Crooked Bough News Round-up

— Rui Preti - Mutual Aid

 

at 4/11/26 3:36pm

Author: Rui PretiTitle: Mutual AidSubtitle: A Fight for a New FutureDate: 2025, SpringNotes: Fifth Estate #416Source: Fifth Estate #416, Spring 2025, Vol. 60, No. 1, page 45, accessed April 10, 2026 at https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/416-spring-2025/mutual-aid/ a review of Fight for a New Normal? Anarchism and mutual aid in the Covid-19 pandemic crisis Ed. Jim Donaghey, Foreword by Ruth Kinna; Afterward by Rhiannon Firth. Freedom Press, 2024 People all over the world, including in the U.S., are facing increasing authoritarianism, natural disasters, industrially-produced destruction of the living environment and intensifying social breakdown. Nevertheless, there is some basis for hope because of the growing numbers of mutual aid projects with the potential to be part of strengthening community defense and decentralized liberatory communities, emerging everywhere. Many people who had previously found it difficult to imagine breaking out of the limits of modern capitalist civilization have experienced social solidarity and have discovered that a return to the old normal state of things is not the only possibility. In the context of what people have learned from experiences of the pandemic, many are talking and writing from an anarchistic perspective about what normal is worth aspiring to. The anthology Fight for a New Normal? is part of the conversation. The articles in the collection explore both the positive and challenging aspects of mutual aid in general and with reference to several specific situations. Articles include descriptions of mutual aid groups in places as diverse as industrial towns in the process of gentrification and those undergoing irreversible deterioration, in Britain, the U.S., Australia, the Philippines, and Indonesia, among others. Anarchist mutual aid has a political perspective of cooperation as part of a model for how a whole society can be run, and the pandemic created a new awareness of interdependence. So, it is not surprising that anarchists have been active in many projects from Appalachia in the U.S. to Chile to Italy and many other countries. Several articles and books have been published recently which give us the opportunity to compare experiences in different social settings. Fight for a New Normal? provides descriptions of several different kinds of anarchist-inspired mutual aid groups. These demonstrate what is involved in providing social solidarity and individual support through bottom-up organizing. One chapter is devoted to mutual aid groups in two cities, Glasgow and Brighton in the United Kingdom. An experienced anarchist activist, Sam, relates the development of Brighton’s No Fixed Abode Mutual Aid into a well-functioning, decentralized group, able to respond collectively to complex issues of housing, poverty, mental health and support for migrants, by building up links with other groups already addressing these concerns, some anarchist influenced and some more mainstream. Sam notes that his and other anarchistically inspired groups differed in significant ways from groups focusing on charity work or government assistance programs. For one thing, the former refused to evaluate and divide people in need into deserving and undeserving categories, with the undeserving judged as personally and morally responsible for their desperate situations. Instead, they gave assistance without demanding proof of worthiness. They were able to provide support to those who might otherwise have been denied it. This was an important aspect beyond what even the most generous charity can do because of financial obligations and entanglements. Sam and his friend Aidan also describe some of the challenges faced by mutual aid projects in Brighton and Glasgow, which over time contributed to burnout of participants. They note that despite hopes of mutual aid helping to create community bonds, in those projects, all too many providers and recipients of assistance were unable to move beyond the division between helpers and those being helped. They recognized the division as “disempowering those who receive support by keeping them in a passive role in relation to the groups, and creating a proprietorial `activist’ mentality in those who provided support.” Volunteers continually tried to explain the difference between the mutual aid they were providing as acts of solidarity and the approach of charities and government welfare agencies. But this was not generally convincing to the grateful recipients. Given the continuing context of modern capitalist society, no satisfactory way of dealing with the problem was found. An article about East London Scrub Hub describes a somewhat different kind of mutual aid activity, one which was a self-organized group of health workers and apparel crafts people who provided personal protective clothing and necessary accessories to healthcare workers in hospitals and clinics who were not receiving them from their employers. Katya Lachowicz, an anarchist and one of the main organizers of the group, describes the development of two parallel types of scrub hub groups, one organized top-down and one bottom-up. The East London group was among the bottom-up type. It succeeded in producing high quality clothing and accessories, and also in bringing together many people who might otherwise never have had the opportunity to collaborate. ...

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— Ignatius - Fairy Dust and Toxic Waste

 

at 4/9/26 8:22am

Author: IgnatiusTitle: Fairy Dust and Toxic WasteSubtitle: Against the Spectacle of "Artificial Intelligence" and the World it ServesDate: 04/04/2026Source: https://cryptpad.fr/file/#/2/file/PpLd4x9pk5bHyXmXT7Qeky2t/ Are My Eyes Still Bleeding It is April 2026. The U.S. is once again escalating its violence against the people of Iran through continued bombardment of population centers, notably including a school for young girls. The bombing of this school killed 168 people at best estimate, over 100 of them children. The depravity of this violence is matched only by the stupidity of the Trump administration’s incredulousness that a country under bombardment and threat of invasion might use what leverage it holds to enact economic harm on their enemy, namely that Iran would choke the strait of Hormuz. Within the brutality of the present moment, there is a grim humor to watching U.S. officials stumble around in the dark looking for explanations for how they might have vastly miscalculated their militaristic strategy. The moments of grim humor are short lived, replaced by images of Israel taking advantage of this war to expand their ethnic cleansing further into southern Lebanon (as they remain equally committed to their genocidal project against the Palestinian people within their borders and without). Colonial projects are wont to foment and act upon their colonial ambitions whenever possible. Amidst this ever-expanding offensive, multiple massive tech companies have been in the news for their collaboration with the U.S. military in its project of massacring school children, specifically OpenAI and their competitor Anthropic. This is far from the first time such companies have made headlines as of late, given how desperate their CEOs and billionaire investors are to justify their valuations and secure their path towards becoming vital infrastructure of modern capital and the modern state. Those who stand to gain incredible sums of wealth and power if “AI” were to truly be mass adopted speak endlessly of the inevitability of this technology infecting all aspects of daily life. They sell the vision of a utopic future ever approaching on the horizon while the tools they claim will build that utopia burn the world around us, send bombs into children’s schools, and enable the expansion of genocidal apartheid regimes. The hype of what “AI” might one day do for us is used to choke out all criticism of what these technologies are doing in the present, including eroding our ability to think for ourselves, to think critically writ large. But the imposition of these technologies onto our daily lives is not inevitable. We don’t have to sit back and passively watch as a handful of egomaniacs consolidate their wealth by expanding the already incomprehensible brutality of the state and racial capitalism. We don’t have to swallow the shit they are forcing down our throats with every dollar, every gallon of water, every stick of RAM they can get their hands on. But if we are to meaningfully fight against this imposition, we must be able to articulate the types of violence these technologies produce and expand. I am taking the time to write the following observations down, not because my thoughts on the topic are somehow unique. I write because, in a world where our very ability to construct a language of meaningful dissent is actively being stolen from us, I believe it is vital to contribute whenever possible towards the preservation of antagonistic positionalities to the world as it is. As with everything I write, my goal is not to change minds, but to carve out space, to light a small beacon in a vast (and often frighteningly dark) sea. My hope is that such a beacon may proliferate, in word and more importantly in action. I leave the decision of that proliferation up to you. Machines and Intelligence: Against the term AI Before I attempt to outline the various horrors enabled and expanded by the technologies that have come be known colloquially as “Artificial Intelligence”, shortened to “AI”. I want to argue against the use of this term. First, this term is purposefully vague so as to collect disparate (albeit related) technologies under one umbrella. This collection allows the developers of individual technologies (say the Large Language Models powering ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.) to evade meaningful critique by hiding what their product actually is behind a billboard covered in the science fiction of what it may or may not become. It is hard to hit what you cannot see, harder still to strike against what is purposefully obfuscated. For the purposes of this zine, I will be focusing mostly on Large Language Models (LLMs), the technology powering the chatbots primarily sold as the “Artificial Intelligence” science fiction has long promised. I put “intelligence” in quotes because to call these technologies “intelligent” is, too, a purposeful obfuscation as to what mechanisms are working behind the scenes. The companies peddling LLMs desperately want you to believe that they have created sentient, genuinely thinking (and perhaps even feeling) beings. They want you to believe that the machine with which you are interfacing is actually just like you, maybe even more like you than any existent physical person. They need you to believe this to hide the fact that they expect you to base your life around a glorified (proprietary) calculator, albeit one that has the ability to adapt its algorithm based upon the data fed to it (a process known as machine learning that has been used in computational research for decades). ...

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— Leonardo Caffo - Antonio Gramsci: A Folk Philosopher Who Still Resists

 

at 4/9/26 2:34am

Author: Leonardo CaffoTitle: Antonio Gramsci: A Folk Philosopher Who Still ResistsDate: 2026Source: caffocabinetofcuriosities.blog Coming into contact with Antonio Gramsci for the first time feels like stepping inside a poor Sardinian peasant house at the beginning of the twentieth century there is the smell of burning wood freshly baked bread books read by candlelight and the heavy air of prison Gramsci is not a high philosopher in the dusty academic sense of the term he is a small hunchbacked chronically ill man who spent the last eleven years of his life in fascist jails and despite everything managed to write thousands of pages that still speak to us today as if we were sitting with him at a kitchen table Gramsci is a folk figure in the most beautiful and most political sense of the word he belongs to the people speaks their language even when he uses difficult terms he bends them to the dialect of struggle comes from below from the colonized South of Italy from a poor family in Ghilarza and carries within himself the rage and the hope of those who have always been subaltern his thought is not a closed system to be studied at university and then shelved it is a work tool a hammer to break the invisible chains that in twenty twenty five are called algorithms influencers public debt green passes cancel culture smart working resilience Big Brother Netflix and TikTok This long article aims to do two things at once explain to those who know nothing about him who Gramsci was and what his key concepts are hegemony organic intellectuals historic bloc war of position war of maneuver subalternity common sense good sense passive revolution trasformismo civil society political society and so on and brutally actualize them in the present showing how twenty first century fascism no longer wears black shirts but logos and how hegemony today is exercised not through direct violence but through mass entertainment and spontaneous consent But let us proceed in order beginning with Gramsci’s life in order to contextualize his thought born in eighteen ninety one in Sardinia the fourth of seven children Antonio suffered from a form of bone tuberculosis from an early age that left him hunchbacked and physically fragile thanks to a scholarship he studied at the University of Turin where he came into contact with socialism and the workers’ movement in nineteen nineteen he founded L’Ordine Nuovo a newspaper that became the organ of the factory councils movement inspired by the Russian Revolution but adapted to Italian reality in nineteen twenty one he was among the founders of the Communist Party of Italy elected to Parliament in nineteen twenty four he was arrested in nineteen twenty six despite parliamentary immunity first sentenced to five years of confinement and then to twenty years in prison he died in nineteen thirty seven at the age of forty six after writing the famous Prison Notebooks and hundreds of letters These works are not systematic treatises they are fragmentary notes written in secret in a coded language to evade censorship yet it is precisely this folk form almost oral that makes them alive and accessible Gramsci writes the way a Sardinian peasant speaks direct concrete full of metaphors drawn from everyday life this is the secret of his enduring resistance a thought that starts from the people and returns to the people The heart of everything is hegemony in nineteen twenty seven in a cell in Turi prison Gramsci wrote a sentence that remains an unexploded bomb the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear this quotation from the Prison Notebooks captures the essence of his thinking on historical transition today we are exactly in that interregnum the old the neoliberalism of the nineteen eighties to two thousand eight is in terminal crisis but the new a more just ecological feminist decolonial society struggles to be born and in this vacuum proliferate the morbid symptoms sovereigntisms conspiracy theories collective burnout influencers selling detox water for seventy nine euros wars mass depression But what exactly is hegemony Gramsci develops the concept in the Notebooks as the way in which the dominant classes do not merely rule through force the State police army but direct society through cultural consent he writes the State equals political society plus civil society that is hegemony armored with coercion here political society is the repressive apparatus while civil society is the ensemble of private institutions schools churches media associations that produce consent hegemony is the cement that holds power together the dominant classes impose their own political intellectual and moral values on society with the aim of welding and managing power around a common sense shared by all social classes especially the subaltern ones It is not only repression it is conviction Gramsci explains that in the West unlike Tsarist Russia the State is protected by a robust civil society made of cultural trenches and fortifications that is why revolution cannot be a frontal assault war of maneuver but must be a slow erosion of consent war of position ...

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— Ilya Kharkow - Journalism and Control in Ukraine

 

at 4/8/26 5:45am

Author: Ilya KharkowTitle: Journalism and Control in UkraineDate: 05/04/2026Source: https://theleftberlin.com/journalism-and-control-in-ukraine/ First, one group of journalists writes that the president has signed a decree introducing a minute of silence. Now, every day at 9:00, the entire country must fall silent in memory of the victims of the war. These texts usually include an exhaustive list of who can be considered a victim. As you might expect, the men who died while trying to escape conscription are not included in that list. Then a second wave of journalists joins in. They add details: pedestrians and vehicles must stop in the street for exactly 60 seconds during the minute of silence. Violations may result in a fine. Later, a third wave appears – the debunking one. It turns out that kids in public schools are not required to kneel during the minute of silence. It turns out that fines will not be imposed on pedestrians, but only on drivers, and only in exceptional cases. Be that as it may, the very idea of a minute of silence could be quite worthy. There is nothing wrong with honoring the memory of the dead. It becomes repulsive only at the moment when grief is turned into an obligation. *** I scroll through the news in bed at night. My eyes hurt, but I keep going. And suddenly I catch myself thinking that reading news about nuclear war no longer scares me, it entertains. The modern world is suffering from vision problems. A new symptom is the inability to plan. In 2026, I cannot say where I will be in five, seven, or ten years. I cannot even be sure within what borders the country that issued my passport will exist or whether it will exist at all. What will happen to the EU? Will the United States leave NATO? What will become of NATO if that happens? What will happen to Russia after Putin? Will there be a third world war? And if there is, will it bring about the end of the era of nation-states? Ukrainian journalism makes almost no attempt to answer such questions. It does the opposite: it clouds the future with sugary propaganda that produces new corpses on the battlefield. Then it publicly takes offense when someone criticizes the customer of the propaganda – the authorities. Society is not the same as the state. But Ukrainian journalism persistently pretends that there is no difference between the two. It also never tires of repeating that no one is interested in cultural news. News about science drowns in reports about inflation, prisons, and the front line. This is not an accident, it is a mechanism. Mikhail Bakunin believed that the liberation of the people begins with education. Modern journalism makes education unfashionable, placing thieves, celebrities, and scandals on a pedestal. Today I want to hold a mirror up to contemporary Ukrainian journalism, because its reflection is the best proof of its worthlessness. *** A few facts about culture that no one cares about. During his lifetime, Vincent van Gogh sold only one painting – The Red Vineyard. It was bought by the Belgian artist Anna Boch in 1890 for about 400 francs. In his short life, van Gogh managed to paint around 900 works and more than a thousand drawings. He died an unrecognized artist. Today, his paintings are worth tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. The problem with journalism is that it is almost always interested only in what has already been recognized. What is already expensive. What has already become success. But culture almost never looks important at the moment it is happening. *** Symbolic initiatives are increasingly replacing real problems. Streets are being renamed. Sometimes even cities, though mostly small ones. All of this is explained by a noble goal: get rid of the Soviet legacy. But journalism is not only about transmitting facts. It is also about a critical view. Questions. Is this necessary? What will it change? Perhaps the same resources should have been directed to the front? Journalism, like the judicial system, is supposed to be impartial. But when news outlets are funded by political parties, impartiality becomes a luxury. And as for the judicial system… try for a moment to imagine that the biblical line “judge not, and you shall not be judged” was meant literally… about courts. That changes a lot, doesn’t it? *** On social media, a woman writes that her husband has been mobilized. She has one newborn child. A rented apartment. Almost no money. She asks: what should she do? Society remains calm. It believes that the state acts fairly. After all, everyone knows that men with three or more children are not mobilized. If she has fewer than three children, then she should manage. The state must have decided this for a reason, and therefore there must be good grounds for it. After some time, another post appears. Another woman writes that her husband has just been mobilized. She has three children. She also asks: what should she do? Society remains indifferent, because it believes that the state is fair. If her husband was mobilized, then the children must not be his. Ukrainian journalism does not cover this. *** A separate genre of Ukrainian journalism is news about how the world admires Ukraine. An ambassador of some country says a few polite words, and soon an article appears. ...

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— Anarchist Front of Iran and Afghanistan - Review and Critique of Recent Protest Movements in Iran

 

at 4/8/26 2:33am

Author: Anarchist Front of Iran and AfghanistanTitle: Review and Critique of Recent Protest Movements in IranSubtitle: From an Iranian Anarcho-Syndicalist PerspectiveDate: April 7 2026Source: Retrieved on April 7 2026 from https://www.instagram.com/p/DW2zCcfADR1/ Many revolutionary movements begin with emancipatory intentions, yet in practice end up reproducing the very patterns of power they rose against. “Avoiding the reproduction of power” is not an abstract principle, but rather a set of practical and organizational methods that can be summarized along several key axes: 1) Horizontalization of structures In anarchist thought, the emphasis is on the “abolition of hierarchy,” which in practice means enabling voluntary and direct participation of all through decision-making in general democratic councils (federalist/confederalist general assemblies), and avoiding the presence of permanent leaders. Horizontality can be slow, exhausting, or prone to “informal powers” (influential individuals). 2) Rotation of responsibilities and roles One way to prevent the concentration of power is the temporary nature of roles; for example, a facilitator should only manage the discussion to maintain order during meetings, and individuals should be constantly replaced. No one should become a “permanent specialist of power,” because even in horizontal movements, roles are unavoidable. 3) Immediate and direct accountability Every individual or group must be accountable to the collective for their words and actions without any hierarchy, and there must be the possibility of immediate removal of spokespersons, representatives, or coordinators. This means that the selection of such individuals is limited, temporary, and revocable. 4) Fast but collective decision-making One common problem is either dictatorship or paralysis in decision-making. Therefore, for practical action, methods such as relative consensus (not full consensus) can be used. In this case, decisions are made quickly in small groups and on a small scale, without waiting for directives from a “center.” 5) Self-organization on a small scale Instead of creating a “single center” and operating under a central command, small self-managed (autonomous) groups that network with one another should be formed. For example, forming groups of 5 to 15 individuals with relative trust, where each group makes its own decisions rather than waiting for orders. This is the model that can later evolve into a network. Its advantage is that, on one hand, repression becomes more difficult, and on the other hand, concentration of power is reduced. Also, if one part is suppressed, the entire network does not collapse. This model has been seen in many labor-syndicalist movements and anarchist actions such as occupations. 6) Transparency and free circulation of information Power often arises from the monopoly of information. Therefore, to address this issue, there should be no backroom negotiations; all decisions must be public, and everyone must have access to information. 7) Prefiguration of the alternative “Live as you want the future society to be.” This kind of alternative-building means: if the goal is freedom, the means must also be free; and if the goal is equality, the structure of the movement must also be egalitarian. 8) Resistance to the “leadership moment” Almost all movements face a moment of pressure: “We need a single leader to be effective.” This is precisely the starting point of the “reproduction of authority” and a very serious warning, because even popular individuals can lead to the concentration of power. Practicing “saying no to power,” even within the movement, is one of the most important and difficult tasks. Therefore, if a person or current begins to exert excessive control, it must be openly criticized and limited, even if highly popular. 9) Continuous internal critique Only movements that continuously critique themselves can survive, thereby exposing hidden class, gender, and charismatic power relations. 10) Complete independence from states and geopolitical powers No financial, political, or media dependence on states, and maintaining independence in decision-making in practice — not just at the level of slogans — because any external dependency quickly creates hierarchical structures. 11) Attention to everyday life, not just the “moment of revolution” If a movement is formed only around street protests, once it subsides, old powers return. However, if alongside it local-regional solidarity networks, mutual aid, and forms of socio-economic self-management are created, the imposition of power from above is eliminated or redefined to a minimum. Practical activities may include helping detainees and their families, the injured, those who have lost income, creating small local (or, if possible, regional) funds, and sharing resources (food, medicine, information). These actions build trust and, most importantly, move the movement from the “street” to “everyday life.” 12) Review and critique of the movement in Iran If we apply these anarchist principles to the protests of recent decades in Iran, a complex picture emerges: on one hand, strong elements of spontaneity and horizontality; on the other, serious obstacles to stabilizing these models: ...

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— Various authors - Stronger than Death

 

at 4/7/26 1:25pm

Author: Various authorsTitle: Stronger than DeathDate: 24 March 2026Source: https://organisemagazine.org.uk/2026/03/24/stronger-than-death/ On March 20, two Italian Anarchists, Sandro Mercogliano and Sara Ardizzone, died in an explosion on the outskirts of Rome, as covered here by Freedom. The below is a statement signed by various groups hosted on Anarchist Cultural Circle “Gogliardo Fiaschi”’s website, originally hosted here. There is an enormous difference between the violence of the oppressed and that of the oppressors: the former follows an ethic, the latter doesn’t. – Sara Ardizzone Our ability to speak and communicate does not allow us to venture down the unbeaten paths of personal accountability for the risks we take. Any discussion along these lines remains inevitably tentative and inadequate. To truly seek freedom — in its authentic and complete form, not in the counterfeit versions bestowed and imposed by the state — means entering into the realm of risk inherent in the quest itself. In this realm, our choices — often wild and solitary — carve out a path of no return. Freedom is a quality that is experienced by putting oneself at risk. We say this without resorting to any rhetorical indulgence: the two anarchists found dead after the collapse of a farmhouse in Rome, Sara Ardizzone and Alessandro Mercogliano, are our close comrades, we are proud to have them as our comrades. The paid hacks, from whose trashy paper we learned of the incident, write about the detonation of an explosive artefact. The attempts to distance oneself, always aimed at ensuring a shameful sense of security, do not belong to us. We are used to never believe what is uttered by the propaganda machine, but if there is a glimmer of truth about the “leaked” information we cannot fail to dwell on the fundamental fact: Sara and Sandro died in action, died in the battle. Social war is not a stunt, a life style or a subculture. It is, first and foremost, a war. Sara and Sandro are a shining example of the inseparable bond between thought and deed which inspires the anarchism, revolutionaries until the very last moment of their lives, and in death. Sara and Sandro are and will always be a piece of our heart, a heart which simply cannot bring itself to write an obituary. The rants of today’s lords of the inquisition and repression go hand in hand with those of the warlords and exploiters. The perpetrators of massacres, the mass murderers, the purveyors of death cry out in outrage the scandal of the bombs of the anarchists. With Sara and Sandro we have shared the unextinguishable passion for the anarchist thought and action. Some of us lived alongside them, sharing the feverish intensity of moments that no clock could ever measure. With them, when we have been under investigation by the repressive machine of the State, we have maintained our dignity consolidated in the tenacity of our choices. We are certain of this: those endless days of ours will never fade into a distant memory. Moments that were not based on ideological rhetoric, but on the conviction of our paths, on feelings, on mutual trust, and on the joy of life. All of us who knew them deeply know that there will never be words adequate to describe their modesty, their tenderness, and their dignity. This is why the revolutionary will of Sara and Sandro has the strength to go beyond time, overcoming sorrow and pain. Their passion for life will be stronger than death. Their integrity will always serve as an admonishment to every oppressor. March 21, 2026 Anarchist Cultural Circle “G. Fiaschi” (Carrara) Anarchist Circle “The Fault” (Foligno) Danilo Cremonese and Valentina Speziale Anarchist Circle “G. Bertoli” (Assemini) Anarchist Nucleus “It is. Henry” (Cagliari) Anarchist Library Sabot (Rome) Natasha Savio Louis of Faenza

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— Nicolas Trifon - Preface on Minority Nationalities in the Balkans

 

at 4/7/26 12:16pm

Author: Nicolas TrifonTitle: Preface on Minority Nationalities in the BalkansDate: 2008Notes: Translated (using digital tools with manual checking) by Andrew McLaverty-RobinsonSource: « Petits peuples » et minorités nationales des Balkans, Les Cahiers du Courrier des Balkans n°6 (Arcueil, France) This is the Preface to Small Peoples and Minority Nationalities in the Balkans (« Petits peuples » et minorités nationales des Balkans), Les Cahiers du Courrier des Balkans n°6 (Arcueil, France) Translated (using digital tools with manual checking) by Andrew McLaverty-Robinson. Nicolas Trifon was a French-based Romanian anarchist of part Aromanian ethnicity, who edited the anarchist journal Iztok in 1989-91. He is known for his critiques of eastern European socialism, which he considered to be a form of state capitalism transitional between caste and class systems. (Translator’s Introduction) In Southeast Europe, the landscape of minority nationalities is more varied and unexpected, more pleasant to contemplate and intellectually more stimulating than that of majority nationalities established as nations. The diversity of the constituent traits (religious, linguistic, social, professional, territorial, political...)[1] of minorities and the strong variation observed from one case to another are as disconcerting, especially at first, as they are fascinating, once one becomes more familiar with them. From this perspective, the range of populations discussed in this issue of Courrier des Balkans is revealing. Groups constituted as national majorities are more alike than these minority populations, which often owe their specific existence to the slow decline of the Ancien Régime of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empire, a situation more favourable to minorities than to nations. Each of these nations, all of relatively recent formation, has a glorious historical past, at least in the eyes of its members, an ethnogenesis as obscure as it is exhilarating, a language codified down to the smallest details, etc. If the data varies, the structure of the national narrative of the majority nationalities is of the same kind throughout the Balkans. It is precisely these strong similarities that make national ideologies incompatible. The breakup of Yugoslavia created unusual situations whose complexity was not always fully grasped at the outset. The accession to independence of the former constituent republics of the Yugoslav Federation has significantly altered the situation of the minorities present on these regions (Serbs in Croatia, Hungarians and Croats in Vojvodina and the rest of Serbia, Albanians in Montenegro...), while in Kosovo the recent constitution of a former minority (within Serbia) into a nation has created a new national minority (the Kosovo Serbs) and puts the already existing minorities in Kosovo (Roma, Gorani, Croat, Bosnian...) in an uncomfortable situation. The materials gathered here provide an account, sometimes in detail, of the redistribution of power on the Balkan chessboard. While deploring the so-called ethnic tensions and ethnic conflicts, outside observers also have a tendency to deplore the preservation of the population diversity in this region, whose complex configuration, inherited from an even more complex history, fuels these tensions and makes these conflicts possible. In doing so, the observer effectively aligns themselves with the various Balkan majority nationalists. In the eyes of these nation-states, the presence on their territory of individuals who define themselves or can be defined as members of another nation, as well as the presence of their compatriots in neighboring nations, constitutes above all an anomaly that must be eliminated at any price. From this perspective, the Aromanians, who identify as such, distinct from the Albanian, Greek, Macedonian, and Slavic worlds in which they live, and from the more distant Romanians whose language belongs to the same linguistic family as theirs, appear to be an anomaly. However, upon closer examination, they are not alone in this situation, if one considers the Pomaks of Bulgaria and Greece, or the Gorani of North Macedonia, Kosovo, and Albania. We should also not lose sight of the fact that, while it remains common, the perception of minority realities in terms of anomaly or aberration is ultimately doomed by the prospect of European integration. Two or three other things must also be taken into account regarding the issues addressed in this collection. Minorities are not homogeneous, far from it, and not all of them aspire to become so. Some may be tempted by nationalism, of their own or other groups, if they think they can gain advantages from it; others indulge in nostalgia for political regimes of the past. The fact of having maintained themselves for centuries, for reasons that are not solely of their own will, does not protect them from rapid changes once confronted, in modernity, with new social and political situations. The precipitous decline in the number of members of some minority communities inside the region is not only due to pressure and power-plays by majority nations anxious to occupy the place taken today by minorities, but also to migratory movements explained by the search for better living conditions. This is, for the case, for example, for the Saxons of Transylvania (Romania) and, on a completely different scale, for the Croats of Kosovo, discussed in this volume in the reports by Markus Tanner in Grossau and Laurent Geslin in Letnica. ...

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— Max Shaver - Can permaculture be confrontational?

 

at 4/7/26 10:35am

Author: Max ShaverTitle: Can permaculture be confrontational?Subtitle: Gardening for the middle-class or a challenge to capitalism?Date: April, 2025Notes: Max Shaver is an anarchist student and thinker in the Pacific Northwest.Source: Retrieved on 3/1/26 from https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/416-spring-2025/can-permaculture-be-confrontational/ The greatest alienation that capitalism has wrought on humanity is perhaps not labor power, as posited by Marx, but rather the ability to live a life reliant on nature. Where once humanity was in intimate contact with the natural world, cityscapes, abstract economies, and industrial technocracy now dominate our lives. Capitalist economic and legal structures have been extremely efficient at prohibiting subsistence economies. Land ownership is now a necessary requisite to interact with nature beyond supervised visitation to mismanaged landscapes. This alienation has occurred with such efficiency that nature’s absence from society is practically perceived as a given. The expulsion of peasants from the commons in the 17th century was the first primary action of modern capitalism. Removing the means for a subsistence economy made them dependent on social hierarchy, forcing them to sell their labor. As colonialism propagated across the Atlantic, it was necessary to destroy the lifeways of the Indigenous population, resulting in atrocities such as the murder of millions of bison. This caused the Indigenous people to become dependent on Western commerce, racking up debt and coercing them into signing unfavorable treaties. Throughout history, one of the primary interventions of social hierarchy in human society has been to remove the capacity for communities to maintain subsistence lifestyles. If nature can provide the necessary resources for life, then accumulation is unnecessary. The illusion that systems of subsistence based on an accurate observation of nature cannot provide for our needs is crucial for the complicity with social hierarchy. The promise of permaculture has been to eliminate this illusion through the application of extensive observation in the design of material systems that simultaneously enhances the evolutionary process of nature and provides for human needs. Accurate observations of the entire apparatus of ecosystems (rather than the dissection of components) allows the permaculture practitioner to replicate nature’s material success. The principles observed are applied to meeting human needs, ensuring that both present and future generations can enjoy lives with all material necessities met. Food, fiber, water, building materials, etc. are grown and produced in sophisticated systems of interconnection and interdependence that strongly resemble the ecosystem within which they reside. Through the permaculture design process, the inherently sustainable and resilient qualities of natural ecosystems are replicated in material human systems. The ability of permaculture to provide for all human needs can preclude the social accumulation of power and the material accumulation of wealth. While some degree of authority is required due to the expertise required to design and maintain these systems, this authority is not highly technical or esoteric. Juxtaposed with the technological expertise required to operate and maintain the extensive extraction-manufacturing economy, permaculture is extremely accessible. A centralized, hierarchical, de-localized system of resource management is unnecessary. Because the global capitalist economy is dependent on the extraction of materials, the transportation of these materials across vast distances, and the extensive manufacturing process required to produce consumer goods, the social hierarchy of technocrats, bureaucrats, the wealthy, and their enforcers who oversee this system lose their place in a material system that seeks to replicate nature in a localized system of interdependent components. The ability for humans to learn from their environment and meet their needs utilizing accurate observations of nature has been a crucial part of our evolution. Permaculture is simply a modern, Western iteration of this inherently human capacity. Indigenous societies around the world have thoroughly embraced this component of our humanity and have accomplished amazing things through its application. As posited by anarchist social theorist Murray Bookchin, the history of human development is the development of social institutions that successfully interface with nature in increasingly sophisticated ways, enhancing both the egalitarian components of society and the scientific. To this end, Indigenous societies have been wildly successful. The development of Indigenous science has allowed countless societies to develop environmentally sound, sophisticated means of providing for human needs. Generally, Indigenous science consists of traditional ecological knowledge, wherein observations of the environment are embedded in cultural traditions and both preserved and added to for generations. This practice has enabled Indigenous societies to accomplish feats such as long-term weather predictions because of the sheer volume of specific, localized data that their cultural traditions contain. Feats such as this are unreproducible by Western science due to the generalized, global nature of the data it can accumulate. ...

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— Luisa Landová-Štychová - Marriage, Family, and Free Love

 

at 4/7/26 10:19am

Author: Luisa Landová-ŠtychováTitle: Marriage, Family, and Free LoveDate: 1912Notes: The author was a Czech anarchist during the 1910s. She was also a feminist, socialist, neo-Malthusian, and philosophical monist. In this piece, she argues that religion, capitalism, housework, and romantic love all alienate women from their interests and pursuit of justice. This piece was written in 1912, while she was an anarchist. It was a speech at an anarchist event and was printed in an anarchist journal. However, the author later became a member of parliament for the Social Democrats and then the Communists. Her activism focused on ‘free love’ and the critique of marriage, as well as birth control as an aspect of working-class women’s liberation. (Note by Andrew McLaverty-Robinson; the original piece contains a longer introduction). Translated by Melinda ReidingerSource: https://filosofia.flu.cas.cz/upload/__files/Contr_2_2023 In the gloom of the past we find traces of woman’s freedom until the period when her maternal and civic rights were abolished with the fall of communism. Woman, taken by surprise by nature, which had weakened her with involuntary, frequent motherhood – was made into man’s prey. It’s entirely logical that the male human being, who had already dared to set boundaries around a piece of land for himself, didn’t hesitate to go farther and also appropriate for himself the female human being to give birth to his blood heirs. Perhaps she resignedly surrendered – perhaps she defended herself and lost – we don’t know. But it’s certain that all of us proletarians – feel the weight of woman’s humiliation most bitterly till the present day. The well-known trinity – capital, militarism, and clericalism – have supports that are seemingly negligible, but actually the most powerful in marriage, even in its free form, and in the family. A human being, as a father or mother, is more likely to let him or herself be oppressed by capital only when they have some level of certainty of the most miserable existence. Poverty and alcohol tempt man to seek pleasure in woman’s embrace, and from this is born a surplus of fodder for barracks and brothels. Human life becomes worthless. And the cleric awaits his victim. Woman, exhausted by wage-earning and domestic work, weakened by frequent births and sleepless nights – the female human being without rights, overloaded with responsibilities, seeks support and solace in the place where until recently she was thundered against as a tool of the devil and the seducer of the miserable “stronger” sex. And they would still be thundering until today if women had not formed a strong bulwark for clericalism through their ignorance, or, among women with more awareness, an incomprehensible lack of character. And in the female human being’s traces of freedom in times of yore, we also seek a key to deciphering the problem of marriage and the family, which we have made so unnecessarily painful. We are forced to guess this riddle by our fears for the fate of our ideals of freedom, equality, and the brotherhood of mankind – for who can guarantee that after some time these ideals will not be understood and applied in a perverse, contrary manner and that a new enslavement that is perhaps even worse will not arise and replace today’s form of it!? Let’s just take notice of the contradictions in the revolutionary parties themselves, despite that the ideas of freedom, equality, and universal brotherhood – are as clear as the Sun. We say – these are personal interests, and shrug our shoulders. And these personal interests are more or less the interests of people who want to be, or already are, spouses and fathers, and who cannot and mustn’t ignore them, despite their pure character. This shouldn’t be overlooked. Marriage itself, whether lawful or free, is nothing other than owning a human being. Either it originated in the delimitation of land, or it gave an impulse to said delimitation. This is indisputable. Love is nothing more than an attack on personal freedom and on humanity itself. The lover demands complete devotion from the beloved, and this often means ruthlessness toward others. Love demands understanding! But how! This requirement of understanding has nothing to do with the understanding conceived of by the modern free human being. This is the so-called merging of souls, which is the relinquishment of one’s own independent mental development, and this requirement is the origin of a great many misunderstandings, and unnecessary pain and arguments. A weak-natured woman usually understands her husband so perfectly that she becomes a complete caricature of him. A woman who is stronger, but also the type who has common sense, becomes hypo- critical, cunning. She agrees with the man on everything, but manages things so that in the end she still does what she, herself, thinks is good. And a proud woman – one with strong individuality? If she lacks nobility, she’ll dominate the man. If she doesn’t manage to do this, she’s quarrelsome and intolerant. She has a vague inkling of the senseless humiliation of the female human being and is taking revenge for it. A noble woman does not want to enslave a man – but she likewise does not want to be enslaved. Although she is still in thrall to the traditions of love, internally, mentally, she wants to live herself, free, and be attentive to her man just like to every human soul, respecting his freedom of opinions and expressions, but demanding the same for herself. If the man is intellectually and emotionally intelligent, these kinds of people live more quietly than others. But not more happily. It is only a compromise, for the woman in a relationship that has crystallized this way always remains in the second place. These are small things to look at – but we mustn’t overlook them. They make up an important element in the upbringing of our children, from whom we would like to raise the liberated people of tomorrow. ...

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— Laura Portwood-Stacer - Constructing anarchist sexuality: Queer identity, culture, and politics in the anarchist movement

 

at 4/7/26 10:01am

Author: Laura Portwood-StacerTitle: Constructing anarchist sexuality: Queer identity, culture, and politics in the anarchist movementDate: September 2, 2010Source: Sexualities 13 (4) I’ve seen the anarchists in our community become more queer in their outlooks, their self-presentation, and even their own sexualities. Neal Ritchie (2008: 273) I don’t like to identify as straight. I find it oppressive. Tina, a self-identified anarchist[1] In this article, I explore how queer sexuality is enlisted in the construction of political identity by members of the contemporary anarchist movement[2] in North America. The anarchist movement has developed its own culture, in which there are clear, though contestable, ways that people cultivate their identities as anarchists. Certain expressions of queerness have become associated with anarchist identity, and I am interested in the effects, both social and political, that this articulation has. Investments in ‘authentic’ expressions of political identity can prove to be divisive within a movement, and can also displace attention away from the material political projects of the movement and onto more superficial, individualized concerns. Yet the integration of resistant practices and identities into the culture of a movement can serve to collectivize what may seem like superficial and individualized concerns, such that they end up carrying real symbolic and material power to effect change. Here, I present some of these effects as they play out in individuals’ personal experience as participants in the anarchist movement. ‘Anarchist’ is a political identity assumed by individuals, and, like any other social identity, it is constructed and communicated through the adoption of lifestyle practices and visible bodily performances. Sexuality is one way (among many) that individuals represent, and thus constitute, themselves as anarchists. Identities are historical, meaning that they are made possible by particular discourses, which arise at particular moments, in particular contexts, and amidst particular power relations (Hall, 1996). Thus the content and meanings of an identity, such as anarchist, are always contingent, varying in ways based on spatial and historical location, and discursive struggles over its definition. Each person who identifies as an anarchist experiences and enacts the identity in their own unique way, but there is enough coherence around the term for it to be a meaningful object of analysis. Despite variation between individuals, the anarchist is a specific type of individual, who represents the incorporation of various practices into a coherent, nameable identity (Foucault, 1990a; Heckert, 2004). Here, I show that queer sexuality is an important component of anarchist identity: particular sexual practices and ways of sexually self-identifying are incorporated into the constitution of the anarchist subject. The definition of queer I work from is rooted in an activist and theoretical tradition that celebrates sexual autonomy and the proliferation of sexual difference, in opposition to the repressive conformity of heteronormativity. Queer is a refusal to accept the legitimacy of socially dominant sexualities on the basis that they are natural or intrinsically valuable. This refusal is resonant with anarchism’s fundamental philosophy, which is a commitment to autonomy, accompanied by an opposition to hierarchy, that is, unequal power relations that allow some people’s autonomy to be violated by others. Dominant sexual mores and institutions create hierarchies in which people are coerced into having and expressing a limited range of sexual desires and interpersonal arrangements (Rubin, 1984). Thus it is ideologically consistent for anarchists to take up queers’ resistance of the established hierarchical valuation of sexual identities and practices. In this article, I describe ways that self-identified anarchists attempt to resist dominant norms of sexuality. The modes of resistance I discuss here do not exhaust those deployed within the anarchist movement; however my selections are reflective of what came up most often and most strikingly in the course of my research. Methodology This article draws on my research on the culture of the contemporary North American anarchist movement. I conducted interviews with 37 individuals who self-identified as anarchists, or had a strong affinity to anarchist politics. The majority of the interviews were done face to face, though some were conducted over email or internet chat. The format of the interviews was semi-structured, in that I introduced general themes to the conversation via open-ended questions about the interviewees’ identification with anarchism, participation in political organizing, membership in anarchist communities, and personal lifestyle practices. In addition to conducting interviews, I attended anarchist bookfairs, conferences, organizing meetings, and social events as both participant and observer. I also read texts, both printed and electronic, written by and for anarchists. Recruiting interviewees for a study on anarchists can be a complicated matter. Radical activists and their organizations are regularly subject to infiltration and surveillance by law enforcement personnel, which may make them particularly wary of people claiming to be doing ‘research’ on their activities. For this reason, I relied on something of a snowball technique, recruiting people I was personally acquainted with and then through them, making contact with other potential interviewees. I chose not to restrict the study to a particular organization or physical location, because of the anarchist movement’s nature as a cosmopolitan, electronically connected network in which organizational affiliations are highly fluid and geographical mobility is common. As I will discuss later, individuals’ experiences of sexuality and anarchist identity are affected by their situation within local communities, so it turned out to be instructive to talk to people who were situated in a variety of locations. At the same time, the construction of anarchist identity is not wholly determined by local context, given the circulation of anarchist discourses and bodies within national and global networks, so the account of anarchist sexuality I offer here is, I think, representative (though not, of course, exhaustive). That said, I would hesitate to generalize any of the specific experiences or discourses I discuss here to the anarchist movement as it exists beyond North America. The cultural, economic, and political contexts within which other branches of the global anarchist movement are situated are perhaps too divergent for me to be able to make any claims for the universality of my findings. I would hope however that the analytical tools I use and the theoretical and practical implications of my work would prove broadly useful across borders, and indeed, for other political movements besides anarchism. ...

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— K. C. Sinclair - Voltairine De Cleyre and Colonialism

 

at 4/7/26 9:26am

Author: K. C. SinclairTitle: Voltairine De Cleyre and ColonialismDate: March 2026Source: Retrieved on April 2, 2026, from historyiswhat.noblogs.org Voltairine de Cleyre, like her fellow historical anarchists of Euro-American (or simply European descent), took contradictory stances on colonialism and Indigenous peoples throughout her life. Her case is just particularly extreme, and due to that, especially instructive. As an otipêmisiw person who’s been studying anarchist history for about three decades now, I’ve never been surprised to encounter anti-Native sentiment when put forward by Euro-American and European anarchists, but it’s only recently that I’ve started writing about it. My work in this case also expands upon that of Klee Benally (Unknowable: Against an Indigenous Anarchist Theory) and Gia Vogerl (Deconstructing Settler Socialism) who first wrote about the anti-Native aspect of De Cleyre’s writing in particular. Of added personal interest to me over the years has been De Cleyre’s comradeship with Honoré Jaxon, a settler socialist from Toronto and Prince Albert (in what’s now Saskatchewan) who married into the otipêmisiwak community, served as secretary to Louis Riel, and then fled to Chicago after Canada crushed the Northwest Resistance of 1885. I’ve also long been an appreciator of De Cleyre’s particular skill at writing and her attention to the Mexican Revolution. Learning from Mistakes When it came to North American history, on the one hand De Cleyre lamented the brutality of the colonizers and the dispossession of Native peoples, as she did in her commentary in the British anarchist journal Freedom and the American anarchist publication Free Society. She even celebrated the Indigenous resistance that was part of the Mexican Revolution and the Native’s hatred for authority that it exemplified to her. On the other hand, she supported the explicitly genocidal rebellion of Nathaniel Bacon against a colonial government that wasn’t doing enough, in Bacon’s opinion, to kill every last Native person. In addition, De Cleyre displayed naivety and ignorance about America’s Founding Fathers and the character and history of anti-Black racism and slavery in the country of her birth. To her great credit, De Cleyre did, more than once, admit that she had taken incorrect stances in the past and wished to correct them. This is much more than can be said, for example, about current-day macho male anarchist pundits such as Peter Gelderloos and the editor of CrimethInc, who refuse to admit to any mistakes, or even any mistakes on the part of their close friends, seemingly due to their fragile male egos and their perceived need to project strength, no matter how fake. It’s a shame that De Cleyre was not able to come to the point of recognizing her mistakes when it came to colonialism and anti-Blackness, but her humility is something to aspire to and something all the more necessary today given the ego-maniacal white boys club that makes up much of American anarchist media. Painful Misinformation In the late 1880s, De Cleyre made a public speech on the Founding Father and author of Common Sense, Thomas Paine. That speech, a glowing tribute to Paine and his work, was later included in the 1914 book, Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, edited by Alexander Berkman. Nowhere in her speech, nor anywhere else in her writing, does De Cleyre so much as mention, let along critique, the line in Common Sense where Paine states that, at the time of the American Revolution, with regard to the British, there were “thousands, and tens of thousands, who would think it glorious to expel from the continent, that barbarous and hellish power, which hath stirred up the Indians and Negroes to destroy us, the cruelty hath a double guilt, it is dealing brutally by us, and treacherously by them.” Nor does she mention how Paine’s counter-revolutionary sentiment and conspiracy theory was then paraphrased in the Declaration of Independence by fellow Founder Thomas Jefferson. De Cleyre had read Moncure Conway’s biography of Paine, and this gave her the mistaken impression that Paine had been an outspoken abolitionist, since a newspaper article, African Slavery in America, was falsely attributed to Paine by Conway. In reality, although he privately opposed slavery, Paine was reluctant to say so publicly, only doing so under his own name in one known case, his 1802 text, To the French Inhabitants of Louisiana, and under an assumed name in the case of the 1792 pamphlet, Old Truths and Established Facts, co-written with Joseph Priestly. Although Paine opposed slavery, and didn’t hold slaves himself, unlike Jefferson, he also opposed, as we see from his comments in Common Sense, rebellion by the slaves, rebellion that actually led to freedom for some of the enslaved who rebelled, as they escaped from America to other British colonies. If De Cleyre was not blissfully ignorant about this, she nonetheless chose to remain silent on it and instead promote Paine as an all-out abolitionist that he never was. In her 1908 text, Anarchism and American Traditions, De Cleyre returned to the theme of the Founders, heaping praise on both Jefferson and Paine. Nowhere does she mention that Jefferson was a slave master who had fretted over slave rebellions, or that he was an advocate, in his letters, of ethnic cleansing against Indigenous peoples. Nowhere does she mention the counter-revolutionary grievances of the Declaration of Independence, the complaints against Britain for restricting the theft of Native lands and for supposedly inciting Blacks and Natives to rebellion. She even states the opposite of the truth, that “the spirit of liberty was nurtured by colonial life” and that it is “American tradition that we keep out of the affairs of other nations.” ...

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— Jess Dillard-Wright and Danisha Jenkins - Dangerous and Unprofessional Content

 

at 4/6/26 5:14pm

Author: Jess Dillard-Wright and Danisha JenkinsTitle: Dangerous and Unprofessional ContentSubtitle: Anarchist Dreams for Alternate Nursing FuturesDate: 14 February 2024Source: Philosophies 2024, 9(1), 25; doi.org Abstract Professionalized nursing and anarchism could not be more at odds. And yet, if nursing wishes to have a future in the precarious times in which we live and die, the discipline must take on the lessons that anarchism has on offer. Part love note to a problematic profession we love and hate, part fever dream of what could be, we set out to think about what nursing and care might look like after it all falls down, because it is all falling down. Drawing on alternate histories, alternate visions of nursing history, we imagine what nursing values would look like, embracing anarchist principles. We consider examples of community survival, mutual aid, and militant joy as strategies to achieve what nursing could be if nurses put an end to their cop shit, shrugging off their shroud of white cisheteropatriarchal femininity that manifests as professionalism and civility. We conclude with a call to action and a plan for skill-building because this can all be different. Keywords: anarchism; care; ethics; futurism; nursing 1. Introduction Anarchism is dangerously destabilizing for professionalized nursing. Anarchism’s rejection of hierarchies demands a rejection of professionalized nursing itself, given nursing’s ongoing entanglements with oppressive regimes of capitalism, managerialism, and professionalism. The circumscribed epistemological and ontological bounds of professionalized nursing as a care practice cannot survive the expansive generosity of anarchism. Many nurse leaders physically cringe at the word “anarchy”, classifying it as dangerous and unprofessional, immediately lamenting the imagined horrors: Chaos! “People would die”, nurse leaders say, clutching their pearls. As if people are not already dying, have not been dying. This reaction is a failure to identify the horrors produced by the violent order imposed by capitalist healthcare systems. But it does not have to be this way. We are nurses whose hearts were broken by nursing in this healthcare system. Our tears nourished and cultivated a commitment to set out to do what we tried to in the first place: help people survive and leave the world a little better than we found it. Or at the very least, minimize the harm along the way. As the late-COVID-19 healthcare–industrial complex (HIC) gasps and wheezes through its dying breaths, nursing needs [r]evolution. In this paper, we set out to think about what nursing and care might look like after it all falls down, because it is all falling down. We invoke the image and ideas of nurse and anarchist Emma Goldman to imagine what nursing values would look like, embracing anarchist principles. We consider examples of community survival, mutual aid, and militant joy as strategies to achieve what nursing could be if nurses put an end to their cop shit, shrugging off their shroud of white cisheteropatriarchal femininity that manifests as professionalism and civility. We conclude with a call to action and a plan for skill-building because this can all be different. 2. Have We Ever Been Nurses As we think through the unlikely pairing of nursing and anarchism, we start with a few words on nursing. Unlike many or most other things understood as universal, nursing is one of those things that most of us will experience in our lifetimes. For most reading this paper, that reality has likely already come to pass. Nursing is a relational care praxis that draws on art, care, science, and community to support wellbeing, health, and disease prevention, as well as care in illness [1][2]. This kind of care happens everywhere and is not limited to professionalized caregivers. Efforts to exercise proprietary claim to care—and exorcize those deemed unworthy to and of care—including nursing care, give rise to some of the most egregious and insidious structures that harm nurses and people who need care alike. The public imbues nursing with trust [3], an honor of dubious lineage that simultaneously confers pastoral power on nurses while enforcing docile maternal bodies. In the history of nursing, the specter Florence Nightingale is regrettably the first image conjured to mind. Nightingale serves as sort of a golden spike, fixing the popular and professional imaginary of nursing in a rigid Victorian schema, articulated through such virtues of Christian femininity as obedience, sacrifice, modesty, order, cleanliness [4]. Nightingale, however, was not the first nurse or only nurse. Nursing care is not now and has never been proprietary to professionalized nursing. Well before Nightingale’s arrival on the scene, nurses were nursing, people were caring for one another. This begs the question, who does the synecdoche of Nightingale-as-nursing as shorthand for the discipline serve? As we think about nursing and about anarchism, it is worth contemplating the archism of professionalization. Following the intervention of Martel in this issue, we understand archism as “a form of projection of authority, the assertion of a deep, ontological basis for power that is in fact based on nothing at all” [5]. For nursing, this is manifested and enforced through the image of Nightingale, a projection of a “mythic violence is the means by which that system sustains itself” [5], razor edges softened by romantic visions of care and entrustedness. Nursing is afforded one history, one image, one ontology—a singular trope on which our history and present balances, at the expense of all other possible pasts, all other stories of what nursing has been, could be [4]. This singular vision forecloses on alternate narratives while simultaneously stifling dissent, denying complicity, demanding obedience, enforcing white heteropatriarchy, establishing and reinforcing nursing’s place in the paternalist hospital family [6], and by turns mobilizing the Janus faces of archism to consolidate power and enforce discipline [7]. For an especially powerful treatment of how racial hierarchy is enforced in nursing leadership, see [8]. And as long as nurses cleave to this, refusing to recognize what is so clearly unfolding before them in the necropolitical economies of healthcare, we have to wonder what it means to nurse, to care [9]. ...

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— Jeff Monaghan and Kevin Walby - The Green Scare is Everywhere

 

at 4/4/26 11:36am

Author: Jeff Monaghan and Kevin WalbyTitle: The Green Scare is EverywhereSubtitle: The Importance of Cross-Movement SolidarityDate: 10/26/2009Source: Upping The Anti, Issue 6. <www.uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/06-the-green-scare-is-everywhere> The burgeoning “War on Terror” is facilitating the re-emergence of “terrorism” as a legal and discursive framework for classifying and suppressing political radicalism. Despite the jingoism, xenophobia, and racism of the “War on Terror,” the Federal Bureau of Investigation has consistently identified “eco-terrorism” – “homegrown” terror ostensibly perpetuated by (mostly) white environmental, animal liberation, and social justice activists – as one of the top threats to America. This climate of fear has facilitated efforts to suppress the environmental justice and animal liberation movements. These efforts are comparable to the campaigns directed towards communists, socialists, and other dissidents during the Red Scare periods of the 1910s and 1950s. In a January 2006 national press conference called to announce the indictment and arrest of several eco-activists, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller indicated that “investigating and preventing animal rights and environmental extremism is one of the FBI’s highest domestic terrorism priorities.”[1] The day of those arrests coincided with the release of convicted Oklahoma City bombing co-conspirator Michael Fortier. No media coverage mentioned the contrast between Fortier’s sentence – 12 years for an act resulting in 168 deaths – and those aimed at the non-violent acts of property destruction allegedly carried out by eco-activists, which ranged from 30 years to life without parole. The “Green Scare,” as activists have termed it, has emerged from an alignment of interests between political elites and industrial capitalists. Like the McCarthyists of old, the objectives of these interests are broader than the regulation of “crime.” They seek to destroy broader political opposition. Efforts to demobilize and neutralize these movements go beyond the immediate targeting of radicals. Under the banner of “fighting terrorism,” the Green Scare has provided opportunities for an alignment of ruling class interests to attack a diverse array of activists who, in various ways, object to the avarice and violence of global capitalism. It is important to note that the suppression techniques of the Red Scare(s) were not, and never were, deployed exclusively against members of the Communist Party. These crackdowns were, and still are, used to demobilize and demoralize a wide spectrum of political opposition on the left. Many of the most severe forms of suppression used covert and overt demobilization techniques to directly target the fringe, marginalized, and more radical elements of the struggle. The suppression directed against animal and environmental liberation activists today is not identical to the violence directed towards movements like the radical labour and anarchist movements of the 1920s, the Black Power movement, the American Indian Movement, or cold-war Communists. However, the Green Scare has two significant implications for individuals and groups working towards radical social transformations. First, an alignment of state and corporate interests working under the guise of “anti-terrorism” is producing a set of dangerous precedents as it tries to destroy radical elements of the environmental and animal liberation movements. The techniques deployed against these activists can and will be used against other left groups that challenge capital and the state. Second, a broader aim of state and corporate elites is to dissuade and neutralize opposition movements to capitalist profit-making by branding elements of the left as irrational and violent terrorists. If the left accepts this characterization of its most radical elements, it will become paralyzed by internal divisions and will be greatly weakened when capital and the state inevitably target more “moderate” and mainstream left organizations. In this context, the suppression of environmental and animal liberation activists in the United States has immediate implications for activists globally, particularly for those of us living in Canada. The extensive process of anti-terrorism policy harmonization between the US and Canada has integrated surveillance and policing practices. These developments are beginning to play a role in the targeting of activists. The multi-agency effort to criminalize the activist group Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) illustrates that Green Scare politics are influencing police, legal, and security measures across Canada and the US. Although SHAC sometimes presents itself as a reform-centred movement, it is heavily reliant on direct action tactics. SHAC targets corporations and individuals and has active groups in the US and Canada. SHAC and similar groups are at the epicentre of the war against “eco-terrorism.” The suppression of SHAC has serious ramifications for other social movements, inasmuch as demobilization techniques of police and other regulatory agencies rely upon the mapping of radical communities, creating a surveillance web that has the potential to migrate and swarm in response to a variety of perceived threats to the status quo. The suppression of SHAC demonstrates that solidarity across movements is needed to collectively resist Green Scare techniques that could easily be applied to the labour movement and social justice organizations that target corporations as part of their campaign strategies. ...

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— Hybachi Lemar - The Frankensteinian Efforts To Control Us Have Failed

 

at 4/4/26 11:24am

Author: Hybachi LemarTitle: The Frankensteinian Efforts To Control Us Have FailedDate: February 17 2026Source: Retrieved on February 19 2026 from https://www.helpacompacontinuehismission.com/2026/02/16/the-frankensteinian-efforts-to-control-us-have-failed/ It’s no coincidence so many of us on the fringes of society find ourselves as fragments of what we formerly were. The struggle to make ends meet, to keep it together – ICE tearing families apart. The feeling – the knowing – that we don’t fit in, in the system here to exploit and alienate us. From these alienated margins, we see the government operating to manipulate the ways that we move, and to control us with its contradictions. The same system tanker-jacking cargo from Venezuela is the same that labels us criminals for life for holding up a gas station for seventy bucks. That’s like the grease calling the oil slick! The fight to control us doesn’t stop in the streets. When we’re thrown in prison, extreme measures are taken to disarm us from every sense of autonomy. Radical literature, relevant literature – banned. The colorfully drawn letter – photocopied, portions of them amputated. Kiosks and tablets – void of imagery, are screwed in place, mechanizing emotions. Completing groups – like “Cage Your Rage” – is required for making parole. The brain that rebels against confining conditions is locked away in the behavior modification program. With fascist precision, reform regulates all movement in lockstep with ideals that have only led to where we find ourselves now. But the Frankensteinian efforts to control us have failed! Isolating our bodies in fluorescent lit cells 24/7 has proven unable to desensitize us. The programs used to scientifically modify our behavior has been rebelliously breached. Instead of caging the rage, the radical within is autonomously being tapped into; to transform that rage or redirect it to rip apart the false logic that caging people with caging ideas could ever free us from caging conditions. No door closed in the mind is unable to be unlatched. Every attempt to divide us only strengthens mutual aid. The more the idea is repressed, the more zines like Fire Ant are found dangerously crawling in circulation. The dignity the DOC aims to strip from us by digitally scanning our correspondence gives rise to Mothers Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity. In the face of those who try to ideologically disarm us, our outreach has become dangerously extended. Every volt from their tasers appear to only electrify us, disobedient to their orders, uncontrolled by commands. The ripped-off, the broken-down, the torn-apart can be seen repositioning ourselves as parts of each other, with alarming recognition that their Frankensteinian efforts to control us have failed! Your Compa, Hybachi LeMar

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— Simoun Magsalin, IGD Worldwide - The Western Left’s Erasure of Anarchists in the So-called “Third World”

 

at 4/4/26 11:14am

Author: Simoun Magsalin, IGD WorldwideTitle: The Western Left’s Erasure of Anarchists in the So-called “Third World”Date: Jan 26, 2022Source: https://itsgoingdown.org/the-western-lefts-erasure-of-anarchists-in-the-so-called-third-world/ Again and again, white and Western leftists have erased anarchists in Asia by saying anarchism in the so-called “Third World” does not exist. If they deign to acknowledge our existence, they deride us by saying we are small or marginal in the context of large hegemonic left blocs led by various communist parties. We anarchists in imperialized nations know we are a minority. We are not like Marxists who seek to proclaim gospels and anoint converts. We are not here to proclaim anarchism but anarchy, for people to freely act under their own power. Freedom is a constant struggle. On and on, these white and Western leftists talk of the “correctness” of Marxist movements, implying marginalization denotes incorrectness. However, to argue that anarchists do not exist in imperialized countries because our milieus are small or marginal is to think that population size determines correctness. Comments spewed from frothing mouths suggest that, because the Communist Parties of China/Vietnam/N.Korea/Cuba boasts several millions of members combined, therefore they are doing something correct. This is obviously ludicrous; population size has never denoted correctness. If that was so, then capitalism is correct and so is liberal democracy, for the hegemonic forces of liberal democratic capitalism still indoctrinate its tenets to the proletarianized the world over. Elsewhere, these white and Western leftists talk of correctness in the context of “successful” revolutions in Russia or China. But to argue Marxism is correct because of the USSR, PRC, etc. is to fallaciously appeal to past victories. Past victories do not determine the conditions of our struggle today. Nor do we wish to build states and cadre bureaucracies. We struggle for more than that. Besides, to claim that Marxism is “correct” because of the 1917 Russian Revolution seems to suggest that an absence of “victories” implies incorrectness. If this is indeed so, then ironically Marxism was incorrect on the eve of the Russian Revolution, before which Marxism had only failed. That anarchism has not “succeeded” according to the criteria of authoritarians (whatever that is), therefore does not discount the possibility that anarchy can still win the day in the future. We know our victories in the imperialized world are limited. We are anarchists not because of our victories, but because we know what currently exists does not have to exist in the way it does. If you “Marxists” want to be victorious, join the United States Military which dominates the entire world, for they are a victorious power. Anarchy is never easy. In the context of the archipelago so-called as the Philippines, white and Western leftists would uphold the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and their armed wing the New Peoples Army (NPA) as righteous “proletarian” actors against the “petty-bourgeois” anarchists. White and western leftists would claim that the “liberated barrios” and extensive guerrilla infrastructure are ultimate proof of the validity of Marxism. So what if the CPP-NPA “works”? If you are a Marxist because Marxism “works,” you must interrogate what exactly constitutes as “working.” What works is not necessarily what is desirable. Imperialism works and reigns victorious over the world; shall you be an imperialist because it “works”? We anarchists already know the answer: yes, Marxists shall become imperialists because it works. This is proven by the social imperialist policies of the former Soviet Union and the current People’s Republic of China and endlessly defended by many Marxists today. Yet so what if cadres “work” to build guerrilla fronts? We are not in the business of building guerrilla fronts; we are in no business at all! Party work disgusts us; I ain’t nobody’s political officer! When we organize, we must ask whom we intend to empower and who is centered in the struggles. Are we empowering an army or workers? A cadre or the proletariat? A party or a people? These are not equivalent. Yet the devotees of Saint Marx such as those in the CPP-NPA see themselves as “proletarian” by virtue of having taken up arms against the bourgeois State, forgetting that to be proletarianized is a negative consequence of this capitalist world that marks us as proles, not a virtue that can be emulated, because it is not a virtue at all. A social revolution is not determined by past victories nor by a “correct” line but by the generalization of an insurrectionary break with the world that proletarinizes, a break from which there can be no return to the status quo ante. Such a generalized insurrectionary break cannot be directed by any cadre or party, nor even by a party of anarchists. Such a break can only be self-directed by proletarians-in-abolition, those that strike at the world that marks them as proles. By directing militancy towards consolidating guerrilla fronts instead of striking at proletarianization, Marxists such as the CPP-NPA actually suppress revolutionary agency. Yet it is exactly the self-direction of proles striking at their proletarianization that keeps alive the prospects of anarchy in the imperialized world! ...

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— Decolonize Anarchism - An interview with a member of Decolonize Anarchism on the current situation in Iran

 

at 4/4/26 7:18am

Author: Decolonize AnarchismTitle: An interview with a member of Decolonize Anarchism on the current situation in IranSubtitle: An interview by the Instituto de Estudos Libertários (Brazil) with an Iranian member of Decolonize Anarchism on the current situation in IranDate: March, 2026Notes: This interview was conducted and translated into Portuguese by Cassio Brancaleone for the IEL. The interview in Portuguese can be found on the IEL website at: ielibertarios.wordpress.comSource: ielibertarios.wordpress.com This interview was conducted and translated into Portuguese by Cassio Brancaleone for the IEL. The interview in Portuguese can be found on the IEL website at: ielibertarios.wordpress.com Opening remarks by the comrade: I send my warmest greetings to comrades in IEL. At a moment when war, repression, and authoritarianism shape so much of the world, transnational solidarity between movements becomes more important than ever. Our struggles are interconnected, and the fight for freedom in one place is inseparable from the struggles of people elsewhere. We look forward to strengthening these ties of solidarity and continuing the shared work of building a world beyond domination and exploitation. Q1. Contemporary Origins of the Crisis From your perspective, what are the main contemporary roots of the current crisis in Iran? How do economic deterioration, political repression, and the legacy of previous protest cycles (such as those in recent years) converge in the present moment? A1. From my perspective, the current crisis in Iran is the result of a long accumulation of authoritarian state power, neoliberal dispossession, imperial pressure, and the unresolved legacy of successive uprisings. What we are seeing now is a convergence of economic breakdown and political illegitimacy. The latest protest wave did not appear out of nowhere; it was at least the fifth major movement in a decade, and it emerged from years of labor struggle, feminist revolt, and popular experience with the state’s inability to provide even the minimum conditions of social reproduction. Economically, the crisis is a crisis of everyday life. The immediate trigger of the 2025–26 uprising was the collapse of the rial, soaring inflation, and the deepening inability of ordinary people to afford food, medicine, housing, and transport. The rial lost nearly half its value in 2025. That means social ruin for workers, pensioners, teachers, truck drivers, petty traders, and the urban poor. This is not simply “mismanagement,” though mismanagement is real; it is the outcome of a political economy in which sanctions, militarization, corruption, privatization, and oligarchic extraction are all offloaded onto society. That is why economic deterioration so quickly becomes political. In Iran, people do not experience inflation separately from the state. They experience it through the regime’s visible priorities: repression over welfare, security institutions over social provision, regional power projection over dignified life at home. The latest protests began around livelihood demands and bazaar strikes, then rapidly escalated into direct denunciations of clerical rule. Political repression is the other half of the crisis. The Islamic Republic has responded to each cycle of dissent not by resolving underlying grievances but by intensifying coercion including mass arrests, executions, internet blackouts, attacks on students, unionists, womxn, and oppressed nationalities, and the securitization of all independent collective life. During the 2025–26 protests the regime shut down the internet, raided hospitals and massacred tens of thousands of protestors in only two days. And it hasn’t stopped. The regime is continuing arbitrary arrests and executions of the protesters. Repression has therefore deepened the crisis instead of containing it, because it destroys the regime’s already thin claims to legitimacy while teaching new generations that no reform from above is coming. The legacy of previous protest cycles is important here. The 2017–18 protests foregrounded economic anger and spread beyond established middle-class reformist politics. The 2019 Aban uprising showed the explosive force of revolt against austerity and fuel-price policies, as well as the state’s willingness to massacre. The 2022 “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi”, “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising transformed the terrain further by centering women’s liberation, Kurdish and Baloch struggles, youth defiance, and the rejection of the regime’s patriarchal and colonial order. The current moment reflects not only the trauma left by repression, but also the lessons learned through struggle. Many people have developed a deep skepticism toward reformism, gained experience with decentralized organizing, built stronger ties between feminist, labor, student, and oppressed-nationality movements, and increasingly understand that the crisis is rooted in the structure of the system itself. Labor unrest is especially important in linking these cycles together. Even before the latest uprising, Iran had seen repeated strikes and organizing among oil workers, teachers, pensioners, and truck drivers. In 2025, the truckers’ strike spread to well over a hundred cities, and teachers’ unions publicly backed it. These developments matter because they show that the crisis is not only expressed in street protest but also in struggles around circulation, workplaces, and the reproduction of daily life. They point toward forms of collective power that exceed electoral politics and external regime-change fantasies. ...

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— Daniel Colson - Deleuze and the Revival of Libertarian Thought

 

at 4/4/26 7:13am

Author: Daniel ColsonTitle: Deleuze and the Revival of Libertarian ThoughtDate: 1999Notes: Notes taken during the presentation given at the 1999 University of Toulouse Symposium, “L’anarchisme : quel avenir ?” .Source: http://1libertaire.free.fr/ An introduction to what needs to be clarified and explored further. It seems that we now have a somewhat better understanding of the novelty of the libertarian movement’s revival. Anarchism was dead or dying in the very places where it had once enjoyed a certain strength. With May 1968, it found a new lease on life among young people, which had symbolic value and then served as a catalyst for various movements such as the women’s liberation movement, autonomist movements, neo-rural and environmentalist movements, the questioning of family and romantic life, and even the labor movement itself—long mired in the trap of authoritarianism—which is rediscovering the concept of self-management. The hopes that arose more than 30 years ago may seem trivial, but they represent an achievement and a promise, the most important of which may lie in the realm of thought and philosophy—an observation that may seem rather optimistic. Anarchist thought in the strict sense has fallen far short of its own expectations, at least as far as the movement we have known for the past thirty years is concerned. Just as the current revival goes beyond historical anarchism, so too is this thought not reducible to anarchist thought in the strict sense—or rather, to what it has become over time. Deleuze is not an anarchist in the conventional sense of the word or in terms of political affiliation. He refers to it only very rarely, notably through his references to Artaud and in A Thousand Plateaus, where he highlights the radical difference between anarchism and socialism and, more curiously, its connections to Eastern thought. But the point is not to focus on these signs of recognition, but rather on the originality of their thinking and the unique qualities that enable us to develop these theories. Two possible mistakes: reducing this philosopher to a purely external anarchist reference in order to co-opt him; or viewing this philosophy as something new. This temptation can be found in the old anarchist journal Les oeillets rouges, one of the few attempts to recognize his interest in libertarian thought. The ideological, symbolic anarchist—often reduced to a few slogans—is frequently disconnected from the movement’s history. Deleuze’s paradox is that the radical novelty of his thought is rooted in the past; it is a reappropriation of that past. Going beyond the most common representations of anarchism, his thought reconnects with the libertarian movement in a far richer way. Deleuze’s thought allows us to reconnect with the original ideas of the anarchist movement. We must not fixate on the great figures of the past. These references are all too often mythological. The problem for the anarchist is not being too faithful to the past, but rather reducing it to a mere point of reference. There are excuses for this, given the movement’s turbulent history and the difficulty of accessing texts—for example, Bakunin’s truncated writings or Proudhon’s hard-to-find works. With a few exceptions, the anarchist movement specifically stopped reading Proudhon and Bakunin fairly early on, as early as the interwar period. This inability is, as is often the case, ambiguous. The libertarian movement lacked the state and institutional resources needed to transform anarchist texts into canonical and dogmatic ones. It could hardly turn itself into a church, but rather into chapels. It is far from certain that the founding texts lend themselves to a dogmatic treatment; this was possible with Marx, despite Rubel, but less so with a Stirner or a Bakunin and their endless digressions. Proudhon’s work also lends itself to contradictions. The neglect of anarchism’s original inspiration was itself a product of its era, an era ushered in by the massacres of World War I and continued by Stalinism and Nazism. Only a certain way of life and practice could breathe new life into certain texts. To understand the nature of Deleuze’s relationship with anarchism is to rediscover the light of time, what it renders possible. As with Spinoza, Nietzsche, or Bakunin, nature cannot be reduced either to the realm of the living or to the entirety of the physical world. For them, nature is being, the totality of what is, which they oppose to any form of idealism or transcendence. Opposed to any aspiration toward another world that would exist as another world already there, it is a monism and an absolute immanentism: everything is given and everything is possible. Possibilities play out in the way human beings can make use of them. A second aspect of Deleuze’s thought, which lies at the heart of the libertarian project and approach, defines anarchy as unity—a single, unified whole—“a strange unity that can only be described in terms of the multiple.” Anarchy, as a conception of the multiple, has over time lost its problematic meaning and has been transformed into a vague political model: the absence of government. It can regain its original strength through the affirmation of the multiple, of the multiplicity of beings, and of their capacity to compose a world without hierarchy or domination.

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— Daniel Colson - Anarchist Science

 

at 4/4/26 7:09am

Author: Daniel ColsonTitle: Anarchist ScienceSource: 1libertaire.free.fr Introduction Gathered at an international congress in London in July 1881, within the founding framework of what was to become, for the next ten years or so, the anarchist ‘party’, the most representative forces and activists of the movement at that time voted, as their sole political programme for many years to come, on two major motions: one, which was stillborn, calling for the creation of an ‘international information bureau’, the other, of a scientific nature, the essence of which we may quote: “Whereas the A.I.T. has recognised the need to supplement verbal and written propaganda with propaganda by deed. Whereas, furthermore, the time for a general revolution is not far off […]. The Congress expresses the hope that the member organisations […] will kindly take the following proposals into account: […] to spread, through our actions, the revolutionary idea and the spirit of rebellion […]. By moving beyond the legal sphere […] to take our action into the realm of illegality—which is the only path leading to revolution—it is necessary to employ means that are consistent with this aim.[…] As technical and chemical sciences have already served the revolutionary cause and are destined to serve it even more in the future, the Congress recommends that organisations and individuals […] place great emphasis on the study and application of these sciences, as a means of defence and attack.” Propaganda by ‘deed’, the imminence of the ‘Revolution’, the study and applications of “technical and chemical sciences”: it is at the moment when anarchism establishes itself as a “party”, as an indisputably “political” force, alongside “socialism” from which it separates itself, that the most modern “sciences” and “technologies” make their appearance in the libertarian project. An appearance that is neither incidental nor fleeting, since it defines the essence of the anarchist programme and strategy for a long time to come. An appearance which, by articulating (or blending?) “politics” and “science”, the two great pillars of Western modernity, invites us to reflect on the relationship that anarchism maintains with this modernity. It is significant that this appeal to ‘facts’ as an expression of reality, and to ‘science’ and ‘technology’ as ‘means’ for transforming it, should come from a movement which, moreover, regards ‘freedom’ as its raison d’être. Following Bruno Latour, one can indeed consider that modern Western society has been constructed, for the most part, from Erasmus to Sartre in philosophy (via Descartes, Kant, Husserl), and from the debate between Boyle and Hobbes to the proliferation of laboratories, machines and manipulations of all kinds in science and technology, on the idea of a clear separation between human freedom and the determinism of nature. In this dualistic construction of reality, which has dominated the West for three centuries, everything that exists should be divided into two “entirely distinct ontological zones: that of humans on the one hand, and that of non-humans on the other”. On the one hand, the social and political world, “the free society of speaking and thinking subjects”, deliberately defined by humans who enact laws and political constitutions; on the other, the “natural” world of “things”, obviously unconscious of itself, yet mechanical and entirely subject to determinism. Undoubtedly, in this conception, man originates from this ‘natural’ world on which he still depends, both externally and internally. But it is by freeing himself from it that he becomes fully human; by setting himself in radical opposition to the nature that surrounds him, he is supposed to bring into being another world—one that is qualitatively different, non-natural—the world of ‘freedom’ . This struggle of the human against the non-human (within and without us), of freedom against necessity, of spirit against matter, would thus constitute, for modern Western thought, the essential task of humanity, its way of becoming human, by imposing its dominion over nature, through science which enables us to master the laws of its determinism, and through technology which enables us to modify it and adapt it to human freedom. It is this interpretation of anarchism – as an extreme and utopian manifestation of modern ideas – that we wish to discuss here. Early Worker-anarchism and the Anarchist ‘Party’ To grasp the meaning of ‘propaganda by deed’ and the particularly violent emergence of ‘technical and chemical sciences’ in the history of the libertarian movement, one must carefully consider the period during which this theoretical and practical appropriation of science took place: a span of some fifteen years, from the late 1870s to the mid-1890s. A relatively short period, often perceived by the historiography of the anarchist movement as a moment of aberration, a parenthesis quickly closed; whereas, in our view, it constitutes, on the contrary, a key moment in anarchism. To understand its working-class form, from its birth within the First International to its virtual disappearance in Spain in 1939. But also to understand the originality of an unclassifiable political current, to understand the strangeness of the relationship this movement maintained with modern conceptions of politics and science. ...

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— Dale Farm Activist - Interview with an Anarchist at Dale Farm

 

at 4/4/26 7:05am

Author: Dale Farm ActivistTitle: Interview with an Anarchist at Dale FarmDate: 18.10.2011Source: <www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2011/10/487069.html> A self written interview by a group of anarchists currently involved in the Dale Farm struggle. The interview attempts to answer some basic questions about anarchism in order to explain our position and reasoning for being at Dale Farm; attempting also to solidify the Dale Farm struggles place in the broader class war. Q. So you describe yourself as an anarchist, what do you mean by that? We believe in a society based on mutual aid, social responsibility and basic human solidarity. We feel that people should be free to live as they wish (where that doesn’t infringe on other people’s freedoms) and there should not be systems of control that restrict or dictate how we live our lives. The democracy we have is a farce, we would like to build a free and equal society where people give to their abilities and receive to their needs. Anarchists see a distinction between the rich ruling class and the ordinary working class, and seek to build a society based on working class solidarity without the inequality between race, sex or creed that this distinction creates. Q. Are all supporters at Dale Farm anarchists? A lot of people here would not call themselves an anarchist, however what brings us together is a shared belief that travellers are at the receiving end of oppression, discrimination, violence, and racism and that this is manifested in the ethnic cleansing at Dale Farm. We recognise the principle of autonomy, and this means we are willing to work with people who come from different ideological perspectives as long as we are centred around a common aim. There is a shared strength between us. Q. How does being in Dale Farm fit in with anarchist ideas? Anarchism is about fighting the struggles of the oppressed against the oppressors (in this case the struggle of travellers against the state); Dale Farm is a flash point in the class struggle and the battle against state racism. Whilst the religious and political beliefs of the community here are not necessarily in keeping with all anarchist thought, residents have been incredibly receptive to our politics and interested in our ideas. Q. How is the eviction ethnic cleansing? Ethnic cleansing is the act of eradicating a particular ethnic group from a nation or area. The case of Dale Farm, which will make it impossible for a certain ethnic community to live in a specific area is a localised example; whilst the broader discrimination and criminalisation of travellers (via the eradication of the right to park up on the roadside) is indicative of the national picture. There is a discrimination against travellers in government policy, travellers have settled because the right to travel freely was taken away; now they attack settled travellers in their homes. 90% of traveller planning applications are refused compared to only 20% of the settled community. This criminalises travellers and destroys their cultural norms and we see this situation as a continuation of a broader attack against travelling communities. The process that has been going on for the last 10 years at Dale Farm is a key part of this cleansing - the diggers will demolish homes, but the government is demolishing culture through a process of forced assimilation to societal norms. Q. There has been a lot in the media about anarchists ‘hijacking’ or ‘taking over’ the Dale Farm protest, what is your response to these claims? To begin with, we don’t see this as a protest because protest is merely stating our disagreement with something; we see it as a resistance because we intend to put a stop to the eviction of Dale Farm and stand up to state violence against travellers everywhere. We are here in solidarity. Everything we’ve done here we’ve been asked to do, we’ve been invited by residents to support them in their resistance of the eviction and they continue to direct our actions and decisions, and call on more support. We came here to show solidarity through a shared struggle. Many of us now also consider the residents here as personal friends, we feel welcome among the travellers and are happy that they are letting us be a part of this autonomous community. Q. The media has painted a picture that some activists have taken leadership roles? Is this true, and if not, how do you make decisions? Decisions are made collectively on an equal basis. We take responsibility for ourselves and are decentralised and autonomous, however all our actions are accountable to the collective community through the process of consensus decision making. People are given an equal opportunity to raise their thoughts and we have open meetings to involve everyone in decision making. However this space is not isolated from the problems of wider society and issues such as patriarchy, class privilege, and dominance do come up . We struggle against these inequalities and hierarchies in our actions, but aim to recognise and deconstruct them where they occur. There is a dialectal process constantly going on, and we try to resolve issues by allowing conflicts of interest to play out. We deliberately don’t create positions which could result in hierarchy, but organise jobs openly and encourage participation in an attempt to combat invisible hierarchies. ...

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— Anonymous - No Escape from Patriarchy

 

at 4/4/26 6:48am

Author: AnonymousTitle: No Escape from PatriarchySubtitle: Male Dominance on SiteDate: 1998Source: Do Or Die #7; Voices from Earth First! Living on a protest camp is a unique experience, it is completely divorced from the reality of British society—preconceived ideas and perceptions are altered drastically. Perhaps it is because of the continuous pressure—the reason you are there is to try and save land from being annihilated by companies, government departments and people who have no respect for the world in which we live, who are prepared to decimate land in favour of profit. Due to this, living on a protest camp is not an easy life, it involves a great deal of work and strength of character. A bonding grows between people that I personally have never experienced elsewhere. I can liken it to that of family relationships— what you go through with each other in such a short period of time is enriching, you are continuously evolving, learning new things about life that no education system could teach you in a hundred years. The overall concept of a camp is one of a free society; you can speak to any ‘road protester’ and they will tell of ideals that focus on anarchy, equality, freedom, free love and basically anything else you want to chuck in as long as it shows respect for freedom in the individual. Yet despite this, as a woman living on site and speaking to other females involved in various campaigns— everyone agreed that it was without a doubt, a patriarchy dominated environment. I am trying not to rant and moan, but it has got to be said that protest camps can be one of the most chauvinistic, domineering and belittling experiences for a woman to be in. Maybe it’s the extremely unbalanced ratio of men to women on site that makes the leering, fire lit eyes of the cider induced hippie a very bothersome experience. For starters, there seems to be this assumption that women can’t climb, can’t put up walk ways and that their treehouses need the stem eye of the more experienced male cast upon them before anyone would dream of having a smoke in them. In the kitchen bender, protest camps seem to be regressing back to an almost medieval level whereby women quietly get things done on a regular basis, and males seem incompetent of even lifting a sponge. There are numerous occasions in which a female will without fuss do the washing up as a matter of course in getting the camp to run smoothly, or get the slop pot bubbling, and not even whisper that she is pissed off with doing it for the tenth night on a run. Yet if one male does it one night you can guarantee the ritualistic argument that will follow during the course of the evening where each testosterone filled being will slam their cards down on the table, and tell every member of the camp and any lurking SAS in more than graphic detail exactly what they had done that day. how they did it, and what techniques they used to tie that particularly complex walkway knot. In most situations it is the description of the knot that gets everyone going, because someone else always knows better and that someone else that knows better, you can bet your harness on it. will invariably be male. A friend of mine said something which summed the situation up very nicely: “The ways some blokes carry on, you’d think it was a fucking achievement managing to have a shit in the shit pit”—and that was said by a man! I recall once sitting up an ash tree that I had lived in for the last two months when a reasonably experienced male climber visited the site and was pottering about in the walkways, passing by my tree. He took one look at my abline and quickened his pace. “Oh dear” he said, “how long have you been abseiling on that”—-just that brief sentence was enough to make my eyes roll into the back of my head, and take a deep breath before proceeding with my somewhat short answer. Before I knew it he was involved with untangling the line of the various branches, tutting to himself about the unsafety of my present line, and about how everyone did it this way these days. Fair enough, at this stage I was grateful for his advice. That would not have been so bad if not an hour later some other “dashing knight in shining harness” was to come ambling past only to re-tie the abline using the previous knot. I threw my hands up in disbelief and left them to it, but admittedly felt somewhat stupid because I had not listened to myself. I should have been able to say that the line was fine as it was. that I had done it myself and I knew it was okay— but my confidence was challenged by these men. and I believed at first that they genuinely knew better. What males do not realise is that there could actually be two ways, maybe even three, of tying that knot, and each method will still be as effective as the last, still as safe, and there is no need for the temperament of those sitting around the firepit to rise to such vocal levels. Why is it that it only seems to be the women that realise this basic fundamental fact and will calmly find the way that suits them the best, and if questioned about it will end up being confused and amused by this ranting male, hell bent on proving his masculinity to you by persuading you that you want to do the knot his way? But I tell you, you don’t, you’re seething underneath, you’re pissed off with this continuous rant and this fervent belief upheld by males on site that women really don’t know how to do anything. ...

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— Anarchist Front of Iran and Afghanistan - The Political Future of Iran

 

at 4/4/26 6:47am

Author: Anarchist Front of Iran and AfghanistanTitle: The Political Future of IranSubtitle: An Analysis from an Iranian Anarcho-Syndicalist PerspectiveDate: March 23 2026Source: Retrieved on March 24 2026 from https://www.instagram.com/anarchist_front/p/DWRjQuzgE3Z/ Recent geopolitical developments in the Middle East, particularly the escalation of military tensions involving the United States, Israel, and the ruling Islamic Republic of Iran, raise significant questions regarding Iran’s political future and regional stability. This research article analyzes potential political trajectories in Iran under wartime conditions through the theoretical lens of anarcho-syndicalism. It explores several scenarios, including the consolidation of power within military-security institutions, the persistence of the current political structure, and the emergence of internal crises. The study also considers the likelihood of civil conflict, elite fragmentation, and the broader implications for regional power dynamics. The escalation of military conflict involving Iran and external actors represents one of the most significant geopolitical crises in the contemporary Middle East. Large-scale military operations targeting strategic infrastructure raise questions regarding the stability of political institutions and the potential transformation of the regional order. However, analyzing Iran’s political future solely through the framework of interstate competition provides only a partial understanding. Critical perspectives, particularly anarcho-syndicalism, emphasize the role of state structures, social organization, and class dynamics in shaping political outcomes. The beginning of the second joint war of the U.S. military-security forces (“Epic Rage”) and Israel (“Roaring Lion”), and the intense, destructive, and deadly bombings that have continued from February 28, 2026 until today, have still not been able to force the Islamic government ruling Iran to surrender. Perhaps they did not expect that so soon and so easily they would be able to force the regime to relinquish power without deploying several thousand infantry troops on the battlefield, even after eliminating Ali Khamenei and many other key decision-makers within the government. What can be observed from street scenes in Iranian cities is a kind of hidden martial law established by the “Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps” and its auxiliary arm, the “Basij paramilitia,” in order to try to prevent the possible emergence of any street protests or uprisings. Therefore, under the current circumstances: Can scenarios such as the occurrence of a kind of classic coup with the cooperation of the army and a segment of opportunistic politicians inside and outside the country be imagined? Is the possibility of a widespread civil war likely in the short-term horizon ahead? Is the possibility of a popular armed uprising to overthrow the entirety of the “Islamic Republic system” feasible? The probability of three real but complex scenarios dependent on the current wartime conditions A) Concentration of power in the hands of military forces In many countries during external wars, military forces take greater political control. In Iran as well, the “Revolutionary Guards” possess military power, an extensive economic and security structure, and a political network within the government. As a result, the government may in practice — and without officially declaring a coup — be run in the form of a military-security state, something similar to a “soft coup within the system.” B) Formal coup This scenario would be more likely if the leadership structure faces a vacuum, or if a severe split emerges among power institutions. In that case, part of the Revolutionary Guards and the army might seize power to “preserve the system” (which, according to Ayatollah Khomeini’s emphatic statement, is “the most necessary of obligations”) or to “save the country.” However, the reality is that in Iran the Revolutionary Guards themselves are the main pillar of the system. Therefore, a real coup against the government is less likely. C) Preservation of the status quo 2 – Is civil war likely? Although this is one of the greatest concerns, several necessary conditions are required for a civil war to occur. First condition) Collapse of the central government As long as the Revolutionary Guards, Basij paramilitia, and security forces can maintain control of the country, civil war will be unlikely. Second condition) Widespread arming of social forces seeking overthrow Since at present the working class and other laboring groups in Iran are not widely armed, the probability of a civil war similar to Syria or Libya is lower. Third condition) Emergence of rival armed forces In some regions such as Kurdistan, Baluchistan, or other border areas, armed groups exist. If the central government weakens, nationwide (local-regional) conflicts and a form of popular armed uprising — not necessarily a classic civil war — could emerge. The most realistic scenarios for the future of Iran and the Middle East Considering the evaluation of the data accessible up to today, we may face these possible paths: A) A short war and a return to negotiations According to what has been openly declared so far, the main objective of the U.S.-Israel alliance is the complete destruction of the nuclear program and missile infrastructure, not necessarily the overthrow of the ruling Islamic government nor the establishment of democracy in Iran. If this position does not change, the war may continue for several weeks or months, and then a ceasefire or new negotiations may emerge. This type of scenario has been very common in the history of the Middle East. ...

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