an old anarchist blog
Part 1: The Blue November It’s amazing how few people realized what was going to happen. There was a sense, of course, that the old US empire was on the verge of something catastrophic, but even as all the telltale signs were lit in neon, basically everyone refused to engage in detailed speculation. Many commented that civil war, internal waves of genocide, infrastructural collapse, and mass death…
It’s 2015 and I’m sitting on a couch with my roommate, gazing down on another Fuck The Police riot turned street party. The day has been long, the bars have already closed, and we’re both back in our rent-controlled collective house in San Francisco’s Lower Haight, too exhausted to go out and join the rowdies blaring music beneath our window. A year since the start of the Ferguson Uprising, months…
“lol,” texted the billionaire, “i love it. fuck them.” And so it was announced: in four years the world would be destroyed. At first there was a flurry of editorials and think pieces. On a wet fall morning a hundred student protesters broke through the outer chain link fencing surrounding an ICBM silo in Montana and were gunned down. That evening, with great fanfare, Philadelphia was nuked. Aid…
This text is available as a zine formatted for printing . An anarchist walks out of a punk show to smoke. On her vest are anarchist patches with various standard slogans, “No Gods No Masters,” “Death To Transphobes,” “Kill Your Local Rapist,” “All Cops Are Bastards,” “Punch Nazis,” “From The River To The Sea Palestine Will Be Free,” “Make Total Destroy,” “The Only Good Cop Is A Dead Cop,” “Eat The…
I haven’t talked much about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine since it occurred, mostly just sharing Ukrainian voices and chastising a now former friend for calling for a NATO enforced no fly zone (e.g. shooting down a nuclear power’s planes). There’s something grotesque about the way slaughter can be turned into posturing discourse among the comfortable while the bombs are falling. The way that horrors…
This text is available as a zine formatted for printing . CW: lengthy and detailed discussion of abuse, rape, stalking, and apologia for such Let’s be clear from the outset: Conflict Is Not Abuse is not even remotely the same thing as the sentiment or thesis that “conflict is not abuse.” Much of the success Sarah Schulman’s book has seen is the result of people wanting a defense of the latter…
Review: The Anarchist-Individualist Origins of Italian Fascism In 1910 Luigi Fabbri and Armando Borghi abducted an anarchist woman who had shamed their friend by divorcing him. Together, they forced her into a gynecological exam so the doctor could publicly pronounce her deformed and incapable of sex. All three were prominent leaders in the Italian anarchist scene and involved in criminal…
“The entire, eons-long practice of human movement into new places was pushed out of our imagination — or, perhaps more accurately, was reimagined as a national security threat. In the process, stasis was glorified as the normative way of being human.” “Only after the death of the national liberation project can we renew our commitment to decolonization.” Many years ago a latinx friend of mine…
This text is available as a zine formatted for printing . Recent years have seen a resurrection of a Great Man Of History Marxist scholasticism that fixates on some (easily accessible) Original Core Texts of supposed genius and discards all the complicated stuff afterwards, certainly everything in recent decades. This impulse is the product of a mass flocking to radical leftism wherein new…
It became briefly popular for a while to focus on our limits to process choice – decision fatigue, “spoons”, etc – and to promote a kind of economizing around such. But I think it’s also illuminating to do the opposite: to economize around our limited capacity to deal with a lack of agency. One of the central motivations of insurrectionary anarchism is the insight that not only can reproducible…