Crooked Bough News Round-up

— Sofia Valencia - The Enemy Doesn’t Know How Many We Are

 

at 12/10/25 9:35pm

Author: Sofia ValenciaTitle: The Enemy Doesn’t Know How Many We AreSubtitle: A Proposal for Building An InsurgencyDate: 2025Source: mtlcounterinfo.org/the-enemy-doesnt-know-how-many-we-are-a-proposal-for-building-an-insurgency ** Contents: *** Dedication *** Revolutionary pledge *** Introduction *** The US state is currently at war with its own population, those in the global south and leftist factions *** The fight will be won *** Rebellions *** An insurgency is needed to succeed *** What does it take to build an insurgency? **** 1) Political and social organizations **** 2) Fighting forces **** 3) Political education **** 4) Revolutionary culture **** 5) Material considerations **** 6) Strategic timing *** Who would support an insurgency *** Why an insurgency would succeed in the US *** How to start building an insurgency *** Until we meet *** Further reading Dedication Embarking on this historical mission, it is imperative to pay respects to those who have come before us, fought the most difficult battles and paved the path of struggle with their fortitude. Without them the proposals put forward in this text would not exist, nor the potential of liberation. Specifically we acknowledge Russell Maroon Shoatz, Safiya Bukhari, Carlos Marighella, Lucy Parsons, Kuwasi Balagoon, Lorenzo Orsetti, Yahya Sinwar, Sekou Odinga, Dedan Kimathi, and the many others unnamed for the sake of space, and all those whose names we will never know because they were so brave. Revolutionary pledge “Positions are seldom lost because they have been destroyed, but almost invariably because the leader has decided in his own mind that the position cannot be held.”[1] This observation opens up a world of possibility based on the sheer will not to be deterred. Unlike the paid mercenaries of a state army, liberation forces are gifted with a deep motivation for the struggle. As a guerrilla commander in the Kurdish HPG once noted, there can be a successful action with just one fighter if they have the will and determination to succeed.[2] Fighting a battle is first and foremost a mental feat, and the trials people in the movement face against the armed henchmen of the United States have hardened the resolve of brave political actors. The possibilities that spring steadfastness underpins the following text. This text lays out a strategy for fighting an asymmetrical war against a much better armed and more technologically advanced enemy. The war of the small against the mighty will be won by fortitude and determination. HPG teacher instructs students in the art of guerrilla war Introduction For many decades the movement for liberation in the United States has been on the back foot. Overwhelmed by the struggle to survive, many find themselves and their groups reacting to the brutality of the state through programs like Cop Watch, ICE Watch, and demonstrations or encampments. These initiatives are important, even essential, but always in response to the violent overtures of institutionalized racism. They can mitigate a rough situation, help people in a one-off crisis or show solidarity, but no recent attempt has presented a way to win the war against humanity waged by the US government. There are many examples of oppressed people throughout history overcoming their oppressors or colonizers, but not many with a long standing anarcho-communist result. On the other hand, there are a lot of far left groups that currently exist that mean well and have excellent analyses but could benefit from strategic direction in order to become revolutionaries. The question for all those on the side of humanity: how to win the war that has been launched against communities of color? How to effectively overthrow the state? How to organize towards a liberated society? Taking example from diverse insurgent forces, this text will look at how to adapt effective organizational models to support an anarcho-communist revolution. Armed with this knowledge and committed to see a revolution through, a nascent movement would have the capacity to build a force that can overturn the state and capitalism while constructing liberatory communities of the future. The US state is currently at war with its own population, those in the global south and leftist factions The US was built on human misery, from the slave trade to the genocide of indigenous people. This foundation has seeped through its ideology. With its mentality of domination, the US wants to obliterate its adversaries rather than see people live with dignity or according to revolutionary principles. The COINTELPRO attacks against the Black Panthers and the bombing of the MOVE headquarters line up squarely with its support of the far right in Central and South America. The weight of this reality can be read on the faces of people and felt in day to day interactions: people have to accept the brutality of the United States to live here. The state makes its war against people of color clear through the development of Cop Cities, the blatantly racist judicial system, routine torture in state and federal prisons, its brutal reaction to uprisings and the military tactics and equipment they bring into city police departments.[3] The United States views not only people of color as enemy combatants but those on the left who fight for marginalized people. The legacy of the Red Scare and the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti is alive and well, and visible in the inability of the left to counter ICE raids and police executions. The question isn’t if the movement should start a war with the state. The war is already here. Instead the question is if people of conscience who live under this regime decide to fight back. ...

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— Ian Alexander Moore - Heidegger, the First True Anarchist?

 

at 12/10/25 9:11pm

Author: Ian Alexander MooreTitle: Heidegger, the First True Anarchist?Date: July 2023Notes: Presented at Heidegger Circle Seasonal Gathering, July 2023.Source: Retrieved on 2025-10-04 from <beyng.com/docs/MooreAnarchist.html> The question posed in the title of this presentation will—to state it right way—ultimately be answered in the affirmative. But first it will be necessary to ask several subsidiary questions. (1) Who is Heidegger, or better, what is meant by the name “Heidegger”? (2) What is anarchy such that it is possible to distinguish between true and false forms and attribute true anarchy to a signature that, for twelve years, could be found on the membership lists of the Nazi Party? And (3) given that the term “anarchy” and its cognates have been used pejoratively for over twenty-five-hundred years and positively—if rarely—for at least two-hundred, how can Heidegger or “Heidegger” (in scare quotes), of all people and things, be considered its first true representative? Reiner Schürmann, the postwar, one-time Dominican who mostly refused to write in his native German, preferring, as though in deliberate defiance of Heidegger, French instead, answers these questions in his celebrated 1982 monograph Le Principe d’anarchie: Heidegger et la question de l’agir. (The French literally translates as: The Principle of Anarchy: Heidegger and the Question of Acting, although Schürmann changed—or at least agreed to change—the title to Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy for the substantially revised 1987 English version). Answers to these three questions—namely, what is meant by “Heidegger”? what is true anarchy? and why is “Heidegger” the first true anarchist—can also be found in Schürmann’s posthumous magnum opus Broken Hegemonies; however, the answers Schürmann provides there are more oblique and differ in important ways from those he gives in his earlier interpretation of Heidegger and in related texts. After examining Schürmann’s position in Heidegger on Being and Acting, I will briefly indicate in what sense, from the perspective of Broken Hegemonies, Heidegger might still be called the first true anarchist. §1. “Heidegger” as Discursive Regularity From the outset, Schürmann is clear that he will be “moving in a direction the man Martin Heidegger would not have wished to be led” (PA: 11/HBA: 3; see also 419/293). This is nevertheless a move that, however violent, Heidegger’s own corpus invites. Anarchy would, as it were, be Heidegger’s one Ungedachtes, that which he could not, as such, ponder or see even though it had been guiding and weighing on him all along, like a single star. Or, if you prefer the language of post-structuralism, we are dealing not with the man Martin Heidegger but with “the body of writings which circulate, operate, put people to flight, or make them think—that is, which function—under the name of ‘Heidegger’” (PA: 11/HBA: 2). And if this body of writings should also prove to embody our site, if, in short, it should also function as a Foucauldian “discursive regularity” (PA: 11/HBA: 3), then to read “Heidegger”—now emphatically in scare quotes—or to read what is in Heidegger would be to read our present. Our age, too, would be moving toward anarchy ... Indeed it is, you might think, what with the unjustified use or abuse of power around the globe, the suppression of freedom and self-representation, and the rise of autocratic nationalism. It’s no wonder that Heidegger is a beloved reference for the far right, from Bannon to Dugin ... This is not, however, the sense of anarchy that Schürmann has in mind. In fact, he shows how this so-called anarchy (we might instead call it the “anarchy of power” or “anomy”) relies on the posit of an absolute archē or foundation—manifest, say, in the will of those twenty-first-century versions of the “Führer himself” who “alone is the […] present and future German reality and its law,” to recall Heidegger’s notorious words from 1933 (GA 16: 184; cf. DHB: /BH:). What then, does Schürmann mean by anarchy, and why is “Heidegger” its figurehead, especially when the words “anarchy” and “anarchism” appear very infrequently—and never positively—in Heidegger’s corpus; when it does not mean the anarchy of power or anomy; when the name “Heidegger” is missing from the indices of major historiographies of anarchism; and, to say it again, when the man Martin Heidegger, whatever his intentions, did not hesitate to submit himself and the institution he led to the total control of Hitler? §2. True Anarchy Heidegger once defined metaphysics as “that space in which it becomes our destiny [der Geschicksraum] that the suprasensory World, the Ideas, God, the moral Law, the authority of Reason, Progress, the Happiness of the greatest number, Culture, Civilization lose their constructive force and become nothing” (GA 5: 221; cited in OP: 68–69). Departing from Heidegger, that is, both taking “Heidegger” as his point of departure but also parting ways with the decisions of the man and with questions about his intentions, Schürmann traces this devolution of metaphysical principles and draws its consequences for action. However different from one another, each epoch, according to Schürmann, has been governed by one overarching principle dictating not just what it means to be but also—and here Schürmann develops the normative implications of Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics—what is permitted to be said and done within that epoch. This principle or archē thus not only inaugurates; it commands. What does it command? That everything be referred to it as the sole foundation, as the one fundamentum inconcussum that will “console the soul and consolidate the city” (DHB/BH: passim) if only we would heed it. ...

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— Members of the Black Rose/Rosa Negra Housing and Territorial Committee - How To Organize a Neighborhood Popular Assembly

 

at 12/10/25 9:05pm

Author: Members of the Black Rose/Rosa Negra Housing and Territorial CommitteeTitle: How To Organize a Neighborhood Popular AssemblyDate: June 2 2025Source: Retrieved on November 16 2025 from <blackrosefed.org/how-to-organize-a-neighborhood-popular-assembly> This is a basic guide on how and why to build structures for decision making and collective action at the neighborhood level, what we call popular assemblies. We emphasize the need for popular assemblies to be rooted in a defined geographic area and aimed at organizing the people who live, work, or stay there to develop the power to confront social problems together. This guide draws directly on knowledge and experience of past experiments in building apopular assemblies. Introduction Scroll social media or a 24-hour news service, and what do you see? Assaults on too-meager social safety nets. Rollbacks of civil rights. Crumbling infrastructure. Immigration police grabbing people off the street. Politicians casually promising to eradicate entire peoples. It’s a bleak moment in history, and there seem to be few avenues to escape it. How did we get here? Elite politicians and businesspeople built their power over us, in part, by battering us with beliefs about our powerlessness. Isolation from each other internalizes those beliefs inside us. We encounter what feels like an unending crisis—alone. We can catch each other, though—but only with the requisite nets of mass organizations. Mass organizations can bring us together to identify, address, confront, and one day replace the ruling classes’ power over us in our backyards. Stunned by Trump’s first election in 2017, communities across the United States turned to each other to figure out how to survive—and resist—the incoming administration. Long-time organizers and newly activated residents gathered in neighborhood and sometimes citywide meetings to share their fears about the promised federal attacks and what they were going to do about them—together.[1] These meetings became the foundations of popular assemblies. As one organizer with the central Los Angeles-based Koreatown Popular Assembly put it, a popular assembly is “an open decision-making space in a neighborhood where people can come together [to] talk about their problems and how they are going to solve the problems together as a group, not just by lobbying the government.” Despite widespread interest in popular assemblies as a strategy for resistance and revolutionary struggle, few materials answer why these mechanism can get us there and how to organize a group of people to assemble one. Drawn from conversations with organizers and related literature about these participatory experiments, this introductory article outlines some step-by-step instructions and general considerations to start building neighborhood democracy from the ground up. Fundamental Building Blocks A popular assembly strategy for social change is built on a few fundamental assumptions. Building Block 1: Structures of domination, like capitalism and the state, exist at numerous levels, but ultimately exercise their power locally. National administrations, transnational firms, and international governmental bodies shape on-the-ground social reality in outsized ways. With signatures and declarations, their decisions reverberate devastating consequences in far-off places. Ultimately, though, on-the-ground agencies, firms, and individuals must execute those decisions in specific locations like office space, governmental buildings, and hotel conference rooms. For example, the Department of Homeland Security Secretary can set a policy from Washington, D.C. to increase migrant deportations across the country. Ultimately, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field offices deploy agents to snatch people from their communities. These operations continue in part because we do not see them unfold from our backyards. It’s imperative, then, as one news service once put it, we know the facts and name the names. If we understand those facts and names, their patterns and addresses, we can disrupt them. Building Block 2: Confronting these structures and their consequences requires organizing people, motivating them to build and wield collective power they otherwise wouldn’t have as individuals What do we mean by “organizing people?” Here’s an answer taken from “Survival of the Organized: Critical Reflections on Organizing and Mutual Aid“: “Organizing [means] working with ordinary people to shape ourselves into a fighting force that is capable of standing up to and eventually dismantling capitalism, the state, and other structures of domination. … [It] is a question of power: building the power of our coworkers, neighbors, classmates, and other “actors of struggle” (i.e. people who share common problems and social locations) to dismantle the ruling class’s dominating, atomizing power over us. To do so, we build people’s confidence to make demands and directly act against bosses, politicians, landlords, administrators, and other class enemies in order to win specific goals and shift relations of power in our workplaces, neighborhoods, schools, and other arenas of social life. We encourage everyday people to run these struggles with formal, directly-democratic bodies—what we call mass organizations—that we can one day use to run all of society.”[2] ...

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— Nicolas Richen - Dark Tourism and Commodification of Exarcheia and Central Athens: “Awful Can Be Awesome”

 

at 12/10/25 8:58pm

Author: Nicolas RichenTitle: Dark Tourism and Commodification of Exarcheia and Central Athens: “Awful Can Be Awesome”Subtitle: For Planet Wonk and Isaac Caballero Suey, Everything Can Be Bought and Sold, Even Our Radical Struggles and the Social Distress “Experience”Date: December 2024Notes: Editor : George VSource: “URBAN SAFARI” — Touristification, Commodification & Repression Isaac Caballero Suey / Planetwonk Experiences For 23 to 49 euros per person, several platforms offer you the opportunity to visit “unexpected”, “alternative”, “rebellious” and “awful” Athens with “locals”! These are urban tours where obscenity has no limit As people who are struggling, living and working in Exarcheia and, more generally, in the center of Athens, we see the urban capitalism siege every day. It is transforming the very nature of our relationships, and nibbling away at our spaces of life, solidarity and freedom. The expression of this violence takes several shapes: from the eviction of populations described as “undesirable” – with all the racism and class violence this implies – and of squatters and social spaces in urban areas intented for “attractive” policies, to tourists, property developers, investors and, ultimately, to the profits of the ruling class. This process leads to the criminalization of our struggles, as well as trials and imprisonment for people of the movement and people on the move (of course for exiled and racialized people, not tourists and digital nomads!), an urban space increasingly under police surveillance, private “security” companies and cameras, and so on. Urban capitalism represents a market based on the unbridled exploitation of a working class, an often immigrant and invisibilized workforce to build luxury buildings, clean the countless Airbnb and hotels, cook or wash dishes behind the scenes in restaurants, or deliver coffees and meals to homes. In Exarcheia, this violence also takes the shape of “alternative” tourism, which has been developing there for several years. The Municipality of Athens and the European Union are working to develop this industry by playing the fake democratic card of “local participation”, notably through the “Curing the Limbo” pilot program (2018–2021). As part of this, saBarBar project and Troubadours Digital (the latter funded by the Ministry of Culture and Sports) have, for example, offered “alternative” tourists “a special tour of the Exarcheia neighborhood: students and theater enthusiasts, musicians, songwriters, people with expressive concerns of different nationalities and cultures, disperse to Exarcheia’s corners, squares and streets to present their own version of the neighborhood. Based on residents’ testimonies and oral history material, they create songs and short performances, composing a creative map of the neighborhood”. At the time, comrades from the neighborhood prevented some of these activities from taking place. Are Squats and Spaces of Struggle “Social Enterprises”? This is Athens, a partnership platform between the Municipality of Athens (through its Tourism and Development Company) and private institutions such as the Greek Tourism Confederation and Aegean company, is also branding Exarcheia by promoting guided tours by “locals” to discover “alternative Athens”. With a promise: “Explore local life and get off the beaten track to discover the authentic side of Greece thanks to our tours”. Quite a program! Exarcheia is described as a “rebellious” neighborhood of “street artists”, a “lively and dynamic hub of radicals and free thinkers”. Navarinou Park (squatted and created by an assembly of residents!) is promoted by This is Athens. Without naming them, the anarchist squat K*Vox and its self-organized clinic ADYE are even mentioned to attract tourists! Squats and spaces of struggle thus become “social enterprises”,[1] a label that has much more to do with management, state policies, NGOs, philanthropy and charity. This tragic capture of our radical struggles by commodity society is not only cynical, but also violent, given the extent to which those who fight for these spaces of freedom are suppressed by the authorities and capitalist interests. In 2022, the Municipality sought to dust off Athens’ image with a communication campaign intended to “rebrand Athens after years of crisis” and to keep tourists in the capital longer, before they consume the Greek islands. This is Athens teamed up with Google and the Greek Ministry of Tourism to create the “The City is the Museum” app. The catchphrase: “Welcome to Athens, a place full of collections representing everyday. The app enables “Athenians to share their favorite places and the stories that make Athens an exciting and modern city”. It features an audio walk called “Athens is changing”, to “understand Athens’ cultural landscape, from underground skate stores to street art culture to the ever-changing Omonia Square”. Here we see how “culture”, “modernity”, “change” and “development” are used to both attract a tourist population and exclude those considered as “undesirable” (refugee people, people surviving in te street, drug addicts, radical militants). While luxury hotels and residences are proliferating in Omonia and the so-called “commercial triangle”, the police hunt of the classes galériennes [French slang word for a person’s social class in precariousness, economic poverty, who carries a social stigma but has a muddling through system] goes on in the streets of central Athens, as do the murders of racialized people, sex workers and LGBTQIA+ people. ...

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— Bikini - Badger Action Warning

 

at 12/10/25 8:49pm

Author: BikiniTitle: Badger Action WarningDate: Winter 1991Source: Wild Rockies Review, Winter Issue, Vol. 4, No. 1. <www.environmentandsociety.org/sites/default/files/key_docs/wild_rockies-ef_vol4-no1.pdf> The Badger-Two Medicine. Anyone in the Wild Rockies probably has heard of it and some of its issues. It is 115,000 roadless acres of Forest Service controlled critical habitat and biological corridor between Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness complex. It is also part of the overthrust belt, an area where ancient rock overlays more recent geologic formations. This ancient rock holds some small promise of satiating our culture’s overbearing slave-master, oil and gas addiction, and is now critically threatened. Besides critical wolf, Grizzly, and ungulate habitat, the Badger is significant to other original habitants of this wild country, the Blackfeet Indian Nation. The Blackfeet hold treaty rights to the area which at one time was part of the reservation. One of these rights is access for religious practices. The Badger is a sacred place for traditional Native American religion; a place of vision quests, and a reconnection to a badly ravaged culture. To the blind eyes of the DC bigwigs calling for unbridled resource extraction, the Badger is a foreign nation inhabited by wolves, grizzly, and other remnant native cultures. Except this one is within US borders, and “easy pickin’s.” Now that the US of A’s policy towards foreign nations recalcitrant to yield oil and gas resources has been clarified recently, it should come as no shock that the Badger is slated for full field oil and gas exploration as early as July 15,1991. The Freddies are firmly committed to gutting the Badger with exploratory drilling and 20-plus miles of new road. Propped up by the new energy crisis of the Persian Gulf war they view themselves as having a clear mandate to ravage the Badger for the slim possibility of a two week supply of natural gas. This despite overwhelming public opposition to the proposal, and non-mitigatable habitat damage. I feel words failing me. I cannot seem to express my (along with many others) determination that this special, sacred area must not be violated. And that it will only come to pass over my dead or incarcerated body. Many feel the same. This is not the return of Redwood Summer, nor another day of something or another. There are no scenarios to create, no heightened awareness or sentiment to create, for the most part it already exists. This will be committed and hardcore defense. We will be there. The only question is, will you? The expected appeals and litigation may delay the need for field defense (they might even win), but they could be ready to roll up the Badger by July 15, 1991. If you’re interested, contact WREF! and we’ll send you all the info and details you can stomach. There is no other place more important to defend. —Bikini ...more on the Badger Chief Floyd Heavy Runner of the Brave Dogs Society, a warrior society of the Blackfeet Nation, blasted federal officials for destroying Blackfeet cultural traditions in proposed plans to lease oil and gas exploration in the Badger-Two Medicine area adjoining the Blackfect Reservation. Heavy Runner accused Forest Service officials of deliberately destroying sacred sites and Blackfeet cultural rituals to promote development in the mountains along the Rocky Mountain Front that join Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness. In a letter to Lewis & Clark National Forest Supervisor Dale Gorman, Heavy Runner said” the United States has determined that the original Blackfeet culture can be sacrificed to oil and gas interests. Our use of the Badger for religious purposes exceeds 300 years.” Citing the oral traditions of his tribe and a photograph of White Calf’s band performing a Sun Dance in the area prior to World War I, Heavy Runner said “I find it unfortunate that officials of the United States can lie to the Congress and lie to the public...the Forest Service has resisted all of our efforts to force a genuine cultural impact statement over the course of the past year...” Heavy Runner accused Gorman of making false statements. “Despite the fact that we provided irrefutable evidence to Mr. Gorman personally, that the area has historic use, Mr. Gorman has denied to the press that there is evidence of historic use.” The issue is a vital one, affecting how Forest Service policy must implement the laws regarding the National Register of Historic Places. Heavy Runner said, “According to the Forest Service, they have only towards the end of 1990 discovered the existence of the National Register “106” process providing for protection to areas such as the Badger.” Quoting internal documents to the contrary, he also produced letters indicating the Forest Service’s awareness of the implication of the law as early as September 1989. “Hence, our own report and correspondences are not published in the Final Environmental Impact Statement..” The Forest Service had recently announced delaying the final draft of the EIS pending examining its compliance to the National Register of Historic Places. The final EIS is now available, however, from: Dale Gorman, Forest Supervisor, Lewis & Clark National Forest, Box 869, Great Falls, MT 59403. ...

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— Zap - Beer and Loafing on the Jack Road

 

at 12/10/25 8:48pm

Author: ZapTitle: Beer and Loafing on the Jack RoadDate: September-October 1996Source: Earth First! Mabon, September-October 1996, Pages 8–9. <www.environmentandsociety.org/sites/default/files/key_docs/ef_16_8_2.pdf> A logging truck driver and a security guard stand close together in the predawn cold. They have steaming plastic mugs of coffee. We don’t. They have smirks on their faces as they offer us some. We do too. “Sure would be good to have a warm cup of coffee.” “No, actually caffeine’s bad for you.” “Well, how ‘bout some hot cocoa?” “The sugar is really bad for you. Y’all should cut back on that stuff.” “Well, shit, how ‘bout Tang?” “Only astronauts drink Tang.” Another bonding experience has begun with locals and environmental protesters. We are freezing our asses off, literally. Eagle can’t feel his fingers due to the awkward angle of the lock boxes. The view of the light spilling into the valley is absolutely breathtaking through the clearcut. I am locked down to the gate, barricading the road, with two logging trucks boxing me in. The headlights burn my retinas. The fumes and engine noise choke my brain as I reflect on the last few days that have made this hallmark moment possible. Only moments before, I had seen the core secondary support people and the affinity-arrestable group break down to the shouted whisper talk of “fuck you.” “No, fuck YOU.” “Fuckin’ shut the fuck up.” “Hey, can we focus here?” Just a case of pre-action jitters? No, it was another one of the many times the action almost didn’t happen. What can be done to ensure a better run next time? Before I break out the crits, I want to make it clear the action was successful and we met all our goals. What doesn’t get said a lot, in a movement which wants to portray a united front, is that there are a few serious flaws in some of the ways we relate and organize. Let’s set the stage for the usual open campaign. Volunteers come from a mixed background of class, skills and experience. The amount of time to be donated, or roles to be played, differs tremendously. In each campaign, the influx and outflow of folks creates a constant state of discovery, new ideas, approaches; fresh blood pumping the revolutionary manifestation, full of life. Some groups know each other; lots are strangers. It can click into a dynamic team, or a scary version of your typical neurotic, codependent mess of a dysfunctional suburban family. In our case, it was a volatile combo of both. Process, respect and timing were the root systems that started to disintegrate. It was Wild Rockies Week, and people wanted to party. Interestingly enough, Avalon’s Litha Journal article kept popping up in my head. Every time there was a scheduled meeting to discuss a possible action, more than half the folks were drunk or high. It took three days to have a somewhat sober meeting. Promises were made and broken, trust issues went unaddressed. When the time came to get into gear, roles were forgotten, folks dropped out or continued sleeping. I am up for a good time when it has its place, but partying and planning are not an effective combination. We could have a set time to drink and a set time to organize. Then folks could choose their priorities. A respect for all roles ought to be encouraged. We all can do things in the movement that we are comfortable with. If being arrested or going backcountry is not for you, say so. Group dynamics can be more high-powered if folks who consistently wash dishes or live in a tripod are respected equally. Being honest about what you can do does wonders, and provides much more support than failing people who are depending on you. In a community where it is sometimes assumed we are on the cutting edge of social reform, people seem to dislike the process of a consensus circle. Sometimes they are way too long and core problems are still not addressed. Dealing directly with personal problems between people before they usurp group trust is key. At Cove/Mallard, clear consensus circles where everyone was heard and the purpose was met needed to happen more. We lacked any follow-up circles after people broke up into smaller groups, so assumptions of roles plagued the action. If few people know each other these processes help folks decide if they want to participate. A genuine awareness of each other’s boundaries would be bliss. In a product-oriented world where the justified means is tearing the earth apart, for us to embrace process would be revolutionary. Even in our whirlwind of craziness there was a central group of people dedicated to stopping road construction. They constantly checked in with one another, giving room for folks to change their minds. They stuck it out and that inspired me. I hope that by looking at the process honestly we can continue to break negative patterns and think of new ideas to make this way of life more empowering.

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— John Krummel - The Strategy of Transgression in the Phenomenology of Ontological Anarchy

 

at 12/10/25 8:48pm

Author: John KrummelTitle: The Strategy of Transgression in the Phenomenology of Ontological AnarchyDate: Spring/Summer 1995Notes: Author’s note: My very first published article as a graduate student in 1995 in a peer-reviewed journal (PoMo Magazine) that no longer exists. I elaborate a non-metaphysical phenomenology that is at the same time a way of thinking and a way of being “without why.” My starting point is Reiner Schürmann’s anarchistic interpretation of Heidegger. It was my first (somewhat sophmoric) attempt to develop a kind of ontology.Source: PoMo Magazine; A Space for the Creative Elaboration, Analysis and Critique of Postmodern Perspectives, Spring/Summer 1995, Volume 1, Number 1. <www.philarchive.org/rec/KRUTSO-3> In this article, John Krummel elaborates a non-metaphysical phenomenology which is simultaneously a way of thinking and a way of “being without why.” Taking as his starting points the vocabulary of Martin Heidegger, and Reiner Schurmann’s anarchistic interpretation of Heidegger, Krummel seeks to reveal the relationships between temporality, language and being which constitute the finitude of what we are and whatever we may claim as the universal or eternal grounds of anything that is. Krummel is a graduate student in the Philosophy Department of New York’s New School for Social Research. He has presented work on Reiner Schürmann and anarchy at graduate student conferences in New York and Toronto, and his paper “Truth and Control in Being and Language” appears in the Winter 1994 issue of Auslegung. A critique is usually based on some posited construct, which serves as a foundation for replacing another construct, against which it is directed. But can critique be directed against the very assumption of a need to erect foundations? And if so, what are we left with? The_ possibility of such a critique has become more and more explicit since the last century, especially with the emergence of phenomenology. In this paper, I will explore the possibilities^ of a post-metaphysical phenomenology which refuses to posit anything beyond the phenomena confronting us, a phenomenology which attempts to make explicit Hie “rhythms” constituting what and how we are. For this purpose, I will rely primarily on the vocabulary of Martin Heidegger himself, as well as Reiner Schurmann’s “anarchistic” interpretation of Heidegger. A non-metaphysical phenomenology would not claim any a-temporality or universality, as they are phenomenologically unjustifiable from our perspective of a singular horizon of mortality. A “non-meta-physical” phenomenology (if one takes phusis to be the coming and going of phenomena) would “listen” to the inter-constitutive web of “rhythmic” relations between^ temporality, language and being, composing the finitude of what and how we are and what we may claim as the ground of anything that is. Rather than revealing any eternal ground, this shows Hie constitution of our being to be an indeterminate process of “eoeistence” through a horizon of time and within a web of discuraivity. Confronted with this temporal and discursive contingency, we are enabled to hold an altitude of critique against Hie vanity of such_ absolutizing claims. With a constant questioning of the constituents of our own being, and a refusal to set up any normative standards, an abyss is revealed behind the absolutizing claims concerning our various essential constituents. In turn, this releases us from the grip of norms and absolutes into alternative possibilities by perpetually making room for their realization. It is a strategy of constant transgression upon all claims to the absolute. In order to explore this possibility, in addition to Heidegger’s ontological phenomenology of temporality and Schurmann’s “radical phenomenology,” I will appropriate Michel Foucault’s notions of an “archaeology of knowledge” and “genealogy of power,0 Meister Eckharfs notions of “being without why,” Nietzsche’s “will to power” and “eternal recurrence,” and Bataille’s notions of time and anarchy. I hope to be able to show that such a phenomenology as a hermeneutic of our being would simultaneously be a way of thinking and a way of being without “why”-both a thinking which faces being to make it explicit and an explicitation of the anarchic process, which is thus the appropriation of Hie ontological process of anarchy. A look at the relationships between language and time, discuraivity and temporality, may unfold what and how we are, how the world exists, and how our knowledge of the world and ourselves is constituted. For example, Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge analyzes discuraivities in their formation and his genealogy of power looks at the relations of truth and power lying behind discursive formations as they fluctuate. Together they show us that the notion of “man” is a posit of the social sciences with their hidden practices and forms of social control determining a space of knowledge, which in turn determines our being as an object to be examined among empirical things while claiming for it its autonomy (Foucault 1966/1970:xxiii). The modem selfconscious subject is thus shown to be fabricated through a web of “discursive formations and extra-discursive power effects” (Schurmann 1986:294–95) which is nonetheless temporal and “ever-shifting.” As such, we are marked out within a period of time and disciplined to be responsible personalities, subordinate to normalization. In an early essay, Heidegger considered philosophical inquiry to be an explication of “factical life” in which is to be found the source making available the different ways of being, branched out through movements of concern, each expressing a determinate interpretedness (Heidegger 1922/1992:361–62). In Being And Time, this facticity of our being is called Dasein (“being-there”)—our human mode of being for which the relationship to being is its being, determining this relationship through its concerns. However, this determination alters with time as a fluctuating discursivity while absorbing us within a network of concerns by which we can evade our inevitable condition. This inevitability, which also conditions the discursivities determining us, is temporality. Heidegger saw time as our inescapable “own-most” (eigen) condition to which we are awoken from the everyday-life when confronted with death. Since time is what ultimately constitutes our being, he considered his project of confronting this facticity an “ontology.” And if phenomena are our only genuine access to being, as is the case for a phenomenologist like Heidegger, only as phenomenology is ontology possible. His fundamental ontology[1] thus takes as its theme our own mode of being as determined in time, to view the phenomenon of our own confrontation with being which in turn constitutes our Way of being, to make explicit our process of being—the indeterminate temporality from birth to death, constituting our being according to the manifold ways we understand ourselves. Through such an explicitation of how the difference between the indeterminacy of being and its determining modes is carried out through us and our interpretations, Heidegger wanted to look at the constituting process of our being. But this view depends upon listening to the comings and goings of phenomena beyond their seizure in linguistic constructs. ...

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— Michael Freeden - Anarchism: The View from Liberty

 

at 12/10/25 6:48am

Author: Michael FreedenTitle: Anarchism: The View from LibertyDate: 1998Source: Excerpted from Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach Like libertarianism, anarchism has carved out a niche related to and intersecting with the major ideological families, yet markedly different from their most typical forms. Like libertarianism, too, anarchism straddles more than one ideological family.[1] But whereas libertarianism overlaps with some liberal and conservative stances that are similar in the ordering and salience of their formative political concepts, anarchism is a looser umbrella term that covers a cluster of concepts whose totality can be made to pull in entirely different ideological directions: towards an individualist or a socialist mode.[2] It may be mistaken to lump the two schools of anarchism under one roof, or family. Despite the shared name, the actual usage of concepts under its aegis offers insufficient joint features to construct a collective family profile. True, anarchism has a common core, embracing three concepts: first—indicated in the name of this ideational cluster—antagonism to power, culminating in the desire to annihilate it (power is decontested as centralized and hierarchical and manifested above all, though not exclusively, in the state); second, a belief in liberty, decontested as spontaneous voluntarism; third, the postulation of natural human harmony.[3] But the adjacent concepts each mode conjoins to the core elicit very different sets of beliefs. In the one, the isolated individual is the supreme unit of analysis; in the other, the community composed of sociable individuals. The individualist mode may result in an abstract and principled resistance to monopolies of organized power in the name of a liberty understood as forbearance from intervention in individual actions. The socialist mode will identify the state as a concrete, historical instrument of class domination, a body oppressing groups and distorting natural mutualist human relationships, that has to be superseded. The generality and ‘thinness’ of the core begs the question whether the allegiance of the two modes is not primarily to libertarianism and to the socialist family respectively.[4] After all, both the Marxist ‘withering away of the state’ and the state of nature theme in early Lockean liberalism point to the possibility of rational communities and individuals foregoing (or almost foregoing) the need for coercion in social life. The reason for considering anarchism in conjunction with libertarianism lies in the striking first-line position accorded to the concept of liberty in both these conceptual groupings, whereas none of the core anarchist concepts is part of the socialist core. Though socialist anarchism espoused liberty, it had to be understood—as the Russian anarchist thinker Michael Bakunin saw it— within a social context,[5] and was hence proximate to one possible logical corollary of harmony: community. In libertarian as well as individualist anarchist theories—both containing few core concepts—personal liberty stands out as their self-styled hallmark. As with any ideology that elevates one core concept at the expense of others, the result is a simplistic world-view combined with a faith in easy remedies to social ills. These creeds gloss over the invariable complexity of ideological structure, either by ignoring the implicit multiplicity of their internal conceptual arrangements, or by using (paradoxically for freedom-fighters but typical of the political struggle over legitimating language) intellectual coercion and manipulation to exclude obvious conceptual connections. While individualist anarchists share with liberals a high esteem for the idea of liberty, they diverge from liberals by not drawing the limitation of power—through distribution and accountability mechanisms designed to give effect to liberty—into their core conceptual structure. One reason for this are the adjacent conceptions of human nature to which they subscribe. Some individualist anarchists, such as William Godwin, associated an individualism decontested as self-government with a progressive rationalism that included benevolence towards others. That objective and universal rationalism[6] ensured that self-government would be compatible with social life, and it could therefore contain an embryonic notion of community.[7] As with liberalism, this version of anarchism paid particular heed to the individual capacity for rational self-development and self-regulation. Indeed, it overvalued them, as a consequence allowing liberty free reign, because the potential conflicts which attended its maximization had been ruled out by this quasi-utopian vision. Unlike liberalism, it was confident enough about self-development to forgo surrounding it with enabling concepts and functions designed to facilitate individuality, such as the state. But other individualist anarchists adopted a more separatist view of human nature, and the proximate conceptions of rationality mutated as well. The identification of people as egoists (hardly a liberal view of human nature) was locked into a self-serving instrumental rationality. Max Stirner, an icon of later individualist anarchists, construed egoism as the sovereignty of individual judgement—a conception of autonomy as ‘ownness’ that negated any other-imposed or self-imposed obligations and abandoned all intimations of a concept of community.[8] But whereas he conjured up a society in a condition of nihilistic conflict that departed from anarchist core assumptions, other anarchists pursued a different conceptual route. ...

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— anomie press - How Liberal Identity Politics Paved The Way For Fascism

 

at 12/10/25 5:56am

Author: anomie pressTitle: How Liberal Identity Politics Paved The Way For FascismDate: 12/08/2025Source: https://nvep.noblogs.org/2025/12/08/how-liberal-identity-politics-paved-the-way-for-fascism/ insurrectionists, nihilists, and queer anarchists are constantly railing against the identity politics endemic to liberalism, which has wormed its way into anarchism by way of the would-be-revolutionaries who view anarchy simply as an intensification of liberal goals. but, most of the time, arguments against idpol focus on the nonsensicality and indirectly oppressive nature of identity itself…and with few concrete examples ever offered of the material harm idpol can do, it’s easy to get the impression that we complain about it simply because of the abstract ways in which an identitarian mindset and praxis can lead to reinforcement of oppressive structures. while it’s true that idpol is nonsensical, abstract, and indirectly oppressive, and it would be plenty of reason to oppose identitarian tendencies on that basis alone, they also create bigger problems that result in much more tangible and imminent threats, like the failure of American anarchists to sabotage the construction of a concentration camp in the Florida Everglades, out of a fear of alienating local indigenous groups. when Trump took office the U.S. government and their allies immediately began building concentration camps in various places around the world, including one notorious site within the U.S; Alligator Alcatraz. when construction began, activists of various backgrounds and political leanings began protesting, and petitions were circulated by the ACLU, Amnesty International, and lots of other groups, begging fascist politicians to be less fascist. some individuals—disillusioned with democracy and “legitimate forms of protest”, but too far away to get directly involved—suggested local Floridians take inspiration from the E.L.F., the A.L.F., and more recent opposition to Cop City in Atlanta. the response from Florida-based “anarchists” like, Skunk Ape Liberation Union, was a resounding “No.”, but (at least ostensibly) not out of a fear of potential risks like getting shot or arrested. the so-called anarchists simply felt it was not their place to take control of the movement, opting to let local indigenous organizers lead, simply because of their race. multiple supposed anarchists in Florida explicitly said they were stepping back to allow local indigenous groups to lead the movement. those indigenous activists wanted to use nonviolence, so the “anarchists” urged everyone to stay docile. this essay comes to mind. we, at anomie press and the NVEP, would never insist that anyone must sacrifice themself—their safety or freedom—for “the greater good” or anything like that, but it’s one thing to simply choose not to take a risky action because of the risks involved, and it’s another thing entirely to vocalize opposition to the prospect of anyone taking direct destructive actions in opposition to fascism, because of how those subversive actions may upset the more liberal-minded “POC” “activist” “allies”. which is exactly what multiple “anarchists” in Florida did. and, to the surprise of the liberals (including the ones calling themselves anarchists) and no one else, the nonviolent tactics accomplished nothing. the detention facility was built, opened, and used. and it’s still being used today (December, 2025). fascists built a(nother) concentration camp in the United States, and a number of “anarchists” decided it was more important to appease the liberals than to oppose the fascists. this is, of course, a microcosm of a long-running trend of liberals trying to control anarchists by insinuating that 1.) anyone using direct action is a straight white cis male, and 2.) straight white cis men experience no oppression, and are morally obligated to follow the leadership of Oppressed Peoples™ who all are inherently more educated and capable of understanding the consequences of different tactics, and developing safe and effective strategies. we counter by stepping back to let the ineffectiveness of the liberals’ strategies speak for itself. idpol has been used to defend oppressors countless times before, like when feminists got mad at rioters for breaking cop car windows during protests against police violence in Seattle in 2011, and tried to turn the rest of the protesters against what they called the “manarchists” in their midst (because violence and destruction are inherently male actions, of course, so any rioter must be a man), and when Black Lives Matter organizers physically got between angry rioters and scared cops to protect the police from the crowds during the 2020 riots in NYC, presenting themselves as representatives of The Black Community™, acting like they had a right to determine how everyone protests, and since some of the black people present were apprehensive about violent tactics, that somehow translated into a moral imperative that everyone must be nonviolent…but Florida 2025 might be the most clear example of idpol directly and explicitly defending our oppressors’ efforts to consolidate and exercise power, directly leading to more oppression. ...

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— Vee Cosgrove - Fragments of an Anarcha-Transfeminist Sociology of Sex Work

 

at 12/9/25 10:44pm

Author: Vee CosgroveTitle: Fragments of an Anarcha-Transfeminist Sociology of Sex WorkDate: May 2022Source: Senior Project Submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York Acknowledgements Thank you everyone for your contributions to this project and to my growth and development as a human being. Before you read my rantings and ravings about sex and transness, I have some specific people to thank/blame. To my parents, thank you for your continued support of my increasingly outlandish academic endeavors. Also, I am so sorry for everything you’re going to learn about me by the end of this. Have fun! To Allison, thank you. This one is kind of hard because how do I adequately describe the nature of our mentor/mentee relationship? I feel like half of my works cited section is just stuff that’s in your office and articles you’ve assigned in class. Words do not capture how intellectually indebted I am to you and your guidance throughout this whole process. Also thanks for listening to me talk about memes. To Andrew, thank you for instilling such a love of social analysis and talking about sad things that I switched from political science to sociology. Not only would I not be a sociologist without you, I specifically would not be here at Bard College without you. Thank you for teaching me about the sociological imagination, and thank you for telling me about Blithewood. To David, thank you for giving me the gift of love for the written word. I may still be a bit of a Captain Ahab, but I hope you can be proud of where my obsessions and passions have led me. To my friends, thank you for sitting with me for hours on end and listening to me ramble about anarchism and BDSM. We may not have been able to recreate the Golden Ginger drink from Starbucks using only paper cups, ice, the Kline dining hall provided spice rack, and mostly-separated non dairy milks, but I have cherished every moment here with you. From bursting through dorm room doors at 4 am the day before Thanksgiving to sitting in my car with me desperately trying to keep the battery from dying mid-blizzard, you have made my life so full of meaning and love that I run the risk of devolving into overly sentimental babbling about our time together. To the women I interviewed, thank you for sharing your stories with me. In the months I have spent listening to you speak of such rich and lived lives full of heartache and joy, I found the strength to imagine a better world. This work would not exist without you. I owe you the world. To trans women everywhere, thank you for accepting me as one of your own. I found in you a reason to fight. I hope that one day we will all be able to live and love freely without shame. There is power in you. Go fuck some shit up. Table of Contents Introduction and Methodology…………………………………………….................................8 Literature Review ………………………………………………………………………………15 Structural Pressures and How People Get Into Sex Work …………………………………….34 How Does Sex Work “Work”? ………….……………………………………………………..38 Conflicts and Dangers ……………………………………………………………...……………54 “Sex Work Is Work” and Anarchist Principles ………………………………….…………….65 Overcome Public Silence and Private Terror in Trans Sexuality ………………………………. 77 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………………….91 Works Cited …………………………………………………………………………………...95 A Last Minute Note On Language In my haste, it would appear that I forgot to include an explanation of why this text is written the way it is and some of the potential complications with it, so here it is. In this text, you will find a fair amount of obscene words, transphobic slurs, and trans community specific colloquialisms. This is deliberate and not done without care. All of my interviewees, plus countless other trans people in my life, have asked to read this when it is done, and it occured to me that I do not know how to write about transness and trans-related subjects without my writing having a distinctly trans character. It also occured to me that I do not know how to write about transness and trans-related subjects without in some way referencing my own existence as a non-binary trans lesbian. I mean come on, part of my whole idea with this project was that I’d get to meet other trans women and talk about being trans women. It stands to reason that this had an influence on the literary character of this piece alongside the empirical. So I wrote much of this work in a style and vernacular that is somewhat accessible to trans people both in and outside of the academy. Granted there is much of this that is dense with jargon and social scientific literary quirks, but when describing sexual acts, I chose to be as explicit and frank as necessary. This was also done because I did not wish to recreate in my own voice the kind of distant, outsider-y tone when confronting bodies that I often find in literature written by cis people about trans people. I am an imperfect author, and I recognize not everyone will appreciate my approach to language here, but it is my hope that you, dear reader, understand why I felt it necessary to speak in a language most familiar to me and those whose experiences I tried to capture here. ...

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— Donald A. R. George - Self-Management, Anarchism and Democracy

 

at 12/8/25 7:39pm

Author: Donald A. R. GeorgeTitle: Self-Management, Anarchism and DemocracyDate: 1993Source: Excerpted from Economic Democracy: The Political Economy of Self-Management and Participation 1. INTRODUCTION Economic ideas do not exist in a political and ideological vacuum and it is therefore important to consider how the idea of self-management is related to various broader ideologies and to ask which ideologies, if any, provide a basis from which self-management as an economic system can rationally be supported. This leads one naturally to analyse the relationship between economic self-management and the wider political environment. In particular it is of interest to ask which interest groups are likely to support self-management and which to oppose it. This, in turn, leads to an analysis of how self-management might be promoted in existing societies. These are the issues dealt with here. Market capitalism is often linked with the ideology of the Right and state command planning with that of the Left. Self-management, by contrast, places the control of capital neither with private capitalists (or their agents) nor with the state (or its agents) but rather with those who work directly with that capital. Moreover, self-management is consistent with either a market system of resource allocation or with central planning, though clearly some forms of central planning (for example, Hungarian-type indirect financial planning) allow more managerial autonomy to the individual enterprise than others (for example, Soviet-type command planning). In many textbooks on comparative economic systems (see, for example, Gregory and Stuart, 1989) self-management is presented as an independent economic system, distinct from both capitalism and socialism. This presents difficulties for the empirical approach to comparative economic systems since Yugoslavia furnishes the only extant example of an economic system in which self-management is the central characteristic. Moreover, to regard self-management as an alternative to capitalism and socialism is a considerable oversimplification, as will be argued below. The question of capital ownership is central to self-management. Any successful system of self-management would have to sustain Vanek’s (1977b) distinction between basic and usufruct ownership, though it is worth noting that many configurations of rights are possible (see Becker, 1977, for a discussion). In principle the basic owners could be individuals or private organisations such as banks or, alternatively, basic ownership could rest with the state. We can therefore think of self-management as having two extreme or ‘pure’ forms, capitalist self-management (where basic ownership rests with individuals or private organisations) and socialist self-management (where basic ownership rests with the state). Yugoslav firms, apparently at least, furnish examples of socialist self-management, while workers’ cooperatives in the West provide examples of the capitalist variety. Self-managed firms may well emerge in the (former) Soviet Union as a consequence of the programme of ‘perestroika’ (see Aganbegian, 1988), while in the West, including the United States, there has recently been an upsurge of interest in workers’ cooperatives (see, for example Jackall and Levin, 1984). In reality, of course, modes of production are rarely pure (see Hodgson, 1984, for a development of this argument). Even in the West some production takes place under non-capitalist conditions. Some capital is state-owned and, in addition to that, a great deal of economic activity takes place within the household. Similarly, in Eastern Europe, even prior to the current (1991) reforms, there was a degree of private ownership of capital, for example in agriculture. Virtually all economies are, in fact, mixed economies. Self-management can provide a new form of social ownership which could generate a desirable and viable alternative to both private and public enterprise as at present understood. 2. ANARCHISM It might be argued that economic self-management is a form of social organisation consistent with the ideology of anarchism, the fundamental principle of which is the rejection of authority, with the possible exception of ‘natural authority’, exercised by persuasion or force of example. Anarchists take the view that, in general, no person can ever have the right to issue directions to another person who is under an obligation to obey them. Anarchists have traditionally applied this principle to the state, arguing that society can and should be organised without a state of any kind, even a democratic one. The principle might equally be applied to economic organisations such as firms. A self-managed firm is, by definition, one in which management decisions are taken collectively by the workforce and not imposed by a hierarchical management structure acting as agents of capital owners, be they private individuals, private organisations or the state. Self-managed firms do require some form of management structure. Even a system under which all management decisions were taken by majority vote might not be acceptable to the purest anarchist. Anarchists have certainly rejected the democratic state on the grounds that majority voting still entails the ‘tyranny of the majority’, that is the exercise of authority over dissenting minorities. Would a system under which managers are elected by the workforce be more acceptable to anarchists? There does seem to be a sharp distinction between authority exercised by capital owners or their agents, and authority exercised by managers accountable to the workforce. Given the technological and organisational complexity of modem production it is easy to imagine self-managed firms in which all members can benefit by vesting, albeit temporarily, certain limited authority in specific individuals. Again the purest anarchist would object that, unanimity aside, electing such individuals by majority vote would involve a ‘tyranny of the majority’. Moreover, of course, the exercise of authority, even by elected managers, would still violate the basic principle of anarchism. ...

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— Anonymous - The Tyranny of the Group Chat

 

at 12/7/25 6:56am

Author: AnonymousTitle: The Tyranny of the Group ChatSubtitle: Signal Fails 2.0 & for telephone desertionDate: November 2025Notes: From Rumoer MagazineSource: Retrived on 12/05/25 from rumoer.noblogs.org "In these times, nearly everyone in our surroundings is constantly carrying a mobile phone (whether“smart” or not). Phones demand a dominant presence in our daily lives and our encounters with everything around us. Input is constantly forcing its way into our lives, and we are continuously creating output for cops and companies. This parallel universe in our pockets distracts us from activities in the real world and leaves little to no space to consciously do and more than anything experience these things.” (Against the constant presence of phones and In favour of spontaneity!, Rumoer #1, winter 2020) We look back at articles from Rumoer #1, #2, #5, and #5.5, all of which discuss the problems surrounding phones, you know, those little informants in our pockets. Five years after the first article on this subject we note that the topic is widely discussed, but we must also conclude that the presence and use of smartphones has become further normalised. Especially for the generation that grew up with them and has never known a life without phones, the phone is an indispensable part of every activity: traveling, socializing, school and work, recreation and even concerning activism. It is no secret that these small electronic devices are unhealthy for us (especially psychologically, but they are now also beginning to affect us physically) and this is now also being addressed in societal discussions. But that is not what this text is about, nor were the previous texts we wro- te. Those texts were about anarchists. And especially about what phones do to the way we organise, our safety, our social relationships and our ability to take action. The assumption that your phone is being tapped on behalf of the AIVD/police is fairly ingrained in everyone. A phone-free meeting is the norm, regardless of the topic. This is a very good trend. Whether you are discussing the organisation of a soup kitchen (not illegal) or the preparation of an arson (quite illegal), it does not matter. Phones away, no one outside that meeting should know who says what, who speaks the most or the least, who has a discussion or conflict with whom, or who gets along best with whom. However, the anti-phone trend falls apart beyond the phone-free meeting. Everyone brings their phone with them, so it is possible to find out which people are connected to the same cell tower at a specific time. When they are turned off, they are turned off at the same time, and when they are turned back on, they are turned back on at the same time, making it easy to track a group via the cell towers*. One plus one equals two. But the most unsafe, inefficient and above all exhausting outcome of a phone free meeting is the Signal groupchat, how ironic! In my opinion the creation of these cursed flows of messages reflect a typical liberal-democratic tendency among us. It is similar to those who vote in elections: we are against the system, but perhaps we can make it a little better (in this example safer) for now. The use of Signal combined with other “secure tech” and adjustments to your phone (such as trying to make the device Google-free), evokes a similar thought. Many of you will say that such group conversations are created in the name of efficiency, but we believe the opposite. And this is exactly what we all need to talk about: how do phones affect the way we organise ourselves? And pay attention! We are not going to preach morality here. It is precisely because of our extensive experience with and presence in group chats that we have come to oppose them. We find them confusing, lacking in affinity, far too concise for discussion, planning or analysis and above all authoritarian due to the many orders for mobilisation that are sent. That is why groupchats fit into the context of the rise of authoritarian politics (see other texts in this Rumoer). When we analyse the group chat we see that it is mostly a new snowball-phonetree. They are mobilisation organs without posibility of discussion and participation. A few leaders place a call-out for events and actions without any dialouge or conviction. There exists the expectation that you will just show up. No passionate conversations, making plans, forming affinities, just the dump, “see you there”. It is true that the signal groupchat doesn’t lend itself for critism and discussion. Everybody knows how fast that can escalate and turn into something terribly chaotic. Screens remove us from our emotion, we don’t see each other. You and I don’t know whether someone is laughing, being sarcastic, is looking irritated, is saying something sharp but in a controlled and constructive manner or is acting out as if they would be throwing a chair during a meeting. We don’t know because we are not there. The worst thing is that we can all fill it in for ourselves, usually we determine how someoneelse is feeling- and how the things said are meant on the basis of how we feel. So discussion in group-chats are avoided or people avoid group chats with discussions all together. What remains is the authoritarian mobilisation of the wanted footsoldiers, demo and action fodder. ...

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— Tony Sheather - Remaking Society

 

at 12/7/25 6:44am

Author: Tony SheatherTitle: Remaking SocietyDate: Summer 2025Source: Anarcho-Syndicalist Review # 92 Summer 2025, page 30 Murray Bookchin, Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future, Black Rose Books, 1989, 222pp. (Reissued by AK Press with a new foreword as Remaking Society: A New Ecological Politics, 2023). A soothing reflection in contrast to the explosion of Post-Scarcity Anarchism and the power of The Ecology of Freedom, Murray Bookchin’s short but incisive work, Remaking Society, was an essay to welcome more general readers to the ideas of libertarian history and thought combined with then contemporary urgings. It came before the polemic of Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism, the revealing and increasingly sectarian Marxism, Anarchism and the Future of the Left, witness to the emerging rifts. It is a book that may be enjoyed even thirty-five years after its publication, the revelation of a man still content with his decades’ long embrace of social anarchism, a writer secure in the general acceptance of the utopian community in America and beyond. The very title is redolent of a balanced, constructive commitment to an achievable goal. It is also an affirmation of the coherence and rationality necessary to guide revolutionary aspiration. The book is a refreshing insight into thoughts and ideas that places the current enormous crisis in Western culture within the historical panorama of ruling elites, be they absolutist monarchs or nations state and capitalist elites, contending with revolutionary forces. While contemporary turmoil is a cautionary reminder of his assertion three decades ago that America was “… culturally, the most illiterate country in the Western world” (162), this compact thesis offers depictions of vision and hope through millennia that assert coherent transformation is still a viable path for civilisation. Certainly, the first stirrings of the author’s unease with the direction and nature of radical politics are apparent in his initial chapter where he articulates his discomfort with the anti-humanistic and irrational threads perceived during the National Gathering of the American Greens in a conference held at Amherst, Massachusetts in June 1987. Bookchin described the catalyst at this event that made tangible his and others’ desire that he pen a compact summary of his writings on social theory, anthropology indeed social “reality” transformed: a young Green participant relaxing outside a conference presentation passionately embraced the supposed virtues of ecology where nature ruled humanity, a humanity deemed responsible for all environmental ills and destruction. Bookchin acknowledges the crudity of this perception but also saw it as a haunting omen of an increasingly biocentric world view where the domination of social hierarchies and tyrannies, most pervasive of all capitalism, be it corporate or state, is opposed by a simplistic yet strident, diminution of humanity’s achievements as well as the complexity of the natural and social realms. Such a perspective, he stated, as indeed articulated by the young Green man, is vulnerable to a sweeping condemnation of all people, ignoring the specific cruelties and violations visited upon the vast majority of humankind by overlords. When the rape of the natural world “justifies” such a “revenge” against humanity, discernment, justice and freedom lose all social and philosophical meaning. These themes become familiar ones throughout the book, domination versus liberation, mysticism against rational humanism, the fracture where nature and society are opposed. Certainly, the destruction of habitats, species and communities are characteristics of historical domination but these are very largely reflections of the distorted ambitions of elites throughout history. Bookchin explores the social relationship between nature and society in his second chapter, a brief and accessible insight into historical perversions of the role of each. His discussion on the anthropological projection of distorted societal concepts like domination and hierarchy onto the animal world are liberating, as are the thoughts on community in the aboriginal realms. His reflections on the emergence of human second (societal) nature from the primeval complexity of first (original) nature seek to restore a vision and welcome the reality of integration, neither the liberal/Marxist dualism where human society is “self-reliant” and independent from other existence on the planet, nor the absorption of one into the other characteristic of much current environmental belief. Hence we are introduced to the thesis of social ecology as a reworking of these conflicting and distorted world views. The insects and animals through the evolutionary path create wonderful connections that provide humankind with the potential to become rational, to embody the creativity of the natural realm. Nature rendered self-conscious. It is a logical step from this discussion to a critique of the development of domination within the history of humanity. Bookchin stresses the significance of mankind’s ability to make a place within the natural world, not adapt as had creatures in the earlier evolutionary chain. He reflects upon the rise of hierarchies of control as community groups in preliterate times became divided into those dependent on age, physical strength or mystical illusion. Qualities of support or wisdom became perverted as warriors vied for economic superiority while seeking another tribe’s land or produce. The complementarity and usufruct that had marked the more communal millennia became prey to the ambitions of “big men” as status became hierarchy, class and ultimately the state. ...

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— Open Assembly of Anarchists for the 17N - DOWN WITH AUTHORITY

 

at 12/7/25 6:35am

Author: Open Assembly of Anarchists for the 17NTitle: DOWN WITH AUTHORITYSubtitle: GENERAL REVOLT THEN, NOW AND ALWAYSDate: November 14, 2025Notes: Translated by Abolition Media Original Greek source: https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1638412/ In the morning hours of November 15 in Athens, Greece, comrades from the Open Assembly of Anarchists for the 17th of November, 2025, were violently attacked by roughly 150 members of the left-populist ARAS group while preparing the anarchist bloc for that day’s march. ARAS functions as a social-democratic counter-insurgent reserve—frequently, though inaccurately, described as “Maoist,” a mislabeling that persists due to persistent misunderstanding. Even though the attack and the wider situation have already been covered in international anarchist media like Freedom News and Anarchist News, the assembly’s own call is nowhere to be found in English. That’s striking, since the text lays out a clear and sharp analysis of the current moment and the tasks facing anarchist and communist militants in the country. The translation that follows seeks to address this gap and make the assembly’s position accessible to an international readership.Source: Retrieved on December 5th, 2025 from https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/23316/ We call on the oppressed and the rebellious, the people of struggle, to join the anarchist/anti-authoritarian bloc for the 17th of November. We address those whose hearts beat and yearn for the burial of economic exploitation and political and social oppression. The invocation of the democratic polity by the state and its supporters, whatever their political persuasion, left or right, is a deception for those at the bottom. Authoritarian violence and attempts to displace subversive social struggles and their rebellious characteristics from the public sphere and collective consciousness are means of terrorizing and silencing subversive ideas and freedoms. Against the dictates of bosses and their political superiors, against the American-Israeli power lobby and the brutality of the genocidal “war” in the occupied Palestinian territories. Against the state and capital that dictate our lives and lead society to total control and subjugation. Free polytechnics [a reference to the Polytechnic Uprising] here and now for all, everything and everyone, outside the shackles of party manipulation and deception. The autonomy of class-social struggles is the unbridled driving force for social liberation. Our slogans remain relevant. Down with authority General uprising November 17, 1973 Then, after, now Then Because history is written with actions, the uprising of November 17, 1973, is a turning point for the mass resistance struggles in Greece, as that year, most of society ceased to show tolerance and submission to the military regime of the colonels. The common revolutionary step went beyond tanks and weapons, spearheaded by the student community. With the tensions that had already been building since early 1973, the ground was being prepared for the next decisive moves against the army and the totalitarian system of power. From February 1973, the Polytechnic, the Chemistry Department, and the Law School were transformed into centers of struggle, as the first rallies began against the then-proposed bill that would prohibit the postponement of military service due to studies. The Law School, in particular, was a key location, as 4,000 people barricaded themselves inside and chanted slogans, while 50 fascists showed up to break up the occupation, only to fail in the face of a few anarchists who played a role in stopping them. Of course, the internal repression within the university complex of the Polytechnic by the left-wing student factions has been masterfully silenced. As early as November 14, 1973, the occupation of the Polytechnic began by a group of workers consisting mainly of members of revolutionary left-wing parties and a small group of anarchists. This assembly, which was housed in Gini [a specific building in Polytechnic school], decided from the outset not to establish a presidium or any governing body for the assembly itself. Subsequently, it was decided to confiscate the students’ typewriters from the architecture school building, which was accompanied by tension with the students, as they realized that they would lose their monopoly on expression. Despite the internal problems of Gini’s constitution, agreements were made on its anti-capitalist character and the attempt to give the occupation a class character. This effort was unsuccessful, as on the morning of November 15, while some workers were leaving to go to their jobs, a group of left-wing students decided to break up the assembly, referring to “non-university members” and ultimately, people ended up leaving in disgust. At 3 p.m. that evening, a new workers’ assembly was formed in the same building, only this time it had a presidium and its role was to inform workers in their hangouts at the time (e.g., Kotzia Square), but without being able to put class-based, anti-capitalist demands on the broader struggle. Left-wing students, under the pretext of preventing security guards from entering the Polytechnic, carried out face control at the entrances, asking for student IDs (as if security did not have countless IDs at its disposal), in a last-ditch effort to sterilize the area. Despite this effort, people managed to get into the Polytechnic, contributing more as unsung heroes than as “pioneering students.” The silencing of those not affiliated with party factions, as well as the subsequent concealment of the confrontational events that took place in the surrounding streets and more generally throughout Athens from November 14 to 17, is nothing more than an attempt by the left to dominate the movements over time. Amidst the anxiety to repel and dismantle the junta, there was no shortage of attempts by the then supporters of state legitimacy, namely the KKE, to ridicule activists, branding them with the sacred rod of speculation, as “provocateurs,” thus undermining the culture of occupation, spark, and struggle, with the aim of controlling the outcome of this entire process of rupture and self-determination of social continuity. Of course, the passion and momentum of all those who opposed roles and attributes surpassed the self-serving maneuvering to prevent the uprising. ...

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— Petrograd Botanical Garden - Farewell to our Ignatius

 

at 12/6/25 5:00pm

Author: Petrograd Botanical GardenTitle: Farewell to our IgnatiusDate: November 3, 2025Notes: Original Greek source: https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1638271/Source: Retrieved on December 5th, 2025 from https://anarchistnews.org/content/farewell-our-ignatius After many months (since June) in a coma at the Red Cross hospital, Ignatius opened his eyes for the first time a few days ago during a visit from his companions, apparently to say goodbye to us, because today, Sunday, November 2, 2025, he passed away. Repeated strokes and difficult cranial surgeries, despite the efforts of the medical and nursing staff, led to his irreversible end. Ignatios was an anarchist comrade known throughout the movement for his multifaceted participation in all its actions and resistance, whether they concerned struggles against repression, alternative self-managed projects, or cultural events. He started afresh at the Karyatidos squat in Peristeri and then participated in collectives managing the Zapatista café. In recent years, he also participated in other political and social collectives, at times in the Anti-Authoritarian Movement and Empros, while maintaining a steady presence in the MEKAREVERSE collective and, of course, attending all the movement's events. However, his long-standing and multifaceted participation in the occupation of the Petroupolis Botanical Garden was what marked him. There, he played a leading role in all the individual actions of the occupation, which concerned the street, the hosting of refugees, and the theater group, participating in numerous performances. But what helped to create the space was the self-establishment of collectives, especially the grocery store, which played a decisive role. One of his great dreams that remained unfulfilled was his planned trip to Chiapas and the Zapatista communities for the International Meeting of Resistance and Uprising held in August at the Comandanta Ramona Camp, visiting the Zapatista communities for the second time. We leave the last sentence for what he loved most, which was dancing and the corresponding education he had in this field since childhood. We wish him now, without state, regulatory, and physical constraints, to enjoy himself making circles and figures from planet to planet and from star to star, and we promise him that we will never forget him. - Petroupolis Botanical Garden free social space

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— Erica Lagalisse - Occult Features of Anarchism

 

at 12/6/25 4:23pm

Author: Erica LagalisseTitle: Occult Features of AnarchismSubtitle: With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of the PeoplesDate: 2019Source: <www.archive.org/details/occultfeaturesof0000laga>   “Well, a 33rd degree Freemason lying on his deathbed once told me the great secret, and you know what it is? ‘Christ was just a man,’ he said.” —Roy Wright (1941–2018) May he enjoy wandering the phantom library of Alexandria, chatting up the angels.   Foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich I first came across Erica Lagalisse’s byline about four years ago and was so impressed by her work that I promptly tracked her down. Not many young intellectuals were as acutely sensitive to class issues as she was, and by class I don’t just mean the 1% versus the 99% but the seldom discussed boundary between college-educated professionals and blue-collar workers. The first time she wrote to me she seemed wary to the point of being suspicious. Maybe she was wondering whether I was one of those snooty hotshot feminist academics she had encountered along her way to a PhD, and, if so, what did I want from her? Soon enough though, we were engaged in a lively correspondence about everything we were working on and thinking about. Drafts of articles were exchanged, along with copious links related to politics, popular culture, and philosophy. In due time, we met and spent long evenings theorizing over dinner and wine. She is a feminist and leftist like me but closer to anarchism, and at a demonstration more likely to be found with the direct action crowd than in the tamer precincts where I hang out. In many ways though, we’re very similar—both children of working-class parents and familiar with class-based insults as well as sexist ones. We’d both encountered misogyny on the left, which had led to some strained relationships with our male “comrades.” And we’re both curious about everything and willing to drop whatever else we’re doing to learn something new. In no time at all, I was editing her writing and helping get it published, while she was encouraging my more reckless speculative tendencies. Erica has been working on this book in one form or another for as long as I’ve known her. At first her motivation seemed impenetrably esoteric to me: Why would anyone want to trace the tangled roots of modern left-wing thought back to their origin in distinctly “irrational,” even mystical, ways of thinking? Gradually, I began to see the deeper question here: What kind of authorities do we listen to and who do we ignore? What makes one kind of person credible and another dismissable? In modern Western culture, the accepted authorities have tended to be white males with extensive formal educations. Hence the female indigenous health worker introduced early on here barely gets a hearing from Erica’s male anarchist comrades, because, as a religious person, she is not “rational.” And clearly she is not male. Another disturbing incident occurs among the anarchists, this time including Zapatista supporters from Mexico. They are sitting around talking about the seemingly invincible power of governments when the conversation wanders to secretive organizations like the Freemasons and the Illuminati. This surprises Erica, who has so far encountered these organizations only on YouTube. But it gets worse: one of the people involved in the conversation points out that the hypothesized secret organizations are dominated by Jews. Erica is shaken; after all, the speaker is a self-proclaimed revolutionary and by virtue of participating in this mixed-nationality discussion a de facto internationalist, and hence “cosmopolitan,” a label traditionally applied to Jews. She makes the obvious empirical objections, which are eventually accepted. But meanwhile Erica is forced to confront her own ignorance. Neither she nor the professors at her university had ever paid any attention to the conspiracy theories that explain social injustice to so many people. At this point you may be expecting a learned diatribe against conspiracy theories, with their fanciful origins and dangerous tendencies toward scapegoating. But hold onto your seat: Erica is far too subtle a thinker and far too intellectually restless to fall for a convenient shibboleth, even one almost universally endorsed by prominent liberals and left-wingers. Instead she throws herself into the study of YouTube films that “document” everything from the U.S. government’s role in the 9/11 attack to the plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy—and not in order to debunk these theories (others have already put plenty of effort into that) but to assess their appeal. Certainly, in a world where so little is certain, where elections can empower the enemies of democracy, and even the weather is increasingly unstable, it’s satisfying to point out that powerful and well-organized people are in charge. Pointing out that conspiracy theories are often as not the intellectual property of the working class—the class that cannot usually afford the kind of education that would lead a person to reject them out of hand—she argues that the elite prejudice against such theories is just another facet of the elite prejudice against working-class people themselves. All right, conspiracy theories lack the intellectual and scientific trappings of academically respectable theories, but they also have a certain explanatory advantage. The elite theories—in, say, the social sciences—attribute causation to vague “systems” and “forces,” most of which are invisible to the untrained eye. Why, for example, do the poor remain in poverty, while the rich get richer all the time? Because of the “system,” the forces that hold the majority of people down while propelling a tiny minority into unfathomable wealth. The appeal of a conspiracy theory is that it replaces these invisible, almost mystical, entities with actual people, even if they include such unlikely suspects as the Knights Templar or the Rothschilds. Who is chosen as a target here may be cause for serious argument, but of course a general search for those responsible is appealing and understandable. When injustice is being perpetrated, it’s good to know the names of the perpetrators—and probably their addresses as well. ...

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— Erica Lagalisse - On Authenticity

 

at 12/5/25 2:27pm

Author: Erica LagalisseTitle: On AuthenticitySubtitle: Theorizing Intersections of Race and Class in Consensus Process and BeyondDate: 2024Notes: This article was originally published by Erica Lagalisse in the Rivista di antropologia contemporanea (vol. 2024, Issue 1), pp. 73–94, as part of a special issue in honour of David Graeber, convened by Matteo Aria and Andrea Buchetti.Source: <www.en.scrappycapydistro.info/zines/on-authenticity> This essay is dedicated to Bev Skeggs and in memory of Bernice Johnson Reagon, bell hooks, Jeff Juris and David Graeber. In 2008 I attended the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition (RAT) conference in Vermont, US. Like many academic conferences that reference “anarchism,” the event drew scholars with an academic relationship to anarchism and activists who had (more) recently entered graduate school.[1] Pondering the aesthetics upon arrival, I noticed how the acronym “RAT” symbolically retrieves the filth of the street at the same moment militants wash it off to position themselves as transcendent subjects of knowledge. Someone handed me a program pamphlet inviting me to a workshop called “The Everyday Anarchist.” It suggested we “take lifestyle seriously as a significant aspect of anarchist politics and identity.” “Everyday anarchism,” the blurb elaborated, means “working against hierarchy in our personal relationships,” “refraining from consumption practices that promote cruelty” and “being part of an anarchist subculture that is identifiable by its stylistic markers.” Below I elaborate on this RAT workshop as an ethnographic departure to explore intersections of racialized and class subjectivity that inform contradictions within North American anarchist social movements. I then review my ethnography of Mexican and Venezuelan anarchist organizing (Lagalisse 2017), and of the Montreal-based Zapatista collective about which I have published over the years (e.g. Lagalisse 2011a, 2014, 2019a), to consider the experiences of the political refugees and graduate students involved in this Zapatista collective in relation to the Coop sur Généreux that hosted our events, a largely white middle class housing collective of 15–20 activists (see also Lagalisse 2010).[2] In this exercise I engage intersectionality as methodology (see Collins 2019; Nash 2008; Maguire 2008) by taking lead from the words and practices of Mexican collective members, local activists of colour, and white working-class people on the borders of the anarchist movement, with attention to gendered difference in each case, to explore subcultural practices of “consensus,” as well as activists’ own understandings of intersectionality, race and class. I organize my exposition to intervene constructively in anarchist movement debates regarding “consensus process” (Polletta 2005; Graeber 2009, 2013; Juris 2013) as well as in dialogue with activist and academic debates regarding intersectionality and epistemology (e.g. Crenshaw 1991; Haraway 1990; Collins 2004, 2019). By mobilizing intersectional analyses of ethnographic intersections of race and class in activist practices of “consensus,” I illustrate how and why it is important for both scholars and militants concerned with “intersectionality” to avoid collapsing analyses of race and class in this instance and beyond, including in relation to studies of “authenticity” and its longing. “The Everyday Anarchist” As I arrived at The Everyday Anarchist workshop, I took a seat in a semi-circle of plastic chairs surrounding a man and woman in their 30s, each holding a microphone. The man co-animator introduced the event saying: “How we live, what we buy, how we dress, what media we use, and what we eat are all practices that stitch together a narrative of the self. They are communicative acts, propaganda by the deed. People not involved in politically radical movements can start by constructing a lifestyle that expresses what they believe in.” Propaganda of the deed is a phrase associated with Errico Malatesta, a subculturally famous anarchist figure from the 19thcentury. It did mean to teach by example, yet the traditional reference was to armed rebellion, not stylistic markers (see e.g. Richards 1965). The woman co-animator of the workshop continued on to say that, “it’s important, when we talk about identity like this, to differentiate between identities that are choiceful and identities that are not. I can’t reject being white or middle-class, these are not choiceful, but I can choose to identify as an anarchist, and I can reject things that aren’t anarchist. It’s these choices that are important. We live in collective houses not because our parents did, but because we are trying to be strictly different. It is important to see how we can live the ideals of anarchism through things we can control, through the things we choose to be associated with, or not….”After framing the topic in this way, the two animators said they wanted to open the floor for discussion. “Like, where are we at?” asked the man animator, “As for me, I used to be a vegetarian, but it’s an ethics I have since moved away from, and am now more into the idea of eating whole foods. I also ask myself new questions like: Should I travel by air? What about the question of fuel?” Participants began to raise their hands. “Lately I’ve been thinking about the issue of consumption, and what it says about who we are — “we are what we eat”, right? Going vegan is something I would like to do, but I haven’t been successful yet, anyway, just a comment….” ...

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— Anarchist Collective Smovka - North Macedonia: Manifesto of the Anarchist Collective Smokva

 

at 12/5/25 11:50am

Author: Anarchist Collective SmovkaTitle: North Macedonia: Manifesto of the Anarchist Collective SmokvaDate: October 15, 2025Notes: Instagram Link: https://www.instagram.com/ak_smokva/ This text was translated from Greek to English.Source: Retrieved on December 5th, 2025 from https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1638022/ The Anarchist Collective Smokva (lit. "Fig") is a group of people who gathered with a strong will for a space that's social, political, and friendly, as well as a more humane model of living. Driven by the desire for mutual aid, horizontal friendship, and direct action, we have gathered, not to represent, but to act; not to talk in someone else's name, but to talk together; not to imitate what exists, but to experiment and create possibilities. We live in systems that feed on war and alienation, while the politicians offer empty promises. We live in the midst of stacked debris, which still pretends to be a form of order. Around us, the old systems of power, capitalist, as well as patriarchal and imperialistic, keep reproducing themselves, unable to exist without war, alienation, theft, and despair. We see how every progress in gender equality is being diminished, we see our friends from the multitude of sexual freedoms being pushed to the margins, we see the air we breathe is getting poisoned by pollution, we see how the mere survival echoes like an impossible future, while the streets are plastered with the excrement of infinite consumption. To this, we answer with an experimental action, creating new forms of togetherness. Solidarity and friendship are not merely slogans for us - they are an everyday practice: in the decisions we make together, in the meals we share, in the care we give to one another, and to the streets that we are taking back. We believe in friendship without roles and equality without masters. We reject the delusions of representative democracy and its hierarchies. Freedom is not delegated, and equality lives in diversity, not in similitude. Smokva is a constellation of friendships and experiments, imperfect, fluid, and alive. A symbol of life that grows, branched and free, a try for peace in an unpeaceful world, that grows between what is, and what could be.

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— Robert Hough - Modern-day anarchism isn’t what it used to be

 

at 12/5/25 11:31am

Author: Robert HoughTitle: Modern-day anarchism isn’t what it used to beDate: November 1, 2025Notes: Original source (paywalled): https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-modern-day-anarchism-isnt-what-it-used-to-be/ Robert Hough’s most recent novel is Anarchists in Love.Source: Retrieved on December 3rd from https://anarchistnews.org/content/modern-day-anarchism-isnt-what-it-used-be One thing I’ve found about being a novelist is that the profession, while gluing you to a chair for the majority of your life, can also, on occasion, place you in unusual situations. Case in point: In September I published a novel which dramatizes anarchist Emma Goldman’s plot to assassinate the Gilded Age industrialist Henry C. Frick, a mission she undertook with her lifelong companion, a fellow revolutionary named Alexander Berkman. As such, I recently found myself with a table at an event called the Hamilton Anarchist Bookfair, which is held every September at the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre, a beautiful stone building from the mid-1800s that has hosted worker and union-related events since 1996. It was a beautiful fall morning, and I left downtown Toronto with my wife, who had charitably agreed to sell copies at the event, thus freeing me up to do some reporting. We arrived right at the start time of 10 a.m. Already the place was bustling. After checking in, I was given a table in a corner next to a vendor named Francois, who introduced himself as being a ‘distro.’ This, I learned, was short for distributor: He sat behind a table covered in anarchist-themed zines, all of which were produced by other people. “I’ve been selling zines for 25 years,” he told me. “And I’ve never made one myself.” After perusing his wares, I picked up a 12-page, photocopied publication from 2024 called The Third Rail; Criminals and Collaborators in the Time of Genocide. On the cover was a picture of a grinning Joe Biden, who, in the interior pages, was referred to as “Genocide Joe, U.S. Puppet-in-Chief.” I gave Francois $5 for the issue. “Oh good,” he said. “My first sale of the day.” I then left my table, where my wife was struggling to mount an Anarchists in Love foam-core poster on a malfunctioning easel I’d bought the day before at Midoco, and walked around the salon. After a bit of hunting, I found the event’s principal organizer; he was sitting in the opposite corner of the room, next to a display of T-shirts. I’ll call him “Jason” – he asked that I not use his real name, as he felt that police infiltration was a problem in anarchist circles. This surprised me: None of the people in the room, save for one young man who was walking around in a flak jacket, black mask and tinted glasses, looked at all dangerous. Then again, following the Anarchist Bookfair in 2018, a spree of petty vandalism did prompt the mayor of Hamilton to briefly outlaw the public display of Circle-A insignias in the city. It was also true that, in another zine I bought that day, a publication called Azimut, there was a list of direct-strike actions perpetrated in Canada over the past year. Mostly, these involved setting parked Teslas on fire. “Emma Goldman was very aligned with the trade union movement,” Jason told me. “The modern anarchist is a bit different. Basically, anarchism went away for quite a while. But in the nineties, it re-emerged in various subcultures, the most notable being the punk and zine cultures. Today, anarchism isn’t just one thing. It’s expressed by people with different goals and aims – it’s more that they’re united by the same anarchist sensibility.” I started roaming the various tables, looking at books, zines and artwork. As Jason had promised, I was met with a potpourri of concerns. There were prison abolitionists (i.e. Rattling the Cages) and their close cousins, the police abolitionists (We All Hate the Police). There were numerous environmental zines (Anarchist Ecology) and there were punk publications (Hamilton Punk History) though not nearly as many as I thought there would be, given I heard many times that day that punk rock was all but single-handedly responsible for reviving anarchism in North America. There were LGBTQ titles (Trans-Gender Revolution), anti-psychiatry titles (Madness, Disability and Abolition), pro-Palestine titles (No State Solution; On Social War, Israel and The Alibi of the States), and revolutionary economics (To Rob a Bank is an Honor). Finally, there were the outliers: I flipped, fascinated, through the pages of Fascist Yoga, A People’s History of Tennis and Occult Features of Anarchism. If I was understanding correctly, an abiding interest in environmentalism, queer rights or prison abolition did not, in of itself, make you an anarchist. Yet if you pursued these movements with an anarchist characteristic, then you were in the club – as Francois told me, “my anarchism is more of a political aesthetic than anything else.” Unlike in Emma Goldman’s days, when anarchism had a strict rule book, modern-day anarchism was more of a tone, a contour, a sensibility. Intending to figure out what that sensibility actually was, I headed into my third workshop of the day, a lecture entitled Anarchism 101. I should mention that I had not fared well in my first two workshops, both of which had been held in a stuffy, smallish room next to the main exhibitor salon. The first, entitled The Coming Climate Catastrophe, was presented by a pair of environmental researchers who, given the number of graphs and tables they had loaded onto their laptop, seemed to know everything there was to know about planetary degradation. I lasted about 20 minutes, at which point I was feeling too terrified to stay any longer. The second was called Introduction to Insurrectionary Anarchism. I had high hopes for this one, insurrection being the most controversial, not to mention seductive, aspect of anarchism. Again, I didn’t last. There’s a distinctly intellectual vein running through anarchism, and at times the presenter, who was fond of words like “conflictuality,” sounded more like a PhD candidate in semiotics than a streetwise revolutionary. ...

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— J.G.J - An Afro-Nihilist Manifesto

 

at 12/5/25 5:21am

Author: J.G.JTitle: An Afro-Nihilist ManifestoNotes: Published by Little Black Cart.Source: <www.ananarchistcalledmutt.noblogs.org/post/2024/12/01/j-g-js-afro-nihilist-manifesto/> I am NEVER a fucking “African-American”! I am NOT “half-Black.” I am a mulatto, but I am ALWAYS Black. I am, sometimes, a Negro. I am usually a nigger... I am usually a “nigger.” I am usually a n**ger. I am usually an (”)N-word(”). Now that THAT’s out of the way… This compendium is in memorium of my brother, Chris Monfort. Though he might not fuck with a lot of this, he would die for my “right” to write it. Plus, he’d appreciate that I “had the balls” to do so… I dedicate this to Franklin “Hogg” Hargus (and his cocksucker). Thank you both for the wisdom and inspiration… An AfroNihilists Libation… I play the Sims, but only Cleo, cuz I wanna set it off... or do the right thing like Mookie and Smiley. I wanna pirate, like a Somali, On the wide Sargasso sea and free every Sally Hemmings. Squat like Ellison’s pre-”Ex-Worker” and be too “G” to need even a name… I am a sick nigga, I am a spiteful nigga, an unpleasing nigger. No more balling like a quadroon, This mulatto is bringing tragedy like a mix of Bigger Thomas and Val Solanis Lighting up August worse than Joe Christmas, in way to put Jimmy Governor to shame… If only other edgelords (of ego addiction and ought-istic affliction) would listen to Zami’s biomythography in lieu of playing into horseshoe theory with hand grenades! I, too, sought the wild by way of the rational Mama “Bone Black” bell may be the diagnostician of their dissonant cognition but Dr. Frantz Fanon deposed Francois de Sade and can cure the caucazoid infection... A daywalking vampire with descent of both Yakub and Khmet my “Immersion-Emersion” should be icy and bloody avenging Saartjie Baartman as would Saidiya Hartman if she, and Wilderson Three, had resisted domestication... Eshu, help me eschew my melanincholia! Let shattered museum glass be my cast cowries... Make me the “abasom” of the Ewe. Dumpster-diving at Akodessewa An ancient adze finds my hand, and I go from Gongoli to Kakuungu (witch doctoring my own Nguzo Sab-bath I take things apart like Okonkwo) So, for Benin and Togo, I do the whole Voodoo Doughnuts crew Like Washington in Waco, circa 1916, They should have asked Ogun about irony, because immolation is the sincerest form of flattery. Shango Unchained is playing in my brain Like Mancala between Marighella and Gerima “Tarantino in the Congo” will be shot, guerilla-style... Shanghai-ed, Dago Dubya Griffith will die in a Coltan mine and the card attached would say “dead wigger storage.” Kunta the hack’s foot off, wrap it in kente cloth, A fetish object fashioned for every Lupita Nyong’o to ward off all the rapey Weinsteins and that one wop hipster (“in ten-thousand”)... May Anarcha’s pain come to Spokane No anesthetic for she of the NAACP since Blackness is but an aesthetic... Dolezal will get paid the same as Korryn Gaines, with a speculum (to take Amadou’s name out her mouth)... Even in a cage, no book deals or box-braids, she’d have Hughes’ poetry and Mandingo fantasies I’d rather kill this mockingbird... She sings too fucking much. My Maafa legacy is reverse missionary, Anansi’s oral theology of anti-prosperity in riotous tribute to Marsha P. Scott D. will see how bomb his church can be and a lot less Lively in the process. Still I weep for the four on 16th street But with the blues and caprice of John Allen and John Lee So I jazz things up with coal trains, in the style of 103 at Lockerbie, and improvise like Coleman (both Alton AND Ornette). I’ll bless the rain like MOVE’s Africas If encaged for burning hippies as at Osage.... Like Ganja (too free for Hess Green), Gravediggaz got a number I can call When the Dr. Know to make track 8 on H.R.‘s “Yellow Tape” Not a song but a prescription, so... In ode to Joy DeGruy (of Ever-Present Anger) and guided by the Cosmos (especially Setepenra) we gather wild Afrikan roots from house to field, with an “X” (a la Malcolm and Micah Johnson) to Mark Essex the spot. Showing Love(lle Mixon) and (Maurce) Clemmons-y to my enemy, I follow the Gospel according to Christopher (Monfort AND Dorner, as Karma for Columbus)... My clip is a tongue to speak my oppressor into oblivion, in hollow-pointed words, 9mm at a time, one shot, (one kill) DO not miss your chance to blow every latter-day Elvis away (it’s only culturally appropriate) Bag some cracker begpackers and McYoga vultures, Bobos in condos can go the way of the Cali condor (but never to recover). Do Liberal do-gooders in the NPIC like Kuwasi B. did the Klan and Nazis... Let every honky be exterminated accordingly. If the Jackson’s repped R and B less than the G, Both Igbo tradition AND Marxist contradiction George and Jon of the BPP might be Communists Tending Toward the Wild... But fuck “if,” and “maybe,” Turner, Vesey and the debtor inheritors of Toussaint’s Ayiti couldn’t know victory pre-CCTV in the iPhone Galaxy. In DuVernay’s USA, every Friday is the 13th, in Quilombos of concrete, so... Why not go Boko Haram? My bastardization of divination ends here, ...

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— Anonymous - GHOST

 

at 12/5/25 2:35am

Author: AnonymousTitle: GHOSTSubtitle: An Anarchist’s Guide for Digital DisappearanceDate: December 4, 2025Source: Retrieved on December 5th, from https://anarchistnews.org/content/ghost-anarchists-guide-digital-disappearance-anonymous INTRODUCTION Some time ago, a friend of mine sent me a document called Digital Safety Tips for Organizers: Online Privacy Checklist to look over. I thought it was great and brought up a lot of important points regarding maintaining privacy if involved in activist activities. However, it inspired me to create more thorough documentation for individuals seeking to use technology as a tool for organization and direct action. With broader knowledge and application of digital self-defense, the tactics outlined here can be especially effective against the known capabilities of the current presidential administration and their goals. After all, who’s to say what strategies they will deploy to defeat “the opposition?” We’ve already seen some terrifying actions on this front, and, in my opinion, it’s best to be over-prepared. Some of these suggestions may seem highly technical for the inexperienced individual, and therefore may present a bit of a learning curve. They may also seem like overkill or inconvenient. But I promise you, when it comes to the many ways an individual can be tracked and subsequently doxxed and/or investigated and arrested, it is worth it to take the time to learn and employ these tactics. Depending on the actions taken, whether by an organization, collective, or otherwise anonymous individuals, one misstep can mean the end for you, and potentially your comrades, at the hands of law enforcement or some right-wing lunatic (if you can even tell the difference between the two). Please note that this is not an attempt at fear-mongering, but to prepare you and fortify your digital OpSec. Because of the various skill levels among individuals, if any of these steps prove to be too difficult for you to safely employ, consider contacting a trusted and technologically-inclined comrade to assist you. If you are uncomfortable with the technicality of the outlined steps, it is probably best you do not approach anything like hacking, as you’re more likely to make missteps. But it is still important that you secure your online privacy. Approach the learning process with an open mind, and you’ll solidify a lot of useful knowledge that can be applied in various ways to maintain privacy and security in your online life, and will put you in a position where you can more easily keep up with changes in the digital landscape. As always, assess your threat model and make decisions based on that. (Threat modeling is beyond the scope of this document but can be learned about through the No Trace Project). Additionally, this document will cover the tech aspects of operational security and won’t go very far into detail about correlation attacks and stylometry attacks (the former of which is when your usage of anonymous online activity is cross-referenced with your mobile device and other online activities, like using TailsOS to send out communiques and immediately shutting down your computer and going to the mall. The latter is analysis of your unique pattern of expression, like the way you usually communicate online [see: Who Wrote That? A zine by Zundlumpen #76]). TAKE STOCK OF YOUR ONLINE PRESENCE • Have you been pwned? You can run your accounts through HaveIBeenPwned.com to see if your credentials have been included in any data leaks. Obviously, if they have, change your passwords immediately. It is best to use a secure password manager with a password generator built in so you can generate a strong password that you don’t have to remember. There is a Linux command line tool called Breach-Parse that can be a bit more thorough when hunting for your own breached credentials. Instructions for installation and usage can be found at github.com/hmaverickadams/breach-parse As you can imagine, having breached credentials floating around in database dumps is very dangerous, especially if you’re communicating with others about your activist activities. • Don’t be a victim of open-source intelligence Google yourself and take note of what you find about yourself through these searches. Is your address, phone number, email, etc, appearing in publicly available databases? Chances are if you’ve ever ordered anything online or signed up for a mailing list or put personal information literally anywhere on the internet, these things are out there for anyone to find either for free or for a very cheap price. The Data Removal Workbook from IntelTechniques is a very useful tool toward the end of erasing yourself from the internet. However, you are likely in thousands and thousands of these websites. So it is faster and easier to use a service like Incogni or DeleteMe to achieve this. It costs money, and if you can afford to pay their monthly fee, it is absolutely worth it. If you find yourself unable to squeeze out the extra cash for these services, do NOT skip this step. Just do the work to remove your info from data broker sites. • Delete your Facebook (and Instagram and Snapchat and Threads and on and on) Are you using social media? Is it necessary that you use social media? Think of social media as a database of your personal information and behavior patterns. A determined adversary with a lot of resources can identify you just based on the way you casually communicate with others in the comments section or through your history of posts. You could also be publishing personally-identifying information without even realizing it. ...

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As of 12/14/25 3:48am. Last new 12/10/25 9:46pm.