For Reuel and all those who fight.

This is a discussion about digital tools for communicating securely and privately. To begin, it must be stressed that a face-to-face meeting, out of sight of cameras and out of earshot from other people and devices, is the most secure way to communicate. Anarchists were going for walks to chat long before encrypted texting existed, and they should still do so now, whenever possible.

A couple of days after the From Embers podcast aired the episode, “Quebec Nationalism and Settler Futurity – Refusing Innocence,” someone posted a thoughtful and engaging reflection about this discussion. As one of the guests on this episode, I’ve taken some time to sit with the concerns shared in the post and decided to converse further with the reflections offered on the topics of uncertainty and settler futurity.

Relationship anarchy questions the idea that love is a limited resource that can only be real if restricted to a couple. You  have capacity to love more than one person, and one relationship and the love felt for that person does not diminish love felt for another. Don’t rank and compare people and relationships - cherish the individual and your connection to them. One person in your life does not need to be named primary for the relationship to be real. Each relationship is independent, and a relationship between autonomous individuals.

When we talk about security culture, people tend to have one of two kinds of experiences. The first is of building walls and keeping people out, the second is of being excluded or mistrusted. Both of these come with negative feelings – fear and suspicion for the former and alienation and resentment for the latter. I would say that they are two sides of the same coin, two experiences of a security culture that isn’t working well.

In February of 1999, a journal titled Tiqqun appeared in France. Its subtitle was Organe conscient du Parti Imaginaire (Conscious Organ of the Imaginary Party), followed by Exercices de Metaphysique Crtique (Exercises in Critical Metaphysics). It was published by several graduate students in Paris, all of whom included their names in the publication data on the back page of Tiqqun.

The barricade is the myth of insurrection. To look back at past revolt is to reflect on the use of barricades. To see struggle today is to watch the burning barricades of the Paris banlieues, the walls of flame in Athens, the camp fires of the Native roadblock. A barricade consciousness was born in myth and spread as a symbol.

I have written Desert as a nature loving anarchist primarily addressing others with similar feelings. As a result I have not always explained ideas to which I hold when they are, to some extent, givens within many anarchist and radical environmental circles. Hopefully I have written in an accessible enough manner, so even if you don’t come from this background you will still find Desert readable. While the best introductions to ecology and anarchy are moments spent within undomesticated ecosystems and anarchist communities, some may also find the following books helpful — I did.

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

Appelism is an informal strain of authoritarian communism that has been gaining traction on this continent over the past decade or so. Taking up elements of both the revolutionary party structure and insurrectionary anarchism, this tendency rebrands authoritarian communism as something that looks like informal networks but acts like a party.

Aaron Bushnell, before self-immolating in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., sent notice to a few radical platforms including CrimethInc. (henceforth: the Outlet) informing them of his decision to commit “an extreme act of protest” against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. He asked simply that they preserve the footage of his action and report on it. Most complied, but in the face of such a humble request, the Outlet was confused: “All afternoon, while other journalists were breaking the news, we discussed how we should speak about this. Some subjects are too complex to address in a hasty social media post.” It’s telling that they self-identify as journalists.

Why come back to questions about affinity and informal organization? Certainly not because we are lacking attempts to explore and deepen these aspects of anarchism, not because yesterday’s discussion, like today’s, aren’t being somewhat inspired by them, and also not because there is a lack of texts – true, most of the time in other languages – that approach these questions perhaps in a more dynamic manner. However, without a doubt, certain concepts require a permanent analytical and critical effort, if they don’t want to loose their meaning by being all-too-often used and repeated. Otherwise our ideas risk becoming a common place, some “evidence”, a fertile ground for the idiotic game of identity competition, where critical reflexion becomes impossible. It also happens that the choice of affinity for some becomes quickly dismissed as if it was about a relationship perched on its own ideas, a relationship that would not allow a contact with reality and neither with comrades. While others wave it around like a banner, like some kind of slogan – and like all slogans, usually it is the real meaning, deep and propulsive, to be its first victim.

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.

On Monday August 14th 2023, Philadelphia police officer Mark Dial shot and killed Eddie Irizarry as he sat in his car. Police initially lied saying that Eddie attacked the cop with a knife, but video footage showed that Eddie was shot in mere seconds while seated in his car with the window up. Following this Dial was suspended for 30 days pending termination. In early September Dial was charged with a number of crimes including murder but the presiding judge would eventually dismiss his charges. The cops who attended the court date in uniform cheered and celebrated when the charges were dropped. On September 26th, that same day Eddie’s family and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (alongside Black leftist groups like Black Alliance for Peace and the W.E.B. DuBois Movement School) organized a peaceful march through Center City protesting the decision. That demonstration dispersed after a couple hours but was followed by looting, initially in Center City before spreading to West, North, and Northeast Philly as the night went on.

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

“There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” is a tired meme that I wish would die. So often this slogan is used by reds to pooh-pooh those of us that strive to make life choices that aid harm-reduction in our communities and our natural environments.

The only thing more embarrassing than the enduring presence of the anachronistic imperial ethnological museum into the twenty-first-century is an imperial ethnological museum attempting a political rebrand as though to justify its existence despite being housed in a recently rebuilt Prussian palace. Upon entering the grand lobby of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, you—the museum-going audience—are met with a series of challenging questions on bright pink and orange banners: discursive prompts about appropriation, Eurocentrism, and taste to anticipate your experience. Translated into both English and German, the banners illustrate the nauseating institutional virtue signaling to which publics have been subjected, particularly after the global protests following the murder of George Floyd and accompanying discourses about colonial monuments. Simultaneously, they read as self-satisfied rhetorical questions, the kind that an obviously guilty person in power asks aloud in perpetuity as a substitute for even beginning to conceive of changing their behavior. Despite being an internationally renowned and world-class museum (and thus, universally accessible), the banner’s first question immediately narrows and truncates its audience: “How would you feel if your belongings were taken and displayed in a museum?” It’s a provocative question that, for many, is far from hypothetical. The global Indigenous demand for the restitution of human remains—and valuable cultural artifacts—pales in the face of the museum’s apparent need to display those objects in pleasing indexical formations behind glass display cases. The orderly museum, in other words, is a purveyor of psychic violence.

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.