The Institute for Anarchist Studies

Organizing Disruption: Fiction that Calls Us to Action

by Dylan Patrick Delos Santos Clymer

Review: Kung Li Sun, Begin the World Over (AK Press, 2022) & Robert Evans, After the Revolution (AK Press, 2022) Javier Sethness Castro, author of “From ‘Trotsky in Tijuana’ to ‘Chernobyl’: Caution & Reason” said, “[t]he promise of historical and speculative fiction is the reconstruction of the … Read more

The Quarantine Commune

by Spencer Beswick

We call ourselves the Moth Mother Collective to honor our kitchen’s many winged inhabitants. Even before coronavirus, we strove to live our lives in common. Six days of communal meals each week, a rotating chore wheel, a garden, workspace, and collective care for the needs … Read more

This is How We Heal

by Susan Anglada Bartley and Lexy Kahn

This essay was written collaboratively by two Portland protest community members, Susan Anglada Bartley and Lexy Kahn, and is the result of conversations after participating in protests, both as frontline protestors and as writers and journalists. Throughout the article, we switch italicized and non-italicized fonts (Lexy in … Read more

Jewish Anarchism

by Shane Burley

A Review of No Masters But God, by Hayyim Rothman, (Manchester University Press, 2021) If anarchists know Jewish history at all, it is likely the role of Jewish radicalism in the political battles of the early 20th century. Jews made up huge portions of the anarchist … Read more

Silence in Perpetual Noise

by Alayne Ballantine

Prison creates a different picture in the minds of those who have been there and those who send people there. We are indoctrinated to believe the prison system was created to keep our friends and neighbors safe. That prisons exist to help rehabilitate those criminals … Read more

Who’s Processing Whom? Digital Commons, Digital Blinders, and a Fraught Social Future

by Chris Carlsson

“Are You Doing the Processing, or Are You Being Processed?” —Processed World, #1 (1981) This … signals the metamorphosis of the digital infrastructure from a thing we have to a thing that has us. —Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Almost four decades ago I … Read more

Black Sheep of all Classes: Fifty Years of Consensus Politics in Christiania

by Tauno Biltsted

Anyone who has been involved in a group project that strives for consensus knows that working shit out together is hard. It’s challenging to collectively do the work of assessing options, making decisions, and executing plans that sometimes carry real individual and collective risks, even … Read more

Living Communism: Theory & Practice of Autonomy & Attack

by Spencer Beswick

May Day, 1987: thousands of black-clad Autonomen (“those who are autonomous”) riot in West Berlin. After a decade spent honing their street-fighting tactics, they stage an offensive against state repression by blocking streets, occupying buildings, and fighting a low-intensity urban war against the police. The … Read more

Place as Message: Anarchist Climate Communication Through Performance

by Taiga Christie

“This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor… no highly esteemed deed is commemorated … Read more

From “Trotsky in Tijuana” to “Chernobyl”: Caution & Reason

by Javier Sethness Castro

The promise of historical and speculative fiction is the reconstruction of the past in the present, or of the present in the past, and the contemplation of what might have been, or of what might still be. As the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud wrote, creative writers … Read more