Ihr wisst, dass das wahr ist. Wenn nicht, warum stöhnt jede*r auf, wenn ihr das Wort erwähnt? Warum sind bei euren anarcho-kommunistischen Theoriegruppen-Treffen immer so wenig Leute anwesend? Warum ist das unterdrückte Proletariat nicht zu Bewusstsein gekommen und hat sich euch angeschlossen in eurem Kampf um Befreiung?

Por que você acha que ninguém aguenta quando você começa a falar? Por que o seu grupo de teoria anarco-comunista nunca recebe atenção? Por que os proletários oprimidos não se conscientiza logo e ingressam na sua luta por libertação mundial?

Ammettilo, la tua politica è fottutamente noiosa.

You know it’s true. Otherwise, why does everyone cringe when you say the word? Why has attendance at your anarcho-communist theory discussion group meetings fallen to an all-time low? Why has the oppressed proletariat not come to its senses and joined you in your fight for world liberation?

On Wednesday, December 7th at Texas A & M University, as FBI agents monitored hundreds of protesters from the tops of roofs, heavily armed riot police clashed with demonstrators bent on disrupting and shutting down an event organized by Preston Wiginton, a 51 year old former student of the campus and long time white supremacist. The event featured a talk by Richard Spencer, a leading ideologue within the growing “Alt-Right,” which attempts to re-brand fascist, Neo-Nazi, and white nationalist ideas for the millennial generation in order to create an all-white fascist “ethno-state.”

nous pensons qu’il peut avoir une résonnace ici, en France, dans cette période électorale. Pour anticiper sur une polémique :  ce que les auteurs (anonymes) appellent ici anarchistes correspondrait davantage en France aux anarcho-autonomes et aux antifas, soit une partie du milieu anarchiste. Il n’est pas fait ici mention du travail révolutionnaire mené par les anarcho-syndicalistes ou les communistes libertaires, ni des positions des anarchistes non-violents. Mais tous les anarchistes pourront partager, nous le croyons, le jugement sur les élections, ainsi que l’urgence d’une révolution. Quels que soient les moyens que nous employons pour en hâter l’inéluctable arrivée. (Ou pas).

Every life that lives today is lived as governed. And yet, the lived experience of being governed, from our first to final breaths, suggests that while all lives may be governable to some degree, life itself cannot ultimately be governed once and for all. The reality that a life must be subjected to relentless governing in order to remain governed evinces that all life shares an inexhaustible resistance to governance, an ineradicable ungovernability, in common. Ungovernable life is the name we can give to this lived resistance, to life’s enduring fugitivity and immanent insurgency.

Noam Chomsky, a self-described anarchist, presents anarchism as:

Talking about “Christianity” is difficult; Christianity is the largest religion in the world, comprising a multitude of denominations, regional variants, and political projects – each with their own complicated histories and specific contexts to unpack. This means that any statement or conclusion with the words “all” or “most” will necessarily miss something, even in the most nuanced discussions on the subject. I want to admit this limitation from the outset not only to mitigate accusations of misrepresentation, but to contrast this text against its primary target: White Christian Nationalism. Easy as it may seem to debunk the ideology of celebrity QAnon cultists and right-wing terrorists, we have a lot to discuss before we can meaningfully counter this clear and present danger. To start, let’s talk about God.

Yá’át’ééh, I feel it necessary to offer these pieces of the introduction I wrote for Black Seed: Not On Any Map, particularly because this overall piece was originally situated in the midst of a larger conversation and may feel like it’s missing a couple of things to some readers.

Ya’át’ééh, je pense qu’il est nécessaire de proposer ces extraits de l’introduction que j’ai écrite pour Black Seed: Not On Any Map (publié en 2021), en particulier parce que le texte intégral se situait à l’origine au milieu d’une discussion plus large, et il se pourrait que quelques éléments manquent pour certains lecteurs.

As a child I didn’t have many friends. I was trans and didn’t know it, and didn’t perform gender in the way I was expected to. I was autistic and didn’t know it, and didn’t engage socially in the way I was expected to. I was plural and didn’t know it, and didn’t act the way I was expected to. I talked to “myself” and stimmed visibly and traded toys with my “differently-gendered” sibling—until, inevitably, these things were shamed out of me, sometimes quite literally beaten out of me. I learned quickly to hide my true self, but never quickly enough, and no matter how hard I tried I could never do it completely. My behaviors were seen as strange by other children, and I was bullied a lot.

Really sucks Ye ain’t coming back. He’s dead to me, as an artist. And it sucks, I absolutely love a ton of his music. I am on record defending him as, at various times, the best mainstream hip hop producer in the industry, and as a visionary artist. That was all true and I stand by every word of it. He’s fallen a long fuckin way from the “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” days.

2002. I was 14. The days when dial up internet connections were still common and the Internet was slooowww. Images could take literally minutes to download, arriving block by block from the top left corner to bottom right.

To the true anarchist anarchy is freedom from rulers and the patriarchy; to the manarchist it is the freedom to exercise patriarchal control and rule over others. Combat manarchists.

Although a frequent subject in renaissance paintings already, the Florentine painter Artemisia Gentileschi famously depicted Judith’s beheading of Holofernes with unusually visceral and tactile detail, in what is believed to be a self-portrait representing herself and Agostino Tassi, the man who raped her when she was seventeen.

“On the night of November 16, 1982, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Richard Jahnke, Sr. stepped out of his car and into the range of the 12-gauge shotgun held by his sixteen-year-old son. Richard, Jr. fired six times; four of his shots hit his father in the chest. Inside the house, his seventeen-year-old sister Deborah waited in the living room with a semiautomatic .30 caliber M-1 carbine. She did not have to shoot. One hour after the shooting, Richard Jahnke, Sr. died from the gunshot wounds inflicted by his son.

The anarchist position on getting vaccinated is simple: reducing the spread of illness protects you and your community. Getting vaccinated reduces the pressure on hospital resources, and it helps slow the spread of the disease. This, in turn, stymies the mutation of the virus into potentially deadly new variants and helps keep those around you safe. The same logic applies to wearing masks. If, as anarchists, we strive to maximise the well-being and freedom of everyone, masks and vaccines are the only viable option in the midst of a global pandemic.

COVID-19 has caused incalculable suffering. For environmentalists, this only portends the coming devastation of climate change. Yet some have argued that for all of the damage the pandemic has incurred, it has also precipitated a recovery in the environment by bringing society to a standstill. This is, to some extent, borne out by the data: the International Renewable Energy Agency has estimated an overall 6-8% reduction in annual emissions for 2020. Reports suggest that air quality has also improved in cities facing lockdown.

“Western civilization” is dreadful, there’s nothing here worth saving. A history of colonization and genocide, rape and repression, unspeakable violence on fathomless scales.

When exploring the potential challenges of a liberatory future, one of the most frequent subjects we reflect upon is that of how our labor might be organized to attend to the needs of all without domination and hierarchy. There is no shortage of theory proposing various answers to these questions and it is not my intention, in this essay, to do the same. Rather, I intend to explore the root beliefs in one of the most regular questions radicals of all tendencies are asked: “How will we make people do the dirty and undesirable work if there is no state or police?”

Many people new to anarchist ideas might find much that they resonate with in the political philosophy, but feel that they have some reservations that keep them from being able to identify fully with anarchism. Anarchism as many come to know it is, in many ways, a profoundly optimistic philosophy when it comes to the human condition. Much of our analysis (or at least the analysis that tends to be more popular and therefore more widespread) is grounded in the idea that much of the harm in our world is produced by the conditions of hierarchy and domination, and would be incredibly lessened if those conditions were radically and fundamentally changed. This remains an important component of anarchistic philosophy which is not my intention to diminish here. However, not all people are ready to embrace this faith in an inherent human capacity for good. Many of us are survivors of trauma, trauma created and compounded by systems but often enacted by individual people (sometimes even other anarchists). Individual people who saw our agency as forfeit, who refused again and again to recognize our humanity, who — even when the choice for accountability and care was clearly available, chose to do us harm instead. To those who have experienced this trauma, often multiple times from many different people, it can be extremely difficult to accept an anarchist philosophy that seems so dependent upon us believing unerringly in the human capacity to be good, to care for others, and to reject power.

Often when survivors of abuse speak out against our abuser’s behavior and control, we are approached by seemingly well-meaning people who exort us to “remember” our abuser’s humanity in the process, even going so far as to tell us to not use the term “abuser” at all, but person-first language like “person who abuses” just to make crystal clear to all who hear us that we put our abuser’s humanity first. Anything less is, in their argument, counterproductive to creating change, because what is needed for change is to center the abuser’s “healing” from their own abusive behavior.