There have long been people in the United States talking about secession or splitting the country into smaller nations. These kinds of discussions seem to be happening more as US states make regional agreements to manage Covid-19 recovery and right wingers fantasize about civil war. Creating smaller American nations will not liberate the people on this land. Instead we should expand individual and community autonomy.

The appearance of the Egyptian Black Bloc in Cairo’s streets in January 2013 triggered gullible excitement in Western anarchist circles. Little thought was given to the Egyptian Black Bloc’s political vision – or lack thereof – tactics, or social and economic positions. For most Western anarchists, it was enough that they looked and dressed like anarchists to warrant uncritical admiration. Facebook pages of Israeli anarchists were swamped with pictures of Egyptian Black Bloc activists; skimming through the US anarchist blogosphere during that period would have given one the impression that the Black Bloc was Egypt’s first-ever encounter with anarchism and anti-authoritarianism. But as American writer Joshua Stephens notes, the jubilant reaction many Western anarchists have towards the Black Bloc raises unflattering questions concerning their obsession with form and representation, rather than content and actions. And in this regard, these anarchists are not different from the Islamists who were quick to denounce the Black Bloc as blasphemous and infidel merely because they looked like Westerners. Further, many Western anarchist reactions to the Black Bloc unmask an entrenched orientalist tendency. Their disregard of Egypt and the Middle East’s rich history of anarchism is one manifestation of this. As Egyptian anarchist, Yasser Abdullah illustrates, anarchism in Egypt dates back to the 1870’s in response to the inauguration of the Suez Canal; Italian anarchists in Alexandria took part in the First International, published an anarchist journal in 1877, and took part in the Orabi revolution of 1881; Greek and Italian anarchists also organised strikes and protests with Egyptian workers. Yet these struggles are nonchalantly shunned by those who act today as if the Black Bloc is the first truly radical group to grace Egyptian soil.

In 1979, four Australian anarchist and “libertarian socialist” organizations published a tract called You Can’t Blow Up a Social Relationship, presumptuously subtitled “The Anarchist Case Against Terrorism” — as if theirs was the only case against it and there was no case for it. The pamphlet has been reprinted and distributed by North American anarchist groups, usually workerists, and by default appears to enjoy some currency as a credible critique of terrorism canonical for anarchists.

On June 26, 2010, while the G20 summit was under way amid mass protests on the streets of downtown Toronto, a startling revelation was made that would reverberate through activist communities for months to come. Two undercover police officers had joined protest groups and been living among activists as part of a large-scale investigation that began more than a year earlier, in April 2009.

On June 25, 2010, activists in Ottawa discovered that the man they knew as François Leclerc was in fact an undercover Ontario Provincial Police officer named Denis Leduc.

One year after the Hamas attack on Israel, I think it is important to take a look at how the Islamist group's escalation of the conflict that has been going on for generations has once again shown how the German left fails to understand international politics. As a result, we see how the left and many anarchists in the country can't find a reasonable approach to the war in Israel/Palestine and now in Lebanon. This text will hardly come as a surprise to activists in Germany. At the same time, I think it's important for anarchists and leftists in other regions to understand the German “Antideutsch” and not just see it as a joke version of some kind of political correctness, but rather as a political movement with its own ideals.

In this new, even more horrifying phase of the 75 year long occupation of Palestine by Israel, it is important to give a platform to Palestinians struggling against ethnic cleansing.

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?

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

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.

This zine is an ongoing project I’ve been writing in my head and on paper for several years now. Since I decided to become permanently sober several years ago, I've constantly struggled to find safe spaces; I hoped that when I started to become a part of radical, activist, and anarchist communities, that I would find folks who shared or at least respected my convictions. Instead, I found a painful paradox: radical scenes that were so welcoming and affirming in many ways, yet incredibly inflexible and unsupportive around my desire to be in sober spaces.

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.

We live in a culture of abuse. With acknowledgement that these numbers are insufficient due to underreporting: more than 60% of adults in the so-called United States have experienced at least one ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) and a quarter of adults have experienced three or more ACEs. Over 33% of women and 25% of men have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime. Systemic marginalization and oppression increases one’s vulnerability to intimate violence: disabled women experience intimate partner violence at a rate 40% higher than non-disabled women, 45.1% of Black women and 40.1% of Black men have experienced intimate partner violence in their lifetimes, 43.8% of lesbian women and 61.1% of bisexual women have experienced intimate partner violence at some point in their lifetime, 26% of gay men and 37.3% of bisexual men have experienced intimate partner violence in their lifetime, more than half (54%) of all transgender people have experienced some form of intimate partner violence, immigrant women experience domestic violence at 3 times the national average, and low income women are five times more likely to experience intimate partner violence than wealthier women.

I am writing this piece sitting near my 14-year-old dog, Galaxy, AKA Gal, who I am going to have to say goodbye to soon, potentially as soon as tomorrow. It is a subject in philosophy I’ve been wanting to tackle and write on for a long while now, and with this lovely soul beside me, and near to departing, writing this seems suddenly imperative.

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.

The anti-capitalists of today look back at the most important works of anti-capitalists of yesterday (or the last century) and find a similar flaw threaded through many of the otherwise clear and continuously relevant writings: many of them believed that capitalism’s end was nigh and inevitable. They thought its strength was in its oppressive power, and that eventually that rigid, oppressive power would be unable to hold its form and collapse. What they did not account for — and what we recognize now — is that capitalism has an uncanny ability to adapt. Its incredible staying power lies not within its oppressive power alone, but in its ability to make so many of us foot soldiers in the very system that undermines our interests, poisons our communities, and makes our relationships untenable. Capitalism maintains, not just because there are rich and powerful who enforce it, but also because the rest of us have internalized its logic and march to its beat in our everyday lives. That capitalist logic is this: to live always on the promise of the future satisfaction of desire. We not only enact this logic in the arenas typically understood as the realm of capitalist logic (workplaces, electoral politics, etc.) but also in our most intimate relationships, and that is the arena I will be delving into here.

Butchness is not only the appropriation of traditional masculinity, but the subversion of it. The sacred weapon in the arsenal of patriarchy, the one they did and continue to do everything to keep us from taking, is not something we even bother to steal under the cover of nightfall. Instead, we swagger right through the front door, wryly appraise the shelf on which it sits, and take what of it suits us best. We wear it openly in the streets, keenly aware of the retribution such a theft will at any moment bring down upon us.

As conversations about the possibilities of abolition continue to proliferate — and as they are at the same time co-opted and distorted by liberal politics — it may help us to take a moment to be clear about the distinctions between liberatory accountability and what many refer to as “carceral logic.”

I grew up in a right-wing household in a rural, predominantly right-wing, community. I was groomed and eventually sexually assaulted by my right-wing Christian father who was highly regarded by everyone in the community who knew him. I was taken to purity balls every year starting at five years old, in which young girls danced with our fathers and ritualistically promised ownership of our sexuality to them until the day that they would “give” us to our future husbands. I was raised to know exactly what was expected of me as a “good” daughter, and viciously punished and suppressed whenever I dared to question or appeared to act outside of my assigned role. What was good for me, for my sense of self or autonomy, was never part of anyone’s consideration in how I was raised. Foremost in adults’ minds was how I could best be molded and shaped into the exact person they thought I should be, regardless of how much pain that process caused. When I eventually broke their mold (and as a transgender butch anarchist, break it I most certainly did), those same adults immediately blamed “outside agitators” like liberal teachers and the mere existence of other queer people for my apparent “change.” My experience of this was not especially unique from the experience of my peers in other right-wing households. In fact, it was, and remains, the norm.

For far too long have radical communities and their discourses treated domestic violence and abuse as external from the considerations of revolutionary struggle. Abuse is seen as simply an interpersonal issue, springing from individual pathology which we must address by correcting certain behaviors and teaching better communication skills. The intervention tools of choice are frequently limited to restorative or transformative justice practices, with the ultimate aim of protecting and maintaining the abuser’s place in the community, often at the cost of survivor safety, participation, and empowerment. There is a fear that ousting abusers and challenging them as adversaries to revolutionary struggle rather than as wayward members of it will ultimately weaken us collectively, because, after all, they are still our comrades.