In quest’analisi, Tom Nomad presenta un resoconto dell’ascesa dell’estrema destra contemporanea, tracciando l’emergere di una visione del mondo basata sulle teorie del complotto e sulla politica del rancore bianco ed esaminando la funzione che serve a proteggere lo Stato. Nel corso dell’articolo, descrive come le strategie di controinsurrezione liberale funzionino insieme alle pesanti strategie di “legge e ordine,” concludendo con un approfondimento su ciò che l’estrema destra intende per guerra civile.

Ammettilo, la tua politica è fottutamente noiosa.

Ciao.

Nel corso della traduzione di questo opuscolo, mi sono soffermatx per la prima volta a pensare davvero alla dimensione della coppia come a una gabbia. Sebbene si tratti di una metafora abbastanza diffusa, non l’avevo mai trasformata prima in un’immagine mentale con una sua concretezza. Ho immaginato una gabbia in cui si trova rinchiusa una coppia di uccellini, che vi si erano introdotti inizialmente perché cercavano un posto caldo e confortevole in cui consumare il loro amore. Dopo qualche tempo, con l’acquietarsi della loro passione iniziale e la continuazione del loro amore, quella gabbia è diventata la loro tana, un rifugio confortevole e sicuro da cui è diventato sempre più difficile uscire. Se la loro relazione ha assunto una forma esclusiva ed escludente, la porta della gabbia è stata chiusa a chiave. Il mondo fuori continuava a esistere, vi era ancora interazione con gli individui che si trovano all’esterno, ma quest’interazione avveniva spesso in coppia e veniva sempre mediata dalle sbarre di ferro che costituivano le pareti della struttura che li conteneva. Con il passare del tempo, a quella sensazione di comfort rassicurante poteva accompagnarsi una sensazione di soffocamento e reclusione, che i due uccellini tendevano però a ricacciare in un angolo della mente… almeno fino al giorno in cui uno dei due, rimasto troppo a lungo rinchiuso, decide all’improvviso di sfondare la porta della gabbia e di uscirne per sempre, spesso con modalità drammatiche di rottura e incolpando l’altro di una reclusione che era prima di tutto autoimposta.

We’re fucking sick of disclaimers. We resent having to provide apologies and justifications for our words before we even speak them. We’re bitter about how specialized discussions of rape, sexual assault, and abuse have become. We feel insulted and embarrassed that we have to constantly point out that we aren’t speaking on behalf of all survivors, as though that were even possible. Sure, we appreciate a well placed trigger warning. It’s just good etiquette. But when fanatical attempts to avoid triggering each other serve as tools to relegate discussions of interpersonal violence to the margins, to wrap the issue in a neat little box which is only brought out on special occasions, when an illusion of “safety” can be guaranteed, well…then we start to get pissed. If we only speak of our oppression from the position of safety, we’ll be forever silent. If we can’t learn to work through being triggered amongst friends and comrades, we’ll be ill equipped to work through it in their absence. An atmosphere of nervousness permeates the discussion, and we confer to the advice of specialists partly out of fear of saying the wrong thing. But all we’re talking about are our own experiences, a topic on which we are all experts. So we long for the day when we won’t need to place ourselves under disclaimers, or any other banner for that matter.

From the time anarchism was first defined as a distinct radical movement it has been associated with the left, but the association has always been uneasy. Leftists who were in a position of authority (including those who called themselves anarchists, like the leaders of the CNT and the FAI in Spain in 1936–37) found the anarchist aim of the total transformation of life and the consequent principle that the ends should already exist in the means of struggle to be a hindrance to their political programs. Real insurgence always burst far beyond any political program, and the most coherent anarchists saw the realization of their dreams precisely in this unknown place beyond. Yet, time after time, when the fires of insurrection cooled (and even occasionally, as in Spain in 1936–37, while they still burnt brightly), leading anarchists would take their place again as “the conscience of the left”. But if the expansiveness of anarchist dreams and the principles that it implies have been a hindrance to the political schemes of the left, these schemes have been a far greater millstone around the neck of the anarchist movement, weighing it down with the “realism” that cannot dream.

Let’s be clear from the outset: Conflict Is Not Abuse is not even remotely the same thing as the sentiment or thesis that “conflict is not abuse.” Much of the success Sarah Schulman’s book has seen is the result of people wanting a defense of the latter thesis and assuming her appropriation of the pre-existing phrase means the book’s content follows whatever their own motivations and approach to that distinction is. I will refer to Schulman’s book by the acronym CINA throughout this review specifically to avoid such a default association and emphasize the ways in which CINA is not an appropriate or productive illustration of the differences between conflict and abuse (a distinction it barely touches and handles inaccurately), nor a useful investigation into the origins of conflations between those two categories.

“Anarchism” is an open word whose contours and meaning are shaped by the long struggle for Black liberation, by the centuries-long resistance to racial slavery, settler colonialism, capitalism, state violence, genocide, and anti-Blackness. “Anarchism” gathers and names the practices of mutual aid and the programs for survival that have sustained us in the face unimaginable violence. It unfolds with and as Black feminism and Indigenous struggle. It offers a blueprint for radical transformation, for the possibilities of existence beyond the world of scarcity and managed depletion, enclosure, and premature death. In The Nation on No Map, William C. Anderson elaborates the anarchism of Blackness, joining a cohort of radical thinkers devoted to dreaming and rehearsing how we might live otherwise in the present and break with the fatal terms of the given, the brutal imposed order of things. The Nation on No Map is a compact and expansive text that sketches the long history of Black struggle against racial slavery, U.S. apartheid, and the settler state and asks us to consider a vision of politics that no longer has the state as its object or horizon and eschews the calcified forms of politics as usual.

Many years ago a latinx friend of mine designed stickers that simply read “Migrants Welcome, Against Borders” (versions in English and Spanish) under a circle-A and the two of us covered the Bay Area with hundreds of them. Amusingly, this provoked the ire of a prominent white anarchist who denounced the phrase as pro-gentrification. She emphatically preferred “Refugees Welcome” because it distinguished those who are coercively displaced from their proper homes by various forms of western imperialism in contrast to those who voluntarily choose to migrate, like (her example) those moving to the bay for tech jobs.

So there was a demonstration and some people got a little militant and maybe broke some windows. Chances are the demonstration wasn’t a rally against the existence of windows so this may not look like the smartest of moves to you. In fact, it probably seems pretty asinine. A broken shop window doesn’t really hurt those in power yet it probably rose more than a few folks’ hackles. Vandalism and a few street scuffles with the cops obviously aren’t potent enough to directly overcome the state by force so why bother if it’s going to turn a lot of people against you?

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.”

Talking about nihilism, much less attempting to define and critique it, is an exhausting sort of task, akin to talking to a mischievous toddler who has learned some empty single-word responses that make an adult go in circles. And one risks serious strain from all the eyerolling necessary to get through any such discussion. Most of us recognize that to bother to debate or critique nihilism is to lose from the outset. In the same way that feeding the trolls is a game utterly disconnected from sincere comparison and collaboration on ideas. And yet total disengagement is unsustainable.

Organizations have a lot of downsides. Anyone who’s ever attended a meeting recognizes this on some level. And yet most folks persist in an either instinctive or confused idealization of forming and participating in organizations.

tl;dr: The pandemic has polarized political discourse – even within the radical left. Conspiracy narratives have penetrated deep into our circles. How this can manifest i had to observe in the organization of Anarchy 2023. The planned meeting in St. Imier is (as of today, please protest!) organized and planned without COVID-19-precautions. At least one of the main organizers was involved in the movement of anti-maskers and COVID-deniers.

This book is dedicated to Sue Daniels (1960–2004), a brilliant ecologist, bold feminist, passionate anarchist, and beautiful and caring human being who nurtured and challenged everyone around her. Your bravery and wisdom continue to inspire me, and in that way your spirit remains indomitable…

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.

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.

This zine explores how identity can provide camouflage that allows for intentional or incidental disruption of radical circles and organizing, and how the security culture we’ve developed to mitigate many threats can clash with the anti-racist, anti-sexist, and otherwise progressive norms within our movements. What this zine is not is a full review of the glaringly obvious ways that our organizing can be disrupted by direct defamation from State and State-adjacent actors or through the abuses committed by members of our radical communities with dominant identities who wield (white patriarchal) power. Those threats exist, but they are also the ones most frequently addressed.

The material contained in this text is gut-wrenching and disturbing. What follows is a critically annotated edition of Apio Ludd / Feral Faun / Wolfi Landstreicher's Child Molestation vs. Child Love, from his (otherwise celebrated) anthology, Rants, Essays and Polemics. It is a defense of the sexual abuse of children and, ironically, a call to "fight the real child molesters" - Landstreicher's term for parents, schools, and churches. In some parts of the work, it is quite graphic and the reader should tread lightly. Those who have suffered child sexual abuse in the past may want to stop here.

Warning! This text is full of spoilers for the film How to Blow Up a Pipeline. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s surprisingly enjoyable, so consider watching it first. :)

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.

Black Anarchic Notes