Federalism and Revolution
A Short Guide for Revolutionaries

Recently I attended the Anarchist Book Fair in Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas and what I saw there, what I heard, and what I felt was all truly hope-inspiring and while I don’t know the actual number of attendants, based on the crowded rooms and the sheer diversity of my comrades present, I’d say there must have been hundreds of anarchists, all gathered together in a deep red state like Texas, a reminder that none of us are alone and that we have family in the most unlikely of places.

The Book Fair was an all-day event and people from all over the country came to read some zines, get stickers, meet organizations, and support them. On the tail of the Prairieland trial our gathering was an incredibly dangerous event to hold and yet I can’t say any of us would have avoided the event. I, myself, was prepared to fight my way out of the building and thankfully it was an incredibly friendly atmosphere the likes of which I’d last experienced at the Tulsa General Assembly many months ago now.

For those of you who aren’t aware yet, the Praireland trial is a landmark case for the repression of radicals and especially anarchists. There were many charges which were falsified and grossly repressive but the one which stuck out most to me was a person named Daniel “Des Revol“ Sanchez Estrada was given a 30 year sentence for the possession of zines. He’s a tattoo artist who calls Dallas and Fort Worth home. The zines in his possession were used as “evidence” of an “antifa cell” in North Texas in spite of the rather mundane nature of the texts themselves and now this human being is practically doing a life sentence for the very thing you’re reading right now. Imagine what they could do to me for writing them?

It brings an important question to the forefront: What now?

Sentences like Estrada's for anarchist literature should have cooled the atmosphere and made people fearful and it is true its inspired fear in the movement. We’re all scared, I know I am, but more dangerously now we’ve become cornered. There were many groups representing the anarchist movement at the DFW Anarchist Bookfair and absolutely none of them were any sort of “Antifa Cell”. What I did see were anarchists dedicated to freedom and by extension, against fascism. What they’re doing to us is more sinister because, in truth, what they’ve begun hunting isn’t just antifascists, it’s the Anarchist movement specifically and the very idea of radical egalitarianism.

The Anarchists as a faction are becoming too widespread and powerful for the United States government to ignore. Our movement has become dangerous to power and as a result power is responding with repression we've seen before, namely in events like the Haymarket Affair. We’re all in danger, this can no longer be denied and instead of hiding we chose to gather, in my eyes this speaks volumes for our unbreakable will but it also reveals an even more subtle threat. The reaction of a cornered animal is to fight and right now in the United States, Anarchists have become beaten and cornered animals. It changes the threat assessment, it changes the very gamble we make in everyday life. Now we can be given a life sentence merely for being anarchists and partaking in our own subculture and consequentially there's very little incentive to let them take us alive anymore, say what you will of my bluntness but I believed we needed to speak our fear.

I’ve long believed we must prepare for a fight because those in power will come for those who seek to replace them and their system. This has never changed in the 200 years the Anarchists have existed, however; this begs the questions about our survival, our strategies, our fight. We receive no benefit from reckless conflict and rather than allow panic to hopelessness to begin festering, I wrote this in the hopes that I could give some pathway to direct our fear into productive revolutionary action.

How can we survive?

Our immense strength as anarchists comes from our connection to each other, our solidarity in struggle. In Catalonia, hundreds of thousands of anarchists came together and very nearly saved Spain from Francisco Franco and yet I do not believe a gunfight with every pig in the street that tries to pull you over is going to get us anywhere except dead. Many, myself included, are no longer capable of living under their authority or watching as they throw our siblings and comrades into concentration camps. I believe that the more perceptive amongst us sense a fight coming and I’ve already seen our current situation referred to as a “low-intensity civil conflict.” We are now permanently fused by repression and mutual enemies, we are ripe with solidarity and in spite of the danger, it also brings us together if we let it. So how do we survive? How do we continue pursuing revolution whilst the fascist state knocks upon our door?

Malatesta and Bakunin both spoke of the "Law of Solidarity" this idea that the anarchist movement itself is founded upon the virtue of solidarity and as a result is the only law which we anarchists are truly beholden to, without solidarity we are weak and impotent. I believe in this idea as deeply as a faith. We are fighting together in the same fight against the same enemy from a vast variety of origins. Everywhere I go I'm surrounded by fast friends and familial bonds. This is solidarity. Yet our people, our movement are still fractured and divided.

COINTELPRO and other programs like it broke the anarchist movement in the so-called United States from the 60's onwards to the 90's when we began resurging with a vengeance such that we were there for Occupy Wall Street and the George Floyd Uprising. Organizers during this period often kept going by way of a sentiment, one I’d accepted myself before Trump’s second presidency. “The revolution won’t be in your lifetime, our work is multigenerational.” You had to convince yourself that you wouldn't see the change in your lifetime because the alternative in such conditions was to become demoralized and burn out. After conversations with comrades I sincerely believe our generation is that lifetime and that now the anarchist revolution has become do or die. Here in 2026, we’ve grown enough to become a threat and to be frank our scale beyond that doesn't matter anymore. We’re out of time to merely keep building horizontal structures and pretending anonymity is enough to protect us, we must begin uniting these structures and while a few efforts to form federations have begun it’s not enough to face the rising tide of fascism by itself. The building must never cease for doing so would guarantee the stagnation of our movement. That said, we must return at least half a mind to the proper defense of our revolutionary structures beyond merely our charters and anonymity.

It’s not up to a few to unite and defend the entire revolution, nor can our capacity extend to such a feat but we may be able to stretch our capacity just enough to continue building a new society in the shell of the old. Mikhail Bakunin spoke of “Organizational Dualism” as an organizational virtue whereas anarchists are encouraged to work through various organizations. In practice of this the ideological organ of the National Confederation of Labor (CNT) in Spain known the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) was attached to the CNT and it's members were commonly members of both the CNT and the FAI, keeping both orgs accountable to each other and maintaining a focus on antifascism and the Spanish Revolution whilst remaining entirely autonomous allowing the FAI to fight fiercely for the revolution before the CNT was forced into the Spanish Civil War. For a more recent example, I myself am a member of several local orgs, all of which are Horizontalists in some form or another. I am constantly looking for excuses to get them all to cross-pollinate as we call it, or exchange members and work together on different projects and events. I’m not the only one, but I am one of few. This is a problem with not knowing how, I’d stake money on it if I had any. It's clear to me that the will is there, so many of us are aware of the need for federation but have no clue how to begin or what a federation even looks like and even less can spare capacity to it.

For the benefit of those less theoretically and historically inclined: “Federalism” is a concept advocated for by Mikhail Bakunin and classical anarchists whereas organizations and people come together autonomously to increase their capacity and power through the formation of a federation which creates a formalized system of solidarity, communications, and mutual aid for every organization involved whilst guaranteeing autonomy for every group level involved from affinity groups to other federations. Its usage by anarchists is closer akin to the definition of “Confederation” where as many independent groups combine into an autonomous mass working toward the same end with no center. In the United States that’s an especially loaded word due to the Confederacy and so most commonly such organizational organs are merely called "Federations."

Through organizational dualism (joining multiple organizations/federations) anarchists can begin to blur the lines between the different organs involved which is an excellent result so long as the specific service those organizations provide in a decentralized system of dual power remain unchanged. Once many anarchists with close ties are working across a variety of organs at a local scale a federation becomes possible, however; it's been my experience that an anarchist movement must move up through scale, even a large organization which tries to implement a national federation before the formation of many local and regional federations will likely see their work stagnate and become meaningless. Remember that anarchist structures are horizontal and built from the lowest level to the highest scale all without centralization and at times, requiring further decentralization.

This collectivizes our power, makes a united front of defense possible, exponentially increases our capacity for organizing and immediately begins to prefigure the society we wish to see. Rather than engaging in meaningless, isolated aggressive action like propaganda of the deed which has been obsolete for a century to ignite a revolution, we'll be infinitely more effective if we give the people something to fight for: a system whereas their voice and decisions genuinely matter which as a consequence gives them something to lose, and something to fight for. We’ve seen the Black Panthers force police to de-escalate through their collective community defense programs, the first gun laws in the United States were passed to prevent the Black Panthers from holding police accountable.

How can we federate safely?

The truth is that you probably can’t. We’re far too late into whatever technofascist theocratic hell we live in for that. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take precautions though. Never in history has a movement pushing for positive change been received without some form of violence, but reckless movements don’t get far either. So what can we do to protect ourselves?

First, begin masking your digital footprint. This is only an easily breakable firewall, but nonetheless it provides an astounding amount of operational security to operate under a pseudonym or pen-name and then to separate those aliases and lives. Here with the anarchists, my name is Dominic Black, my old name is dead to me, it makes me cringe to hear it and yet I have to live a normal life and keep working under a separate name in order to create the illusion of two different people. The average person doesn’t know I’m an anarchist unless I’m operating as an anarchist at that moment. Many of us believe that we should always be acting in our capacity as anarchists and this is true but reality doesn’t afford us the privilege anymore because leftists are having their lives threatened merely for their beliefs. Much like the partisans of the world wars, we must learn to adapt to our environment and blend in so that we may continue fighting.

Second, know your comrades. To earn my trust, you’ve got to commit a crime in my presence and that sounds really bad but hear me out. This is a litigious society and that means you don't have to kill someone to prove your worth. I’m far less likely to believe that the person that smoked a ton of weed with me in Texas, it can get you 15 years in prison is a federal agent. Those disposed to choosing morality over law will show this organically, there's no need to actively create scenarios. Only by building relationships, trust, and disciplining yourself and what you say around those you don’t trust can you minimize the risk. Visit your comrades’ houses and hold a bonfire or something, a federal agent won’t introduce you to their family.

Third, ideologically examine everyone you meet. As has been made clear by the state and its agents, they're either not allowed to study our theory or they’re incapable of understanding it. That doesn’t exactly reduce their ability to destroy us as proven by COINTELPRO and the Prairieland trial but if you understand and believe in anarchism, it shows in conversations my comrades sound very different from liberals, authoritarian socialists, and fascists. Spend hours talking to your comrades about where you stand on matters and where they do.

Fourth, stop fed-jacketing. In our time, anarchists don’t just have to worry about the state. Liberals and authoritarian socialists make routine attempts to infiltrate organizations, sew division, co-opt, and then run them into the ground with near identical methods to COINTELPRO. Division is an effective method. This doesn’t mean ignoring serious allegations, it means that when someone starts turning people in the organization against each other you should be wary of jumping too quickly to stand against your comrades. An infiltrator will not just hit one group in my experience, they tend to hit multiple ones and persist in disrupting them until the organization either dies or is successfully co-opted and rendered ineffective.

Fifth, don’t talk about your sensitive plans near technology. Every organization needs monthly (and emergency) meetings out in nature with every single device turned off so that they can speak openly. It’s one thing to crack a Molotov joke or two, but by planning through technology you endanger yourself and everyone around you if you start dry snitching, don't even take the chance of being the reason your comrades got life sentences, separate your words from theirs and practice consciously avoiding using the names of comrades unless they've given you express permission to use their name regarding a specific subject. We live in a surveillance state and while they’re not after every single one of us personally, they can and will use anything you say near or with technology against you if you do find yourself targeted.

Sixth, vet every single member of your organization. Ask neighboring organizations if anyone knows them, hunt down locals that can account for their life in the area to verify that a person is who and what they say they are. Don’t allow rapists into your organization. I’ve seen this and morally, obviously don’t do this, but in experiences I’ve absorbed from comrades, when this happens they operate exactly like an infiltrator. They will destroy your organization, your reputation, and your credibility in order to protect themselves and that’s not even to mention the harm they’re doing to human beings, the same ones you’re trying to liberate. If you don’t speak out, you are no better than a rapist and I dearly hope the rest of the movement treats you as such.

Seventh, talk to each other. Infiltrators will commonly attempt to hit multiple organizations. In a local example, many of us in Tulsa didn’t know where a person had appeared from or what they were doing, but they proclaimed themselves an anarchist and so we had our suspicions but without any correlating incidents as far as any one organization knew, this person continuously spammed groups and tried to funnel radicals towards more liberal projects. When they would be asked to cease spamming groups with the person's self-promotions they would accuse the organization of hierarchy, start arguments, and in a few cases completely split organizations which weren't ideologically stable. For a time this person rampaged through many local organizations until after beginning to encounter larger and more stable organizations, they began being organically excluded due to their behavior. Over time, with conversations between these organizations we came to realize this person may have been an actual infiltrator but without evidence other than their disruption, we were hesitant to call it out as such. Ultimately they'd be organically excluded from the movement merely by their own behavior and consequentially the person was funneled back towards their own echo chamber and outside of the movement but they did damage before they were stopped, they forced smaller less stable organizations to shift communication methods or destroyed organizations entirely. When we began talking to each other, we all realized that this person was a threat to the movement. You don’t need to fed-jacket someone to say “Hey, this person is in several other groups spamming the chat literally to death, starting arguments, and disrupting groups and so heads up, I would be careful about this person so they don’t harm your organization.”

You need to understand that you accept risk every day just being an anarchist. I can no more change the conviction in my heart than I can change the color of my skin. That’s why they’re my convictions and not merely beliefs and never have they wavered in my life even if my practice of them did. In your risk assessment ask yourself, is this about you? What about the generations after us which must suffer the consequences of our actions or inaction? Can you live with death camps in your children’s lives? I cannot. It deprives me of sleep each and every night since the night I learned of Alligator Alcatraz and discovered that 1,200 people were missing. I’m not doing what I do because I’ve assessed that the risk to myself is minimal, I’m doing it because I strongly believe the risk to people who are marginalized already is far graver and of more concern to my conscience as a human being. I do this because I can’t stand the idea of a generation after me suffering like I did. That’s my risk assessment.

I’m not trying to discourage you, I’m trying to light a fire in your heart because our world is on fire. Only we, the people, can stop this. And we can’t do it alone or separately. Therefore the only way forward is to federate, and if this movement is even half as strong and true as I believe it’s become then we will continue pursuing the same ends knowing each and every one of us is doing the same in their own capacity. Take comfort in the fact that the human being beside you is in the same trench you are now. All we have left to protect us is each other.

If you absorb and take seriously the seven points I’ve listed I promise this will mitigate the threat to you and your organizations while federating.

Are there enough of us?

Yes, there are. But not if you restrict yourself to your specific flavor of anarchism. Do the Anarcho-Syndicalists have a different end goal for society than you? You’d be unwise to think so. We all want a revolution where freedom and egalitarianism reigns supreme, that's what makes us libertarian socialists and anarchists at all. We have very different methods of getting there and I’ve learned that these organizations aren’t just different methods, they’re fulfilling specific systems. The Anarcho-Syndicalists are replacing bosses with workplace democracy, the Anarcho-Communists are trying to build communities where basic needs are met. Food Not Bombs is distributing food whilst Cooperation organizations are literally creating food through community gardens, the Makhnovists and Insurrectionists want nothing more than to give everything to defend that. All the ingredients are here for a new, radically egalitarian system if we are careful to build it precisely in such a way as to achieve this.

Decentralize everything. By making yourself unimportant you make it so that the movement isn't permanently broken by losing you because if any single person is too valuable to the cause, you must reduce their value to merely what their physical labor and social company can provide. That doesn’t mean devaluing them as people though I want to be explicit, that’s not what I’m saying here. As an example, my initial value to the anarchist movement is my historical and theoretical knowledge, beyond that it’s the relationships I build. If you’ve seen my previous work, you know I’ve endeavored to unload each and every piece of historical knowledge I possess and to interrogate it so that we can learn from the successes and failures of the past. My educational curriculum which is inspired by Francisco Ferrer and Paulo Freire is nothing except in an attempt to disperse my knowledge across the anarchist movement in a way that can keep moving without me. I am making it so that I have nothing left to contribute to the movement except the labor I explicitly give to it in whatever form that takes and more importantly, I am making it so the movement loses not but my capacity and my good company. The movement and organizations I'm apart of can’t be killed by removing me or using me.

Our comrades are all around us, across cities, states, and nations. There’s an organization for almost every system in almost every context and you cannot know what you’re missing until you’ve brought what you have together. You’re not going to start a perfect dual power federation right off the bat, there will be holes and that's part of the process. It’s my hope that by doing what we can as local federations to fill those voids and federating upwards to regional federations, we can cover nearly every system needed that’s possible to imagine and we can do so together in consensus based structures.

Your organization and you are unique to your context. As long as you are pursuing the fulfillment of the cause closest to your heart and trust that your comrades are going to do the same you are doing everything you possibly can. Someone wants to be the garbage man, someone wants to be a laborer, someone wants to fix your car or your computer. Our society will flourish when everyone can do what they love to do, including the fighters.

This Is It

The world is on fire, I want to reiterate that. Democrats are choosing the side of the fascists through their opposition to radical ideas (And not so radical ones like being against genocide) while communists are actively working against us and some have even called for our eradication, fascists, oligarchs and pedophiles are pushing us into a corner, accusing us of terrorism for wanting a free and equal society. Your fellow human beings are being thrown into concentration camps and given sentences equivalent to life in prison for reading literature. Alex Pretti was murdered for helping others to their feet. They are crushing us and everyone around us and it’s up to us whether or not to let them. We either unite and defend ourselves against fascists, our sworn enemy, or we remain divided and allow fascists to strangle us out of existence.

Fascists have made the first move against us, revolution is a matter of necessity and the necessity is present here and now. Society must change or these petulant authoritarian children are going to force us to reap the consequences of their sick and twisted pathologies. You don’t have to throw a molotov or fire a gun, but you do need to have a wartime mindset, you need to be on your toes and prepared to defend, you need to be prepared to support yourself. Start creating alternatives for capitalist systems, all of them. Food from the wild, housing from scraps, clothes from cloth, water from the well and boiled. You need to do this because you need to be able to survive if and when the state and corporations cut you off. Do you truly believe we’re far from open blacklists? They will starve us out if they can and have to.

Yes, revolution (the total reorganization of society from the roots up) is not only desirable but has become a necessity for the survival of the anarchist movement. What’s more, the survival of every human being in an age of nuclear bombs and fascist superpowers.

It Starts At The Heart

The United States is the western hegemony, it’s the great big empire enveloping our world, and make no mistake the stranglehold the United States has on everyone else makes it even less possible for them to fight back. Do you think Palestine can truly fight for its survival with the United States backing Israel’s every move? Can Brazil or Chile or Chiapas escape colonization whilst the empires which oppress it remain at total strength? The world is waiting on us in the United States not because the need us to save them but because we must all save each other. They cannot break free unless the empire has been destabilized and we cannot finally end the empire without their help. This isn’t us or them, it takes all of us to defend what we've built and I speak these words much the same to our comrades in Russia and China: I know you’re out there, I know some of you somewhere and sometime are reading this, until you fight back, your comrades can't either so I urge us all to defend ourselves by uniting. It’s all or nothing. Any single group acting will be crushed by the empires of the world so the obvious solution is for the world to act together against the empires.

Do what you must do, and trust your comrades to do the same. Remain accountable to your people, and your people alone. You owe nothing to the empires, elites, and pedophiles running the world. Most importantly, don’t shame those who don’t fight like you. Not everyone can pick up a gun, just like not everyone can stand to do the boring accounting work for an organization, nor can they stand to do social media, or start gardens. We each have different skillsets and all of them are necessary for a coherent system from mutual aid all the way to defense.