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.

When faced with the stories of physical and sexual violence, manipulation, gaslighting, and coercion that survivors tell from their experiences within abusive relationships, many people’s first question frequently seems to be “why didn’t they just leave?” And, indeed, with a limited understanding of the overall context that forms abuse, victims remaining with their abusers seems unimaginable. After all, if someone walked up to you on the street and called you a worthless piece of garbage, or slapped you in the face, you would not be inclined to share their company any further, so why do abuse victims appear to accept horrific treatment time and time again without leaving?

In every interaction and through every social structure, humans exercise an unavoidable psychological instinct known as self interest. It is a deep motivational factor that is inseparable from our subjectivity. Whether we are kind or cruel, it operates in the background of our decisions and persists despite our awareness of its presence. It is a definitive root feature of the human animal.

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.

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.”

The Age of Reason is dead. Rejoice! We buried him in the shade of the birch tree, and we sang as we dug. We sang new and old songs of knowledges bravely earned, and those lessons became the soil we shoveled on top of him. The Age of Reason came to all of us once, and all of us, in one form or another, at one time or another, in one place or another, or all three, took a sip of his spoils just to know what it tasted like. Some of us, we are deeply ashamed to say, drained the whole glass and asked for more. We know this shame is something we cannot bury. But we did bury him.

In the explosion of interest in the topic of abolitionism during and after the explosive summer of 2020 its meaning and purpose has become distorted in its trek through the popular imagination. The topic of Transformative/Restorative Justice also increased in popularity, and as a result many people even conceptualize TJ/RJ as being one in the same with abolitionism as a political position. While this essay is not intended as an outright dismissal of the importance TJ/RJ practices, it is an examination of why they have risen to prominence and a challenge to the idea that they represent the totality of an abolitionist politic.

Relationships are deeply personal. They are the smallest and most fundamental blocks that form our histories, our cultures, our societies. We are dependent, and thus deeply vulnerable, to other human relationships from the time we are born to the moment we die. Nothing human-made was made outside of relationships. Everything we make is a product of relationships. We are intrinsically tied to other people; such is the reality of human existence. To discuss relationships, then, will always be something that hits everyone in a way that is close, personal, and sometimes uncomfortable. We have insecurities we have been unable to quell and often reach for different forms of relationships as a salve to those insecurities. All of us, ultimately, wish to feel loved, cherished, and appreciated by other human beings, and almost all of our activities beyond basic survival activities (and very often even those basic survival activities) seem to bend towards that end. What will give me the adoration of others? What will earn me the love of others? What will make others impressed, drawn to me, trusting of me? When driven by such intense social need, it can be difficult to truthfully and genuinely assess the underlying values we hold when we seek out connection. What makes a relationship valuable? What makes a person valuable? What makes me valuable?