“Just put a rag on ya face when you ride
you don’t want them sattelites to take ya picture”
– Dead Prez, D.O.W.N. (2004)
“They building up the East Side and investin’ too,
While the entire West Side is left destitute”
– Judah The LyricalRev, Rockford Files (2006)
“They try to tell us to believe in the government,
But even when Barack is president, niggas had to sell rocks”
– Vic Mensa, No More Tear Drops (2020)
Intro
This is a revolutionary anarchist perspective from Rockford, Illinois and the conditions here. Smaller cities are often not focused upon enough when it comes to revolutionary analysis. T... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
1 - Hack For The Joy – An Introduction
Once upon the time, hacking was all about the spontaneous emotions as raw, uncaptured and wild. It was never about the meaningful action, nor for some cause, the act of hacking was merely for the fruit of extreme thrill, challenge and stubbornness against all authority. It was the indescribable defiance of resistance that reached out and smugly slamming at the system where it hurts. Moreover, a hacker often find themselves align with how an Egoist saw themselves. A hacker had no nationality because there are no borders on the vast array of networks. They had no societal constructs like race, gender and class because anonymity shields them from all intrusive puncturing. Most importantly, ha... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Comrades in Kalamazoo!
... Over the summer the black students looked around for a Director of the Afro-American Student Center. They chose John F. Hatchett, a man who was expelled from I.S. 201 after the whole uproar there. He was approved by the University Senate, and by Dean Whiteman (Dean White Man) under Hester’s direction. (Hester is President of New York University.) The faculty was not consulted.
Almost immediately after his appointment, a furor was raised by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, by other Jewish and religious organizations, over an article that Hatchett wrote in Afro-American Teachers’ Journal which was allegedly anti-Semitic. The article has been quoted out of context in n... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Fredy Perlman, born August 20, 1934, Brno, Czechoslovakia, died July 26, 1985 Detroit, Michigan
Fredy Perlman was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia on August 20, 1934. He emigrated with parents to Cochabamba, Bolivia in 1938 just ahead of the Nazi takeover. The Perlman family came to the United States in 1945 and lived variously in Mobile, Alabama, Brooklyn, Queens before settling in Lakeside Park, Kentucky, a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio where Fredy graduated high school.
In 1952 he attended Morehead State College in Kentucky and then UCLA from 1953–55. Fredy was on the staff of The Daily Bruin, the school newspaper, when the reactionary university administration fired all of the editors of the publication. The five editors, i... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Initially we intended to write an article analyzing the role of art in transforming a run-down working class area, Lower Manhattan, New York City, for the benefit of capital. In the course of our research and discussion we realized that what was happening in Lower Manhattan wasn’t an isolated incident, but part of an increasingly significant capital accumulation process with art as a major protagonist, and involving a widespread transformation of urban space. We believe there is a general global tendency of culture to act as an element in the regeneration of the inner cities, adapting itself in different ways to different places. There seem to be two strategies at work: a) Art as state-manipulated gentrifier as in the Lower East Side,... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
The defeat and subjugation of the populations of the planet has been the victory of the socialized mentality over individualistic wildness. We are supposed to believe that this world’s problems, such as poverty and oppression, are the fault of those old Christian bugbears Selfishness, Greed, Pride, Hate and Immorality more generally. Nothing could be further from the truth. This moralizing narrative demands, like any morality, self-mutilation and increased repression.
The forced slave march down the road of ‘Human Progress’ has been led by various deified abstractions over mountains of corpses, bulldozing through the wild woods to plant monocultures drip-fed subservience. It has been the march of the phantoms. Never... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
You put your left foot in
You take your left foot out
You put your left foot in
And you shake it all about
You do the hokey pokey
And you turn yourself around
That's what it's all about
-Inhabit
In habit, daily routine thinks in place of us.
From work to ‘free time’, everything comes about within the continuity of survival.
We always have something to cling to. The most stupefying characteristic of today’s society is the ability for ‘comfort’ to exist a hair’s breadth from catastrophe. The mass is usually fond of the mediocre, the immobility of habit, the rigidity of prudence and afraid of the new, the radical, the unknown of insurrection. Old habits die ha... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
These thoughts were submitted by an egoist-nihilist anarchist on Athens IMC.
I would not even bother to participate in the ongoing debate, but some of the latest comments from an ‘antifascist comrade’ intrigued me.
First, to be able to get the features of antifascist action indexed, I believe one should determine the content of the very concept of fascism.
Fascism is primarily a loud and violent slap in the face of the ‘revolutionary’ who is recognizing revolutionary subjects in the face of phantoms such as the society and the class, and is longing for uprisings and revolutions. And how hypocritical indeed is the fact that social anarchists shriek about antifascism! Because, essentially, their wa... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
During the wrecking of the Moscow Anarchist Federation [April 1918], the Bolshevik authorities executed one of the Federation’s most active workers, Comrade Khodounov.
He was known as an honest and sincere comrade not only among Anarchists but wherever he had an opportunity to work.
He was one of the workers of the Telephone shops and as such he enjoyed high confidence among his fellow employes. He organized an Anarchist group at the factory. The workers elected him as their representative to the Soviet of one of the Moscow boroughs.
During the October days comrade Khodounov organized a fighting unit consisting of Anarchist workers living in various districts of Moscow. He spent several sleepless night at the sess... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
I can only be amused when the religious mindset insinuates itself into the viewpoints of those who claim to oppose this society, filling these radicals of various types with its binaries, its puritanical/moralistic thinking, its renunciations and its judgments. It is not so surprising when this occurs. After all, if one doesn’t launch her challenge against this society from herself, but rather from an ideal placed above himself, he inevitably confronts the world as a righteous judge aiming to condemn and punish rather than as an enemy aiming to defeat and conquer. Therefore, this moral challenger has no choice but to absolutely reject everything that she has come to associate with this world and to embrace everything he has come to as... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
You’d have to be really blind not to see sabotage as the classical weapon of the exploited. And you’d have to have a pretty short memory to forget that in every social war, a rebel refuses to wait for everyone to move before expressing his or her anger.
From the riots of November 2005 to the CPE riots of spring 2006, from factory occupations and kidnapings of directors to the numerous acts of sabotage during the railway workers’ movement of November 2007, it’s clear for a lot of people that we won’t have an end to our situation of misery and exploitation by begging for it. In this prison society, we’re expected to believe we’re in the best of possible worlds: commodity democracy. And they try... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter 1
Who will revive the violent whirlpools of flame if not us
and those that we consider brothers?
Come! New friends: this will please you.
We will never work, oh tides of flame!
This world will explode.
It’s the true path. Forward, on the march.
— A. Rimbaud
The spread of sabotage, its increasing practice, on a greater or lesser scale, far and wide against the domination of the market is a given fact. Burning ATM booths, disabling locks at shopping centers, smashing shop windows, setting fire to the offices of temp agencies and employment offices, the sabotage of the infrastructure of capitalism (high-speed railroads, dams, expressways, construction projects) ... are offensive p... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
It’s that time again, when after four (or eight) years, the presidential election becomes “the most important of our time.” The clowns might be different, but the circus remains the same: filling vacancies on the Supreme Court, a rollback of abortion rights, foreign wars and targeted assassinations, the growing prison population, the expansion of the surveillance state... The campaigns of Trump and Sanders will surely be remembered as footnotes; the former is so buffoonish that even other Republicans can’t help making fun of him, while the latter, a Socialist Jew, is obviously unelectable to the Executive Branch. Sure to be forgotten as well (at least until the next time) is the excitement of a certain group of self-... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
A book that made militancy more shameful still, by attempting to re-brand it as joyful.
Preliminary considerations
The authors want to make like Marie Kondo [1] and give joy through organizing, and she'd be happy to stumble on such a big mess. The name-dropping in “Joyful Militancy” serves to confer it academic standing, and to point out where they're coming from, and what they're intended audience is. Since my reply to it is not academic, I will not engage with the ideas of each of the big-name authors they cite. Yet responding in kind, I'll drop [2] the name of those authors and texts I've tastefully plagiarized, to point to where I'm coming from, and to whom I'm corresponding with.
The challenge with engaging... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
We just finished reading your letter, that you wrote to us and all the French comrades. We read it with pleasure, finding in it multiple points we recognize ourselves in. We read it attentively, because it comes from the people who unfortunately have to face, before us and more than us, the repression. However, we must say that it also left a bitter taste and provoked a kind of discomfort.
We want to ask you: who are you talking to? What are you talking about? As your letter is addressed to the French comrades and formulates a precise critique against the “innocent” line of defense of the Tarnac arrestees, we wouldn’t like that in Italy you think “the French comrades” are all busy to collect signatures i... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Dearest white progressive/radical,
Recent events in which reported progressives and radicals, purposely or ‘unintentionally,’ marginalized people of color, their lives, images, thoughts and struggles — after prompting a ‘what the fuck’ — remind me this seems so familiar.
No, you won’t need to tune out the comments about ongoing racism that you always tune out, until a white person says the same thing. To you, white progressive or radical, here are some other thoughts to consider.
Your society — and if you’re white, it is your society, regardless of your political pretensions to the contrary — and your way of life are built on a foundation of white supremacy. As... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
A nasty wind is blowing, it’s useless to hide it. So nasty that a certain worry even spreads among the fine souls of the left, and the establishment of a “dictatorship” by the current government is denounced in an increasingly vehement manner. It is true, on the right they have never forgotten their traditional inclination for caster oil and the cudgel, but the fact remains that repression, censure and prohibition are the bread that every form of government administers to us, no matter what it is. In reality, beyond the political faction momentarily charged with administering it, it is this one-way world that requires a one-way life, made from a one-way thought and one-way behavior... in an authentic coherence of abjection... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
I have often suspected, that there may be in the Air some yet more latent Qualities or Powers differing enough from all these, and principally due to the Substantial Parts or Ingredients, whereof it consist
For this is not as many imagine a simple and elementary body, but a confused aggregate of ‘effluviums’ from such differing bodies, that, though they all agree in constituting by their minuteness and various motions one great mass of fluid matter, yet perhaps there is scarce a more heterogeneous body in the world.”
– Robert Boyle, Suspicions About The Hidden Realities of the Air
They say: ‘we will return to the new normal.’ This is a blank check, a license to impose whatever con... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Yet one more episode in the chronicles of repression is now well-known to all: on October 1 Alfredo Bonanno (from Italy) and Christos Stratigopoulos (from Greece), two anarchists who have already been hit by repression on a number of occasions, were arrested in Greece following a robbery, and imprisoned in the small town of Amfissa. It is not our intention to comment on their action, which nevertheless has our full appreciation, nor will we indulge in other details concerning the comrades’ arrest, which have been abundantly exposed in previous leaflets and communiques.
On the contrary, what we feel the urge to do here is to remind all the comrades reading these lines that Christos and Alfredo are still being detained in the con... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Despite 9/11, Americans are still more likely to be struck by lightening than by terrorists, but only obsess about the latter.[1] They are thousands of times more likely to be shot by spouses, neighbors or workmates than terrorists, despite which they vigorously defend their ‘right to bear arms’. The sociologist William Catton has done us all the favor of putting fears about terrorism in context:[2]
The annual death toll from influenza in the United States is almost ten times the seven or eight year global toll from terrorism, yet most people tend to think of flu as more of a nuisance than a dire peril.
US foreign policy is led by a ‘war on terror’ that has killed more people — typically a... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
One thing that is more amazing than the expansion of the strategy of occupation from school to school is the remarkable similarity in the rhetoric of our opposition across terrains.
And I don’t mean Capital or university administrations, I’m talking about our most fervent opponents within our own ranks: particularly among the “build the movement first” leftists.
Rather than enter the discourse over the effectiveness of the “demand and march” model of campus activism or movement building as preceding any action, these opportunists and proceduralists have resorted to calling students who take the initiative to liberate buildings and spaces “adventurists.” This same term has been re... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Major General Amos A. Fries, the U.S. army’s official poisoner, or as he is more politely entitled by those who believe in poisoning strikers and radicals, “Chief of the Chemical Warfare Service,” writes to the public press of New York City to say, “If possible, consideration should be given to women and children (when gassing them with poison gas) so as to cause them no undue injury. Isn’t that sensible, humane, and even gallant? Would you teach a policeman to use the same vicious blow with a club on the head of a child or a woman as he would on a desperate armed man? Again, we think there is but one answer to the question.”
General Fries was defending himself against a certain amount of rather sh... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
‘To realize our plans and to spread the libertarian ideas to a wider public in Poland we need urgently your political but also your practical solidarity.’
Thus ended an ‘Appeal to the libertarian movement in the West’ of Polish libertarians which has found since its first publication in December 1982 a remarkable resonance in the international anarchist press. Recently we received some new information from our comrades in Warszawa who have founded in June the Emanuel Goldstein Group and have sent us a first tape-recorded communique in which they explain today’s situation and their plans for the near future.
First some words about the results of the solidarity campaign for the support of the Polish... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
On September 1, Lech Walesa, the worker who negotiated the end of the recent Polish strike wave, climbed two flights of wooden stairs to the temporary offices of the new Independent Trade Union which he heads. Walesa carried a two-foot crucifix, a bunch of gladiolas and a pennant from a bicycle club, all to adorn the headquarters of what he and the Western press have hailed as a “triumph” for the strikers — the right to organize a labor organization independent of the government-controlled, official union federations.
The events of the previous 18 days, which had given Walesa the keys to his new office, saw a courageous revolt of hundreds of thousands of Polish workers, which, although it had the proportions of a ge... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
This article is being written just as the pressure of a Soviet invasion of Poland is being eased and under the assumption that such an attack is not about to occur. Amid an atmosphere of continuing political crisis, growing worker militancy, continuing economic problems, and constant reshuffling of the Polish government personnel, Solidarity, the recently formed “independent” labor organization, looks like it is about to become a permanent part of Polish society.
Solidarity, with Catholic nationalist Lech Walesa at its head, has become a pawn in the strategy of the Polish communist party and the Soviet Union to tame an exceedingly combatative working class. (This obviously contradicts our statement in last issue’s F... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
So technique killed ethics. Because in front of any issue, human beings do not ask themselves what is most right, but what works. They no longer asks themselves this because at this point, in our world dominated in all its aspects by technique, it is given for granted that what is right is what works. Ideas become instruments to evaluate not for their meaning but for their way of being used, for their functionality, for their efficiency. All of this, as it has already been mentioned before, is certainly one of the consequences of the intrusion into all aspects of our lives of technique. However, it would be a mistake to think that this phenomenon only emerged in the last few decades, through the infestation of computers and cell phones, pla... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Civilization is backwards, Primitive societies are advanced!
When we say we want green anarchy, a stateless society, free and in harmony with Nature, people tell us that it’s “a nice dream but it’ll never happen” as “it’s against human nature”. The point is that is has happened — green anarchy was how all people lived for a good 90% of history, how they lived before they were even Homo sapiens, how some still live better than we do today. When we point this out, people start pissing and whining about “going back to the caves” and getting protective about their TVs, cars and other fruits of “Progress”, particularly Lefties and “anarchists” who don&rsqu... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
The Coronavirus Act 2020 in the UK is now in force for the next two years. It is a totalitarian coup by a right-wing government which has already shown it’s utter contempt for the judiciary, for parliament and for the people. Many of the provisions of this Act are already experienced by those on the margins of society, by dissidents, those in the prison and criminal justice system, the poor, and ethnic groups consistently disposed of by the police and the system, through poverty, imprisonment and death. Now the grand experiment is whether the kind of control infrastructure and total suspension of rights already administered to particular groups can be rolled out to the entire population.
The most manipulable provisions come, as... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
There is a place in this society where one is perpetually under surveillance, where every movement is monitored and controlled, where everyone is under suspicion except the police and their bosses, where all are assumed to be criminals. I am speaking, of course, of prison..
Within the walls of prison there is no freedom of choice, no illusion of democracy. There is only prison. Daily actions are regulated by strict schedules and enforced by armed guards, the choice of when, where and with whom to spend time completely taken away. Every action is surveilled with suspicion. All individuality, all identity is destroyed and replaced by that of prisoner, of criminal. Prison is the complete realization of this society’s need to isola... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)