Vor etwa drei Jahren begann die Coronavirus-Pandemie, die sich über den gesamten Globus ausbreitete. Unser Leben hat sich mit dem Fortschreiten der Pandemie nicht nur einmal, sondern viele Male verändert. Die Krise ist noch nicht vorbei, und dieser Text versucht, darüber nachzudenken, wie Anarchist:innen bisher mit der Pandemie umgegangen sind. Er beginnt mit einer (beklagenswert unvollständigen) Nacherzählung der Ereignisse, um sicherzustellen, dass wir ein gemeinsames Verständnis des Ablaufs der Ereignisse haben, das als Grundlage für unsere Analysen dient. Im Folgenden geht es nicht darum, einzelne Organisationen oder Aktionen und ihre Verdienste zu kritisieren, sondern um Überlegungen zu den allgemeinen Trends, die sich aus der anarchistischen und angrenzenden Bewegungen ergeben haben. Es handelt sich keineswegs um eine formale akademische Abhandlung, aber wo es angebracht oder nützlich ist, haben wir Links zu weiterführenden Quellen angegeben.

About three years ago, the coronavirus pandemic began and swept across the globe. Our lives have changed not just once but many times as the pandemic has progressed. The crisis is not over, and this text attempts to reflect on how anarchists have handled the pandemic thus far. It starts with a (woefully incomplete) recounting of events to ensure that we have some shared understanding of the progression of events to serve as a foundation on which to base our analyses. What follows is not nitpicking individual orgs or actions and the merits thereof but instead reflections on the broad trends that emerged from the anarchist and adjacent movements. This is by no means a formal academic paper, but where appropriate or useful, we have linked to resources for further reading.

Dieses Zine basiert auf einer Reihe von Vorträgen mit dem gleichen Titel, die auf anarchistischen Treffen im Sommer ’23 in Stockholm, Ljubljana und St. Imier gehalten wurden. Nach jedem Vortrag wurden der Inhalt des Zines und künftige Vorträge durch die Diskussionen mit anderen in den Räumen und später in den Ecken und Winkeln der Orte verbessert. Die Worte auf diesen Seiten sind nicht nur meine eigenen, denn Wissen entsteht nicht aus dem Nichts, sondern wird aus unseren vergangenen Erfahrungen und Interaktionen mit anderen zusammengesetzt. Wir lernen gemeinsam, nicht allein.

This is based on a series of talks with the same title given at anarchist convergences in the summer of ’23 in Stockholm, Ljubljana, and St. Imier. Following each talk, the content of the zine and future talks were improved by the discussions with others in the rooms and later in the nooks and crannies of the venues. The words on these pages are not solely my own because knowledge isn’t incepted out of nothing but rather synthesized from our past experiences and interactions with others. We learn together, not alone.

Cette brochure est basée sur une série de conférences du même titre tenues aux convergences anarchistes de l’été 2023 à Stockholm, Ljubljana, et St. Imier. Après chaque conférence, le contenu de la brochure et de futures présentations furent améliorés par des discussions avec d’autres personnes dans la pièce. Les mots sur ces pages ne sont pas que de moi parce la connaissance n’est pas produite à partir de rien mais est plutôt synthétisée à part de nos expériences et interactions passées avec les autres. Nous apprenons ensemble, pas seules.

Diese Zine enthält die Texte der Reden, die auf dem Anarchistischen CSD am 17. Juli 2022 gehalten wurden. Einige der Texte wurden von Mitgliedern des ACSD Kollektivs selbst geschrieben, andere stammen von Freund:innen und anderen Genoss:innen.

We recently received this anonymous contribution, and we publish it as a part of ongoing discussion on the Russian invasion against Ukraine. Text does not necessarily reflect collective views of Autonomous Action.

This zine contains the texts of the speeches that were presented at the Anarchist CSDon July 17^th, 2022. Some of the texts were written by members of the ACSD Collective itself, and other came from friends and other comrades.

An anarchist walks out of a punk show to smoke. On her vest are anarchist patches with various standard slogans, “No Gods No Masters,” “Death To Transphobes,” “Kill Your Local Rapist,” “All Cops Are Bastards,” “Punch Nazis,” “From The River To The Sea Palestine Will Be Free,” “Make Total Destroy,” “The Only Good Cop Is A Dead Cop,” “Eat The Rich,” “Death Before Detransition” and… “Fire To The Prisons.”

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.”

TRIGGER WARNING: OBVS it's A ZINE ABOUT SUBSTANCE (Mis) USE THERE) SPECIFIC BIT ABOUT PARTNER ABUSE AND, WITH WRITTEN WARNING & STARS, AND YOU CAN EASILY SKIP IT WITHOUT LOOSING THE SENSE OF WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT. FAIR BIT ABOUT QUEERPHOBIA (INCL, THE INTERNALISED ONE). VAGUE MENTION OF POLICE

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.

It’s been a mainstay of the radical left for a long time to blame the lack of radical activity by whatever particular collective subject they believe to have potential on some sort of capitalist subterfuge. The various arguments for what exactly happened range considerably, but they tend to assume that a subset of the population who would otherwise revolt against the system have been brought off and/or propagandized into submission.

“I’m honestly still trying to kick the nationalist habit,” jokes activist Ahmad Nimer, as we talk outside a Ramallah cafe. Our topic of conversation seems an unlikely one: living as an anarchist in Palestine. “In a colonized country, it’s quite difficult to convince people of non- authoritarian, non-state solutions. You encounter, pretty much, a strictly anti- colonial – often narrowly nationalist – mentality,” laments Nimer. Indeed, anarchists in Palestine currently have a visibility problem. Despite high-profile inter- national and Israeli anarchist activity, there doesn’t seem to be a matching awareness of anarchism among many Palestinians themselves.

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.