Crooked Bough News Round-up

— Courtney Desiree Morris - Why Misogynists Make Great Informants

 

at 11/5/26 11:42pm

Author: Courtney Desiree MorrisTitle: Why Misogynists Make Great InformantsSubtitle: How Gender Violence on the Left Enables State Violence in Radical MovementsSource: Retrieved on February 10, 2019 from https://ia902605.us.archive.org/17/items/WhyMisogynistsMakeGreatInformants/misogynists_great_informants.pdf In January 2009, activists in Austin, Texas, learned that one of their own, a white activist named Brandon Darby, had infiltrated groups protesting the Republican National Convention (RNC) as an FBI informant. Darby later admitted to wearing recording devices at planning meetings and during the convention. He testified on behalf of the government in the February 2009 trial of two Texas activists who were arrested at the RNC on charges of making and possessing Molotov cocktails, after Darby encouraged them to do so. The two young men, David McKay and Bradley Crowder, each faced up to fifteen years in prison. Crowder accepted a plea bargain to serve three years in a federal prison; under pressure from federal prosecutors, McKay also pled guilty to being in possession of “unregistered Molotov cocktails” and was sentenced to four years in prison. Information gathered by Darby may also have contributed to the case against the RNC 8, activists from around the country charged with “conspiracy to riot and conspiracy to damage property in the furtherance of terrorism.” Austin activists were particularly stunned by the revelation that Darby had served as an informant because he had been a part of various leftist projects and was a leader at Common Ground Relief, a New Orleans–based organization committed to meeting the short-term needs of community members displaced by natural disasters in the Gulf Coast region and dedicated to rebuilding the region and ensuring Katrina evacuees’ right to return. I was surprised but not shocked by this news. I had learned as an undergrad at the University of Texas that the campus police department routinely placed plainclothes police officers in the meetings of radical student groups—you know, just to keep an eye on them. That was in fall 2001. We saw the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, watched a cowboy president wage war on terror, and, in the middle of it all, tried to figure out what we could do to challenge the fascist state transformations taking place before our eyes. At the time, however, it seemed silly that there were cops in our meetings—we weren’t the Panthers or the Brown Berets or even some of the rowdier direct-action anti-globalization activists on campus (although we admired them all); we were just young people who didn’t believe war was the best response to the 9/11 attacks. But it wasn’t silly; the FBI does not dismiss political work. Any organization, be it large or small, can provoke the scrutiny of the state. Perhaps your organization poses a large threat, or maybe you’re small now but one day you’ll grow up and be too big to rein in. The state usually opts to kill the movement before it grows. And informants and provocateurs are the state’s hired gunmen. Government agencies pick people that no one will notice. Often it’s impossible to prove that they’re informants because they appear to be completely dedicated to social justice. They establish intimate relationships with activists, becoming friends and lovers, often serving in leadership roles in organizations. A cursory reading of the literature on social movements and organizations in the 1960s and 1970s reveals this fact. The leadership of the American Indian Movement was rife with informants; it is suspected that informants were also largely responsible for the downfall of the Black Panther Party, and the same can be surmised about the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Not surprisingly, these movements that were toppled by informants and provocateurs were also sites where women and queer activists often experienced intense gender violence, as the autobiographies of activists such as Assata Shakur, Elaine Brown, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz demonstrate. Maybe it isn’t that informants are difficult to spot but rather that we have collectively ignored the signs that give them away. To save our movements, we need to come to terms with the connections between gender violence, male privilege, and the strategies that informants (and people who just act like them) use to destabilize radical movements. Time and again heterosexual men in radical movements have been allowed to assert their privilege and subordinate others. Despite all that we say to the contrary, the fact is that radical social movements and organizations in the United States have refused to seriously address gender violence [1] as a threat to the survival of our struggles. We’ve treated misogyny, homophobia, and heterosexism as lesser evils—secondary issues—that will eventually take care of themselves or fade into the background once the “real” issues—racism, the police, class inequality, U.S. wars of aggression—are resolved. There are serious consequences for choosing ignorance. Misogyny and homophobia are central to the reproduction of violence in radical activist communities. Scratch a misogynist and you’ll find a homophobe. Scratch a little deeper and you might find the makings of a future informant (or someone who just destabilizes movements like informants do). ...

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— Lilia Folt - On Anti-Surveillance Mindfulness

 

at 11/5/26 11:38pm

Author: Lilia FoltTitle: On Anti-Surveillance MindfulnessDate: September 27th, 2026Notes: Originally published in Dissonant Times, a grassroots journalism and counter-info project from the Willamette Valley of Oregon.Source: Dissonant Times, Retrieved on 11/5/2026 from https://dissonanttimes.org/anarchic-reflections-on-anti-surveillance-mindfulness/ Surveillance has become a ubiquitous feature of everyday life in America. Cameras watch us from businesses and homes, from bus stops, from cars, from traffic lights. Bluetooth trackers ping our smartphones as we pass by, mapping our movements. The phones themselves illuminate our paths through society by continuously pinging cell towers, providing our cell providers our location data, information that is only a subpoena away, if that. In countless ways, we’ve been made to both passively accept and actively participate in our own surveillance. This vast complex of surveillance doesn’t just gather information about us, it also shapes our behaviors, temperaments, and ways of moving through the world. Surveillance molds us down to the level of subjective, sensory, embodied experience. At that same level we can begin to shake off its hold on us and reclaim ourselves. For that, I am offering a practice I’m calling “anti-surveillance mindfulness,” a form of walking meditation that builds mindful awareness of surveillance cameras. This practice, if taken up consistently, opens onto a broader project of transforming our relationship to the places we live in, a project that itself naturally blossoms into materially transforming public space, as self expands to world in the moment-by-moment practice of mindfulness. Anti-Surveillance Mindfulness Readers may or may not be familiar with the Panopticon. Designed by 18th century English liberal Jeremy Bentham, the Panopticon was a model for an institutional building designed so that a single prison guard can watch all the inmates from a central watch tower. The inmates, meanwhile, cannot tell whether or not they are being watched, and therefore could be watched at any moment. To quote Bentham: The more constantly the persons to be inspected are under the eyes of the persons who should inspect them, the more perfectly will the purpose of the establishment have been attained. (...) This being impossible, the next thing to be wished for is, that, at every instant, seeing reason to believe as much, and not being able to satisfy himself to the contrary, he should conceive himself to be so. A lot has changed since the 1700’s, but the disciplinary paradigm of surveillance has remained the same. If anything, it has expanded beyond specific institutions to encompass much of society. There are cameras everywhere, and we are being watched, and while we are aware of this, we tend to see it as normal and unremarkable, an inevitability we must resign ourselves to. Consciousness of being surveilled fades into the background, becoming a constant assumption of being watched that we internalize. This surveillance consciousness is running us all the more effectively because it is not distinct, because it is unconscious. That is why the first step in anti-surveillance mindfulness is becoming conscious of surveillance. Mindfulness is at the same time a means and an end, the seed and the fruit. When we practice mindfulness in order to build up concentration, mindfulness is a seed. But mindfulness itself is the life of awareness: the presence of mindfulness means the presence of life, and therefore mindfulness is also the fruit. — Thích Nhất Hạnh, The Miracle of Mindfulness “Mindfulness” is a practice originating in various sects of Buddhism. The mindfulness practices and concepts I’m familiar with have largely been within the school of Zen Buddhism[1]. The classic mindfulness practice is watching the breath, and that is a great starting point. Take a breath in, the air entering through your nose, your stomach and chest softly expanding as you inhale. Then exhale through the mouth, the stomach and chest settling back down, gently exhaling for a little longer than your inhale. Repeat this several times, deepening your breaths slightly. From there, start to check in with your body. Notice how it feels to be sitting down, or to be standing if you are standing; notice how it feels to be holding this piece of paper, holding your phone, or looking at your computer, however it is that you are reading this. The practice I am calling “anti-surveillance mindfulness” is a walking meditation, or a meditation performed however it is you get around. While walking or rolling on the sidewalk, first get in touch with your breath, as above. Then, begin to notice your surroundings: the buildings, the sky, the trees, the people, the sounds. Make note of the cameras that you see while walking around, on businesses, or Ring cameras on houses, cameras too on bus stops. Tesla cars all have cameras. Look at what angles these cameras are pointed in, if you can figure out where they’re pointing—on some of the dome-shaped cameras, this isn’t clear. Notice when you are in view of these various cameras; notice when you are not in view of cameras. With this practice, surveillance goes from being a taken-for-granted, constant background of your subjectivity, to a distinct phenomenon that you are consciously aware of. When it fades into the background, it becomes a part of you—putting it into your conscious awareness makes it once again separate from you and your being. ...

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— K. C. Sinclair - Proudhon, Slavery, and the American Civil War

 

at 11/5/26 11:37pm

Author: K. C. SinclairTitle: Proudhon, Slavery, and the American Civil WarDate: November 2026Source: Retrieved on November 5, 2026 from historykeepshappening.wordpress.com In a passing remark made by the renowned historian of anarchism, Paul Avrich, in his 1988 book, Anarchist Portraits (pg.20), we are told that the infamous French anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, did not support the side of the North (otherwise known as the Union) in the American Civil War. Avrich, uncharacteristically, provided no source for this, as if it was already common knowledge, neglecting to clarify whether Proudhon opposed both sides of the war, or perhaps worse, supported the South. He also left us hanging as to whether he’d gleaned this information from Proudhon’s own words in French, from secondary sources in English, or from both. Not much of Proudhon’s work had been translated into English at the time, but perhaps Avrich accessed the French documentation. The subject in the chapter in question was not Proudhon but instead a passionate supporter of the North, the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, and Proudhon was only mentioned as a point of contrast, so perhaps this is the simplest explanation for Avrich’s failure to provide a citation. Whether Avrich knew it or not, the subject of Proudhon’s position on the war had already been addressed by the presumably non-anarchist musician and writer, Thomas A. Sancton, in his 1979 academic journal article, The Myth of French Worker Support for the North in the American Civil War. Decades later, in 2021, Sancton greatly expanded that article with his book, Sweet Land of Liberty: America in the Mind of the French Left, 1848-1871. In the 1979 article, Sancton referenced both published works and private letters of Proudhon’s in order to show that if the French anarchist had opposed both sides of the war, for different reasons, he still more strongly opposed the North than the South. Sancton, unfortunately quoted Proudhon out of chronological order and without translation, so I have rearranged and translated those quotes for the purposes of this article. Proudhon, in a September 1862 letter to Gustave Chaudey asked, “we have no faith in the North’s philanthropy; we do not accept that the Federal Constitution prevents secession; …. what’s more, the forces of the North are suffering one setback after another; England, Belgium, and France — consumed by poverty — call for cotton; and if the imperial [French] government, by a stroke of good luck links the two issues of Mexico and the Confederates, restoring relations between Europe and New Orleans, will you still attack it on that front?” Proudhon refers here to the Second Franco-Mexican War. Imperialist France had invaded Mexico in early 1862, a few months after the American Civil War began. Sancton doesn’t provide his own analysis of this particular quote beyond noting that it proves that Proudhon’s anti-Yankee sentiment was not isolated to his published works. But, for our part, we can note that Proudhon, for an anarchist, sounds oddly defensive about both the government of the American secessionists and that of his own French Empire, particularly given that the defense of slavery was very much the South’s reason for seccession. Proudhon, in a letter to (Lucien?) Jottrand in October of 1864, wrote, “I am not, I admit, a friend of the Anglo-Saxons, and I believe that few people are fond of them. Also, I deplored the policy of our emperor, who could have, if he had wanted… obtained from the South the promise of emancipation for the blacks, and intervening then as an interested party in the present war, would have, at the time I am writing to you, brought those in the North to their senses.” Again, Sancton does not comment on the specifics of Proudhon’s words here, only elaborating to the extent of pointing out that Proudhon had some influence on the French labour movement, even if he was not its official spokesman. We, on the other hand, can note that Proudhon’s opposition to the North is clearly stronger than his opposition to the South, and that he was strangely naive about the South’s willingness to part with slavery. In his 1865 book, On the Political Capacity of the Working Classes, Proudhon even commented publicly on the war. Sancton uses an extended quotation from that book, the translation here being taken from the one done by Shawn P. Wilbur, while the truncations are Sancton’s. “As I write,” Proudhon explained, “[…] the United States of the North also claims to retain in the Union, by force, the United States of the South, calling them traitors and rebels, neither more nor less than if the old Union were a monarchy and Mr. Lincoln an emperor. It is clear, however […] leaving aside the question of slavery, the war waged against the South by the North is unjust […] in which case the Americans will do well to erase from their platforms in the future the words of political liberty, republic, democracy, confederation and even Union. Already they are beginning to deny on the other side of the Atlantic the rights of States, which means the federative principle […]” Once more, Sancton provides no commentary, but we can see that Proudhon’s naivety reached truly astonishing heights as he preposterously abstracted away from the question of slavery and even accused the North of having started the war, despite the South having both seceded and fired first, and the North not making moves to abolish slavery until the war was well underway. Incredibly, in Proudhon’s formulation, states’ rights and the abstract federative principle take precedence over the rights of enslaved people. Naturally, he does not even bother trying to explain how a people can properly exercise their right to federation while still being enslaved by others. ...

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— anonymous - Adventures in the Terrible Beauty of Resistance

 

at 11/5/26 11:34pm

Author: anonymousTitle: Adventures in the Terrible Beauty of ResistanceSubtitle: An interview by Millennials are Killing CapitalismDate: 29/09/2026Source: https://millennialsarekillingcapitalism.libsyn.com/adventures-in-the-terrible-beauty-of-resistance-with-the-death-to-toll-campaign Welcome to Millennials Are Killing Capitalism. This is Jay. In this episode we had the rare opportunity to interview a spokesperson from a direct action group that has targeted Toll Holdings, in australia. The campaign has engaged in a range of sabotage, vandalism, and disruptive actions, including sledgehammering windows, cutting internet cables, blockading roads and in an international port entrance, they have also slashed lines and cut valves to disable vehicles, covered facilities inside and out with paint and foul liquids, and sabotaged infrastructure such as signal boxes used by Toll. In this discussion we asked them about the development of the antizionist movement in australia after October 7th 2023, and asked about how their group settled on its target, prepared their campaign, and selected the tactics they wanted to use in it. As our guest raises the spirit of adventure they see as necessary to take meaningful direct action to confront the genocidal war machine, I also asked them what they think about allegations of adventurism that can be levied from the left at those who take such action. Because this campaign is heavily under threat by the State, we agreed to some additional security measures in this conversation. The voice you hear is not the actual voice of the person we interviewed; the original interview was transcribed and then converted to audio using text-to-voice generator. Just as an editorial disclaimer from me amid heightened attacks on various forms of speech, I just want to say as a platform we are not advocating that people engage in any form of illegal activity. Having said that we do understand the greatest crime that humanity has recognized, the crime of genocide, is still ongoing. There are moral, ethical, and even legal imperatives that people are engaging in order to try to stop that crime from continuing to unfold. This interview is to hear from those who are taking direct action to hold genocide and War crimes. These actions have been threatened with severe repression, and many who take these forms of action do face repression. We see it as a journalistic responsibility to ensure that people hear from those who are willing to take action to stop genocide. We know that their voices will be marginalized by most media platforms out there. It is also very important that people show up and support political prisoners if we are ever to build a movement that is capable of confronting the machinery of genocide and imperialism. We will include links to the Death to Toll campaign website, and other interviews with their spokespeople in the show description. First of all welcome to Millennials are Killing Capitalism, it’s great that we are able to do this interview to talk about the work that you’re doing in so-called australia, or that region in the world. It’s not an area that we get to cover as often as we should, and that’s typical of us US-brained people that you know, we tend to be quite US-centric. Or maybe focusing on areas like Palestine, and Iran, and Lebanon, where we’ve seen some of the hot elements of this war in its most direct forms. But we do want to highlight different ways that people in different places are resisting the genocide of Palestinians, and this broader campaign to undermine the sovereignty of the entire West Asian region as we see it. And your campaign is one that was brought to my attention by some friends of the platform. And it’s really important that people are able to hear from you. A: Thanks so much. Really happy to be here. So to start, could you talk a little bit about the anti-zionist or pro-Palestine movement in so-called australia. Obviously I’m saying so-called because like the United States, Australia is another settler colony historically. Give me some of the lay of the land, what that has looked like over the last however many years you want — and share what inspired this campaign we are discussing today. A: Yeah, so there’s obviously been activism in solidarity with Palestine for a long time in Australia, but I would say that post-Al Aqsa Flood, there was this moment of intensity where, for a minute, it felt like everything changed. And it felt like things had changed in a bad way because of the horror of the genocide and the urgency that that engendered. But I think that one thing that also changed was the sense that, like, honour and agency had been returned to colonized people, in a way. You’d be familiar with the sort of humanitarian thing of like, all these poor people, they’re suffering but the idea of colonized people fighting back. Of colonizers running for their lives. And of the possibilities of what this world can look like just being blown open, like, suddenly I felt and I think many others felt that this was something which was opened up by Al Aqsa Flood. And of course, when possibilities are opened up, you know, the possibility of resistance is opened up. And then at the same time, where you have resistance you have counter-insurgency. ...

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— Ernesto Castro - We Have Confused Thinking with Certificates of Belonging Long Enough

 

at 11/5/26 3:52am

Author: Ernesto CastroTitle: We Have Confused Thinking with Certificates of Belonging Long EnoughSubtitle: An interview with the Spanish philosopher Ernesto CastroSource: Retrieved on 2026-11-05 from <mowmag.com/attualita/-nei-vetri-rotti-non-c-e-nessun-significato-politico-intervista-totale-a-ernesto-castro-la-star-della-filosofia-mai-tradotta-in-italia-citare-sorel-o-benjamin-non-trasforma-un-incendio-in-una-tesi-di-dottorato> Introduction In Spain, Ernesto Castro is something of an anomaly: an academic philosopher who fills lecture halls, who has turned his classes into one of the most-watched philosophy channels in the Spanish-speaking world, and who despite this (or perhaps because of it) remains wary of his own popularity. Born in Madrid in 1990, he teaches Aesthetics at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where for years he has been building a philosophical system of his own, which he has named “generic naturalism.” He has not yet been translated into Italian, and that gap is worth filling. His bibliography has a range that in Italy would seem almost suspicious. There are books of ontology, such as Realismo poscontinental, in which he tries to end the old trench war between analytic and continental philosophy. There is El trap. Filosofía millennial para la crisis en España (2019), which used a musical genre despised by highbrow critics to read the forms of life, desires and contradictions of the generation that grew up inside the 2008 crisis. There are the political essays, from Ética, estética y política. Ensayos (y errores) de un metaindignado (2020) to Memorias y libelos del 15M, an unsparing reckoning with a movement Castro lived from the inside, at twenty, in the squares of the indignados. And there is a Platonic trilogy of philosophical novels, opened by Jantipa o Del morir (2022) and continued with Perictione o De la libertad (2023), an epistolary novel set in Paris in 1968. Why talk about him now, and why in Italy? Because the squares are full again. From France to Spain, from Portugal to Belgium and all the way to Milan, a new wave of protest, driven by the cost of living, low wages and the housing crisis, has brought back onto the streets a generation that waves One Piece flags alongside red and Palestinian ones, that is rediscovering the communist vocabulary, and that at the same time lives in countries where the ballot box rewards the radical right. Castro is one of the few European thinkers who has already been through all of this: he has watched a street movement be born, become a party, enter institutions and disappoint many of its promises. He talks about it without nostalgia and without cynicism, and with a quality rare in public debate: a willingness to contradict even those who consider him one of their own. There is also a more intimate, distinctly Italian reason. The radical thought our struggles produced, from Tronti’s operaismo to Negri’s autonomism, has been read, debated and often mythologized elsewhere. Hearing how it is judged by a Spanish philosopher trained on Manuel Sacristán, one who refuses to “inherit the obligation to always prove it right,” is a good way of looking at ourselves in the mirror. The answers that follow are an exercise in what Castro calls the training of attention, as opposed to the management of indignation: drawing distinctions where everyone else generalizes, and thinking precisely when it would be most comfortable to stop. The Interview 1. From 15M to 2026. You took part in the indignados movement and wrote about it in Memorias y libelos del 15M. Today protests have spread to France, Italy, Belgium, Portugal and Spain, driven by the cost of living, low wages and the housing crisis. Is this a return of 15M or something different? And what should these squares learn from 15M’s passage from the street to the institutions, with its promises and its disappointments? It’s best not to turn 15M into a generic name for any discontent that takes to the streets. I took part in it at twenty, and precisely for that reason I distrust its retrospective canonization. The most valuable thing about those squares was that you could argue with someone who didn’t share your premises and leave the conversation thinking something else. When a movement turns into an identity to be defended, that possibility begins to disappear. We had come together to talk, and we ended up fighting over who got to speak on behalf of everyone. Nor do I accept, just like that, on trust, that Podemos was 15M come of age. Assembly democracy and electoral competition follow different logics. Many demands for institutional transformation were lost along the way, while the initial plurality narrowed until it became a new division into friends and enemies. We left the two-party system without leaving binary thinking. To today’s protests I would say: don’t confuse the success of your spokespeople with the satisfaction of your demands. That someone moves from the banner to the parliamentary seat may be wonderful for their CV. For those who still can’t pay the rent, it all remains to be proven. And I would also say: don’t turn defeat into a comfortable identity. Being right against the whole world is not the same as having changed something. 2. The aesthetics of protest. In El trap you read millennial precarity through a musical form. Today in Paris you see One Piece flags in the marches, next to red and Palestinian ones. Has pop culture become Gen Z’s political grammar? Is it a sign of powerlessness or a new form of collective imagination? ...

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— Leonardo Caffo - We Have Confused Thinking with Certificates of Belonging Long Enough

 

at 11/5/26 3:52am

Author: Leonardo CaffoTitle: We Have Confused Thinking with Certificates of Belonging Long EnoughSubtitle: An interview with the Spanish philosopher Ernesto CastroSource: Retrieved on 2026-11-05 from <mowmag.com/attualita/-nei-vetri-rotti-non-c-e-nessun-significato-politico-intervista-totale-a-ernesto-castro-la-star-della-filosofia-mai-tradotta-in-italia-citare-sorel-o-benjamin-non-trasforma-un-incendio-in-una-tesi-di-dottorato> Introduction In Spain, Ernesto Castro is something of an anomaly: an academic philosopher who fills lecture halls, who has turned his classes into one of the most-watched philosophy channels in the Spanish-speaking world, and who despite this (or perhaps because of it) remains wary of his own popularity. Born in Madrid in 1990, he teaches Aesthetics at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where for years he has been building a philosophical system of his own, which he has named “generic naturalism.” He has not yet been translated into Italian, and that gap is worth filling. His bibliography has a range that in Italy would seem almost suspicious. There are books of ontology, such as Realismo poscontinental, in which he tries to end the old trench war between analytic and continental philosophy. There is El trap. Filosofía millennial para la crisis en España (2019), which used a musical genre despised by highbrow critics to read the forms of life, desires and contradictions of the generation that grew up inside the 2008 crisis. There are the political essays, from Ética, estética y política. Ensayos (y errores) de un metaindignado (2020) to Memorias y libelos del 15M, an unsparing reckoning with a movement Castro lived from the inside, at twenty, in the squares of the indignados. And there is a Platonic trilogy of philosophical novels, opened by Jantipa o Del morir (2022) and continued with Perictione o De la libertad (2023), an epistolary novel set in Paris in 1968. Why talk about him now, and why in Italy? Because the squares are full again. From France to Spain, from Portugal to Belgium and all the way to Milan, a new wave of protest, driven by the cost of living, low wages and the housing crisis, has brought back onto the streets a generation that waves One Piece flags alongside red and Palestinian ones, that is rediscovering the communist vocabulary, and that at the same time lives in countries where the ballot box rewards the radical right. Castro is one of the few European thinkers who has already been through all of this: he has watched a street movement be born, become a party, enter institutions and disappoint many of its promises. He talks about it without nostalgia and without cynicism, and with a quality rare in public debate: a willingness to contradict even those who consider him one of their own. There is also a more intimate, distinctly Italian reason. The radical thought our struggles produced, from Tronti’s operaismo to Negri’s autonomism, has been read, debated and often mythologized elsewhere. Hearing how it is judged by a Spanish philosopher trained on Manuel Sacristán, one who refuses to “inherit the obligation to always prove it right,” is a good way of looking at ourselves in the mirror. The answers that follow are an exercise in what Castro calls the training of attention, as opposed to the management of indignation: drawing distinctions where everyone else generalizes, and thinking precisely when it would be most comfortable to stop. The Interview 1. From 15M to 2026. You took part in the indignados movement and wrote about it in Memorias y libelos del 15M. Today protests have spread to France, Italy, Belgium, Portugal and Spain, driven by the cost of living, low wages and the housing crisis. Is this a return of 15M or something different? And what should these squares learn from 15M’s passage from the street to the institutions, with its promises and its disappointments? It’s best not to turn 15M into a generic name for any discontent that takes to the streets. I took part in it at twenty, and precisely for that reason I distrust its retrospective canonization. The most valuable thing about those squares was that you could argue with someone who didn’t share your premises and leave the conversation thinking something else. When a movement turns into an identity to be defended, that possibility begins to disappear. We had come together to talk, and we ended up fighting over who got to speak on behalf of everyone. Nor do I accept, just like that, on trust, that Podemos was 15M come of age. Assembly democracy and electoral competition follow different logics. Many demands for institutional transformation were lost along the way, while the initial plurality narrowed until it became a new division into friends and enemies. We left the two-party system without leaving binary thinking. To today’s protests I would say: don’t confuse the success of your spokespeople with the satisfaction of your demands. That someone moves from the banner to the parliamentary seat may be wonderful for their CV. For those who still can’t pay the rent, it all remains to be proven. And I would also say: don’t turn defeat into a comfortable identity. Being right against the whole world is not the same as having changed something. 2. The aesthetics of protest. In El trap you read millennial precarity through a musical form. Today in Paris you see One Piece flags in the marches, next to red and Palestinian ones. Has pop culture become Gen Z’s political grammar? Is it a sign of powerlessness or a new form of collective imagination? ...

[Link to media]

— Lois Waisbrooker - A Sex Revolution

 

at 11/4/26 5:38pm

Author: Lois WaisbrookerTitle: A Sex RevolutionDate: 1894Notes: Second EditionSource: <http://www.pierssen.com/misc/treasures/asr.htm> Preface. Dear Reader:—The history of the past shows us that nations rise, go through a longer or shorter period of prosperity and then decay. The ruling motive in the life of nations, so far, has always been the same, the aggressive or masculine. Self-aggrandizement, our nation right or wrong, all to be laid upon the national altar in the name of patriotism, a centralizing of wealth and power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many, and the result has always been what? Go, gather together the human wrecks of any one nation and you have your answer. Now will not this latest and brightest of nations perish also unless methods are changed, unless the social lever is reversed? Already the seeds of decay are taking root; is there not some law through which we may take a new lease of life, and what is that law, if there be such, if it be not that “woman, take the lead?” True, woman is already quite prominent, is becoming more so, but she does not seem as yet to realize that with man’s methods she will succeed no better than man has done. She must formulate her own methods before her true work can appear. Woman must be free, must refuse to be led, must believe in herself, before the evils attendant upon imperfect motherhood can be eliminated, and as I see things, the only hope of our nation lies in this direction. Let us once rise above the necessity of armies, navies, prisons, almshouses, asylums, etc., then the future will stretch out before us with ever increasing brightness. The first step toward this desirable consummation is to believe that it can be done; the next is that it will be done, and lastly to determine to do it ourselves. L. W. Chapter I. First, a little something about myself. I, Margaret Mulgrove, am a childless widow. My husband, Richard Mulgrove, went into the Union army at the beginning of our last war and never came out alive. My only child, little Bessie, took the scarlet fever in the second year of my widowhood, and though employing the most skillful physician in the whole country around, I could not save her. To say that I was desolate does not begin to express the feeling I had. An aunt, my father’s only sister who lived in another State, hearing of my bereavement, decided to come and stay with me awhile and wrote me to that effect. Now my father and mother had in their lifetime (I forgot to say that I was an orphan also) had been good orthodox Christians and had brought me up to walk in the same path, so when Aunt Belinda wrote me she was coming I was a little troubled, for I had been told that she was an Infidel. I believed infidelity to be something awful, and as our community was a very respectable one, to have a woman of that character come among us, and as my relative was an affliction I had not counted on, but it could not be helped; aunt would be there the next day and I must make the best of it. So the next morning I went to work to put things in the best order possible to receive my expected relative. She came about ten o’clock, a pleasant faced, white haired lady toward whom my heart instinctively went out, and in spite of my prejudices I felt that I should love her. She stayed with me several months during which time nothing was said or done which brought up the subject of beliefs. True, I had purposely avoided everything that could lead in that direction, but she did not seem at all inclined to be aggressive. The Sunday, and in fact the day before she left, our minister’s sermon called out some remarks from her that surprised me very much. “Why aunt,” I exclaimed, “I thought you were an Infidel!” “And so I am to church theology.” “And yet you have just affirmed your belief in the underlying principle of all church theology.” “How is that?” she asked. “You said you believe in God manifest in the flesh.” “I said I believed God manifest in the flesh was necessary to the salvation of the race, but I did not say I believed it had already taken place.” “Not taken place! do you then look for a coming Christ?” The old lady smiled. “Before you can understand me,” she said, “you must learn that a narrow personal application of a general principle is, must be false. The universal spirit of life can never be manifest in its fullness through, or be embodied in a person, in any one man or woman. When God is manifest in the flesh as I mean, it will be through the race. Man, as a race will have become God-like, will have arisen above his present condition, will be saved, not from future, but from present hells.” “Well, I really cannot understand you, aunt.” “I mean simply this, my child, when enough of the love, power and wisdom immanent in the deific fountain becomes developed in the race, and in harmonious proportions, then the evils which now afflict humanity will disappear.” “But how is this to be done?” I asked. “By belief in our own power to accomplish, through the God within ourselves, that which the church expects, waits for a God outside of ourselves to do for us. God, the soul or spirit of the universe must be manifest in, and act through us to the overcoming of all difficulties, to the surmounting of every obstacle that lies in the way of the progress of the race.” ...

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— Various Authors - Hip Culture

 

at 11/4/26 1:07am

Author: Various AuthorsTitle: Hip CultureSubtitle: 6 Essays on Its Revolutionary Potential; Yippie, Third World, Feminist, Marxist, High School Student, AnarchistDate: 1970Source: <https://archive.org/details/HipCulture> Synopsis Counter-Culture or Counter-Revolution Is the ideology of Hip Culture the essence of self-determination, of the universal right of the individual to control her/his everyday life; the harbinger of the end of domination, authoritarianism, hierarchy and power? Is Hip Culture making demands that cannot be accommodated by the system and will thus bring about the end of the capitalist era? OR Is “do your own thing” the slogan of hip middle-class, white men who continue to do their thing, as their straight counterparts have always done, by dominating and exploiting women, the Third World and working people? Will today’s energy of discontent merely be channeled into the making of a groovy drug/rock sanctuary for the disenchanted inheritors of capitalism’s overabundance?   Stanzas of .... And I Danced in the Mud and the Blood and the Beer, a poem by Jon Grell, are interspaced throughout the essays. 1 well, it’s two days after i split from woodstock and the mud is still caked heavy on my boots and my pants below my knees are still shit brown, four days of constant tripping has still left an acid reality in my head and, yeah, goddamnit, i wish i was still the fuck up there instead of coughing my lungs out from too much carbon monoxide here in good old new york city. Right On, Culture Freeks! George Metefsky[1] Why Cultural Revolution? To believe that revolution is possible in this country without destroying the psychological stranglehold of middle class culture upon the workers, as if revolution could be made by the 3rd World poor alone, is a delusion. The vast majority of Americans are indeed working class; but the whole thrust of their culture, which is capitalist, has been to repress that class identity. They think of themselves as white, American, taxpayer, home-owners—not as workers. To bring about real revolution, it has always been necessary to raise the consciousness of the greater mass of the people to the point where they see the need for the revolution and identify with it. This means that the worker’s middle class identity, and culture supporting that identity, must be seriously weakened before they can identify with the revolution. To avoid this hard fact, many leftists are fond of arguing from the revolutionary experiences of Russia, China, or Cuba, that a capitalist ‘crisis’ will sooner or later reduce the middle class worker to poverty, forcing him into revolutionary consciousness. They ignore the concrete lesson of the Great Depression of the 1930’s, when workers’ struggles were contained by the middle class “liberalism” (and the CP. Popular Front), and channeled into purely economic reforms within the system. The people of Russia, China, or Cuba shared not only common poverty, but a common consciousness and folk culture that was quite distinct from the bourgeoisie. It was but a short step to class or national consciousness of common discontent of the fact that they had nothing to lose through revolution. For a useful parallel to the U.S., we must go to the abortive revolution in France, May ’68. Only with France do we find the same middle class majority, and the same economic grievances: constant, irritating inflation. France showed that it will not be bureaucratic unions which are the vanguard of the revolution in the imperialist mother country, but students and young workers who are not yet totally sucked into the hyperworker/superconsumer role, who find a rebellious (if commercialized) identity in their “youth culture.” Even if the most advanced workers join the revolution out of plain economic dissatisfaction, reactionary union bureaucrats will oppose them, while the majority of the middle class continues to support reaction. Imperialism supports a huge middle class within the mother country. There is far less revolutionary working class tradition in this country than in France, and workers are trained to shy away from it. To awaken them, middle class culture itself must be smashed. Middle class culture is vulnerable. While people identify themselves as “middle class,” they have merely exchanged working class discontent for a more diffuse middle class dissatisfaction, not just with the war, rising prices, and frozen wages, but with the whole game of accumulating plastic and hating people. Their dissatisfaction breaks through the officially approved consciousness in a million ways. For instance, the middle class with its taste for folk music, and the lower middle class with their country and western, seek to identify with a real, soulful folk culture which middle class life excludes, in which they can be free participants rather than passive consumers. No one can identify with a Hollywood orchestra the way you identify with Johnny Cash. The system never really succeeds in repressing people’s common humanity—the ‘3rd world within’—and this conflict finally reduces the middle class to passivity and cynicism, driving them to the extremes of local reaction, or rebellion. Come a healthy people’s culture, and middleclass culture tends to collapse like a sick balloon. ...

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— thanatokephaloides - A Samhain Memorial

 

at 11/4/26 1:06am

Author: thanatokephaloidesTitle: A Samhain MemorialSubtitle: Anti-Capitalist Meetup: Samhain 2015 Anarchist/Socialist Open Memorial ThreadDate: November 1, 2015Source: Retrieved on Oct 29 2026 from https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/11/1/1443162/community/Anti-Capitalist-Meetup-Samhain-2015-Anarchist-Socialist-Open-Memorial-Thread/ SAMHAIN. Pronounced “sow-ween” or “sow-ain”, the term is the old Gaelic name for this time of year. Today it is better known as Hallowe’en, All Hallows Day, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day, and covers the time between October 31 to November 2 inclusive. It is a lot more than going from door to door begging for candy, although this enjoyable modern ritual also has its place, binding us to our ancestors’ other children (especially those who still are children!). But it goes much further than that. This week, I thought I would simply open a Samhain Open Memorial Thread amongst the Anti-Capitalist Meetup community. On this day, when the ancient, pre-Christian Lore of the Celtic peoples of Western Europe teaches that the Veil between the living and our dead Ancestors is thinnest, it is appropriate to bring those Ancestors to remembrance by name that our memories of them and our debts to them may live on. Let us remember them, love them, revere them, and give them our gratitude in Solidarity for what their lives have given us. I thank ZhenRen for his contributions to our Diary of two weeks ago, which I have taken the liberty of adapting to this week’s Diary by making a very small set of textual changes to expand the poetry to cover all of our Ancestors instead of just one. With that, let us begin…….. From this Comment by ZhenRen, I open our Memorial this evening: Come, you ancestors! Brothers, sisters, comrades, come! Come you all, for the Veil is thinnest On this very night of nights! Come ye, that we may love you again That we may bond with you again That we may share Solidarity with you again For: “Our heart is with you! Our anger is fuelled by your strength. We are all here. We are all here. It’s just your bodies which will stay where they are. You will be with us forever. You will be our light and illumination forever.” — words after “For:” adapted from Emel’s eulogy of Ali Kitapci I offer the text from Istanbul Indymedia in Ali Kitapci’s memory as a lesson tonight: For Ali Kitapci.. It’s raining. On all our memories with Ali… It’s raining. Yet yesterday the killers have washed away the blood on the street long ago. It’s raining. All those drinks we had together, all those actions we went, all those slogans we shouted, all that gas we breathed. Ali’s asthma crisis.. It’s raining. State attacks. It’s raining so badly. All the comrades, we are together just like we did 20 years ago. We are together, just like it happened in 1936! Ali had given his life to the class struggle, to the trade-union movement. He was one of those unnamed “heroes” struggling to transform the anarchist movement from a weak breath into a lively alternative of freedom. Let his memory be our comrade… We won’t forget, we won’t forgive! To this I add: We are all together, just like it happened in 1936….. and 1886…. and 1917…. 1914….. 1940…. and many, many other times! On this night, all of our comrades are together; we living reaching out to you who live no more as we live; but yet you live on, so long as we do not forget…… I call to remember our Anarchist Ancestors, the Heroes of Haymarket 1886, the ones who gave the ultimate sacrifice for our holy Cause as well as those who, like us, lived for that selfsame Cause afterwards. Comrades, sisters, and brothers, please suffer me to name them: August Spies Albert R. Parsons George Engel and Adolph Fischer spilled their life’s blood at the murderous hands of the State of Illinois; whereas Samuel Fielden Michael Schwab and Oscar Neebesuffered imprisonment, privation, and other bitter sacrifices for the same sacred Cause we hold so dear! To these, please allow me to add: Emma Goldman Paul Proudhon Mikhail Bakunin Alexander Berkman and, of course, Ali Kitapci himself, whose life and actions in Anatolia, ending with his untimely and unfortunate death, inspired what amounts to a far better Anarcho-Socialist Samhain Memorial than I could hope to write by myself alone! Let me add to these some names that might sound just a little strange here: Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Yes, these men were typical bourgeois richies of their day; yet certain ideas they proposed had reach far beyond their grasp or even their understanding. I refer to the individual-held freedoms of religion, speech, and press, without which it would still be a crime in all English-speaking nations to even mention the word “Samhain”, much less celebrate it as we are doing now! (The subjects of the UK’s Monarch only fully received this freedom in 1951 source, and South Africans still don’t have it source!) To these, I offer a more personal memorial: to my maternal grandfather James E. Riley, who taught me far more things than I could hope to relate with my expected remaining lifetime; but relevant to our Memorial and our Cause, he taught me that Socialism was not the fearsome bugaboo that most sources in my native Colorado Springs, Colorado wanted me to think it was, but rather, truly, the sole alternative to total and complete barbarism! ...

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— Nikos Maziotis - The reckoning of a city guerrilla

 

at 11/4/26 1:03am

Author: Nikos MaziotisTitle: The reckoning of a city guerrillaDate: 28/10/2026 October 2026 After 14 years in prison for my involvement in Revolutionary Struggle, I have reached the end of a long and harsh ordeal. Being a revolutionary is demonstrated by the cost of the choices one is willing to pay and by defending the choices of struggle for which one found oneself in prison.In our case, a long-term imprisonment or death in a confrontation with the servants of the state and the bosses, as happened to comrade Lambros Foundas on March 10, 2010, is the price of our choices –something I knew from the very beginning. In struggle, as in life in general, nothing comes without a price. Because whatever is worthwhile is difficult and requires sacrifices. However, the cost of the choices applies to everyone without exception, even the enemy, as well as to the servants of the state who were wounded by the weapons of Revolutionary Struggle: in Exarchia in 2009 after the murder of Grigoropoulos; during the expropriation of Piraeus Bank in Kleitoria in 2014; and in Monastiraki, also in 2014, when they nearly killed me. For several years, the structures and mechanisms of the state and capital experienced the power of Revolutionary Struggle’s bombs, including the ECB branch, the Bank of Greece and the IMF office, the Athens Stock Exchange, the Ministries of Employment and Economy, the Evelpidon courts, police stations such as those in Kallithea and Perissos, and banks such as Citibank and Eurobank. Of course, the United States will never forget the anti-tank rocket attack on its embassy in Athens in 2007. Meanwhile, the former Minister of Public Order, Voulgarakis, realized that no government official, regardless of how senior they may be, is invulnerable. Revolutionary Struggle is part of a historical tradition within the revolutionary and anarchist movement dating back to the era of the First International of Workers, which employed armed struggle and guerrilla warfare, as did the organization Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) in Russia, or as did the anarchists with what they called “propaganda by the deed” when they carried out bomb attacks and assassinations of kings, heads of state, and prime ministers. It is part of a historical tradition whose constituent elements included the armed resistance against Franco, the guerrilla struggle against the Axis forces in occupied Europe, and urban guerrilla warfare in recent decades. Revolutionary Struggle is part of a historical tradition based on the struggles of peoples for social liberation from the yoke of the state and capital, for self-organization against the centralized state, whatever form it may take. A tradition based, among other things, on the Paris Commune of 1871, the anti-state tendency of the Russian Revolution –including the Kronstadt Commune of 1921 and the Makhnovshchina (1918–21) in Ukraine, which fought against the tsarist White counterrevolutionaries, the nationalists, and the rising Bolshevik totalitarianism– the Mexican Revolution, and the Spanish Revolution (1936–39), which was murdered both by the Stalinist counterrevolutionaries and the Francoist fascists. Throughout my life of struggle, I have spent 18 years in prison for my choices, which I honored and defended publicly in society and before the enemy. Of those 18 years, 14 were for the actions of Revolutionary Struggle. However paradoxical it may seem to some, freedom fighters passionately love life, sometimes risking being killed, while they love freedom, risking ending up in prison. The founding of Revolutionary Struggle in 2003 and my participation in it were the result of a militant and political maturation. From this ordeal, as comrade Roupa did as well, I emerge victorious, with my head held high. Because we defended our political identity as members of Revolutionary Struggle. Because we defended our actions and every attack carried out by Revolutionary Struggle, one by one, as well as all 18 operations from 2003 to 2017, in all the trials against the organization. Because we defended our comrade Lambros Foundas, a member of the organization who was killed in a clash with police officers. Because if we had renounced our political identity in the hope of saving ourselves from repression, if we had not assumed political responsibility, that would have been the highest form of alienation; we would have betrayed our dead comrade Lambros Foundas, who was killed during a preparatory action by Revolutionary Struggle against the First Memorandum, and who gave his life so that the crisis could become an opportunity for the Social Revolution. We emerge as political victors because we remained unrepentant, because we did not renounce our choices. If in earlier periods in Greece –such as, for example, during the Metaxas dictatorship, the civil war, and the 1967–’74 dictatorship– the issue at stake in repudiation and repentance was communism, in our time the issue at stake is renouncing one’s status as a member of the guerrilla organization and, by extension, in practice, renouncing the guerrilla struggle and the revolution. ...

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— Nick Heath - Spanish anarchists in the Welsh valleys

 

at 11/4/26 1:01am

Author: Nick HeathTitle: Spanish anarchists in the Welsh valleysDate: January 25 2011Notes: A short account of the Spanish miners in South Wales and their relationship — sometimes positive, sometimes strained — with the local mining population.Source: Retrieved on Nov 1 2026 from https://libcom.org/article/spanish-anarchists-welsh-valleys Just as the Franco-Italian anarchist miner Lawrence Storione imported revolutionary ideas to the Fife area of Scotland, so too did Spanish anarchist and socialist miners and steelworkers to South Wales in similarly little known circumstances. The Orconero Iron Ore Company in northern Spain had been a subsidy of the Dowlais Iron Company in South Wales since 1873. In 1900 several hundred Spanish workers and their families were brought to Dowlais from northern Spain in what was seen as a way of undercutting wages for Welsh workers. A street was specifically built for them in Dowlais- King Alphonso Street after the then Spanish monarch Alfonso XII and two areas of the town were given over to them. However if the idea was to undercut the Welsh workers, it was a bad plan as most of those who came to South Wales were socialist or anarchist workers who had themselves been victimised for activity in Spain. They joined the local unions straight away. Shortly after, several Spanish families moved to the anthracite mining village of Abercrave in the Swansea Valle to work for a French mining company that had opened up the International Colliery there. “Abercrave, a quiet little mining village of only a few thousand inhabitants at the top of the Swansea Valley, has now become one of the most cosmopolitan in the district. In addition to the Welsh, English, Scotch and Irish residing in the locality, there has been a strong influx during the past few years of Frenchman, Spaniards, Portuguese, Germans, Belgians &c, and employment has been found for them in the local collieries. The Spaniards form the strongest colony, and it is computed that there are over 200 in all” ( quoted in O’Leary). In Abercrave the Spanish settled on Davies Street and Brooklands Terrace, a line of single story two-room cottages. The area became known as Spanish Row or Espaniardos Row. Among those who came to Wales was the anarchist Melchor Esteban. He had been a steel worker in Bilbao. Anarchist and atheist, he obtained work at the Dowlais Ironworks in 1907 and shortly after moved to the International Colliery at Abercrave. He had brought his family with him including his son Gregorio, born in 1887, who was to later to volunteer for the International Brigades during the Civil War. The anarchist paper Freedom first mentioned the Spanish communities in Wales in June 1901, as the result of a visit to Dowlais by the Spanish anarchist Tarrida del Marmol and the London Welsh anarchist Sam Mainwaring (they were collaborating on an anarchist paper The General Strike). Mainwaring had conducted the first socialist tour of South Wales in alongside fellow Socialist Leaguer Frank Kitz in 1887 and had set up the South Wales Socialist Society in Landore in 1892. Through the use of Spanish by del Marmol and of Welsh and English by Mainwaring, they were able to sooth tensions between the different communities. Tensions once more came to the boil in 1913, when feelings emerged among Welsh miners that ”trade unionists of good character” had been thrown out of work in favour of “strangers”. Within a month the number of Spanish workers was commented on, though with the proviso that most conducted themselves in an exemplary manner and had good relations with native workers. Some of the Spanish, including the children, spoke Welsh and English fluently, and there were numbers of young Spanish workers who prided themselves on raising their cultural level through self-education. Both Melchor Esteban and another anarchist Victoriano Lafuente were active on local lodge committees of the South Wales Miners Federation. None of the Spanish were even known to be behind with their SWMF dues (apparently many of the Spanish boys were good at rugby, some graduating to premier clubs where they had distinguished careers). Less than a month later there was a meeting of workers from the Abercrave, International and Gwaunyclalwdd collieries, which considered whether it was advisable to employ Spanish, French and German workers. Committees were formed with the aim of approaching management to make sure that no more foreigners would be employed at the three collieries. In this situation the anarchist Guy Aldred made an appeal to the Welsh miners: “You are workers. So are your foreign comrades of the pick and shovel…Your choice is between revolution and increasing slavery. But you will not ensure your emancipation by fighting your fellow-slaves. It is the system, the principle of profit, the aggression of Mammon which you have to war against . Not your fellow workers”. Wil Jon Edwards, a local socialist who shared many of Aldred’s views voiced a similar position in the local press but was careful not to mention revolution. The troubled situation continued into the next year with accusations that the buildings the Spanish, French and Italians occupied were over-crowded, that they lived in ‘disgusting conditions’. An anti-foreigner demonstration was organised and plans for a strike that was narrowly averted. There was an incident between a Spanish workers and locals. But all the Spanish workers were in the South Wales Miners Federation and they strenuously denied the charges against them. ...

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— Llinos Anwyl - Learning Welsh Is What Solidarity Sounds Like

 

at 11/4/26 12:59am

Author: Llinos AnwylTitle: Learning Welsh Is What Solidarity Sounds LikeSubtitle: Language revival is class struggle — why the left in Wales can’t stay monolingual.Date: November 3 2025Source: Retrieved on Nov 1 2026 from https://llinos.substack.com/p/learning-welsh-is-what-solidarity Everyone in the movement means well, but good intentions don’t make a bilingual revolution. At the start of almost every radical meeting I’ve attended in Wales, someone says: “Welcomecroeso.” Then the rest of the discussion unfolds entirely in English. The word sits on the top of each agenda like a decoration — a gesture toward belonging that never quite lands. Most of us already support the language in principle. We sign petitions, design bilingual posters for English-only events, and attend Welsh gigs… but principle is easy, participation is harder. Across Wales, the new left speaks the vocabulary of decentralisation but rarely practises it. English remains the medium of minutes, funding bids, and strategy documents. The political project of localisation is conducted in the language of centralisation. That isn’t accidental. It’s structural. For two centuries, capital has concentrated ownership of communication just as it concentrated ownership of land and labour. English became the infrastructure of that concentration: the language of contracts, management, and scale. When industrialisation pulled labour into English-speaking centres, Welsh declined not because people stopped caring but because production moved. As the coalfields and docks expanded, labour migration and recruitment reorganised the Welsh economy around English as the lingua franca of hierarchy. When English became the language of wages and advancement, Welsh lost its economic footing. As capitalism evolved from industry to services, from production to speculation, the flow of capital moved further from the communities that spoke it. Today, value is extracted through ownership rather than labour: property replaces production, tourism replaces work, and heritage replaces life. The extraction continues, only the mechanism has changed. When profit depends on selling the idea of place rather than sustaining the people in it, language becomes branding. What’s left is a culture detached from its conditions of survival. To treat Welsh as culture rather than infrastructure is to misunderstand the nature of its decline. As Gareth Miles argued, the future of the language can’t be separated from the system that organises work, housing, and ownership. Welsh doesn’t disappear because people stop valuing it; it disappears when the means to live through it are taken away. In Marxist terms, culture sits on top of a material base, and when that base is hollowed out by capital, the language built upon it collapses too. Capitalism doesn’t just commodify land and labour, it commodifies speech, rewarding the languages of markets and administration while devaluing those of community. A language survives only when its speakers can afford to stay put, when there are jobs and affordable homes. Without those conditions, “language rights” become decorative: folk songs that no longer belong to the people who sang them. Devolution gave Wales political institutions without economic sovereignty. The Senedd controls language policy, education, and culture, the symbolic layers of autonomy, while fiscal and industrial power remain elsewhere by design, not accident. Cymraeg 2050, the government’s target for a million speakers reflects that contradiction. It measures success mainly in numbers and campaigns, not in whether people can actually live and work through the language. As Colin H. Williams notes in Wake Me Up in 2050, the state can provide frameworks for language planning, but alone, they aren’t enough; real revival happens where policy meets community. Yet even the frameworks are shaped by the logic of managerialism — language as Key Performance Indicator. Public-sector bilingualism has advanced, but market forces still decide who can afford to live in Welsh-speaking areas. The result is an NGO-ised revival: consultants, awareness campaigns, and a linguistic economy dependent on grants rather than production. Real language planning would mean economic planning; community-owned housing, decentralised media, universal basic income, translation as public infrastructure. I’ve had several conversations with people who say that Welsh feels exclusionary. What they’re describing is the moment when power stops being automatic. For those used to living inside the linguistic majority, equality can feel like loss — just as workplace democracy feels slower than management, or community ownership feels messier than the market. It’s not exclusion; it’s redistribution. To see why that feeling runs so deep, it helps to remember how the imbalance was built. In Wales, English has long been the language of administration, education, and progress. Welsh became the language of the home, the chapel, and the playground; intimate, local, and undervalued. When those spheres were eroded by industrial collapse and social atomisation, the language was left without its base. It’s important to note that the decline of Welsh wasn’t caused by resentment or rejection, but by the slow dismantling of the social and economic structures that once sustained it — families dispersed for work, industries closed, and communities that spoke together were broken apart by the forces of history rather than hostility. ...

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— Jim Colton - The Welsh Anarchists

 

at 11/4/26 12:46am

Author: Jim ColtonTitle: The Welsh AnarchistsDate: Published in November 1971, in Black Flag, Vol. 2, No. 8.Source: Retrieved on Nov 1 2026 from https://thesparrowsnest.org.uk/collections/public_archive/8426.pdf Impossible to say when the idea of Anarchism first came into Wales. It was certainly in the 19th century because in the 1890s the London group was explaining that though it had such a cosmopolitan membership it could deal with correspondence in every European language and many Asiatic ones, “Welsh unfortunately is not one of them, and we have had to ask our comrades to write in English,” (according to the late George Cores’ letters). Around the turn of the century there were numerous Anarchist groups. The most prominent speaker was a miner named Sam Mainwaring, who was one of the most active advocates of what became the “Triple Alliance” unionism and introduced Syndicalism. Mainwaring, who came from Neath, Glam. – near Swansea – was known throughout Wales as the pioneer of revolutionary syndicalism, even more than Tom Mann. He wrote many pamphlets, all in Welsh, none of which appear to be extant. He it was (according to Matt Kavanagh) who first used the term “anarcho-syndicalism” to explain his difference with Tom Mann, Guy Bowman and others. This did not prevent them working together, as all were undoubtedly revolutionary syndicalists. His nephew, also Sam, carried on the Anarchist movement amongst the Welsh miners, almost alone towards the finish, until his death in about 1942. Time and again during the Spanish War he raised at the miners’ conference the fact that the OP leadership of the NUM was discriminating against the CNT miners in Spain. Another active Anarchist miner in the ‘20s was James Colton, whose militancy and record has been overshadowed by the fact that he married Emma Goldman. (On a tour of the mining areas, extremely unpopular because of her stand on Russia, she was facing both constant threat of deportation and the impossibility of leaving England: at that time it was easy for a woman, by marriage, to acquire British nationality). She was the first to admit that his record in the movement outstripped hers. In the days of the syndicalist movement he had been a popular orator, speaking to thousands of miners with fervent oratory and applause. Because he opposed the Russian dictatorship, he was all but thrown out of the union and his job; faced abuse and ostracism and doggedly kept on speaking. These are only three of the “old brigade”. The young Welsh comrades should take pride in following their tradition.

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— Anonymous - At Play in Hell

 

at 11/3/26 11:03pm

Author: AnonymousTitle: At Play in HellSubtitle: For a Halloween UprisingDate: October 30th, 2026Notes: Translated by Ill WillSource: https://illwill.com/at-play-in-hell   The following text circulated anonymously on message boards in Italy on October 29, 2026. Drawing inspiration from the riotous legacy of “Black Halloween” in the United States, and echoing the emphasis on joyful conspiracy from the Invisible Committee’s recent interview and video-tract, the authors enunciate an offensive position within the ongoing youth insurgency spreading across Europe and beyond.   We do not judge our times. Our times judge us. The times are so revolutionary, and yet so far from our liking. We have only ourselves to blame. —Guy Debord, “Second Report on the Construction of Situations” C’est les ténèbres[1] Out of the dark, I cut the cord Tore down the wall, changed my name —Visino Bianco 1.1 Since October 17, we’ve once again been confusing names, masks, and roles. Journalists and government officials — in cahoots, as usual, with the Instagram autonomists — feel duped. They wanted a movement, an organization, students, second-generation activists, and prominent figures. In short, they desperately wanted a subject. Having woven the web of their desires (“pro-Palestine” and “second-generation,” of course, and above all intellectual), they even managed to lure a poor soul into it — whose most radical act, aside from organizing a few rallies, was writing for Il Fatto Quotidiano. 1.2 Not even Halloween managed to spark the imagination of our enemies. Instead, they’re trying to pull the same old trick on us, yet again: to pin us down to ourselves. To force us, yet again, to speak up: “Who are you? What do you want? What are you against?” Only those who are scared to death ask questions like that. To exorcise their fear, they conjure up the specter of the “Maranza,” of young people, of social centers, even the long arm of Russia. Any name will do, just so they don’t have to listen to the cosmic silence; any mask will do, so long as it covers over the only face that truly terrifies: the one that isn’t there. Subjects for sale 2.1 Thrown into disarray, the government, the cops, and the media demand a subject, a purpose, a reason. Imbeciles of every kind leap to their rescue: “Autonomists against data centers!”, “Communists against the government!”, “Students against the war!”, “Citizens against the high cost of living!” When society needs reassurances, activists are there to provide it. They craft slogans for journalists seeking stories, demands for politicians seeking votes, marches for cops seeking blood, anxieties for psychotherapists in search of money, and above all, subjectivities, subjectivities, subjectivities! — to soothe the nightmares of our enemies. 2.2 When 10,000 people are paraded around in a march for four hours, sapping everyone’s strength and cheerfulness and giving the cops time to plant traps at every intersection and square in the city, only to then triumphantly lead the surviving demonstrators straight into the wolf’s jaws, to be massacred between Piazza Baldissera and Piazza Crispi, one should have the good sense to lock oneself away and reflect for a few years, perhaps outside of Turin. But there doesn’t seem to be a defeat harsh enough, nor a humiliation deep enough, to dissuade the militants from thrusting their stupidity upon us. Fortunately, experiences like the one on Saturday, October 24, are revealing. Now we know that the only interesting marches are the wild ones; that real demands aren’t shouted through a megaphone; that an insurrection isn’t launched on Instagram; and that only those who know how to laugh together can build collective power. 2.3 The activist is the piece of chewing gum that any official, breathing a sigh of relief, sticks haphazardly into the cracks of the social dam. Trusting our yawns Memorizing politics of ancient history Flung down by corpse evangelists… Ah, but I was so much older then I’m younger than that now —Bob Dylan 3.1 Anyone who has attended a general assembly has experienced firsthand the full range and nuances of boredom. The wretchedness of the speeches — which compete to miss the point — is surpassed only by that of the proposals, which seem designed to discourage anyone from carrying them out. But it would be too easy to blame things upon this or that Marxist-Leninist, feminist, autonomous, or environmentalist group. If assembly statements are so deadly boring, it’s ultimately because what they desperately communicate is always the same thing: “Here I am!” Nothing is sadder than witnessing the compensatory rituals of those who, lacking all vitality, must constantly reassure themselves that they exist. 3.2 Moreover: nothing is more humiliating than playing the role of an audience in the spectacle of assemblies. Sacrificing one’s enthusiasm, one’s need for friendship, one’s hatred for this shitty world on the altar of activism. Accepting the assembly-form means resigning oneself to communicating from a place of absence: absent from the situations in which one finds oneself, absence of joy, absence from others and from oneself. Thanks for not coming! ...

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— James Michael Yeoman - Salud y Anarquía desde Dowlais

 

at 11/3/26 10:56pm

Author: James Michael YeomanTitle: Salud y Anarquía desde DowlaisSubtitle: The translocal experience of Spanish anarchists in South Wales, 1900–15Date: 2016Source: Yeoman, J.M. (2016) Salud y Anarquía desde Dowlais: The translocal experience of Spanish anarchists in South Wales, 1900–15. International Journal of Iberian Studies, 29 (3). pp. 273–289. ISSN: 1364-971X Abstract In the early twentieth century a group of Spanish anarchists settled in the town of Dowlais, South Wales, as part of a wider migration to the area prompted by the town’s ironworks. Over the following fifteen years this community kept in constant contact with their comrades in Spain through the networks sustained by the anarchist press. Examination of these records reveals the dislocation experienced by these migrants, and their efforts to retain their identity and standing within the movement they had left behind. This study highlights the benefits of a translocal approach towards anarchist internationalism, which focuses on the experience of ordinary members of the movement and their struggles to overcome the challenges presented by international movement. Keywords Anarchism Spain Wales internationalism translocalism migration Introduction Studies of turn-of-the-century anarchist transnationalism are often framed around elite figures and propagandists (Bantman 2006: 961–62), such as Pyotr Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta and Fernando Tarrida del Mármol. Many of these figures lived truly fascinating lives, moving regularly through major cities on both sides of the Atlantic, driven by a combination of devotion to the cause and a need to stay one step ahead of the law. Influenced by the broader shift towards transnational labour history, some recent studies of anarchist internationalism have sought to flesh out the experience of these figures more fully (Levy 2010) while others have shifted their focus away from these exceptional, and largely atypical, individuals altogether. Far more attention is now directed at the experience of ordinary anarchists, whose reasons for movement were – like most migrants of the era – as much material as political, and who often had little time or resources to engage in extensive political activity (Goyens 2007; Bantman 2013). Of particular relevance for this study is the increasing number of works dedicated to transnational networks formed between radicals separated by geographic and political borders (Turcato 2007; Khuri-Makdisi 2010). The Spanish movement has not been entirely isolated from these historiographical trends. Anarchist migration and networks between Spain and Latin America have received some attention from scholars such as Moya (1998), Sánchez Cobos (2008) and Shaffer (2010), as have anarchist links between Spain and the Philippines (Anderson 2005). Nevertheless, the trans-Atlantic networks of Spanish anarchism remain understudied; a fact noted by Martha Ackelsberg elsewhere in this special issue. Likewise, the movement of Spanish anarchists within Europe has received little attention in recent scholarship. While the turn to transnational anarchist history is welcome and important, some questions about the premises of such studies remain. Many transnational studies focus on the period when the international anarchist movement was at its strongest, from the late nineteenth century up to the outbreak of World War I, which overlapped with one of the great periods of globalization. Capital flowed into and out of nation states, borders were relatively fluid and movement of people was both an opportunity and a compulsion for many. This situation presented internationalists with an unprecedented context in which to spread their message to the working class of Europe and the Americas. There is a risk, however, that transnational studies portray cross-border activity as a straightforward and ultimately positive activity, obscuring the difficulties and failures experienced by those engaged in transnational radicalism. For many, migration was an undesired and distressing experience, and even those of an internationalist outlook often maintained parochial or nationalistic ideas and practices (Bantman 2006: 961, 970). Likewise, states and borders continued to function in the increasingly globalized world, presenting huge and complex obstacles for those who wished to undermine them (Bantman and Altena 2015: 7–10). A further problem lies in the concept of transnationalism itself. While the state should not be ignored, its defined political and geographic frontiers can be problematized, yet concentrating on activity across national borders does not necessarily achieve this. Instead, it can maintain the ‘notion of the world as formed and ordered by a static framework of clearly distinguishable nation states’ (Greiner and Sakdapolrak 2013: 374). If historians of transnationalism are interested in the negotiations between individuals and communities, flows of information, exchanges and the crossing of boundaries, they should acknowledge that these processes occurred within as well as between nations. Far from undermining the study of internationalism and arguing for a return to national meta-narratives, this perspective asks the scholar to disrupt the fixed image of the state, regarding international exchanges and networks as part of a process, which continued into national interiors and localities (Werner and Zimmerman 2006: 36–37, 43–44). ...

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— Arthur Maglin - Zine Reviews: Hip Culture & The Cultural Revolution

 

at 11/3/26 10:47pm

Author: Arthur MaglinTitle: Zine Reviews: Hip Culture & The Cultural RevolutionDate: March 19, 1971Source: The Militant. <www.marxists.org> Hip Culture: 6 Essays on Its Revolutionary Potential. Times Change Press. New York, 1970. 63 pp. $1.25. The Cultural Revolution: A Marxist Analysis by Irwin Silber. Times Change Press. New York, 1970. 62 pp. $1.25. The material contained in these two pamphlets constitutes a useful resource for the study of what the youth culture is and what it means. The fact that there is not all that much agreement among the authors represented here points out the difficulties some radicals have had in figuring out this phenomenon. In his pamphlet The Cultural Revolution and in his essay in Hip Culture, Irwin Silber takes an almost wholly negative view of the youth culture. He views it as escapism On the part of white middle-class young people. Of the 1969 Woodstock music festival, he writes: “Creating a mini-society for three days, they enacted a ritual of that revolution which the estranged young of America’s White middle and upper echelons envisage as liberation.” As Silber sees it, the envisaged liberation is utopian because it is anti-technological and is not to be attained through political struggle. Pablo “Yoruba” Guzman of the Young Lords Party is in general agreement. With Silber’s line of thought. He thinks the youth culture is a white thing that is counterposed to organizing for social change. Paula Marcus, a radical high school student, thinking along the Same lines as Silber and Guzman, writes: “Hip culture broke away from previously established culture. It fell into similar ruts and prejudices that exist in the former culture.” She, too, concludes that the youth culture is a diversion from struggle. By way of contrast, George Metefsky, writing for the Yippies, takes a much more enthusiastic attitude toward the youth culture. Rather than viewing the youth culture as a diversion from revolutionary struggle, he thinks it is the essence of revolutionary struggle, needing only an extra bit of politicizing to make it perfect: “That hip culture has only slowly developed a Communist politics shows the tremendous anti-communist brainwashing in this society. But freeks have made the massive rejection of repressed behavior for free activity—of capitalist accumulation in favor of consumption ‘by each according to his needs.’” Murray Bookchin, well-known anarchist theorist, also thinks that the youth culture essentializes the priorities of social struggle: “In its demands for tribalism, free sexuality, community, mutual aid, ecstatic experience. and a balanced ecology, the Youth Culture prefigures, however inchoately, a joyous communist and classless society, freed of the trammels of hierarchy and domination, a society that would transcend the historic splits between town and country, individual and Society, and mind and body.” One of the greatest dangers to the youth culture’s development, as Bookchin sees it, comes from “Bolshevik-type organizations” currently “infiltrating the Youth Culture.” Taking things from another angle the Lower East Side Women’s Liberation Collective exposes the hip culture’s rampant male chauvinism. AS in the society at large, from breakfast to bed, a woman’s work is never done: “The hippy woman cooks, washes, cleans house, and she does it Without all the modern conveniences capitalist society has produced to ‘lighten woman’s load.’ Preparing and cleaning up from macrobiotic meals is not much different from any other full course meal, except that it is a lot harder to fix than prepared food — like an hour and a half longer.” Viewing these essays as a whole, With the exception of this last article Which deliberately limits itself to a critique of “cool” sexism, one is struck by the fact that all of these writers tend to view the youth culture as a stable, unchanging phenomenon that must be either a diversion from or the essence of revolutionary activity. But the youth culture is neither a finished nor a stable phenomenon. The youth culture is an integral part of the combined and uneven development of the worldwide youth radicalization. It has long since ceased being—if it ever really was—a white middle-class thing. On the contrary, it is international and interracial—in this country it clearly overlaps with Black culture and for good reason. The youth culture represents a revolt from the transmitted values of the status quo — bigotry, the authoritarian family, puritanism, money ae a way of life, militarism, self-effacing conformity in personal appearance, and so on. Many people Who start at this gut level make their way in time to Marxist revolutionary consciousness (and Murray Bookchin is right from his point of view to be worried about this phenomenon). These two pamphlets can be ordered from Times Change Press, 1023 Sixth Ave, New York, N. Y. 10018.

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— Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional - Don’t Forsake Us!

 

at 11/3/26 10:46pm

Author: Ejército Zapatista de Liberación NacionalTitle: Don’t Forsake Us!Subtitle: Zapatista Women in ’94Date: 1994Notes: Originally published by Ediciones OnA, València-Chiapas: 1st edition May 2018, 2nd edition January 2019, 3rd edition July 2019, 4th edition January 2020. English translation by Ediciones Bloodfruit/Malvivientes, 2026.Source: Retrieved 10/30/26 from https://www.patreon.com/bloodfruit/posts/dont-forsake-us-173797846 The money raised from the this first volume are going to the benefit of Compañera M. Mother, Social Warrior, Multiply Employed, Indigenous. The best way to understand the path of the women who struggle is through their own words. These brief texts, interviews and declarations of the women of the Zapatista Army for National Liberation in the first months of the armed uprising of 1994 showcase the situation of indigenous women in Mexican territory, and are a mirror of the dignity that has kept the Zapatista struggle alive despite male chauvinism, racism and capitalism. This edition was part of a mutual aid initiative to redistribute the funds of the circulating texts and “Independent” editions among the struggles’ female protagonists Words From Comandanta Ramona and Major Ana María Another concern that indigenous women have is the free choice of partners. “The dowry custom still exists, the girl is never taken into account, she is sold off (in this region, the average price of nuptial dowry is two thousand pesos). The idea of having a boyfriend doesn’t exist; it is sin.” Ana María, Infantry Major: “Don’t Forsake Us!” is the desperate plea of the women of the Zapatista Army for National Liberation so that their hopes of being heard within and without their communities may not die. “We ask all women to fight alongside us” is what Comandanta Ramona and Major Ana María say in Tzotzil and Spanish. Their call to Mexican women is not one to take up arms, but rather so that, within their spaces, they may support the changes proposed by the Revolutionary Law of Women, as well as their extensive list over equality, justice, health, education and housing. That night, the penultimate they would spend at the Cathedral, they arrived through the back of the altar, accompanied by Subcomandante Marcos. He, dressed in his unmistakable military uniform. Some steps behind, the only two women of a group of the 19 delegates of the Indigenous Clandestine Revolutionary Committee. “I’ll leave them with you so that you can speak to them about anything you wish,” he said in a joking tone as he bid his farewell to the group of five female reporters and two photographers intent on interviewing the women of the Zapatista Army. Ramona’s wide and sharp eyes revealed weariness. The black wool skirt, the beautifully embroidered loom-woven blouse, and her short stature contrasted with Ana María’s gray ruana and sturdy frame. Alongside them, Comandante Javier remained behind (to translate Ramona’s Tzotzil’s words into Spanish). The words of the Comandanta, even if in Tzotzil, flow smoothly from her indigenous heart. I left my community in search of work because of necessity itself, there was no longer anything to live off of. When I arrived someplace else I began to learn that it wasn’t the same situation as that of women in the countryside. I learned there to understand and gain conscience of the differences, that’s how I learned of the organization (EZLN), and that it was also necessary to organize women. Within EZLN women’s participation in key. Ramona belongs to the political group that works in the communities; Ana María is part of the approximately 30% of female combatants/insurgents who voluntarily refuse to form a family in order to engage in armed struggle. “I am an insurgent. I’ve dedicated my entire life and time to the cause,” affirms Ana María, a 26 year old Infantry Major who, when speaking of displacement and suffering endured, furrows her brows in sadness, the only sign of expression able to be seen beneath her balaclava. “It’s a long story,” she says, Ever since I was eight years old I took part in peaceful struggles, in marches, in meetings. My family was one that fought, that always organized in order to have a dignified life, but that never achieved it through that route. We were in an organization —won’t say which— with other persons, with other peoples. We would go there, the children too, and that’s how we went began to learn that we weren’t going to achieve anything through peaceful struggle. It had been like that for years and years. My family, before I was even born, had been fighting. I arrived [to EZLN] very young; I was fourteen years old when I joined the fight. At first we were just two women out of the eight or ten who started the movement. Many women have joined EZLN without telling their families. When I left home and found out that there was an armed struggle I took a decision and said to myself, “I will also take up arms!”, because one of my brothers was already a member; but my parents, most of my family knew nothing. So I fled from home and went in search of my comrades in order to be able to join as well, and I spent many years learning and participating in it without my family finding out. This has happened in many places, within many families. There, my brother and I learned how to read and speak in Spanish. They then taught us battle and political tactics in order to be able to speak to the people and explain our cause to them. We asked for land and the government would not give it, so we began the take-overs and repression was their reply. ...

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— Indigenous Action - Voting is Not Harm Reduction

 

at 11/3/26 10:44pm

Author: Indigenous ActionTitle: Voting is Not Harm ReductionDate: February 5, 2020Source: http://www.indigenousaction.org/voting-is-not-harm-reduction-an-indigenous-perspective/ When proclamations are made that “voting is harm reduction,” it’s never clear how less harm is actually calculated. Do we compare how many millions of undocumented Indigenous Peoples have been deported? Do we add up what political party conducted more drone strikes? Or who had the highest military budget? Do we factor in pipelines, mines, dams, sacred sites desecration? Do we balance incarceration rates? Do we compare sexual violence statistics? Is it in the massive budgets of politicians who spend hundreds of millions of dollars competing for votes? Though there are some political distinctions between the two prominent parties in the so-called U.S., they all pledge their allegiance to the same flag. Red or blue, they’re both still stripes on a rag waving over stolen lands that comprise a country built by stolen lives. We don’t dismiss the reality that, on the scale of U.S. settler colonial violence, even the slightest degree of harm can mean life or death for those most vulnerable. What we assert here is that the entire notion of “voting as harm reduction” obscures and perpetuates settler-colonial violence, there is nothing “less harmful” about it, and there are more effective ways to intervene in its violences. At some point the left in the so-called U.S. realized that convincing people to rally behind a “lesser evil” was a losing strategy. The term “harm reduction” was appropriated to reframe efforts to justify their participation and coerce others to engage in the theater of what is called “democracy” in the U.S. Harm reduction was established in the 1980s as a public health strategy for people dealing with substance use issues who struggle with abstinence. According to the Harm Reduction Coalition (HRC) the principles of harm reduction establish that the identified behavior is “part of life” so they “choose not to ignore or condemn but to minimize harmful effects” and work towards breaking social stigmas towards “safer use.” The HRC also states that, “there is no universal definition of or formula for implementing harm reduction.” Overall, harm reduction focuses on reducing adverse impacts associated with harmful behaviors. The proposition of “harm reduction” in the context of voting means something entirely different from those organizing to address substance use issues. The assertion is that “since this political system isn’t going away, we’ll support politicians and laws that may do less harm.” The idea of a ballot being capable of reducing the harm in a system rooted in colonial domination and exploitation, white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, and capitalism is an extraordinary exaggeration. There is no person whose life is not impacted every day by these systems of oppression, but instead of coded reformism and coercive “get out the vote” campaigns towards a “safer” form of settler colonialism, we’re asking “what is the real and tragic harm and danger associated with perpetuating colonial power and what can be done to end it?” Voting as practiced under U.S. “democracy” is the process with which people (excluding youth under the age of 18, convicted felons, those the state deems “mentally incompetent,” and undocumented folx including permanent legal residents), are coerced to choose narrowly prescribed rules and rulers. The anarchist collective Crimethinc observes, “Voting consolidates the power of a whole society in the hands of a few politicians.” When this process is conducted under colonial authority, there is no option but political death for Indigenous Peoples. In other words, voting can never be a survival strategy under colonial rule. It’s a strategy of defeat and victimhood that protracts the suffering and historical harm induced by ongoing settler colonialism. And while the harm reduction sentiment may be sincere, even hard won marginal reforms gained through popular support can be just as easily reversed by the stroke of a politician’s pen. If voting is the democratic participation in our own oppression, voting as harm reduction is a politics that keeps us at the mercy of our oppressors. While so many on the left–including some Indigenous radicals–are concerned with consolidation of power into fascists hands, they fail to recognize how colonial power is already consolidated. There is nothing intersectional about participating in and maintaining a genocidal political system. There’s no meaningful solidarity to be found in a politics that urges us to meet our oppressors where they’re at. Voting as harm reduction imposes a false solidarity upon those identified to be most vulnerable to harmful political policies and actions. In practice it plays out as paternalistic identity politicking as liberals work to identify the least dangerous candidates and rally to support their campaigns. The logic of voting as harm reduction asserts that whoever is facing the most harm will gain the most protection by the least dangerous denominator in a violently authoritarian system. This settler-colonial naivety places more people, non-human beings, and land at risk then otherwise. Most typically the same liberal activists that claim voting is harm reduction are found denouncing and attempting to suppress militant direct actions and sabotage as acts that “only harm our movement.” “Voting as harm reduction” is the pacifying language of those who police movements. ...

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— Zoé Samudzi - Black Feminist Anarchism & Leftist Neglect of the African Continent

 

at 11/3/26 10:42pm

Author: Zoé SamudziTitle: Black Feminist Anarchism & Leftist Neglect of the African ContinentDate: March 21st, 2018Source: https://www.patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism/posts/transcript-black-17686926 This week we’re excited to bring you a conversation with Zoe Samudzi. Zoé is a freelance writer and doctoral student at the University of California, San Francisco. Her work is broadly around different aspects of race and coloniality, specifically through a black feminist lens. We had an opportunity to talk with Zoé about Black Feminist Anarchism. We also talked more broadly about how the necessity for US leftists to develop fuller understandings of the continent of Africa and its current conditions. Zoé talked about how her mother’s memory of Rhodesian colonialism has informed her anti-fascism. And she suggests that if the US is to unify around anything meaningful it will be on the ground meeting the material needs of marginalized communities, not developing a post-revolutionary theory upon which we’re all going to agree. Zoé is a co-author of the forthcoming book As Black As Resistance on AK Press. This is the second transcript we’ve published in our attempt to transcribe all of our episodes to increase the accessibility of our podcast. All of our transcribers have volunteered to do this, and we would like to thank @pauisanoun on twitter for transcribing this. The original audio version can be found https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-2-black-15022605 Jared: Welcome to “Millenials Are Killing Capitalism”. This is Jay, Josh will be joining the episode in a minute once we jump into the interview. This week, we’re excited to bring you a conversation with Zoé Samudzi. Zoé is a freelance writer and a doctoral student at the University of California, San Francisco. Her work is broadly around different aspects of race and coloniality, specifically through a Black Feminist Lens. We had an opportunity to talk with Zoé about Black Feminism, the complex relationship she sees between the standard, anti-imperialist binary, and the experiences she and her family have had on the continent of Africa and, specifically, in Zimbabwe. We also talk more broadly about the necessity for U.S. leftists to develop fuller understandings of the continent of Africa and its current conditions, which differ broadly across the 54 countries on the continent. Zoé talked about her mother’s memory about Rhodesian colonialism and how that has informed her anti-fascism. Finally, Zoé suggests that if the U.S. leftists unify around anything meaningful, it will be on the ground meeting the material needs of marginalized communities, not developing a post-revolutionary theory that we are all going to agree to. We hope you enjoy our conversation. Josh: So, Zoé, we know the political systems in Africa have not always existed through forms of bureaucratic rule. There were and are plenty of African peoples who found it possible to do without any regular apparatus of government. African communities were able to live peacefully together, to defend themselves, enlarge their wealth with very little help of central authority. We watched your speech on Black Feminist Anarchism — talk to us more about anarchistic elements in many traditional people in African societies. Zoé: Yeah, in a lot of parts of the continent, people lived in communal systems where labor was divided, social roles were allocated in these kind of particular ways but goals were collectivized, justice was a kind of collective endeavor. That’s obviously not to historicize and pretend that there were no highly centralized communities and structures. There were kingdoms across the continent, where power was extremely centralized and where systems were extremely hierarchical, so I think there was a combination of these two things. Josh: Absolutely, and also on that speech, I loved the emphasis you put on, in a lot of these structures and practices, from Black and brown organizers — organizations, I should say — rather than simply reading theory from cis, white dudes — and, by the way, I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment — would you recommend that approach to understanding anarchism to anyone that’s new to the theory? Zoé: You know, my entry to anarchism was through theory and a lot of comrades I know, you know, we go to school with nazis and nazis are beating people up. Josh:: Absolutely. Zoé: So we’re gonna go beat up nazis. And so, I think, something that’s been really beneficial to me has been to have conversations with people whose entrance into anarchism was through praxis, was through mutual aid, was through feeding communities, was through community defense. I think there’s a lot that happens in certain kinds of praxis that isn’t in a lot of the theory. Emotional labor, for example, and kind of supporting parents and having these new understandings of raising kids — that’s something that Bakunin doesn’t talk about. That’s something that a lot of the theory doesn’t talk about. A lot of anarchist theory doesn’t talk about race until Black anarchists started getting shine and attention. I would very much recommend that the orientation is through praxis, is through looking at the ways that communities have organized the resistance to the state, have provided resources to themselves outside of the state, and kind of supplement that understanding with good theory from Black folks, anarcho-feminists, from disabled folks, from queer anarchists, from queer and trans anarchists. ...

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— Rasmus Hästbacka - Landmark Collective Agreement for Migrant Workers

 

at 11/2/26 4:20am

Author: Rasmus HästbackaTitle: Landmark Collective Agreement for Migrant WorkersDate: November 1, 2026Notes: More articles by the author here. Photo below: migrant workers after the agreement was signed. Photographer: Valeriia Eltarenko.Source: Znetwork Workers at the construction of Microsoft’s data center outside the city of Gävle in Sweden secured a collective agreement under threat of strike action through the syndicalist union SAC. The case has attracted attention from a large number of European media outlets. The Guardian has published a five-month investigation into conditions for migrant workers on data center sites across Sweden, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands. The investigation uncovers evidence of dangerous conditions and unpaid wages, including at the Microsoft site outside Gävle. “Days before publication of this investigation, the syndicalist union, representing 70 Romanian workers at Microsoft’s site in Gävle, brokered a settlement with BenBau, which it says will give workers back pay and allow union access to sites,” reports the Guardian. The back pay amounts to 15 million Swedish kronor (roughly 1, 5 million US dollars). On October 25, this group of workers voted unanimously for a collective agreement with BenBau AB, one of the companies building Microsoft’s server halls, reports the Swedish newspaper Arbetaren. The deal raises wages to 260 kronor an hour (26,46 US dollars), includes a time bank for longer leave periods in the workers’ home countries, and allows the workers to elect health-and-safety delegates from their own ranks. The agreement opens with the statement: “This collective agreement is the first Swedish collective agreement written by and for migrant workers.” Since the deal was struck, even more workers have joined the union at the construction site. This outcome is the latest result of the syndicalist union’s years of organizing among migrant construction workers, particularly those from post-Soviet countries who use Russian as a common language. Freelance journalist Volodya Vagner has reported extensively on these efforts. “By confronting exploitative employers with aggressive litigation and long-forgotten methods of struggle, like blockading the construction sites of contractors with wage debts, the union has managed to redistribute millions of dollars in unpaid wages and damages,” writes Volodya Vagner. The collective agreement at the Microsoft site is consistent with SAC’s new collective agreement-strategy articulated in 2020. This strategy is a response to a Swedish anti-strike law that entered into force in 2019. The strategy was presented on the Counterpunch news site: “According to our assessment syndicalists can still fight lawfully for both collective agreements and alternatives to such agreements”, SAC representatives stated. Yet collective agreements are nothing new for Swedish syndicalists. During the 20th century, Swedish syndicalists entered into hundreds of collective agreements. SAC was founded in 1910. Fittingly, the vote on the 2026 collective agreement took place in the childhood home of the legendary Joe Hill. This rewrite was made by Rasmus Hästbacka, labor lawyer and member of SAC

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— Kevin Morgan - A ‘splendid field’? Emma Goldman in South Wales

 

at 11/1/26 2:24pm

Author: Kevin MorganTitle: A ‘splendid field’? Emma Goldman in South WalesDate: 2009Source: Retrieved on Nov 1 2026 from https://www.academia.edu/33805349/A_splendid_field_Emma_Goldman_in_South_Wales In May 1925 the ‘anarchist communist’ weekly Freedom carried a glowing report of the meetings in Britain of the American anarchist Emma Goldman. The object of Goldman’s meetings was to expose the tyranny of the Bolshevik regime and publicise her campaign for the defence of Russian political prisoners. Fearlessly she took this message, not only to London and the English provinces, but to what she called the ‘very hotbed of Communism’ in the South Wales coalfield.[1] Speaking in the Rhondda, in Penygraig, Treorchy, Pentre and Trealaw, she succeeded, according to Freedom, in reducing the Bolsheviks’ supporters to sullen acquiescence. Just for once, the ‘Communist dovecotes of the Rhondda Valley’ had had a proper shaking.[2] Papers of radical movements would have no purpose if they never exerted themselves to promote the standard-bearers of their cause. Nevertheless, the discrepancy between Freedom’s claims and Goldman’s private observations was in this instance more than usually wide. The Welsh in Goldman’s view had one indispensable advantage: that they were not the English. Beyond that, her experience in South Wales induced a mood that was close to despair. Her marriage of convenience to the Ammanford miner Jim Colton has occasionally suggested a more romanticised treatment of the connection. Goldman certainly admired the miners’ fortitude and humanity, and the ‘splendid material’ that existed in the union rank and file. Nevertheless, the immediate political prospects seemed about as gloomy as they could be, and the communist dovecotes almost unassailable. For Goldman, the 1920s was a decade of relentlessly declining expectations of the anarchist movement. Ironically, it was in Ammanford, where at least it had a presence, that she found herself wondering whether there was something inherently the matter with the movement that it could take no root either in Britain or America.[3] The aims of the present article are modest. It seeks to show why the South Wales coalfield figured so prominently in Goldman’s itinerary. It gives a sense of her first-hand impression of the coalfield as a cultural and political outsider. And it offers her reflections on why the seed fell on such stony soil, even where an anarcho-syndicalist strain within the British labour movement proved relatively resilient. As far as possible, it presents the story in her own words, using the comprehensive microfilm edition of her correspondence produced by the Emma Goldman Papers Project.[4] It would be interesting to view the episode from the perspective of the coalfield itself, through local newspapers or the Welsh labour press. It would also be worth locating within a longer sequence of transnational exchanges: for example, by comparing it with what appears to have been the more effective visit to the coalfield of the American syndicalist Big Bill Haywood in 1910. For the time being, however, the focus here is very much on Goldman’s own immediate reactions to what she saw in South Wales. The wider significance of her comments need not be overstated. Goldman’s, as will be seen, was very much a surface impression of the area, based on just a few weeks’ stay. Nor indeed did she suggest otherwise: and with the exception of the brief account that appeared in her autobiography Living My Life, none of these observations appeared in print.[5] Goldman’s political capital was not immediately transferable into the British labour movement currency, and the failure of her campaign can be explained in a number of ways. Indeed, it would doubtless have been less comprehensive had Goldman herself understood these better. Even so, and when all such personal factors have been taken into account, the insight she provides into the prevalence of pro-Bolshevik views in Britain is an important one. In spite of ‘incessant hammering’, she concluded mournfully, in Britain the socialist and trade-union element ‘will have nothing whatever to do with critical work on Russia’.[6] ‘Nothing short of a bomb explosion’: Emma Goldman in London Her timing was anything but auspicious. Arriving in Britain at the tail-end of the first Labour government, in September 1924, Goldman straight away witnessed the government’s fall over the issue of the Russian treaties. In the ensuing general election Labour was then exposed to the most flagrant red-scare tactics in British history. Had Goldman primarily aimed to link up with the ailing British anarchist movement, this might have had a very different bearing on her fortunes; indeed, would most likely have led to her status in Britain being viewed rather differently by the incoming Conservative government. Goldman’s ambitions, however, were set much higher than this. Her first British engagement, two weeks after the election, was a ‘semi-private’ dinner at London’s Anderton hotel attracting some 250 well-wishers. Among them were such luminaries of the intellectual left as Harold Laski and Bertrand Russell – the latter, according to Freedom, providing the evening’s ‘most complete avowal of Anarchist convictions’.[7] Also providing a speech of welcome was the feminist writer Rebecca West,who was to prove one of Goldman’s most steadfast supporters. Presiding over the meeting was the Liberal-turned-Labour MP Josiah Wedgwood, who had described himself to Goldman as the sole member of parliament who disapproved of the Bolshevism regime from a radical standpoint.[8] As Goldman at the dinner declared her intention of adding her own voice to the clamour against Bolshevism, she got a sense straight away of how true that was. ...

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— Iain Mckay - Michael Bakunin, Anarchist & Syndicalist

 

at 11/1/26 6:36am

Author: Iain MckayTitle: Michael Bakunin, Anarchist & SyndicalistDate: 2026, FallNotes: Publication information is available online at https://syndicalist.us/Source: Scanned from Anarcho-Syndicalist Review #95, Fall, 2026, page 40 This year marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Michael Bakunin (May 30, 1814, to July 1, 1876). While best known for his struggle against Marx in the (First) International and his correct prediction that the so-called workers' state would generate a new ruling class, there is much more to Bakunin than that. He wrote on a wide range of subjects which activists today will find of interest—the nature of a social revolution, union organizing, nationalism and national liberation, atheism, the need for a specific anarchist organization, amongst others. It is important to stress that the conflict within the International was not a personal one. Bakunin championed a tendency that had existed within the International since the start, one which could be termed (to use a later word) syndicalist—that argued for struggle on the economic terrain and favored federalist socio-economic organization which prefigured the socialist world desired. This inevitably brought the federalist wing of the International into conflict with Marx who favored political action (electioneering) and centralized political organization (parties). Bakunin championed this tendency (which was supported by the majority of the International) and became its best-known advocate. As is clear from the writings included in this issue, Bakunin advocated syndicalist tactics and specific anarchist organization. However, this is often ignored by commentators upon him and anarchism. Instead, Bakunin's constructive ideas are replaced with suggestions that he was an advocate of pan-destruction and terrorism. Suffice to say, comparing hostile accounts of Bakunin to anarchist ones and the reader would not be condemned if they concluded that there were about two different people with the same name. Often this criticism is based on works for which any actual evidence of Bakunin's authorship is lacking or, at best, limited, superficial or dubious. These date from his short association—and infatuation—with the Russian Nihilist Sergei Nechaev and many of the commentators seem blissfully unaware of any research conducted since Marx and Engels first made the assertion, research which shows that Bakunin had no role in the infamous works written during that short period and that Nechaev was their author. This explains why their content is so at odds with Bakunin's other writings, whether public or private. Bakunin's advocacy of syndicalism can be seen from his public writings, his letters to comrades and his posthumously published works. Thus we see him argue for economic organization and struggle, reject electioneering and correctly predict it would lead to reformism, see the general strike as a means of commencing the social revolution (although not rejecting the need for insurrection) and a host of other ideas which are associated with the later syndicalism which is all too often claimed to be different to revolutionary anarchism or a new development produced by the failure of "propaganda by the deed" (again, wrongly all too often proclaimed the anarchist tactic). Yet we find Bakunin arguing that the "International, by thus placing the proletariat outside the politics of states and the bourgeois world, constitutes a new world, the world of proletarian solidarity across all countries. This world is that of the future... it is the organisation of international solidarity for the economic struggle of labor against capital." Likewise, he indicated that the organs formed to fight capitalism (unions, councils) would be what replaced it: This completely practical, completely vital study of social science undertaken and constantly pursued by the workers themselves, both in their respective trade sections and in these trades councils, will necessarily lead and has already led to a large extent to produce in them this unanimous and fully considered conviction, demonstrable both in theory and in practice, that the serious, final, complete emancipation of the workers is possible only on one condition, and that this condition is the appropriation of capital, that is to say the raw materials and all the instruments of labor, including land, by the workers collectively....The economic question considered in this extent and embracing both all conditions of labor as well as those of the just distribution of the products of labor, is the real terrain that the worker must never abandon. As soon as he abandons it, he loses himself in metaphysical, juridical, political, theological abstractions, and disorientated, deprived of his two faithful guides, his common sense and the awareness or instinct of his real interests, he always finds himself once again, to his great surprise, the slave and exploited of the bourgeois. While remaining on the economic terrain, the worker will be all powerful.... The organization of trade sections, their federation in the International [Workers'] Association and their representation by trade councils [Chambres de travail] not only creates a great Academy where all the workers of the International, uniting practice with theory, can and must study economic science, they even carry the living seeds of the new social order that is to replace the bourgeois world. They create not only the ideas but the very facts of the future. ...

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— Dani Burlison - Aradia: A Divine Ally In Times Of Revolt

 

at 10/31/26 11:57pm

Author: Dani BurlisonTitle: Aradia: A Divine Ally In Times Of RevoltDate: 26 Oct 2026Source: Retrieved on October 31 2026 from https://www.cawshinythings.com/aradia-a-divine-ally-in-times-of-revolt/ You may have heard of her: Aradia, daughter of Diana, the Roman moon goddess, and Lucifer, the personification of the morning star. Siblings in this particular tale, they create and birth Aradia with the sole purpose of sending her to earth to help liberate Italian peasants from the crushing weight of the ruling class. The lore says she was meant to teach witchcraft and sorcery to the disempowered resistance, so they could utilize the teachings to rise up and win the class war. To poison the powerful. To bind them and their oppressive deeds from causing further harm. At least this is what Charles Godfrey Leland relayed in his slim, influential 1899 book, Aradia: Or The Gospel of the Witches. “And thou shalt be the first witches known;And thou shalt be the first of all i’ the world:And thou shalt teach the art of poisoning;Of poisoning those who are the great lords of all;Yea, thou shalt make them die in their palaces;And thou shalt bind the oppressor’s soul (with power)” The book itself includes invocations, spells, tales of Aradia’s origins, and claims of a secret witch society who had a long, unbroken lineage of practicing folk magic and pre-Christian spiritual and healing traditions throughout Italy. In the book, followers of Aradia are instructed to gather in groups and have monthly naked meetings in forests during the full moon in honor of Diana until “…the last of your oppressors shall be dead.” “If I were just to look at the book itself without the modern view, I would say Aradia is an initiator, she is someone who elevates people who are really not just disenfranchised, but slaves; enslaved in their souls, enslaved in their bodies,” says Dr. A.D. Manns, cultural historian and author of Aradia’s Hidden Hand: The Untold Life of Roma Lister (Hexen Press, 2025). “And through her intervention, she’s bringing these subjugated peoples to another level, allowing them to gain a certain degree of mastery.” It is thrilling to consider; not a savior coming to rescue everyone, but rather a divine ally of sorts arriving with the power of organizing with the people and providing them with more tools to fight. Poison those in power. Cast spells. Achieve collective freedom. A woman named Maddalena (sometimes known as Margherita or Maddalena Talenti) was Leland’s paid informant who collected, and provided Leland with, information detailing Aradia’s origin story as the symbol of resistance and uprising she is portrayed as in Aradia. Maddalena herself claimed she was a link in the unbroken lineage Leland described in the book, a Tuscan and Etruscan witch, a role she said was passed down to her through generations. Reception of the book has been complicated. It has been discussed, critiqued, praised, referenced, evaluated. It even influenced the modern witchcraft and neo-pagan revivals in the mid-1900’s. Wicca has roots in Leland’s Aradia, too; Gerald Gardner was deeply inspired by the book and adopted much of what he read and wove it into spells and rituals for his Gardnerian Witchcraft teachings. Doreen Valiente’s Charge of the Goddess, which is an influential piece of Gardnerian Wicca’s Book of Shadows, was also heavily inspired by Aradia’s modern lore. And Stregheria, or Italian American witchcraft, which was popularized by Raven Grimassi’s work, can also follow its threads back to Aradia. Tales of everyday people being taught to fight back against oppression is a strong and enduring theme that has led these spiritual traditions to carry on, growing in popularity even more so in the rapidly tilting times we are in today. <em><em>Aradia book cover (Wikicommons image)</em></em> Born in Pennsylvania in 1824, Charles Godfrey Leland was somewhat of an armchair anthropologist and self-taught journalist, with a law degree and an education dabbling in languages and poetry. He fought in the French Revolution of 1848 and had a keen interest in the arts, founding and directing the Public School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia in 1880, an institution that taught crafts to the disadvantaged children of the city. Aside from his eclectic education and an interesting assortment of career paths, Leland is probably known best today as a Folklorist; he traveled extensively and took a special interest in the Roma of Europe, Native Americans, Irish Travelers, and other marginalized and oppressed people, writing books and magazine articles about them; some of Leland’s perspectives and writings are fairly problematic, with stereotyped perspectives on the cultures he studied, especially in regard to the Roma. It can be assumed that some of this seeped through in Aradia. He attributed his varied interests in everything from the occult to the arts and law—and as a Union soldier who fought at the Battle of Gettysburg—to an incident he claimed happened while still a newborn. In her biography of Leland, his niece Elizabeth Robins Pennell writes that Leland often shared a story of his Dutch nurse performing a ritual on him in the family’s attic, which included candles, a bible, a key, a knife, salt and even some money to set him on his path to becoming “a scholar and a wizard.” ...

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As of 11/8/26 2:26am. Last new 11/6/26 1:53am.