Hurrah for Anarchy: Mayday as Celebrated by the Anarchists

Mayday, to the anarchists, is a holiday of remembrance. Perhaps you’ve heard the communists and liberals say that it’s a celebration of the eight-hour workday. I suppose it’s that too. But for me, it’s a holiday to remember when the State put anarchism itself on trial. In 1886, the line was drawn and the US radicals lost their innocence; the illusion of “free speech” and free association was shattered. Let that illusion never re-form.

Mayday is our holiday. Mayday is a celebration of anarchism, of our history of defiance. It has a lot to do with labor, but Mayday has nothing to do with electoral politics, with the American flag. “Labor day” was invented and implemented to distract people from the radical history of labor.

Mayday is also, of course, the celebration of Beltane — a religious and spiritual holiday that celebrates springtime. And for the past decade at least, it’s the day of protest and action in response to the US treatment of immigrants. It’s a big enough holiday to share, and anarchists are present in those movements as well.

Myself, on Mayday, I remember five people who were killed for being anarchists.
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La Vida Sin La Ley

Una Introduccion al Anarquismo


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Este documento radical ha sido traducido con orgullo por Camarada P.M.A Vazquez, también conocido por su seudónimo “Columbus Bull”

“Quiero la libertad, el derecho a la auto-expresión, el derecho de todo el mundo a las cosas hermosas, radiante.”
—Emma Goldman, 1931

Un anarquista es alguien que rechaza la dominación de una persona o clase de personas sobre otra. El anarquismo es un término general muy amplio para un grupo de filosofías políticas que se basan en la idea de que podemos vivir como anarquistas. Nosotros los anarquistas queremos un mundo sin naciones, gobiernos, capitalismo, racismo, sexismo, homofobia … sin ninguno de los numerosos y interconnectados sistemas de dominación que el mundo soporta el peso en estos dias.

No hay una única expresión perfecta del anarquismo, porque el anarquismo es una telaraña de ideas en lugar de una sola filosofía dogmática. Y lo preferimos de esa manera.
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Trump’s First Hundred Days and the Fascist Agenda

by Alexander Reid Ross

First, the future

Fascists in the US today can agree on little more than the desire for a white ethnostate. Despite conjecture on Trump’s deep interests and desires, few indicators suggest that he would effect such a drastic transformation as that. However, it is the question of process that matters most.

There is truth to journalist Arun Gupta’s insistence that Trump’s program would lead to ethnic cleansing, which is why fascists have taken such a shine to him and why the ACLU has declared that they will “see him in court.” Trump has announced his plan to immediately deport as many as three million migrants from the US, and alt-right founder Richard Spencer, who has already associated Trump’s platform with “peaceful ethnic cleansing,” has called Trump’s presidency a “first step” toward a white ethnostate.
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The Days After the Election and the Days Before the Revolution

by Anarchist Resistance NYC

Today, many radicals are asking themselves how they could be waking up to President Trump. Our question instead is what does this mean for the Left in this country. Paralyzing myths have now been shattered, and this situation could, with a lot of work, passion, and clear thinking, lead to a strategy of action and a far greater positive change than voting for the status quo. The change we are talking about is generational and will have a far greater effect than any string of elections, no matter how repugnant they may be.
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The Criminal Legal System for Radicals

Setting and Balancing Personal, Political, and Legal Goals

by the Tilted Scales Collective

This text is a chapter-length excerpt from the upcoming A Tilted Guide to Being a Defendant, to be released ideally near the end of 2016 by Combustion Books.

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As a political defendant, you will be dealing with the criminal legal system on its own turf. The political level of your situation includes largely unfathomable technicalities and procedures that are designed to disempower you and make it necessary to hire an expert (i.e., a lawyer). You can also approach your predicament on a political level, which may be more familiar ground to you and your supporters. A political defense may be less limited by the court’s rules, ranging from complete disregard of those rules to calculated rebellions against the court’s authority while attempting not to jeopardize your case entirely. Regardless of the balance you strike between political and legal defenses, you will also need to think about the personal level: what you want to achieve and what you are willing to endure.

This chapter is meant to help you think about your charges in broad, strategic terms. We explore three goal areas in this chapter: personal, political, and legal. These goal areas overlap a lot, but we have broken them down to facilitate their exploration. We also offer thoughts on ways to effectively balance these goal areas, although we do not presume to be able to tell anyone how they should handle their case. Rather, we encourage all defendants to consider the different ways in which their decisions affect them and others before committing to a course of action. Our social movements do not need more prisoners, yet when people are thrust into these situations, our movements do need dedicated, smart, and informed defendants who hold strong in the face of terrible consequences.
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Baba Yaga Burns Paris to the Ground

by Wren Awry

To Begin . . .

“I’m interested in myths,” Angela Carter wrote, “Just because they are extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree.”

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Carter was among the first to imitate fairy tales in her fiction (a little tome called The Bloody Chamber, anyone?), and her work highlighted the patriarchy and violence of the classic stories. While the myths Carter re-tooled came from story books, history is also rife with myths that made the world — myths that are ripe for turning inside out. It is these historical myths, and their connections to fairy tales, that fascinate me. I’m especially intrigued by one of them: that of the pétroleuses, fire-wielding women who supposedly set Paris ablaze during the Commune of 1871.

Furies glide through the rich quarters […] and fling their little vials of petrol, their devil’s matches, their burning rags.

The myth of the pétroleuses was certainly invented to make people unfree (in this case, by the Communardes’ conservative opponents and yellow journalists). [note] But I like pétroleuses because their fire and ferocity hint at interesting predecessors. Born of the collective fear of a power-hungry elite, pétroleuses follow in a long line of mythologized fire-wielding devil-women — women like Baba Yaga, the youngest sister in the Grimms’ “Fitcher’s Bird,” and the women burned during the great witch hunts of early Modern Europe.
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A Mountain River Has Many Bends

The History and Context of the Rojava Revolution

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This text is the introduction to our book A Small Key Can Open A Large Door.
This text is the introduction to our book A Small Key Can Open A Large Door.
In Northern Syria, 2.5 million people are living in a stateless, feminist, religiously tolerant, anti-capitalist society of their own creation. They call their territory Rojava, and they defend it fiercely. They’re at war with the extremist group ISIS, and they’re doing better than anyone in the world expected — least of all the Western powers who seek to treat them as pawns.

It’s a complicated situation, but we in the rest of the world have much to learn from the Rojava revolution. To that end, we offer this long-form introduction to the history and the present struggle of the Kurdish people.

Long live the Rojava revolution!

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Grin and Bare It All

Against Liberal Conceptions of Sex Work

grin and bear it all
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Hi, I’m Luna Celeste! I’ve been stripping for about five years, and into all this anarchy stuff for about fifteen. In this zine I’ll be speaking with some authority on my own experiences, and to some degree, on those of my co-workers and friends who perform other kinds of sex work. However, subjective experiences of sex work, and even just stripping, vary depending on one’s location, gender (identity/presentation), particular line of work, working conditions, socialization, class, race, etc. I am no authority on every aspect of the sex industry, but have spent a lot of my free time thinking, reading, and writing about the industry from an anarchist and feminist perspective.

Special thanks to C.B. Daring, Heather, Margaret Killjoy, and Nikita for the edits, and so many more friends who gave me feedback and support in writing this.

ferretpenguin@riseup.net

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Propaganda of the Dead

Anarchist Lessons for the Zombie Apocalypse

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I was in a med study when the zombie outbreak began. That’s right, a master’s degree in philosophy and the only way I could come up with to pay rent was to sell my still-living body to capitalist science. I know, I know… in retrospect I should have studied something useful, like small engine repair.

Oh, and I wasn’t just in any med study when the zombie outbreak began, I was in the med study where it began. The researchers were testing some kind of acne medication, looking to see if there were any adverse side effects when it was used on healthy adults. There were. Thanks, capitalist society, for pretty much ending the world.

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Life Without Law

An Introduction to Anarchist Politics

Life Without Law

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I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.
—Emma Goldman, 1931

An anarchist is someone who rejects the domination of one person or class of people over another. Anarchism is a very broad umbrella term for a group of political philosophies that are based on the idea that we can live as anarchists. We anarchists want a world without nations, governments, capitalism, racism, sexism, homophobia… without any of the numerous, intersecting systems of domination the world bears the weight of today.

There is no single perfect expression of anarchism, because anarchism is a network of ideas instead of a single dogmatic philosophy. And we quite prefer it that way.

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