In 1884, cholera tore through Italy, claiming thousands of lives. Despite a three-year prison sentence hanging over his head, Errico Malatesta joined other revolutionary anarchists on a daring mission to Naples—the heart of the epidemic—to treat those suffering from the disease. In so doing, he and his comrades demonstrated an alternative to coercive state policies that remains relevant today in the age of COVID-19.
The following text recounts the story of the outbreak and Malatesta’s intervention, including all the available primary materials about the Italian anarchists’ participation, some of which have not previously appeared in English. Much of the historical background is drawn from Frank M. Snowden’s ex... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Peering through the fog behind his eyes, he saw an alcohologram: a world of anguish, in which intoxication was the only escape. Hating himself even more than he hated the corporate killers who had created it, he stumbled to his feet and headed back to the liquor store.
Ensconced in their penthouses, they counted the dollars pouring in from millions like him, and chuckled to themselves at the ease with which all opposition was crushed. But they, too, ofen had to drink themselves to sleep at night — if ever those vanquished masses Flop coming back for more, the tycoons sometimes fetted to themselves, there’s gonna be hell to pay.
Wasted, Indeed: Anarchy & Alcohol
Ecstasy v Intoxication: for a world of enchantment, or anarch... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) How will our society emerge from the COVID-19 crisis? Does the pandemic show that we need more centralized state power, more surveillance and control? What are the threats ranged against us—and how can we prepare to confront them?
Several days ago, the number of coronavirus deaths in New York City surpassed the death toll of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Whenever pundits and politicians invoke 9/11, you know they’re trying to set the stage for some shock and awe.
The September 11 attacks served to justify the Patriot Act, extraordinary rendition and torture, the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq; these paved the way for a host of other catastrophes, including the rise of the Islamic State. While 2977 civilians were kil... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) On February 1, 2019, officers of the FSB, the Russian state security apparatus descended from the KGB, arrested a dozen people in the latest wave of their campaign of repression against accused anarchists throughout the country. After brutally torturing them over the following 24 hours in order to force them to agree to incriminating statements, they released 11 of them. The twelfth arrestee, Azat Miftakhov, temporarily disappeared within the legal system while the FSB continued torturing him and refusing his lawyer access to him. This is just the most recent of a series of events in which the FSB have systematically employed torture to force arrestees to sign false confessions in order to fabricate “terrorist conspiracies” invo... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) “The idea that an understanding of genocide, that a memory of holocausts can only lead people to want to dismantle the system is erroneous. The continuing appeal of nationalism suggests that the opposite is true: that an understanding of genocide has led people to mobilize genocidal armies, that the memory of holocausts has led people to perpetuate holocausts. The sensitive poets who remembered the loss, the researchers who documented it, have been like the pure scientists who discovered the structure of the atom. Applied scientists used the discovery to split the atom’s nucleus, to produce weapons which can split every atom’s nucleus; nationalists use the poetry to split and fuze human populations, to mobilize genocidal a... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In April, a countrywide revolt broke out in Nicaragua against neoliberal reforms introduced by the government of Daniel Ortega, a Sandinista revolutionary from the 1980s. We worked with Nicaraguan anarchists who participated at the forefront of the movement to bring you the following interview, offering an overview of the events and an analysis of the difficulties of organizing against leftist authoritarian governments while resisting right-wing cooptation.
The FSLN (Sandinista National Liberation Front) overthrew the US-backed military dictatorship of Somoza in 1979 and held power from 1979 to 1990. [For a brief summary of US interventions in Nicaragua during that time, read this text by Noam Chomsky.] After 16 years of neoliberal governm... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Those who wish to carry out acts of violence always seek to frame themselves as victims. If they are perceived as victims, this can legitimize the violence they perpetrate, or at least distract from it. So it was a godsend for the far right when James Hodgkinson opened fire in Alexandria on June 14, wounding House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and four other people. It gave them a chance to turn the story around: suddenly “Leftists” were the violent ones. Never mind the millions imprisoned and deported under Scalise’s governance, never mind the police murdering a thousand people a year, never mind the Republicans’ effort to deny tens of millions access to health care, never mind the white supremacist mass murders and s... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) At base, these three Hollywood movies by Mexican directors share the same chilling fixations and questions. All three derive their edge from focusing on grievous threats to children while dwelling upon whether adult humanity deserves to—or even can—survive its self-inflicted catastrophes.
Babel, like Amores Perros before it, is a long, grim meditation on guilt and penitence. The characters begin in personal Edens, oblivious to the weight and danger of each moment. These Edens are far from idyllic—they range from banal to tormented—but the calamities that shatter them make them seem blissful by comparison. Tragedies result inexorably from seemingly trivial decisions, ultimately humbling all the characters before thei... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Ungdomshuset was a four-story autonomous social center located in the Nørrebro neighborhood of Copenhagen. A stronghold of the workers’ movement since the end of the 19th century, it had served the community as a bastion of international squatting networks since the beginning of the 1980s. Twelve years ago today, on March 1, 2007, it was evicted and destroyed in one of the biggest police operations in Danish history. In response, supporters initiated some of the most intense rioting that Denmark had seen in generations. After a week of street fighting and a year of weekly demonstrations, the Danish government was forced to let the movement take possession of a new building. This stands as a major victory, illustrating the power... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Starting on the night of Sunday, August 9, in response to an election widely deemed to be rigged, a massive protest movement has broken out in Belarus against Aleksandr Lukashenko, the strongman who has ruled the country for over a quarter of a century. Police have arrested thousands of people, firing live rounds and murdering demonstrators. From Sunday to Tuesday, Lukashenko’s government apparently shut down the internet and landline telephones in hopes of dampening the protests, while claiming that the blackout was the work of forces outside Belarus. Belarusian opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanouskaya was detained and apparently forced to read a script declaring that Lukashenko had won the election and urging people to “obe... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Alongside government repression, what poses a greater threat to the yellow vest movement—the reactionaries who are participating in order to present themselves as the alternative to Macron’s neoliberalism, or the reformists who aim to replace horizontal self-organization with new party structures and legislation? In the following analysis, we show how these two phenomena are connected. The rhetoric of direct democracy associated with the left in the occupation movements of 2011 has been taken up across the political spectrum, as reformists promote referendums as a substitute for the participatory power people have experienced in the streets.
In the following critique, we don’t mean to suggest that reactionaries or reformi... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Several blocks before the L & 12th Street intersection, I was already feeling that the march had run its course. At each cross street, we met a line of police, sirens blaring. A few brave souls still managed to fell some final windows on the periphery. Yet while the Bank of America windows had crashed in triumphant cacophony, these windows struck the pavement with an urgency that reflected our increasingly dire situation. We had no destination, no end goal. It felt as though we were running solely to evade police. I knew that it was time to break from the group, yet I still held a kind of separation anxiety.
Leaving has always been hard for me. Dispersing consistently feels like a haphazardly unthought-out ending tacked onto an otherwi... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) What could there possibly be beyond democracy?
text courtesy of special agent Rolf Nadir
Nowadays, “democracy” rules the world. Communism has fallen, elections are happening more and more in those poor underdeveloped third world nations you see on television, and world leaders are meeting to plan the “global community” that we hear so much about. So why isn’t everybody happy, finally? For that matter—why do less than half of the eligible voters in the United States, the world’s flagship democracy, even bother to vote at all?
Could it be that “democracy,” long the catch-word of every revolution and resistance, is simply not democratic enough? What could be more democratic?
Every littl... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Citizenfour is just the latest expression of public fascination with the figure of the whistleblower. Jesselyn Radack, Thomas Drake, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden—the whistleblower defects from within the halls of power to inform us about how power is being misused, delivering forbidden information to the people like the holy fire of Prometheus.
But can the whistleblower save us? Is whistleblowing enough? What limitations are coded into a strategy of social change based around whistleblowing, and what would it take to go beyond them?
Certainly, whistleblowers look good compared to the institutions they expose. Faith in authorities of all stripes is at an all-time low, and for good reason. In a news clip in Citizenfour, we see Obam... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I, Suspect
Since cameras became mobile enough to take pictures of people without their consent, punching photographers has become the great American pastime. From celebrities hounded by paparazzi to civilians who resent news teams invading their privacy and demonstrators who don’t want to be profiled, everybody loves swinging on a person shoving a camera in their face.
But what about when the person shoving the camera in your face isn’t there—it’s just the camera and you? Every time I turn a corner and see a camera pointed at me, in my mind I can’t help but hear the word “Gotcha!” Even at our most innocent, it’s hard not to feel like a suspect. Indeed, to the security professional who sees t... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) On September 30, several hundred fascists participated in a march in Gothenburg called for by the Nordic Resistance Movement (NMR), a neo-Nazi organization that openly professes the doctrines of Adolf Hitler. Over the past year, members of the NMR have bombed several refugee homes and a left-wing bookstore in Gothenburg, while members of the Finnish branch of NMR murdered a passerby at a demonstration in Helsinki. In Gothenburg, over 10,000 counter-demonstrators utilized a diversity of tactics to block the NMR march from reaching its starting point; although the police were the ones who physically stopped them, previous precedents show that the police will support and protect the neo-Nazis unless forced to do otherwise by grassroots anti-fa... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) As one middle-aged mother observed while members of the Quebec Black Bloc hugged each other before going off to battle the cops, “I always thought this was going to be sinister, but these are just brave kids!”
For a more specific consideration of dressing for anonymity, consult Fashion Tips for the Brave
Materials
Matching clothing that conceals the wearers’ identities
Trust and communication
A mission
Optional Materials
Provisions: water (plenty, especially if you’ll be dressed in hot gear or expect chemical weapons attacks), food (don’t rely on shops or shopkeepers in contested zones), etc.
Camouflage: different layers of clothing for different purposes or stages of the act... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) It is wrongheaded, when not outright dishonest, for those who scapegoat immigrants to argue that they want the US government to concern itself with the needs of US citizens rather than the needs of the undocumented. More repression of the undocumented will not benefit US citizens. The expansion of the powers of the federal government will absolutely be used against US citizens as well as the undocumented. This is already taking place today.
Those who advocate for more state violence against the undocumented are not sincerely concerned with the rights or welfare of US citizens. Rather, they are so deeply invested in racist injustice that, in order to see more people of color suffer, they are willing to embolden the US government to intensif... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The border does not divide one world from another. There is only one world, and the border is tearing it apart.
Borders: The Global Caste System
The border is not just a wall or a line on a map. It’s a power structure, a system of control. The border is everywhere that people live in fear of deportation, everywhere migrants are denied the rights accorded citizens, everywhere human beings are segregated into included and excluded.
The border divides the whole world into gated communities and prisons, one within the other in concentric circles of privilege and control. At one end of the continuum, there are billionaires who can fly anywhere in private jets; at the other end, inmates in solitary confinement. As long as there is a ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) National boundaries are one of the chief structural factors that enforce de facto white supremacy. While Donald Trump’s remarks have made it clear that he sees immigration policy as a way to systematically privilege whiteness on a global scale, the regulation of immigration has always served that function, ever since this land was wrested from its original inhabitants. National boundaries are one of the ways that the state purports to protect citizens from the Other—when nothing is more dangerous than to concentrate so much force and legitimacy in a single militarized institution.
The constructs of race and national citizenship are two of the most fundamental tools used to divide those who are exploited under capitalism. We do ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In Paris, on November 13, 129 people were killed in coordinated bombings and shootings for which the Islamic State claimed responsibility. Although this is only the latest in a series of such attacks, it has drawn a different sort of attention than the massacres in Suruç and Ankara that killed 135 people. The lives of young activists who support the Kurdish struggle against ISIS—so far the only on-the-ground effort that has blocked the expansion of the Islamic State—are weighed differently than the lives of Western Europeans.
The same goes for the lives of millions who have been killed or forced to flee their homes in Syria. European nationalists lost no time seeking to tie the attacks in Paris to the so-called migrant c... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) “The war is still going on.”
-Graffiti in Mostar
In February 2014, two decades after the war that left Bosnia devastated and divided into three ethnic regions, the country erupted in flames again. This time, it was not ethnic strife, but the rage of people uniting against politicians. For years, these politicians had stirred up ethnic divisions to distract them while systematically looting the country. The result was intense poverty: unemployment was at 44 percent in 2014, and up to 60 percent among the young.
People flooded into the streets. Beating back the police, they burned the parliament and municipal buildings. In the turmoil of the protests, panicked politicians stole money from the national treasury. In Mosta... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Perhaps, gentle reader, you’ve never been part of a social body targeted by the US government. Imagine undercover agents infiltrating your community with the intention of setting people up to be framed for illegal activity. Most of your friends and family would have the sense to keep themselves out of trouble, of course—but can you be absolutely sure everyone would?
What if someone fell in love with the agent and was desperate to impress him or her, and the agent took advantage of this? Every community has people in it that may sometimes be gullible or vulnerable, who may not display the best judgment at all times. And what if the agent provocateur is a person everyone trusts and looks up to? Government agents aren’t alwa... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) After a groundswell of anarchist and autonomous protest in 2013, Brazil experienced a right-wing reaction that culminated with the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers Party (PT). The events in Brazil offer an instructive case study of phenomena that are prevalent elsewhere around the world—indeed, the United States might have experienced something similar had Hillary Clinton been elected. Looking at Brazil, we can identify the dangers of premising social movements on presenting demands to the authorities; we can see how the discourse of “fighting corruption” serves right-wing forces jockeying with left parties to hold state power, while legitimizing the function of the government itself; we can study how... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, fascist proponent of dictatorship and mass killings, has won the election. Who needs a military coup when you use voting to accomplish exactly the same thing? We’ve already explored in detail how the left and centrist parties paved the way for this. From Brazil to France, parties across the political spectrum have lost all pretense of offering any solution to social problems other than escalating state violence. In this context, it’s not surprising that politicians who explicitly represent the police and military are coming to power, as they have become the linchpin of the state itself.
Our hearts go out to our comrades in Brazil, who have already experienced a tremendous amount of state repression an... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In 2016, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was impeached in a legal coup d’état. On March 14, 2018, City Council member Marielle Franco was murdered in downtown Rio de Janeiro, likely by the police or their colleagues in the paramilitary cartels. Yesterday, a judge ordered the imprisonment of Lula da Silva, the most popular candidate in the upcoming presidential election. Rather than understanding these as interruptions of Brazilian democracy, we have to recognize them as the functioning of a system in which the forces that purport to provide security are themselves the greatest source of danger.
The Execution of Marielle Franco
On March 14, City Council member Marielle Franco and driver Anderson Gomes were shot and killed i... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In Brazil, 23 people accused of participating in demonstrations against the World Cup have been sentenced to seven years in prison for “criminal association.” Globally, in conjunction with the torture cases in Russia, this represents another step towards criminalizing people on the basis of their politics and relationships. We have to keep abreast of these developments and mobilize international solidarity to deter governments from employing these strategies more and more widely.
To Burst Ropes and Chains
“The constitution did indeed guarantee freedom of speech, but the laws punished anything that could be considered an attack on state security. One never knew when the state would start screaming that this word or th... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) This is the story of the occupation of a derelict building in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on November 12–13, 2011, told in the voices of a wide range of participants. While anarchists and corporate media have circulated news of this action far and wide, the experiences shared inside the building have remained a sort of black box. This report opens up that box, just as the occupiers opened up the building, to reveal a world of possibility.
In contrast to the occupation movement in some parts of the US, anarchists were involved in Occupy Chapel Hill from the very beginning, sending out the initial call and facilitating the first meetings. The points of unity consensed upon at the first gathering were based on the Pittsburgh Principles,... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Disclaimer: This was written the night of September 24, immediately following the events described, without time to verify all the reports summarized or assemble additional information. There may be errors; if so, we will correct them shortly.
This is on-the-spot reporting just in from the first day of the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, which has seen a great deal of spirited resistance and confrontation—perhaps as much as has occurred at any anarchist mobilization in North America in half a decade. This gushy, hastily composed account presents the context, attempts to convey the spirit of the day, and raises a few preliminary questions.
The basic narrative of the day runs thus: The protesters attempt to reach the summit site, but are br... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) We who fight to create a freer world face a fundamental contradiction. On one hand, we don’t want to become a vanguard, “leading” or imposing our will on others, as that would run counter to our anti-authoritarian values. On the other hand, we believe with good justification that our political goals—including the destruction of capitalism, the state, and hierarchy—can’t be accomplished without strategies that are currently unpalatable to most of our fellow citizens. The impoverishment of millions and the destruction of our ecosystems demand that we act decisively. What criteria will equip us to challenge these systems without resorting to the authoritarian means we condemn?
Some of us have developed a pr... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)