – feel the weight of woman’s humiliation most bitterly till the present day. The well-known trinity – capital, militarism, and clericalism – have supports that are seemingly negligible, but actually the most powerful in marriage, even in its free form, and in the family. A human being, as a father or mother, is more likely to let him or herself be oppressed by capital only when they have some level of certainty of the most miserable existence. Poverty and alcohol tempt man to seek pleasure in woman’s embrace, and from this is born a surplus of fodder for barracks and brothels. Human life becomes worthless. And the cleric awaits his victim. Woman, exhausted by wage-earning and domestic work, weakened by frequent births and sleepless nights – the female human being without rights, overloaded with responsibilities, seeks support and solace in the place where until recently she was thundered against as a tool of the devil and the seducer of the miserable “stronger” sex. And they would still be thundering until today if women had not formed a strong bulwark for clericalism through their ignorance, or, among women with more awareness, an incomprehensible lack of character. And in the female human being’s traces of freedom in times of yore, we also seek a key to deciphering the problem of marriage and the family, which we have made so unnecessarily painful. We are forced to guess this riddle by our fears for the fate of our ideals of freedom, equality, and the brotherhood of mankind – for who can guarantee that after some time these ideals will not be understood and applied in a perverse, contrary manner and that a new enslavement that is perhaps even worse will not arise and replace today’s form of it!? Let’s just take notice of the contradictions in the revolutionary parties themselves, despite that the ideas of freedom, equality, and universal brotherhood – are as clear as the Sun. We say – these are personal interests, and shrug our shoulders. And these personal interests are more or less the interests of people who want to be, or already are, spouses and fathers, and who cannot and mustn’t ignore them, despite their pure character. This shouldn’t be overlooked. Marriage itself, whether lawful or free, is nothing other than owning a human being. Either it originated in the delimitation of land, or it gave an impulse to said delimitation. This is indisputable. Love is nothing more than an attack on personal freedom and on humanity itself. The lover demands complete devotion from the beloved, and this often means ruthlessness toward others. Love demands understanding! But how! This requirement of understanding has nothing to do with the understanding conceived of by the modern free human being. This is the so-called merging of souls, which is the relinquishment of one’s own independent mental development, and this requirement is the origin of a great many misunderstandings, and unnecessary pain and arguments. A weak-natured woman usually understands her husband so perfectly that she becomes a complete caricature of him. A woman who is stronger, but also the type who has common sense, becomes hypo- critical, cunning. She agrees with the man on everything, but manages things so that in the end she still does what she, herself, thinks is good. And a proud woman – one with strong individuality? If she lacks nobility, she’ll dominate the man. If she doesn’t manage to do this, she’s quarrelsome and intolerant. She has a vague inkling of the senseless humiliation of the female human being and is taking revenge for it. A noble woman does not want to enslave a man – but she likewise does not want to be enslaved. Although she is still in thrall to the traditions of love, internally, mentally, she wants to live herself, free, and be attentive to her man just like to every human soul, respecting his freedom of opinions and expressions, but demanding the same for herself. If the man is intellectually and emotionally intelligent, these kinds of people live more quietly than others. But not more happily. It is only a compromise, for the woman in a relationship that has crystallized this way always remains in the second place. These are small things to look at – but we mustn’t overlook them. They make up an important element in the upbringing of our children, from whom we would like to raise the liberated people of tomorrow. ...

[Link to media]

— Laura Portwood-Stacer - Constructing anarchist sexuality: Queer identity, culture, and politics in the anarchist movement

 

at 4/7/26 10:01am

Author: Laura Portwood-StacerTitle: Constructing anarchist sexuality: Queer identity, culture, and politics in the anarchist movementDate: September 2, 2010Source: Sexualities 13 (4) I’ve seen the anarchists in our community become more queer in their outlooks, their self-presentation, and even their own sexualities. Neal Ritchie (2008: 273) I don’t like to identify as straight. I find it oppressive. Tina, a self-identified anarchist[1] In this article, I explore how queer sexuality is enlisted in the construction of political identity by members of the contemporary anarchist movement[2] in North America. The anarchist movement has developed its own culture, in which there are clear, though contestable, ways that people cultivate their identities as anarchists. Certain expressions of queerness have become associated with anarchist identity, and I am interested in the effects, both social and political, that this articulation has. Investments in ‘authentic’ expressions of political identity can prove to be divisive within a movement, and can also displace attention away from the material political projects of the movement and onto more superficial, individualized concerns. Yet the integration of resistant practices and identities into the culture of a movement can serve to collectivize what may seem like superficial and individualized concerns, such that they end up carrying real symbolic and material power to effect change. Here, I present some of these effects as they play out in individuals’ personal experience as participants in the anarchist movement. ‘Anarchist’ is a political identity assumed by individuals, and, like any other social identity, it is constructed and communicated through the adoption of lifestyle practices and visible bodily performances. Sexuality is one way (among many) that individuals represent, and thus constitute, themselves as anarchists. Identities are historical, meaning that they are made possible by particular discourses, which arise at particular moments, in particular contexts, and amidst particular power relations (Hall, 1996). Thus the content and meanings of an identity, such as anarchist, are always contingent, varying in ways based on spatial and historical location, and discursive struggles over its definition. Each person who identifies as an anarchist experiences and enacts the identity in their own unique way, but there is enough coherence around the term for it to be a meaningful object of analysis. Despite variation between individuals, the anarchist is a specific type of individual, who represents the incorporation of various practices into a coherent, nameable identity (Foucault, 1990a; Heckert, 2004). Here, I show that queer sexuality is an important component of anarchist identity: particular sexual practices and ways of sexually self-identifying are incorporated into the constitution of the anarchist subject. The definition of queer I work from is rooted in an activist and theoretical tradition that celebrates sexual autonomy and the proliferation of sexual difference, in opposition to the repressive conformity of heteronormativity. Queer is a refusal to accept the legitimacy of socially dominant sexualities on the basis that they are natural or intrinsically valuable. This refusal is resonant with anarchism’s fundamental philosophy, which is a commitment to autonomy, accompanied by an opposition to hierarchy, that is, unequal power relations that allow some people’s autonomy to be violated by others. Dominant sexual mores and institutions create hierarchies in which people are coerced into having and expressing a limited range of sexual desires and interpersonal arrangements (Rubin, 1984). Thus it is ideologically consistent for anarchists to take up queers’ resistance of the established hierarchical valuation of sexual identities and practices. In this article, I describe ways that self-identified anarchists attempt to resist dominant norms of sexuality. The modes of resistance I discuss here do not exhaust those deployed within the anarchist movement; however my selections are reflective of what came up most often and most strikingly in the course of my research. Methodology This article draws on my research on the culture of the contemporary North American anarchist movement. I conducted interviews with 37 individuals who self-identified as anarchists, or had a strong affinity to anarchist politics. The majority of the interviews were done face to face, though some were conducted over email or internet chat. The format of the interviews was semi-structured, in that I introduced general themes to the conversation via open-ended questions about the interviewees’ identification with anarchism, participation in political organizing, membership in anarchist communities, and personal lifestyle practices. In addition to conducting interviews, I attended anarchist bookfairs, conferences, organizing meetings, and social events as both participant and observer. I also read texts, both printed and electronic, written by and for anarchists. Recruiting interviewees for a study on anarchists can be a complicated matter. Radical activists and their organizations are regularly subject to infiltration and surveillance by law enforcement personnel, which may make them particularly wary of people claiming to be doing ‘research’ on their activities. For this reason, I relied on something of a snowball technique, recruiting people I was personally acquainted with and then through them, making contact with other potential interviewees. I chose not to restrict the study to a particular organization or physical location, because of the anarchist movement’s nature as a cosmopolitan, electronically connected network in which organizational affiliations are highly fluid and geographical mobility is common. As I will discuss later, individuals’ experiences of sexuality and anarchist identity are affected by their situation within local communities, so it turned out to be instructive to talk to people who were situated in a variety of locations. At the same time, the construction of anarchist identity is not wholly determined by local context, given the circulation of anarchist discourses and bodies within national and global networks, so the account of anarchist sexuality I offer here is, I think, representative (though not, of course, exhaustive). That said, I would hesitate to generalize any of the specific experiences or discourses I discuss here to the anarchist movement as it exists beyond North America. The cultural, economic, and political contexts within which other branches of the global anarchist movement are situated are perhaps too divergent for me to be able to make any claims for the universality of my findings. I would hope however that the analytical tools I use and the theoretical and practical implications of my work would prove broadly useful across borders, and indeed, for other political movements besides anarchism. ...

[Link to media]

— K. C. Sinclair - Voltairine De Cleyre and Colonialism

 

at 4/7/26 9:26am

Author: K. C. SinclairTitle: Voltairine De Cleyre and ColonialismDate: March 2026Source: Retrieved on April 2, 2026, from historyiswhat.noblogs.org Voltairine de Cleyre, like her fellow historical anarchists of Euro-American (or simply European descent), took contradictory stances on colonialism and Indigenous peoples throughout her life. Her case is just particularly extreme, and due to that, especially instructive. As an otipêmisiw person who’s been studying anarchist history for about three decades now, I’ve never been surprised to encounter anti-Native sentiment when put forward by Euro-American and European anarchists, but it’s only recently that I’ve started writing about it. My work in this case also expands upon that of Klee Benally (Unknowable: Against an Indigenous Anarchist Theory) and Gia Vogerl (Deconstructing Settler Socialism) who first wrote about the anti-Native aspect of De Cleyre’s writing in particular. Of added personal interest to me over the years has been De Cleyre’s comradeship with Honoré Jaxon, a settler socialist from Toronto and Prince Albert (in what’s now Saskatchewan) who married into the otipêmisiwak community, served as secretary to Louis Riel, and then fled to Chicago after Canada crushed the Northwest Resistance of 1885. I’ve also long been an appreciator of De Cleyre’s particular skill at writing and her attention to the Mexican Revolution. Learning from Mistakes When it came to North American history, on the one hand De Cleyre lamented the brutality of the colonizers and the dispossession of Native peoples, as she did in her commentary in the British anarchist journal Freedom and the American anarchist publication Free Society. She even celebrated the Indigenous resistance that was part of the Mexican Revolution and the Native’s hatred for authority that it exemplified to her. On the other hand, she supported the explicitly genocidal rebellion of Nathaniel Bacon against a colonial government that wasn’t doing enough, in Bacon’s opinion, to kill every last Native person. In addition, De Cleyre displayed naivety and ignorance about America’s Founding Fathers and the character and history of anti-Black racism and slavery in the country of her birth. To her great credit, De Cleyre did, more than once, admit that she had taken incorrect stances in the past and wished to correct them. This is much more than can be said, for example, about current-day macho male anarchist pundits such as Peter Gelderloos and the editor of CrimethInc, who refuse to admit to any mistakes, or even any mistakes on the part of their close friends, seemingly due to their fragile male egos and their perceived need to project strength, no matter how fake. It’s a shame that De Cleyre was not able to come to the point of recognizing her mistakes when it came to colonialism and anti-Blackness, but her humility is something to aspire to and something all the more necessary today given the ego-maniacal white boys club that makes up much of American anarchist media. Painful Misinformation In the late 1880s, De Cleyre made a public speech on the Founding Father and author of Common Sense, Thomas Paine. That speech, a glowing tribute to Paine and his work, was later included in the 1914 book, Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, edited by Alexander Berkman. Nowhere in her speech, nor anywhere else in her writing, does De Cleyre so much as mention, let along critique, the line in Common Sense where Paine states that, at the time of the American Revolution, with regard to the British, there were “thousands, and tens of thousands, who would think it glorious to expel from the continent, that barbarous and hellish power, which hath stirred up the Indians and Negroes to destroy us, the cruelty hath a double guilt, it is dealing brutally by us, and treacherously by them.” Nor does she mention how Paine’s counter-revolutionary sentiment and conspiracy theory was then paraphrased in the Declaration of Independence by fellow Founder Thomas Jefferson. De Cleyre had read Moncure Conway’s biography of Paine, and this gave her the mistaken impression that Paine had been an outspoken abolitionist, since a newspaper article, African Slavery in America, was falsely attributed to Paine by Conway. In reality, although he privately opposed slavery, Paine was reluctant to say so publicly, only doing so under his own name in one known case, his 1802 text, To the French Inhabitants of Louisiana, and under an assumed name in the case of the 1792 pamphlet, Old Truths and Established Facts, co-written with Joseph Priestly. Although Paine opposed slavery, and didn’t hold slaves himself, unlike Jefferson, he also opposed, as we see from his comments in Common Sense, rebellion by the slaves, rebellion that actually led to freedom for some of the enslaved who rebelled, as they escaped from America to other British colonies. If De Cleyre was not blissfully ignorant about this, she nonetheless chose to remain silent on it and instead promote Paine as an all-out abolitionist that he never was. In her 1908 text, Anarchism and American Traditions, De Cleyre returned to the theme of the Founders, heaping praise on both Jefferson and Paine. Nowhere does she mention that Jefferson was a slave master who had fretted over slave rebellions, or that he was an advocate, in his letters, of ethnic cleansing against Indigenous peoples. Nowhere does she mention the counter-revolutionary grievances of the Declaration of Independence, the complaints against Britain for restricting the theft of Native lands and for supposedly inciting Blacks and Natives to rebellion. She even states the opposite of the truth, that “the spirit of liberty was nurtured by colonial life” and that it is “American tradition that we keep out of the affairs of other nations.” ...

[Link to media]

— Jess Dillard-Wright and Danisha Jenkins - Dangerous and Unprofessional Content

 

at 4/6/26 5:14pm

Author: Jess Dillard-Wright and Danisha JenkinsTitle: Dangerous and Unprofessional ContentSubtitle: Anarchist Dreams for Alternate Nursing FuturesDate: 14 February 2024Source: Philosophies 2024, 9(1), 25; doi.org Abstract Professionalized nursing and anarchism could not be more at odds. And yet, if nursing wishes to have a future in the precarious times in which we live and die, the discipline must take on the lessons that anarchism has on offer. Part love note to a problematic profession we love and hate, part fever dream of what could be, we set out to think about what nursing and care might look like after it all falls down, because it is all falling down. Drawing on alternate histories, alternate visions of nursing history, we imagine what nursing values would look like, embracing anarchist principles. We consider examples of community survival, mutual aid, and militant joy as strategies to achieve what nursing could be if nurses put an end to their cop shit, shrugging off their shroud of white cisheteropatriarchal femininity that manifests as professionalism and civility. We conclude with a call to action and a plan for skill-building because this can all be different. Keywords: anarchism; care; ethics; futurism; nursing 1. Introduction Anarchism is dangerously destabilizing for professionalized nursing. Anarchism’s rejection of hierarchies demands a rejection of professionalized nursing itself, given nursing’s ongoing entanglements with oppressive regimes of capitalism, managerialism, and professionalism. The circumscribed epistemological and ontological bounds of professionalized nursing as a care practice cannot survive the expansive generosity of anarchism. Many nurse leaders physically cringe at the word “anarchy”, classifying it as dangerous and unprofessional, immediately lamenting the imagined horrors: Chaos! “People would die”, nurse leaders say, clutching their pearls. As if people are not already dying, have not been dying. This reaction is a failure to identify the horrors produced by the violent order imposed by capitalist healthcare systems. But it does not have to be this way. We are nurses whose hearts were broken by nursing in this healthcare system. Our tears nourished and cultivated a commitment to set out to do what we tried to in the first place: help people survive and leave the world a little better than we found it. Or at the very least, minimize the harm along the way. As the late-COVID-19 healthcare–industrial complex (HIC) gasps and wheezes through its dying breaths, nursing needs [r]evolution. In this paper, we set out to think about what nursing and care might look like after it all falls down, because it is all falling down. We invoke the image and ideas of nurse and anarchist Emma Goldman to imagine what nursing values would look like, embracing anarchist principles. We consider examples of community survival, mutual aid, and militant joy as strategies to achieve what nursing could be if nurses put an end to their cop shit, shrugging off their shroud of white cisheteropatriarchal femininity that manifests as professionalism and civility. We conclude with a call to action and a plan for skill-building because this can all be different. 2. Have We Ever Been Nurses As we think through the unlikely pairing of nursing and anarchism, we start with a few words on nursing. Unlike many or most other things understood as universal, nursing is one of those things that most of us will experience in our lifetimes. For most reading this paper, that reality has likely already come to pass. Nursing is a relational care praxis that draws on art, care, science, and community to support wellbeing, health, and disease prevention, as well as care in illness [1][2]. This kind of care happens everywhere and is not limited to professionalized caregivers. Efforts to exercise proprietary claim to care—and exorcize those deemed unworthy to and of care—including nursing care, give rise to some of the most egregious and insidious structures that harm nurses and people who need care alike. The public imbues nursing with trust [3], an honor of dubious lineage that simultaneously confers pastoral power on nurses while enforcing docile maternal bodies. In the history of nursing, the specter Florence Nightingale is regrettably the first image conjured to mind. Nightingale serves as sort of a golden spike, fixing the popular and professional imaginary of nursing in a rigid Victorian schema, articulated through such virtues of Christian femininity as obedience, sacrifice, modesty, order, cleanliness [4]. Nightingale, however, was not the first nurse or only nurse. Nursing care is not now and has never been proprietary to professionalized nursing. Well before Nightingale’s arrival on the scene, nurses were nursing, people were caring for one another. This begs the question, who does the synecdoche of Nightingale-as-nursing as shorthand for the discipline serve? As we think about nursing and about anarchism, it is worth contemplating the archism of professionalization. Following the intervention of Martel in this issue, we understand archism as “a form of projection of authority, the assertion of a deep, ontological basis for power that is in fact based on nothing at all” [5]. For nursing, this is manifested and enforced through the image of Nightingale, a projection of a “mythic violence is the means by which that system sustains itself” [5], razor edges softened by romantic visions of care and entrustedness. Nursing is afforded one history, one image, one ontology—a singular trope on which our history and present balances, at the expense of all other possible pasts, all other stories of what nursing has been, could be [4]. This singular vision forecloses on alternate narratives while simultaneously stifling dissent, denying complicity, demanding obedience, enforcing white heteropatriarchy, establishing and reinforcing nursing’s place in the paternalist hospital family [6], and by turns mobilizing the Janus faces of archism to consolidate power and enforce discipline [7]. For an especially powerful treatment of how racial hierarchy is enforced in nursing leadership, see [8]. And as long as nurses cleave to this, refusing to recognize what is so clearly unfolding before them in the necropolitical economies of healthcare, we have to wonder what it means to nurse, to care [9]. ...

[Link to media]

— Jeff Monaghan and Kevin Walby - The Green Scare is Everywhere

 

at 4/4/26 11:36am

Author: Jeff Monaghan and Kevin WalbyTitle: The Green Scare is EverywhereSubtitle: The Importance of Cross-Movement SolidarityDate: 10/26/2009Source: Upping The Anti, Issue 6. <www.uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/06-the-green-scare-is-everywhere> The burgeoning “War on Terror” is facilitating the re-emergence of “terrorism” as a legal and discursive framework for classifying and suppressing political radicalism. Despite the jingoism, xenophobia, and racism of the “War on Terror,” the Federal Bureau of Investigation has consistently identified “eco-terrorism” – “homegrown” terror ostensibly perpetuated by (mostly) white environmental, animal liberation, and social justice activists – as one of the top threats to America. This climate of fear has facilitated efforts to suppress the environmental justice and animal liberation movements. These efforts are comparable to the campaigns directed towards communists, socialists, and other dissidents during the Red Scare periods of the 1910s and 1950s. In a January 2006 national press conference called to announce the indictment and arrest of several eco-activists, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller indicated that “investigating and preventing animal rights and environmental extremism is one of the FBI’s highest domestic terrorism priorities.”[1] The day of those arrests coincided with the release of convicted Oklahoma City bombing co-conspirator Michael Fortier. No media coverage mentioned the contrast between Fortier’s sentence – 12 years for an act resulting in 168 deaths – and those aimed at the non-violent acts of property destruction allegedly carried out by eco-activists, which ranged from 30 years to life without parole. The “Green Scare,” as activists have termed it, has emerged from an alignment of interests between political elites and industrial capitalists. Like the McCarthyists of old, the objectives of these interests are broader than the regulation of “crime.” They seek to destroy broader political opposition. Efforts to demobilize and neutralize these movements go beyond the immediate targeting of radicals. Under the banner of “fighting terrorism,” the Green Scare has provided opportunities for an alignment of ruling class interests to attack a diverse array of activists who, in various ways, object to the avarice and violence of global capitalism. It is important to note that the suppression techniques of the Red Scare(s) were not, and never were, deployed exclusively against members of the Communist Party. These crackdowns were, and still are, used to demobilize and demoralize a wide spectrum of political opposition on the left. Many of the most severe forms of suppression used covert and overt demobilization techniques to directly target the fringe, marginalized, and more radical elements of the struggle. The suppression directed against animal and environmental liberation activists today is not identical to the violence directed towards movements like the radical labour and anarchist movements of the 1920s, the Black Power movement, the American Indian Movement, or cold-war Communists. However, the Green Scare has two significant implications for individuals and groups working towards radical social transformations. First, an alignment of state and corporate interests working under the guise of “anti-terrorism” is producing a set of dangerous precedents as it tries to destroy radical elements of the environmental and animal liberation movements. The techniques deployed against these activists can and will be used against other left groups that challenge capital and the state. Second, a broader aim of state and corporate elites is to dissuade and neutralize opposition movements to capitalist profit-making by branding elements of the left as irrational and violent terrorists. If the left accepts this characterization of its most radical elements, it will become paralyzed by internal divisions and will be greatly weakened when capital and the state inevitably target more “moderate” and mainstream left organizations. In this context, the suppression of environmental and animal liberation activists in the United States has immediate implications for activists globally, particularly for those of us living in Canada. The extensive process of anti-terrorism policy harmonization between the US and Canada has integrated surveillance and policing practices. These developments are beginning to play a role in the targeting of activists. The multi-agency effort to criminalize the activist group Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) illustrates that Green Scare politics are influencing police, legal, and security measures across Canada and the US. Although SHAC sometimes presents itself as a reform-centred movement, it is heavily reliant on direct action tactics. SHAC targets corporations and individuals and has active groups in the US and Canada. SHAC and similar groups are at the epicentre of the war against “eco-terrorism.” The suppression of SHAC has serious ramifications for other social movements, inasmuch as demobilization techniques of police and other regulatory agencies rely upon the mapping of radical communities, creating a surveillance web that has the potential to migrate and swarm in response to a variety of perceived threats to the status quo. The suppression of SHAC demonstrates that solidarity across movements is needed to collectively resist Green Scare techniques that could easily be applied to the labour movement and social justice organizations that target corporations as part of their campaign strategies. ...

[Link to media]

— Hybachi Lemar - The Frankensteinian Efforts To Control Us Have Failed

 

at 4/4/26 11:24am

Author: Hybachi LemarTitle: The Frankensteinian Efforts To Control Us Have FailedDate: February 17 2026Source: Retrieved on February 19 2026 from https://www.helpacompacontinuehismission.com/2026/02/16/the-frankensteinian-efforts-to-control-us-have-failed/ It’s no coincidence so many of us on the fringes of society find ourselves as fragments of what we formerly were. The struggle to make ends meet, to keep it together – ICE tearing families apart. The feeling – the knowing – that we don’t fit in, in the system here to exploit and alienate us. From these alienated margins, we see the government operating to manipulate the ways that we move, and to control us with its contradictions. The same system tanker-jacking cargo from Venezuela is the same that labels us criminals for life for holding up a gas station for seventy bucks. That’s like the grease calling the oil slick! The fight to control us doesn’t stop in the streets. When we’re thrown in prison, extreme measures are taken to disarm us from every sense of autonomy. Radical literature, relevant literature – banned. The colorfully drawn letter – photocopied, portions of them amputated. Kiosks and tablets – void of imagery, are screwed in place, mechanizing emotions. Completing groups – like “Cage Your Rage” – is required for making parole. The brain that rebels against confining conditions is locked away in the behavior modification program. With fascist precision, reform regulates all movement in lockstep with ideals that have only led to where we find ourselves now. But the Frankensteinian efforts to control us have failed! Isolating our bodies in fluorescent lit cells 24/7 has proven unable to desensitize us. The programs used to scientifically modify our behavior has been rebelliously breached. Instead of caging the rage, the radical within is autonomously being tapped into; to transform that rage or redirect it to rip apart the false logic that caging people with caging ideas could ever free us from caging conditions. No door closed in the mind is unable to be unlatched. Every attempt to divide us only strengthens mutual aid. The more the idea is repressed, the more zines like Fire Ant are found dangerously crawling in circulation. The dignity the DOC aims to strip from us by digitally scanning our correspondence gives rise to Mothers Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity. In the face of those who try to ideologically disarm us, our outreach has become dangerously extended. Every volt from their tasers appear to only electrify us, disobedient to their orders, uncontrolled by commands. The ripped-off, the broken-down, the torn-apart can be seen repositioning ourselves as parts of each other, with alarming recognition that their Frankensteinian efforts to control us have failed! Your Compa, Hybachi LeMar

[Link to media]

— Simoun Magsalin, IGD Worldwide - The Western Left’s Erasure of Anarchists in the So-called “Third World”

 

at 4/4/26 11:14am

Author: Simoun Magsalin, IGD WorldwideTitle: The Western Left’s Erasure of Anarchists in the So-called “Third World”Date: Jan 26, 2022Source: https://itsgoingdown.org/the-western-lefts-erasure-of-anarchists-in-the-so-called-third-world/ Again and again, white and Western leftists have erased anarchists in Asia by saying anarchism in the so-called “Third World” does not exist. If they deign to acknowledge our existence, they deride us by saying we are small or marginal in the context of large hegemonic left blocs led by various communist parties. We anarchists in imperialized nations know we are a minority. We are not like Marxists who seek to proclaim gospels and anoint converts. We are not here to proclaim anarchism but anarchy, for people to freely act under their own power. Freedom is a constant struggle. On and on, these white and Western leftists talk of the “correctness” of Marxist movements, implying marginalization denotes incorrectness. However, to argue that anarchists do not exist in imperialized countries because our milieus are small or marginal is to think that population size determines correctness. Comments spewed from frothing mouths suggest that, because the Communist Parties of China/Vietnam/N.Korea/Cuba boasts several millions of members combined, therefore they are doing something correct. This is obviously ludicrous; population size has never denoted correctness. If that was so, then capitalism is correct and so is liberal democracy, for the hegemonic forces of liberal democratic capitalism still indoctrinate its tenets to the proletarianized the world over. Elsewhere, these white and Western leftists talk of correctness in the context of “successful” revolutions in Russia or China. But to argue Marxism is correct because of the USSR, PRC, etc. is to fallaciously appeal to past victories. Past victories do not determine the conditions of our struggle today. Nor do we wish to build states and cadre bureaucracies. We struggle for more than that. Besides, to claim that Marxism is “correct” because of the 1917 Russian Revolution seems to suggest that an absence of “victories” implies incorrectness. If this is indeed so, then ironically Marxism was incorrect on the eve of the Russian Revolution, before which Marxism had only failed. That anarchism has not “succeeded” according to the criteria of authoritarians (whatever that is), therefore does not discount the possibility that anarchy can still win the day in the future. We know our victories in the imperialized world are limited. We are anarchists not because of our victories, but because we know what currently exists does not have to exist in the way it does. If you “Marxists” want to be victorious, join the United States Military which dominates the entire world, for they are a victorious power. Anarchy is never easy. In the context of the archipelago so-called as the Philippines, white and Western leftists would uphold the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and their armed wing the New Peoples Army (NPA) as righteous “proletarian” actors against the “petty-bourgeois” anarchists. White and western leftists would claim that the “liberated barrios” and extensive guerrilla infrastructure are ultimate proof of the validity of Marxism. So what if the CPP-NPA “works”? If you are a Marxist because Marxism “works,” you must interrogate what exactly constitutes as “working.” What works is not necessarily what is desirable. Imperialism works and reigns victorious over the world; shall you be an imperialist because it “works”? We anarchists already know the answer: yes, Marxists shall become imperialists because it works. This is proven by the social imperialist policies of the former Soviet Union and the current People’s Republic of China and endlessly defended by many Marxists today. Yet so what if cadres “work” to build guerrilla fronts? We are not in the business of building guerrilla fronts; we are in no business at all! Party work disgusts us; I ain’t nobody’s political officer! When we organize, we must ask whom we intend to empower and who is centered in the struggles. Are we empowering an army or workers? A cadre or the proletariat? A party or a people? These are not equivalent. Yet the devotees of Saint Marx such as those in the CPP-NPA see themselves as “proletarian” by virtue of having taken up arms against the bourgeois State, forgetting that to be proletarianized is a negative consequence of this capitalist world that marks us as proles, not a virtue that can be emulated, because it is not a virtue at all. A social revolution is not determined by past victories nor by a “correct” line but by the generalization of an insurrectionary break with the world that proletarinizes, a break from which there can be no return to the status quo ante. Such a generalized insurrectionary break cannot be directed by any cadre or party, nor even by a party of anarchists. Such a break can only be self-directed by proletarians-in-abolition, those that strike at the world that marks them as proles. By directing militancy towards consolidating guerrilla fronts instead of striking at proletarianization, Marxists such as the CPP-NPA actually suppress revolutionary agency. Yet it is exactly the self-direction of proles striking at their proletarianization that keeps alive the prospects of anarchy in the imperialized world! ...

[Link to media]

As of 4/18/26 1:05pm. Last new 4/14/26 6:31pm.