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Anarchy Works

This book takes examples from around the world, picking through history and anthropology, showing that people have, in different ways and at different times, demonstrated mutual aid, self-organization, autonomy, horizontal decision making, and so forth–the principles that anarchy is founded on–regardless of whether they called themselves anarchists or not. Too well documented to be strictly mythology, and too generalized to be strictly anthropology, this is an inspiring answer to the people who say that anarchists are utopian: a point-by-point introduction to how anarchy can and has actually worked.

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First, They Shot the Anarchists: Trump and ‘The New Normal’

“Across the political spectrum, at time when so many people are starting to take seriously punching Nazis, blockading airports, and rioting as a vehicle for both self-defense and as a means of collapsing the regime by creating a state of crisis, there is predictably by the State, the media, and the Left, condemnation of these tactics. Why? The answer is as easy as it is simple: for these are the tools that are at the disposal of all poor and working people. And to be able to demonize in the minds of millions not even ideas, groups, or organizations, but moreover tactics – this is the real goal of all apparatuses of control. To make evil and wrong what is possible for human beings to be able to accomplish with their very bodies en masse in offensive capacities that further their interests and in defensive ones that protect them. If a State can do this inside the minds of its subjects, it can do anything.”

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To Our Friends

“In 2007 we published The Coming Insurrection in France. It must be acknowledged that a number of assertions by the Invisible Committee have since been confirmed, starting with the first and most essential: the sensational return of the insurrectionary phenomenon. Who would have bet a kopeck, seven years ago, on the overthrow of Ben Ali or Mubarak through street action, on the revolt of young people in Quebec, on the political awakening of Brazil, on the fires set French-style in the English or Swedish banlieues, on the creation of an insurrectionary commune in the very heart of Istanbul, on a movement of plaza occupations in the United States, or on the rebellion that spread throughout Greece in December of 2008?

During the seven years that separate The Coming Insurrection from To Our Friends, the agents of the Invisible Committee have continued to fight, to organize, to transport themselves to the four corners of the world, to wherever the fires were lit, and to debate with comrades of every tendency and every country. Thus To Our Friends is written at the experiential level, in connection with that general movement. Its words issue from the turmoil and are addressed to those who still believe sufficiently in life to fight as a consequence.

To Our Friends is a report on the state of the world and of the movement, a piece of writing that’s essentially strategic and openly partisan. Its political ambition is immodest: to produce a shared understanding of the epoch, in spite of the extreme confusion of the present.”

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Work, Community, Politics, War

“Whenever this kind of working class resistance breaks out, politicians try to extinguish it in a flood of petitions, lobbying and election campaigns. But when we are fighting for ourselves, our activity looks completely different from theirs. We take property away from landlords and use it for ourselves. We use militant tactics against our bosses and end up fighting with the police. We form groups where everyone takes part in the activity, and there is no division between leaders and followers. We do not fight for our leaders, for our bosses or for our country. We fight for ourselves. This is not the ultimate form of democracy. We are imposing our needs on society without debate—needs that are directly contrary to the interests and wishes of rich people everywhere. There is no way for us to speak on equal terms with this society.”

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This is Not a Dialogue: Not Just Free Speech, but Freedom Itself

“Maybe you missed this, but you’re not in a dialogue. Your views are beside the point. Argue all you want—your adversaries are glad to see you waste your breath. Better yet if you protest: they’d rather you carry a sign than do anything. They’ll keep you talking as long as they can, just to tire you out—to buy time.

They intend to force their agenda on you. That’s what all the guns are for, what the police and drones and surveillance cameras are for, what the FBI and CIA and NSA are for, what all those laws and courts and executive orders are for. It’s what their church is for, what those racist memes are for, what online harassment and bullying are for. It’s what gay bashings and church burnings are for.”

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Three Way Fight

Many theoretical writings focus on armed resistance against the state-capitalist system, and the need for militantly opposing state imperialism and police repression. This “Us” against “Them” position has a lot of valid points, and we would by no means criticize the imperative nature of militant resistance against the state and capitalism in particular. However, this position neglects third parties that are also extremely hostile to bourgeois democracy and capitalism as they stand now, yet are no more sympathetic to our egalitarian, anti-authoritarian values: modern day fascism.

Fascism is a term that stiffly resists concise definitions, but for the purpose of clarity, one will be attempted anyway. Fascism is a violent, reactionary mass political movement that seeks to replace the current ruling elite with its own idealized class and impose its brand of totalitarian order on the rest of the populace. This is not the single ‘golden’ definition, as fascism wears many different faces depending on where and how it arises. Hopefully this definition will provide a nominal understanding for the purposes of this essay.

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Claim No Easy Victories: An Analysis of Anti-Racist Action (ARA) and It’s Contributions to the Building of a Radical Anti-Racist Movement

“Given the re-emergence of popular radical anti-fascism we are putting up a 2002 article on the history of Anti-Racist Action. The article is a short and incomplete history. There is room for expanding on issues and 15 years later some needed corrections. But the article stands as one of the only attempts to document, analyze and promote ARA as the radical, militant and independent antifascist movement that it was.”

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Bern Notice: Building a Material Force in an Age of Trumpism

“If we strive to create a material force within the social landscape; an autonomous anti-capitalist and anti-colonial movement that builds counter-power and new forms of life, then we must take stock of the other emerging forces in the current terrain. We have to think about how we can fight—and win, against the growing rise of the autonomous far-right, especially after Trump’s presidential run ends. For after Trump returns to being a real estate billionaire baron full-time, the cadres that gathered their forces during his campaign will take further shape autonomously, as backlash will surely build against Hilary, assuming that she takes the Presidency. At the same time, as we take a position in this “three-way fight,” we must make sure that our resistance to the far-right is also linked to our struggle against the state and capital; attacking white supremacy as a neo-colonial system and not simply a fight against white nationalist formations on the fringes.”

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Repress This

This zine is meant to give you and your loved ones practical insights and suggestions for basic actions and precautions. As a committee, we want to demystify the work we do so that all of you can feel more empowered to engage in solidarity work. Many of us have noticed through our participation in Occupy Oakland and other social struggles that the work of supporting arrestees and organizing against repression often falls on a small segment of the movement. Although many of us within this segment are more than happy to do the political work we do, we hope that we can engender a deeper and more diffuse practice of solidarity spread far beyond ourselves and immediate comrades. It is important that the bulk of the anti-repression activity and organizing does not fall solely on “support people” such as the ARC, Occupy Legal, Oakland 100 Support Committee, and the great number of people and collectives on which we’ve come to rely. We should all strive to take on some of the less sexy anti-repression and legal work that is so crucial to our movements. Everyone’s well-being should be everyone’s priority

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The Criminal Legal System for Radicals

Tilted Scales Collective offers a helpful collection of insights for radicals coming up against the legal system. The discussion – excerpted from an upcoming book – focuses on the need to balance personal, political, and legal goals and how these different considerations often intersect with each other. It is important reading for all radicals and its detailed analysis offers many helpful tips for navigating the legal system and preparing for encounters with it.

Topics covered include subpoenas, going underground, staging “political” defenses, taking plea agreements, snitching (don’t do it), making public statements, and much more. It is both very thorough and highly readable.

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Whatever You Do, Don’t Talk to the Police

This short zine/pamphlet offers basic advice for people engaged in political activity who will likely encounter police as a result of their political work (everyone will, it’s only a matter of time). The zine starts with the premise that people should not talk to the police and offers practical suggestions on how to minimize interactions and avoiding incriminating one’s self and other participants. From their it moves on to discuss the importance of making opposition to police an essential part of grassroots organizing. It also offers some basic tips on attending street demonstrations as well as suggestions on how minimize the potential negative ramifications of social media usage.

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Ten Blows Against Politics

This short text originally published by Guerra Sociale is a short argument against politics and participation in the realm of politics. It highlights the way in which politics is an activity of separation, representation, impersonality, and control. It is especially strong in its arguments that political activity and the realm of politics is “spectacle”. This is a helpful text in articulating arguments against participation in the political process, and as such, may be particularly helpful during elections.

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After Bern: An Open Letter to the Newly Disheartened

“But government is much more than carrots and sticks, politics involves overall the spectacle and myth of democracy. For instance, in our training sessions we were told, “Get them to create a set of agreements around rules and behavior in the classroom, but make sure you shape and guide these rules. Obviously, don’t let them get out of hand.” Meaning, we were to help give the appearance of the students shaping the guidelines for their behavior, however at all times we (who were ruled over by the administration and themselves by the US government) in actuality were there to create the physical framework. But moreover, we existed to guard against school and thus government authority being attacked by the unwashed young masses hell bent on doing zero work and collectively singing J-Lo songs.”

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Class Struggle and the Origins of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race

“Allen, however, was not an academic; he was a class conscious, anti-white-supremacist, working class intellectual and activist, who had researched and written on the historical development of the “white race” for twenty-five years, and he was not comfortable with the proposition that Frederickson described. As he explained in his internet-published “Summary of the Argument of The Invention of the White Race“ — viewing “race as a social and cultural construction” has value in “objectifying ‘whiteness,’ as a historical rather than a biological category,” but it is “an insufficient basis for refutation of white-supremacist apologetics.” The apologetics, or arguments, that Allen had in mind were from those who would argue that such social constructs are somehow natural or genetically determined. He stressed that “the logic of ‘race as a social construct’ must be tightened and the focus sharpened” and “the ‘white race’ must be understood, not simply as a social construct (rather than a genetic phenomenon), but as a ruling class social control formation.”

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The Lowry Wars

On December 21st, 1864, a wealthy slaveholder and minor official of the Confederacy named James P. Barnes was ambushed on his way to the Post Office in Robeson County, North Carolina. After being initially cut down by a shotgun blast, Barnes was shot at point blank range in the head…Thus began a period of roughly eight years of almost uninterrupted, multiracial attacks on plantation society in southeastern North Carolina. Dozens of sheriffs and White supremacist militia were murdered, plantations and White-owned stores expropriated, and five different successful prison breaks carried out, in what to this day represents a period of marked pride and dignity for North Carolina’s Lumbees.

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I Will Not Crawl: On Black Struggle and Armed Self Defense in Monroe, NC

This publication offers a brief biographical sketch of an incredible man named Robert F. Williams, along with several chapters excerpted from his famous 1962 book Negroes with Guns. Though less well known than more urban groups like the Black Panthers, the words and actions of Monroe, NC’s militant NAACP chapter were tremendously influential on later organizations that advocated self-determination, autonomy, equality, and self-defense.

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The Real Resistance to Slavery in North America

“Amerindians and whites found it easier to escape enslavement. The Amerindians knew the land and also had kinfolk to help or seek out. The whites could better blend in with free people, or join others moving to colonize other parts of the land. The Africans, on the other hand, had no such advantage. They either found sympathetic Amerindians to help them, or had to try to find and join with other runaways, called “Maroons,” fugitive enslaved people of North, Central and South America and the Caribbean islands who had set up their own communities.”

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The Stockade Stood Burning

Something happened in Tennessee, something almost unimaginable to the mine owners and politicians of that state. When the companies tried to intimidate their workers by bringing in convict labor to take over their jobs, the workers responded by storming the stockades, freeing the prisoners, and loading them onto freight trains bound for Nashville and Knoxville and places far away…The Tennessee convict war was one of the largest insurrections in American working-class history. And yet, unfolding at exactly the same time as the more publicized labor wars in Homestead, Pennsylvania, and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, it was largely ignored.

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You Can’t Shoot Us All

A recreation of an already existing zine that was previously unavailable online – Covers the Oscar Grant Rebellions in Oakland, California.

“When we realized that, in the eyes of the powerful, our lives are just piles of bones waiting to be shattered, arteries and veins on the verge of tearing open, hearts and lungs that stop beating and expanding at the moment they pull the trigger, the only thing left to do was to come together and make them tremble before us.”

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Poor People’s Movements: Why they Succeed and Why They Fail

“Examinations of four different periods of struggles in the US, from the depression to the civil rights movement, suggesting formal, reformist, and bureaucratic organization led them to fail.”

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Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America

“Louis Adamic’s superb history of class violence in the US. It traces the origins of gangsterism and racketeering in unions in the 1930s to its roots in workers needing to defend themselves from the armed violence of the state and bosses’ thugs.”

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Delusions of Progress: Police and the White Hell of Civil Society

“No amount of rhetoric geared towards “racial justice” can change this fact: if a struggle for liberation remains within a managed discourse of the citizen, the Public, and the responsible protester, then it will always reproduce the form of the state, and it will therefore always reproduce the police. Whiteness, civil society, the state, and the economy flow in and out of one another, and in all things policing is the structural and discursive glue that binds them together.”

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3 Positions Against Prison

This zine offers an excellent critique of prisons, arguing that prison is not just a physical site but also a condition that exists within society. Specifically, it offers a solid analysis of prison abolition, arguing that in seeking to “shrink” the prison industrial complex, abolitionists often end up replacing prison with other less brutal institutions. Consequently, prison doesn’t disappear but rather its mechanisms – surveillance, militarization of the police, etc – spread throughout society.

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Our Enemies In Blue

“Let’s begin with the basics: violence is an inherent part of policing. The police represent the most direct means by which the state imposes its will on the citizenry. They are armed, trained, and authorized to use force. Like the possibility of arrest, the threat of violence is implicit in every police encounter. Violence, as well as the law, is what they represent.”

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The New Afrikan Prison Struggle

A history of the New Afrikan liberation struggle from slavery, to civil rights, to black power and black liberation. Then discusses the growth of black liberation prison struggle and organizing.

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“To Struggle Means We Are Alive”: Prisoners Speak Out on Ferguson, Baltimore, and Ongoing Revolt Against the Police

“A new ‘zine that assembles interviews with and essays by prisoners on the recent wave of anti-police revolt and #BlackLivesMatter protests is now available. “To Struggle Means We’re Alive”: Prisoners Speak Out on Ferguson, Baltimore, and the Ongoing Revolt Against the Police brings together a variety of perspectives and voices, mostly from “social” prisoners who have been struggling or active in some way on the inside. This publication was compiled as a modest attempt to raise up those kinds of voices that tend to be obscured or made invisible by both corporate media and social movement discourse alike, as well as offer a venue for these perspectives to continue to circulate throughout the prison system. Finally, this was a catalyst for communication with prisoners ahead of the national prison strike that has been announced for September 2016. Hopefully others can share it with folks with whom they’re communicating on the inside.”

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500 Years of Indigenous Resistance

The history of the colonization of the Americas by Europeans is often portrayed as a mutually beneficial process, in which “civilization” was brought to the Natives, who in return shared their land and cultures. A more critical history might present it as a genocide in which Indigenous peoples were helpless victims, overwhelmed and awed by European military power. In reality, neither of these views is correct.

500 Years of Indigenous Resistance is more than a history of European colonization of the Americas. In this slim volume, Gord Hill chronicles the resistance by Indigenous peoples, which limited and shaped the forms and extent of colonialism. This history encompasses North and South America, the development of nation-states, and the resurgence of Indigenous resistance in the post-WWII era.

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Dispatches From Standing Rock

Five texts that appeared on various public websites over fall 2016, each marking an intensification of the struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline. We hope this zine will serve to extend the visibility of this ongoing revolt, with which we feel a profound affinity.

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Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing The Ally Industrial Complex

The ally industrial complex has been established by activists whose careers depend on the “issues” they work to address. These nonprofit capitalists advance their careers off the struggles they ostensibly support. They often work in the guise of “grassroots” or “community-based” and are not necessarily tied to any organization.

They build organizational or individual capacity and power, establishing themselves comfortably among the top ranks in their hierarchy of oppression as they strive to become the ally “champions” of the most oppressed. While the exploitation of solidarity and support is nothing new, the commodification and exploitation of allyship is a growing trend in the activism industry.

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From Democracy to Freedom

Democracy is the most universal political ideal of our day. George Bush invoked it to justify invading Iraq; Obama congratulated the rebels of Tahrir Square for bringing it to Egypt; Occupy Wall Street claimed to have distilled its pure form. From the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea to the autonomous region of Rojava, practically every government and popular movement calls itself democratic.

And what’s the cure for the problems with democracy? Everyone agrees: more democracy. Since the turn of the century, we’ve seen a spate of new movements promising to deliver real democracy, in contrast to ostensibly democratic institutions that they describe as exclusive, coercive, and alienating.

Is there a common thread that links all these different kinds of democracy? Which of them is the real one? Can any of them deliver the inclusivity and freedom we associate with the word?

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An Interview with Keep Hoods Yours (KHY)

“Just do it. Do it. You already have the tools, skills and desires to do graffiti, and you’re already pulling it off. Just think about placement, strategy, what’s important to you, and see if anyone else is down. That’s our point, that it’s really that easy.”

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Now Serving Felonies: An Illustrated zine from the confines from Prison

“For some, graffiti is an attempt to break the separation between an impersonal urban landscape and the vibrancy of life. It is a very literal assertion of the value of creativity over the sanctity of property, a visual declaration of the will to live. Politicians, from positions of unchecked power, simplistically assert that graffiti is “wrong”. They attempt to coerce their constituency into assimilating their morality, as if “right” and “wrong” really are objective terms. For writers, the world isn’t so *black and white*. Why, asks the writer, can’t the dead walls of our city become the canvases of our aspirations?”

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Gender Fascists of the Dark Enlightenment

“The Men’s Rights Movement is the name given to the latest incarnation of the antifeminist movement, the gender faction of the white male Protestant culture that has been at the heart of America’s foundation. Since the early days of the suffrage movement, there’s been a reactionary backlash to counter the calls for women’s liberation.

In the 2010s, the growth of the internet has given rise to a network of virulently antifeminist, jingoistic, racist and misogynistic websites. Men from all over the world post their darkest violent rants about their hatred of women. Some of these threads lead to the creation of gunman Elliot Roger who targeted a sorority. Other sites provide an intellectual backing to the whole ideology of neomasculinity.”

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Toward the Queerest Insurrection

Queer involves our sexuality and our gender, but so much more. It is our desire and fantasies and more still. Queer is the cohesion of everything in conflict with the heterosexual capitalist world. Queer is a total rejection of the regime of the Normal.

“Queer is not merely another identity that can be tacked onto a list of neat social categories, nor the quantitative sum of our identities. Rather, it is the qualitative position of opposition to presentations of stability – an identity that problematizes the manageable limits of identity. Queer is a territory of tension, defined against the dominant narrative of white-hetero-monogamouspatriarchy, but also by an affinity with all who are marginalized, otherized and oppressed.”

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On Women and Violence

We present these two essays in a humble effort to contribute to ongoing debates around feminist struggle, violence, and self-defense. The first, titled “Justice is a Woman with a Sword,” is a classic of the 2nd Wave. This essay sought to question the (then) assumed pacifism of “women,” as connected to certain notions of femininity, and the often unexamined adoption of such a stance by the growing feminist movement of the 60’s and 70’s. The idea that women could take “justice” into their own hands, to directly defend themselves from an epidemic of patriarchal violence and sexual assault, was an extremely radical idea for many at the time. The growth of a vast array of women’s martial arts schools and organizations, not to mention the spread of women’s shelters and crisis centers, directly owes its existence to this radical realization that women did not need to rely on men’s institutions (police, the State, the Church, etc.) to protect themselves.

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Dangerous Spaces

A collection of writings on women’s and queer violence, self-defense, and revenge.
here is a violence that dominates. It is gay bashing. It is rape. It is the clear-cut and the vivisection lab. It is the bank and the local coffee shop. It is the patrol car and the prison. It is your job, your late rent, your rotting teeth, your wounds that won’t heal. It is the silence that maintains all of the above.

There is a violence that liberates. It is the murdered homophobe. It is the knee-capped rapist. It is the arson and the mink liberation. It is the smashed window and the expropriated food. It is the cop on fire and the riot behind bars. It is work avoidance, squatting, criminal friendship, and the total refusal of compromise. It is the chaos that can never be stopped.

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Politicians Love Gun Control

Sweet Tea reframes the age-old gun debate in this country, exposing the inherently political/corrupt nature of the two traditional sides of the argument, and goes on to explain the benefits of gun ownership, particularly for oppressed groups, the radical left, and anarchists.

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Fragments of an Anarchist Public Health: Developing Visions of a Healthy Society

If we carry the importance of empowerment to its fullest logical extent in terms of health care and public health policy—that is, seeing the need to build real conditions for self-management, attacking the roots of inequalities instead of just minimizing their effects, addressing market forces and norms of competition that have invaded every facet of social life, and realizing that these conditions are systemically perpetuated through the institutions we create but not intrinsic to the societal roles these institutions need to fulfill—we can pragmatically and rationally consider more utopist visions of how health care institutions (and institutions throughout society) can be restructured.

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Black Liberation Army and The Paradox of Political Engagement

This essay by US Afropessimist theorist Frank B. Wilderson, III juxtaposes three armed guerrilla groups – the Black Liberation Army, the Red Army Faction, and the Irish Republican Army, in order to determine the anthropological and socio-affective conditions enabling political violence to be communicable and comprehensible.

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Brazillian is Not a Race

In a sea of contemporary poetry that’s often just a vehicle for the author’s vanity, this is poetry that is truly and powerfully about some real shit. This chapbook covers some of the many complexities of race and nationality through crucial depth and layered insights.

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Mixed Up!

A zine about Mixed-Race Queer & Feminist Experience.

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The Illegitimacy of Violence, The Violence of Legitimacy

What is violence? Who gets to define it? Does it have a place in the pursuit of liberation? These age-old questions have returned to the fore during the Occupy movement. But this discussion never takes place on a level playing field; while some delegitimize violence, the language of legitimacy itself paves the way for the authorities to employ it.

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