Please note this piece was written in September 2022 and so reflects the situation at that time.

From Occupy to Ferguson, whenever a new grassroots movement arises, pundits charge that it lacks clear demands. Why won’t protesters summarize their goals as a coherent program? Why aren’t there representatives who can negotiate with the authorities to advance a concrete agenda through institutional channels? Why can’t these movements express themselves in familiar language, with proper etiquette?

From the initial revolt in Ferguson last August to the demonstrations in Oakland and Berkeley last week, property destruction has been central to a new wave of struggle against police violence. But what does vandalizing businesses have to do with protesting police brutality? Why break windows?

148 years ago this week, on April 6, 1871, armed participants in the revolutionary Paris Commune seized the guillotine that was stored near the prison in Paris. They brought it to the foot of the statue of Voltaire, where they smashed it into pieces and burned it in a bonfire, to the applause of an immense crowd. This was a popular action arising from the grassroots, not a spectacle coordinated by politicians. At the time, the Commune controlled Paris, which was still inhabited by people of all classes; the French and Prussian armies surrounded the city and were preparing to invade it in order to impose the conservative Republican government of Adolphe Thiers. In these conditions, burning the guillotine was a brave gesture repudiating the Reign of Terror and the idea that positive social change can be achieved by slaughtering people.

Neither Republican calls for more guns and policing nor Democrat demands for more gun control can put an end to the epidemic of mass shootings in the United States. The problem runs deeper than either of these approaches can address.

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.

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.

This is about so-called “non-monogamous relationships,” about some of the benefits of trying out one of the alternatives to the formulaic dating/marriage/divorce model for love. Your response to this article will probably be similar to the one I had a few years ago when I read a discussion of the same subject by David Sandstrom in the Swedish zine Handbook for Revolutionaries: “good idea, but, uh, not relevant to me, of course…” It turned out I was wrong. Had I remembered a lesson I’ve learned over and over, I would have realized that often the ideas that make me the most defensive and uncomfortable at first turn out to be the most important for me in the long run. Not to say that I’m offering a program that you must all immediate adjust yourselves to… but we can’t remind each other enough to be open to new ideas, in case they do prove to be helpful in our lives.

“You can't fight alienation with alienated means.”

While too many anarchists wring their hands about the end of the rollicking anti-globalization mobilizations of the last decade, others are conspiring a resistance of direct action in places where we have a chance to win. The truth is that while we learned many valuable organizational and tactical lessons during the years after Seattle, most of our energy was spent on largely symbolic actions. The real strength of these mobilizations was actually in the organizing: the ability to awaken many people to the possibility of resistance to global capitalism, as well as providing a catalyst for regional and international networks. At no point did these mobilizations actually threaten to end world capitalism or seriously challenge State power. or even liberate any socio-geographical territory. As anarchists, now is not the time to mourn the death of “anti-globe” mobilizations, but move to the next phase of our resistance – Insurrectory Mutual Aid.

Thanks to reporting from Colorado Springs Independent, it is now public knowledge that Colorado Springs Police infiltrated the Chinook Center and a number of orgs that organize there such as Colorado Springs DSA and Colorado Springs Tenant Union, using a pink haired cop named April Rogers who went by Chelsie Kurti and pretended to be a sex worker.

I have previously pointed out that the on-the-ground efforts in Rojava and Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi can be seen as…

“w/ out imagination there is no memory
w/ out imagination there is no sensation
w/ out imagination there is no will, desire
…
the war that matters is the war against the imagination
all other wars are subsumed in it.”

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.

On the night of August 8th, 2009, hundreds of inmates at the California Institution for Men in Chino rioted for 11 hours, causing “significant and extensive” damage to the medium-security prison. Two hundred and fifty prisoners were injured, with fifty-five admitted to the hospital.

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’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 following is a transcript of a talk delivered in Seattle on July 20, 2020, lightly-edited by the author for readability. A video recording produced by Red May is online here.

I’m writing this because I’m frustrated. I’m frustrated with the responses to the uprising in Iran. I’m frustrated about how sadly unsurprising they are given the landscape of the discussions surrounding hijab and feminism have been developing for decades.

Anarqxista Goldman — self-named after Emma Goldman — was (allegedly) an anarcha-feminist sex worker, writer, and activist who used the handle @Anarqxista on twitter.

This will not be a very well-organized essay, since it amounts to more or less collating and editing a few related conversations and arguments I had several years ago concerning the matter of body autonomy and youth liberation. At the time, the prevailing discourse between anarchist circles I moved in and their liberal, authoritarian, and conservative critics went something like this:

You have most likely heard someone assert that, “rape is not sex, rape is violence.” Or the somewhat less reductive: “rape is not about sex, rape is about power,” or “rape is not about desire, it is about power,” or any other variation on the classic anti-rape slogan.