After such recent anarchist events as the San Francisco Bay Area Bookfair and the Total Liberation Conference it seems increasingly clear that significant populations of the self-described anarchist movement in North America manifest anarchy in the context of either a historical society much like the society for creative anachronism (SCA), or a literary society. Anarchism has become an ideology to be debated, discussed, argued, while sipping coffee or reenacting some historic moment in anarchist history (e.g. Mayday). These are the benign aspects of anarchist identity politics. These types are often thoughtful, just steeped in their own gray matter, or wrapped in whatever the hippest clothes of the scene are. What’s missing ultimately... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
The Anarchist movement long fought against women’s oppression. And many prominent figures in the women’s movement were Anarchists. The following are some examples, but there are many more.
Michael Bakunin
Michael Bakunin, a founder of Anarchism, was a fighter for women’s freedom. “In the eyes of the law”, Bakunin noted, “even the best educated, talented, intelligent woman is inferior to even the most ignorant man”.
For the poor underprivileged women, said Bakunin, there is the threat of “hunger and cold”, and the threat of sexual assault and prostitution.
Even within the family, women are too often the “slaves of their husbands”, and their children are... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Superficially, anarchism is a movement of the Left but this is not strictly so, since it implies being part of the political spectrum. Anarchists reject this, asserting that there is more in common between Right and Left political parties (like the struggle for power) than between even extreme Left political groups and the anarchists. History has shown us that no matter how ‘Left’ a party is when it starts off, the achievement of power brings it round to the Right, for every government wants to maintain the status quo; wants to extend the control it has over the people, and isn’t this what the Right really means?
Certain right-wing attitudes are specifically rejected by left-wing parties — until they become us... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
In March 2012, we had the chance to meet some anarchists from the
local infoshop and mindsetbreakerpress in manila, the capital of
philippines. We talked to them about their general situation and about
one campaign against gentrification and squatting in the national
park. We publish parts of interviews and background information.
Early history of anarchism in the philippines
(following some parts of the article “Anarchy in the R.P.” from the newspaper “gasera” #1)
The analysis below is a historical rereading of the
archipelago based on a nonhierarchial and nonstatist
lens. It is an attempt of the editors to see a shared
perspective in history.
There is evidence that anarchism was alrea... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Can you tell us about the history of anarchism in Indonesia?
MT: As far as I know from my friends' stories and from what I’ve learned, the origin of anarchism in Indonesia came together with the arrival of punk music around 1998. At that time anarchy was synonymous with punk and some people in that community began to delve deeper into anarchic ideology and values. Since that time anarchist discourse began to develop among individuals or collectives in the punk / hardcore community, and later to a broader range of groups such as activists, students, workers; essentially reaching a wider public with different backgrounds.
Along with the spread of anarchic discourse, many discussions on this topic began to occur, and anarch... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
This anonymous article was found on the web. Many seem to be confused or angry at those who have used street fighting tactics in Genoa. By explaining the motivation behind using these street fighting tactics, especially from the Black Bloc perspective, this article hopes to sooth some of that anger. The article also suggests some ways we as a movement can move forward concerning the disagreement over forceful or nonviolent direct action.
Firstly, I am an anarchist, and this has been written because much of the anarchist position on street fighting tactics needs to be explained, especially after the murder of the brave street fighter Carlo Giuliani.
Nobody should expect radical change to be a comfortable and easy process. Many ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
February 1 occured searches in appartments of activists who, according to assumption of security forces, belong to anarchist organization “People self-defense”. More than ten people were detained, some were beaten and tortured with electric shocks. However, afterwards almost all the detainees were released. As it turned out, all this was started with the aim of apprehending a graduate student of the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University anarchist Azat Miftakhov.
He is suspected of making explosives. Also security forces try to associate him with an explosive device found in Balashikha in January.
All others were required to testify against him. To the credit of the detainees, no one gave t... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Part I
The question always before anarchists is how to act in the present moment of struggle against capitalism and the state. As new forms of social struggles are becoming more clearly understood, this question becomes even more important. In order to answer these questions we have to clarify the relationship between anarchists and the wider social movement of the exploited and the nature of that movement itself. First of all, we need to note that the movement of the exploited is always in course. There is no use in anarchists, who wish to destroy capitalism and the state in their entirety, waiting to act on some future date, as predicted by an objectivist reading of capitalism or a determinist understanding of history as if one wer... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
On a particularly chaotic Friday afternoon, Piñera inaugurated the nationwide chain reaction to the pandemic. Since the beginning of March, fear of the virus has slowly entered the conversation: between the agitated return to classes that seeks to be a replica (like an earthquake) of the October Revolt, the massive feminist demonstrations, the radicalization of the reactionary sectors and the imminence of the plebiscite, it is taking on more and more importance.
The international situation is no less complex. Last year saw the beginning of a new worldwide wave of revolts against capitalist normality, and the much manipulated “institutionality” seems to be collapsing from all sides, leaving room not only for insurge... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
This text was written in Madrid, so many of the descriptions and reflections may not match the reality of other locations, especially given the heterogeneity of the 15-M Movement. Even so, we think that it could be useful as a point of departure for reflection for all the comrades involved in the assemblies, regardless of the site. The text was written and corrected hastily so that it would be ready before the convocation of village and neighborhood assemblies on May 28. Keep this in mind while reading it and excuse any mistakes that it may have.
— Some Anarchists from Madrid[1]
0. A word to begin ...
Let’s set the record straight. The signers of this text are anarchists, anti-authoritarian communists, anti-capi... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Most dismissals of anarchy or anarchist ideas come through the belief that for an anarchy to work, perfection is requirement. In other words, people dismiss anarchy because they believe anarchy means “utopia”.
If anything, anarchy is anti-utopia. It is utopia’s antithesis. Right now we are living out Plato’s dream of the perfect society, outlined in the Republic. It’s not a perfect society that we are living in, but we are always striving for perfection, whether as individuals or as a society. There are always new technologies being created in order to perfect us as human beings: cosmetic surgeries, life-extending drugs, genetic therapy, etc. And there is always an attempt to recreate or fix this pillar... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Life is becoming smart and clean. All knowledge and communication stands at my disposal at any time. Everything becomes practical and efficient, simple, playful and always positive, everything becomes Google. Everyone can take part, it is free and voluntary. I can decide anytime and the whole world is open to me - I have nothing to hide.
So it seems. That's the product, the machine.
But if you look beyond the smartphone to face the WHY and the HOW, unpleasant questions and answers will arise, that push for consequences. Google is just one company of many, only part of the new power structures, but a crucial one. The technologies are powerful means and tools used to restructure capitalism and domination. To mark the fight again... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
“One can only empathize with individuals, motivated by a sincere desire for reform, who join ecology groups, consumer organizations and alternative political parties. In any of these groups these individuals are directed by a firmly entrenched leadership through a maze of politically motivated compromises to an end that is sadly predictable: the indefinite postponement of profound social transformation, the enrichment of the careers of a few bureaucrats and the permanent disillusion of a number of intelligent individuals.
from ‘Call it Sleep’ — Cronin/Seltzer
The movement which has sprung up around animal rights has gained widespread notoriety and a fair amount of support. It appeals to all sorts of... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Translator's Foreword
This text is less so a general critique of insurrectionalist methodology or ideas than a critique of how a specific insurrectionalism, that which has developed in Barcelona in the last eighteen years, has played out in practice. It problematizes a set of practices and attitudes that it sees in the self- proclaimed insurrectionalist milieu there, from arrogance to bad security to an incomplete understanding of repression. At times it broadens to critique insurrectionalisms of other places or more general aspects of the tendency.
Unlike other critiques of insurrectionalism, this one doesn't come from the left. It doesn't seek to pacify resistance or manage struggle, nor do its authors believe in the preserv... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Anthropology, the study of human beings throughout time and space, is often criticized as anthropocentric. This is because anthropologists tend to extract human beings from their natural environments, looking at them as isolated animals above all others, and the dominatrix of nature. Anarcho-primitivism, the radical critique of civilization which uses a great deal of anthropological and ethnographic data tends to reconnect humanity with nature.
John Zerzan is anarcho-primitivism’s most famous and vocal thinker. He has published many texts in which he gives a thorough argument against civilization. He traces the demise of civilization back through domestication, time, art, numbers, language, and symbolic thought. His arguments ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
No Capital Projects but the End of Capital
18 November 2009.
The University of California is occupied. It is occupied as is the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and the Technical Institute of Graz; as were the New School, Faculty of Humanities in Zagreb and the Athens Polytechnic. These are not the first; they will not be the last. Neither is this a student movement; echoing the factory occupations of Argentina and Chicago, immigrant workers occupy forty buildings in Paris, including the Center Pompidou. There is still life inside capital’s museum.
We send our first greetings to each of these groups, in solidarity. We stand with everybody who finds themselves in a building today because they have chosen to be, beca... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Anticivilization Gathering: Weaving a Cobweb April 30th — May 3rd
This year’s anti-civilization gathering suffered slightly from less numbers than the previous year’s gathering. Still there were people from a range of European countries and different groups and projects.
Last year’s gathering was at a large squat called “Can Masdeu” in the suburbs of Barcelona, but this year the organizers had opted for a campsite called “Solell de les Codines” further north near Montesquiu, a village in the area of Osona, in North of Catalunya.
It’s possible that the concrete manicured campsite, relatively close to a large road was not quite the ideal venue for a gathering of civili... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
In the fall of 1991, a series of investigations were stared in the German city of Göttingen concerning the law Paragraph 129a (propaganda for, support for, formation of, or membership in a terrorist organization). The reason for these investigations were 52 unsolved anti-fascist “attacks” that had been carried out in the Göttingen region since 1981. The state prosecutor’s office in Celle (GSA) formed a special commission with Lower Saxony’s criminal justice department (LKA), the SoKo 606, which was supposed to “solve” these attacks. It soon became clear that the cops were focusing their investigations on autonomist anti-fascists. In Aug. 1992, the first series of house raids were carried out in ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
By presupposing the axiom of the economic, the Marxist critique perhaps deciphers the functioning of the system of political economy; but at the same time it reproduces it as a model. There is neither a mode of production nor production in primitive societies. There is no dialectic and no unconscious in primitive societies. Marxism is the projection of the class struggle and the mode of production onto all previous history; it is the vision of a future “freedom” based on the conscious domination of nature. These are extrapolations of the economic. To the degree that it is not radical, Marxist critique is led despite itself to reproduce the roots of the system of political economy.
—The Mirror of Production
Lef... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
There appears to be a trend in radical circles of distinguishing prisoners based on their so-called ‘crimes’, with the intent (conscious or not) to identify ‘political prisoners’ who, by virtue of their actions, are more deserving of support and solidarity. Prisoners who have been targeted by the state due to their political beliefs and/or actions are given special attention among radicals, while the rest of the prison population spending their days in a cage are often only an afterthought, used as a means to lend credibility to political ideology, or completely forgotten.
This privileged and moralistic practice has invaded radical circles and creates a distinction between ‘political’ and ‘or... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Why should we, the proletarians, have children if they are taken by the capitalists to be killed metaphorically in work and by the militarists to be killed in reality as soldiers?
Antinatalism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism) is a philosophy with a centuries-long history that is against the birth of new fetuses in the human society for ethical and philosophical reasons.
Antinatalists believe that the existence in life will necessarily cause a person to live negative experiences, and use two philosophical positions to support the idea that the birth of new humans is a bad thing:
1. The philosophy of Hedonism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonism) that says that the meaning of life is happiness.
2. The ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
We present this publication attempting to answer the questions that first arise around anti-technology and also with the aim of raising awareness of the subject.
We recommend you read these texts in the woods, where the fanzine and we belong.
Make as many copies as you want, send it to anyone to whom it may interest.
Anti-technology is a nonprofit publication, the price, if any, can’t exceed printing costs.
Warning! We didn’t find any “native” speaker to proofread the english version.
A rabid dog doesn’t stop being dangerous simply because you change its collar, you can’t educate, tame or cure the dog’s rabies. We can look back and remember when the dog was good an... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Why come back to questions about affinity and informal organization? Certainly not because we are lacking attempts to explore and deepen these aspects of anarchism, not because yesterday’s discussion, like today’s, aren’t being somewhat inspired by them, and also not because there is a lack of texts – true, most of the time in other languages – that approach these questions perhaps in a more dynamic manner. However, without a doubt, certain concepts require a permanent analytical and critical effort, if they don’t want to loose their meaning by being all-too-often used and repeated. Otherwise our ideas risk becoming a common place, some “evidence”, a fertile ground for the idiotic game of iden... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Beyond Workerism, Beyond Syndicalism
The end of syndicalism corresponds to the end of workerism.
For us it is also the end of the quantitive illusion of the party and the specific organization of synthesis.
The revolt of tomorrow must look for new roads.
Trade unionism is in its decline. In good as in evil with this structural form of struggle an era is disappearing, a model and a future world seen in terms of an improved and corrected reproduction of the old one.
We are moving towards new and profound transformations. In the productive structure, in the social structure.
Methods of struggle, perspectives, even short term projects are also transforming.
In an expanding industrial soci... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
The situation changes quickly. Along with everyone else, I follow it avidly and share updates, watch our lives change from day to day, get bogged down in uncertainty. It can feel like there is only a single crisis whose facts are objective, allowing only one single path, one that involves separation, enclosure, obedience, control. The state and its appendages become the only ones legitimate to act, and the mainstream media narrative with the mass fear it produces swamps our ability for independent action.
Some anarchists though have pointed out that there are two crises playing out in parallel — one is a pandemic that is spreading rapdily and causing serious harm and even death for thousands. The other is crisis management stra... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
I
Anyone can put an end to tossing about in the slavery of what they don’t know—and refusing the sop of empty words, come to daggers with life.
—C. Michelstaedter.
Life is no more than a continual search for something to cling to. One gets up in the morning to find oneself in bed a mere matter of hours later, a sad commuter between lack of desire and fatigue. Time passes, spurring us less and less. Social obligations no longer seem to break our backs as we have got used to spreading the weight. We obey without even taking the trouble to say yes. Death is expiated by living, wrote the poet from another trench.
We can live without passion or dreams—that is the great liberty this soci... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
I live in Auschwitz-Disneyland. I make sure that all my papers are in order,
I document my existence on social networks,
I apply for grants and loans. I wear clothes that express who I am, I am a walking billboard, a name tag, I pick a style. I take a train, a subway, my car, un Bixi[1], it's so convenient. I take a shower, I smell good, according to the ads this foaming gel makes me irresistible. Auschwitz-Disneyland is the countryside in the city, the city in the suburb, and the suburb in the countryside. Auschwitz-Disneyland is naked life in one's Sunday best, the hegemony giving itself the answer. In Auschwitz-Disneyland, “holidays make you free.” In Auschwitz-Disneyland, we order at the drive-through, we study... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
As anarchists, considering insurrection and looking for ways to make it possible is not the same as drawing up a master plan leading towards insurrection and looking for the cattle to execute it. Neither can it be about a crowd joining an initiative and not taking responsibility for thinking for themselves, discussing, creating an autonomous course. Of course this is a caricature, but it enables one to sketch out certain mechanisms inherent to each attempt to bring people together without, at the same time, proposing circles of affinity and permanent discussion as necessary conditions to enable informal organization.
The enthusiasm at the beginning of a shared project after a period of searching for affinity is contagious and attract... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)