None of us wanted to wake up on January 18th to the news that a forest defender in Atlanta’s Weelaunee Forest named Tortuguita, known to the Law and its death system as Manuel Teran, had been murdered by police during a morning raid. It was the last thing that we wanted to hear. Tears came to my eyes while reading the news of their killing before their name and picture had been released, and later after seeing an image of them glowing, smiling, luminously full of life I thought of how much more devastated I would feel if I had known Tortuguita, if I had heard their voice, felt the warmth of their presence, knew them as a friend, as a fellow anarchist and a comrade, how utterly broken my heart would be if they were my child, if I had raised them lovingly and spoke to them almost every day on the phone, as their mother Belkis had.

We define the metropolis as the compact group of territories and heterogeneous devices crossed in every point by a disjunctive synthesis; there is not any point of the metropolis, in fact, where command and resistance, dominion and sabotage are not present at the same time. An antagonistic process between two parts, whose relation consists in enmity, totally innervates the metropolis. On one side, it consists, true to it’s etymology, in the exercising of a command that is irradiated on all the other territories – so everywhere is of the metropolis. It is the space in which and from which the intensity and the concentration of devices of oppression, exploitation and dominion express themselves in their maximum degree and extension. In the metropolis, the city and the country, modernity and second natures collapse and end. In the metropolis where industry, communication and spectacle make a productive whole, the government’s required job consists in connecting and controlling the social cooperation which is at the base to then be able to extract surplus value using biopolitical instruments. On the other side, it is a whole of the territories in which a heterogeneous mix of subversive forces – singular, Common, collective – are able to express the tendentiously more organized and horizontal level of antagonism against command. There are not places and non- places in the metropolis: there are territories occupied militarily by the imperial forces, territories controlled by biopower and territories that enter into resistance. Sometimes, very often, these three types of territories cross one another, other times the latter separates itself from the other two and, in yet other occasions, the last enters into war against the first two. The Banlieue is emblematic of this “third” territory: but if everywhere is of the metropolis, then its also true that everywhere is of the Banlieue. In the metropolitan extension of Common life, the intensity of the revolutionary imagination of communism-to-come lives.

On October 7, Hamas, the ruling party in the Gaza Strip, breached the siege wall surrounding them to carry out a series of attacks. The Israeli government has responded with a full military operation. While both sides have targeted civilians as well as soldiers, these events can only be understood in the context of decades of repression and ethnic cleansing.

The following is a brief but thorough statement on prisons and those who would contest them. It offers a broad critique of many commonly-held assumptions and positions that could characterize leftist and anarchist political practice with regard to prison and prisoners. In particular we chose to reprint the article here (it originally appeared in the magazine Fire to the Prisons #10) because of its poignant criticism of the prison “abolitionist” movement which has grown in the last few years.

We are settlers on this land, raised in cities, rootless, and alienated from the ecosystems we can’t help but be part of. But we want to unlearn what we have been taught by the dominant culture, and in the process, we want to re-learn joy, connection, and wonder, while embracing grief and loss in order to heal. We want to decolonize, and to do this, we need to build a new kind of relationship with the land. We want to take steps towards an anarchist ecology, towards a knowledge of the land that is anti-colonial and anti-authoritarian.

The text translated here first appeared in 1995 as a pamphlet addressed to the occupied spaces and social centers in Italy by two anarchist occupied spaces. In the few years previous to this, a movement aimed at the legalization of certain occupied spaces sprang up, largely centered around the Milanese social center Leoncavallo (now well-known as one of the places from which Ya Basta! And the Tute Blanche originated). From the start, this movement for legalization involved not merely negotiation with the state institutions, but the formation of alliances with specific parties of the official left. That the first social centers to involve themselves in this movement were part of the Autonomia reveals the purely instrumental nature of their decentralism and “autonomy”. The legalized social centers are now all camp followers of one or another of the Left parties. In this text, the authors first set forth their own basis for choosing to carry out occupations and then examine the implications of the legalization movement in terms of the recent history of squatting in Europe and in terms of the effects of negotiation and compromise with the institutions of domination on the project of self-organization and more particularly on those spaces that refuse legalization, compromise and negotiation with power.

“You can't fight alienation with alienated means.”

Not drinking HASN'T MAGICALLY FIXED MY PROBLEMS, MY LIFE AND IT HASN'T FIXED ME, BUT IT SHOWED ME THAT THERE ARE DIFFERENT WAY THAT ARE PERHAPS BETTER FOR ME. AND I'M SO OVER SELF-DESTRUCTION AS A WAY TO REBEL. I'M SO OVER BELIEVING THAT WHITE IMPERIALIST CISHETERO CAPITALIST PATRIARCHY WANTS ME TO

Situation in Gaza Strip is getting more catastrophic every day. In our attempt to better understand the situation in the region , we made an interview with an Israeli anarchist. We talk about the modern anarchist movement, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, resistance against it and prospects for the future.

Back in the 1990s, answering mail for the ’zine I used to publish, I noticed that Germans—even German anarchists—responded strangely whenever the conflict between Israel and Palestine came up. Every time anything related to the issue appeared in my ’zine, I got a lengthy letter from an irate German accusing me of Palestinian nationalism or even borderline anti-Semitism. I never once received such a letter from citizens of any other nation, even though the ’zine was distributed as far as Israel, nor did I ever receive one from a Jewish reader of any nationality. From my perspective, the positions in the ’zine on that issue were not particularly controversial: like most others in the anarchist community, I deplored the violence and racism of the Israeli military and the Zionist settler movement, while remaining suspicious of those seeking to capitalize on what I considered understandable Palestinian desperation. At the time, I interpreted these letters as nothing more than an overzealous effort on the part of some Germans to be sensitive about issues affecting Jewish people.