The Russian security services are using torture to force false confessions to frame anarchists as participants in terrorist networks. https://crimethinc.com/2018/03/26/why-the-torture-cases-in-russia-matter-how-the-tactics-that-the-russian-state-uses-against-anarchists-could-spread
Last week, comrades published Conflictual Wisdom, “Revolutionary Introspection towards the Preservation of the Anarchist Individual & Community.” In this collection, longtime anarchists reflect on how to maintain longevity while confronting seemingly invincible adversaries. Here, we present a refined version of one of the anonymous contributions, exploring how to understand the anarchist project outside a post-Christian millenarian narrative of redemption.
“They are just ghosts, the ones who think people fight to win! They fight because they like it.’”
-And There Was Light, Autobiography of Jacques Lusseyran, blind hero of the French Resistance
It is not a question of whether we can win, but of how we wish to live.
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 right-wing groups appropriate the tactical innovations of anarchist movements, and explore ways to defend ourselves against this. Above all, in a time when left and right parties are engaged in increasingly pitched struggles for control of the state, we have to carve out space for social movements that reject the state itself, resisting the attempts of all parties to manipulate or subordinate us. The Brazilian example offers an important reference point for the challenges and opportunities that face us today.
To celebrate International Women’s Day, here is the commemoration of today’s holiday that appeared in Kronstadt Izvestia #6 on March 8, 1921 during the Kronstadt uprising, the same day Trotsky attacked. “We send greetings from Red Kronstadt, from the Kingdom of Liberty.”
An educational installation at the central intersection in Carrboro, North Carolina featuring a banner and CrimethInc. zines about the struggle in Rojava.
Presidents’ Day, a federal holiday, observes George Washington’s birthday on February 22. Yet as a slave owner and profiteer on others’ servitude, George Washington is a poor exemplar of the struggle for freedom. Rather than looking to him for a model representing resistance to tyranny, let’s remember the slaves and indentured servants who sought to escape from him and the Native Americans who defended themselves against his attacks.
Washington is celebrated as the father of the American Revolution, itself the blueprint for countless subsequent struggles for independence and democracy. We can’t grasp the meaning of the American Revolution without recalling that George Washington was one of the wealthiest people in North America. Even now, he remains among the wealthiest presidents in US history, with holdings that would be worth about half a billion dollars today. Of all subsequent presidents, only Donald Trump is wealthier.1
A year into the latest incarnation of this project, we’ve accomplished a lot—but we could be doing a lot more with a little assistance. We’re hoping trustworthy comrades will step up and help us to continue expanding our efforts, freeing up time and resources with which we can produce more books, articles, posters, speaking tours, and the like.
Here is a list of roles and tasks that you could fulfill. Needless to say, all this is volunteer work: we do these things out of love and desire for social change, and for the pleasure of working on creative projects with other brilliant and virtuous opponents of the existing order.
I’ve never liked the part of the story when the mentor figure dies and the young heroes say they aren’t ready to go it alone, that they still need her. I’ve never liked it because it felt clichéd and because I want to see intergenerational struggle better represented in fiction.
Today I don’t like that part of the story because… I don’t feel ready.
Last week, I lived in the same world as Ursula Le Guin, a grandmaster of science fiction who accepted awards by decrying capitalism and seemed, with every breath, to speak of the better worlds we can create. On Monday, January 22, 2018, she passed away. She was 88 years old and she knew it was coming, and of course my sorrow is for myself and my own loss and not for a woman who, after a lifetime of good work fighting for what she believed, died loved.
Happy Anniversary! Today is the day we celebrate white supremacist dufus Richard Spencer getting punched in front of an Australian news crew. How are you celebrating?
